Mumbai, Nov 21 (IANS) A day after polling for the Maharashtra Assembly elections, the Maha Vikas Aghadi (MVA) has initiated the post-verdict strategising, with preliminary discussions on a variety of issues that could crop up on Saturday after the results start tumbling out, party leaders said here on Thursday.

A Congress party source in Mumbai said the basic issues figure around the leadership issue, sounding out potential winning rebels or independents and preparing the groundwork for the support of fringe groups as needed.

Senior leaders like Balasaheb Thorat, Prithviraj Chavan, and M. Arif Naseem Khan have sounded out over a dozen independent candidates or rebels of the Congress-Nationalist Congress Party-SP-Shiv Sena-UBT as they keep their fingers crossed for a likely fractured mandate.

NCP-SP state chief Jayant R. Patil, along with national General Secretary Jitendra Awhad, are engaged in a similar exercise for a few of its rebels to come to the aid of the party after the results.

Besides, leaders of the three parties are slated to hold a meeting later this evening and on Friday to hammer out the details of staking a claim to form the government, a power-sharing formula, plus the contenders for the post of Chief Minister and Deputy Chief Minister.

Adopting a diplomatic stance, state Congress President Nana F. Patole said today that the final decision on who would be the CM will be taken only by the party high command.

However, Leader of Opposition Vijay Wadettiwar said this evening that the MVA partner which bags the highest number of seats "would be a natural claimant to the post of CM" – a stance loosely echoed even by SS-UBT leader Sanjay Raut.

Legislators of all the MVA alliance parties shall be reaching Mumbai by Saturday when the counting of votes is scheduled to take place and the results are expected to come out from noon onwards, with the final shape of the new Assembly slated to emerge by late evening.

A senior leader from the NCP-SP confided that "everything is finalised" and now only the finishing touches remain pending the declaration of the results, given a very narrow window of barely three days to set up a new regime by November 26.

The leader, declining to be identified, hinted that "there some big political surprises may be in store even after the results", but refused to elaborate on his claims.

An SS-UBT leader said that although the MVA has dismissed many of the dozen-odd exit polls as "mischievous and misleading", the opposition groups are not willing to take any chances given past experiences. He cited the bombshell after the 2019 Assembly polls when the Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP)’s Devendra Fadnavis and (undivided) NCP’s Ajit A. Pawar had suddenly joined hands, were sworn in as CM and DyCM in a dawn ceremony but the two-men government collapsed in barely 80 hours.

It was only after collecting the flock of MLAs from places within Maharashtra, New Delhi and Haryana that the MVA government was finally formed with Uddhav Thackeray taking oath as CM (in November 2019), he pointed out.

Nevertheless, leaders of the MVA scoff at speculation that they have booked multiple hotel rooms, helicopters, and aircraft either in Mumbai or other Congress-ruled states, as witnessed in 2019.

Maharashtra voted on November 20 for the 288 Assembly seats in a hotly-contested election and the people’s verdict will be revealed after the EVMs are unsealed and unlocked on Saturday. In the meantime, both the MVA and ruling MahaYuti exude supreme confidence in gaining a clear majority to stake the claim to government formation.

(Quaid Najmi can be contacted at: [email protected] )