The Bharatiya Janata Party will not contest the Shiv Sena for the Mumbai Mayor’s post, Maharashtra Chief Minister Devendra Fadnavis told ANI on Saturday. He said his party would not be in Opposition, though it would keep a close watch on the functioning of the Brihanmumbai Municipal Corporation.

“We will not put up a candidate for mayor or deputy mayor for BMC,” Fadnavis said. “We will support the ruling party, but will not compromise on transparency.” The BJP won 81 seats in the recent BMC elections. However, the Shiv Sena came out as the single largest party with 84 seats. The Congress got 31 seats and the Nationalist Congress Party won nine seats. Raj Thackeray’s Maharashtra Navnirman Sena got seven seats. There are 227 seats in the BMC.

After the results were out, Prime Minister Narendra Modi congratulated the party in the state and thanked the public for “continuously placing their faith in [the] BJP”. The elections to the BMC – India’s richest civic body with an annual budget of over Rs 37,000 crore – had turned into a bitter fight between the BJP and the Shiv Sena, who had ended their alliance before the polls. The two sides, which have traded corruption accusations, fought the civic polls separately for the first time in two decades.