The Sena which is in power in Aurangabad Municipal Corporation (AMC) and the BJP has called a general body meeting of the AMC on Tuesday to discuss the issue of renaming the city after Sambhaji.
Crying foul over the Sena move to rename Aurangabad, the Congress condemned the Sena move and asked the Sena-BJP alliance instead to focus on the development of the city.
A Sena leader said that the renaming of Aurangabad as Sambhaji Nagar and Osmanabad as Dharashivhad has been pending since 1995. Aurangabad, he said was named after the Muslim Mogul Emperor Aurangzeb and the Hindus were against it. “The AMC in June 1995 passed a resolution to rename Aurangabad as Sambhaji Nagar by majority vote and the proposal was sent to the Maharashtra government for approval,” he said.
In November 1995, the Sena-BJP government which was in power in the state, issued a Government Resolution (GR) approving the proposal of the AMC. But the GR was not implemented as a local court issued a stay order on a petition filed by AMC Councilor Mushtaq Ahmed. The Congress-NCP government which came to power later cancelled the GR.
Now if the AMC which has called for the general body meeting approves the proposal again, and if passed, it will then be sent to the Congress-NCP government for approval, and it is unlikely that the state government will approve the city’s change of name.
Rafiq Siddiqui, a Congress leader, said that the Sena-BJP move to rename Aurangabad and Osmanabad cities is nothing but communal politics and a plan to create Hindu-Muslim divide and antagonize the Muslim community. And any such move would only boomerang on the saffron alliance.
In another development, the Central Bureau of Investigations (CBI) has claimed that it had concrete evidence against guilty army and civil officials in Mumbai’s Adarsh Housing Society scam. The CBI charged the officials of having indulged in serious crimes like that of taking away important documents from the files and changing the important documents in the official files with fake documents.
Based on the concrete evidences, a First Information Report (FIR) will soon be registered against several army and civil officials, the CBI said.
A CBI official indicated that due to the technical reasons, the CBI requires sanction to prosecute the army and civil officials. The sanction is awaited and would soon be given after which criminal cases would be registered against the officials and further legal process would begin; the official clarified adding that case would be registered under the Anti-Corruption Act and the Indian Penal Code.
