MAHARASHTRA-Tremors in Shiv Sena

under the garb of social welfare organisation, Ganesh Naik, the rebel Shiv Sena leader of Navi Mumbai, has thrown down the gauntlet. Naik's open defiance of chief minister Manohar Joshi's instruction to tender his resignation as cabinet minister, forcing the chief minister to sack him, had brought the year-old tensions between Bal Thackeray and Naik into the open, marginalising the Sena in Navi Mumbai. In the Navi Mumbai municipal corporation (NMMC) 26 of the Sena's 34 corporators defected to Naik's Nagri Vikas Aghadi formed on the eve of the mayoral polls in the corporation in which the Aghadi candidates for the posts of mayor and deputy mayor defeated their Shiv Sena rivals by comfortable margins with the support of the Congress and independents. This has ominous portents for the Sena. If the wound festers, the Sena stands threatened in its second stronghold in the coastal region, Thane, after the setback it suffered in Mumbai in the Lok Sabha polls.