Mumbai Sanjay Raut, a Shiv Sena member of the Rajya Sabha, chided Governor Bhagat Singh Koshyari for claiming that Gujaratis and Rajasthanis and other non-Maharashtrian mercantile communities were to blame for Mumbai’s status as India’s financial capital. Raut claimed that central enforcement agencies were acting against Maharashtrian entrepreneurs.
The executive editor of the newspaper, Raut, wrote in his weekly column printed on Sunday in the party mouthpiece Saamana that although Maharashtrians did not control Mumbai’s money, history had shown how they had shaped the city and its fortunes over the years. The article was written before Raut was arrested by the Enforcement Directorate (ED) last week on suspicion of money laundering.
‘In Mumbai, the Marathi manoos kept labouring hard and fighting adversity. Everyone else came here only for lakshmi darshan (earning money),’ he charged. Raut stated that Gujarati traders had fled religious persecution at the hands of the Muslim rulers of Gujarat in the 17th century during the control of the East India Company by moving to Mumbai.
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