In yet another attack by the Bharatiya Janata Party on Maharashtra Chief Minister Uddhav Thackeray, the saffron party’s state chief Chandrakant Patil on Friday said that Nationalist Congress Party chief Sharad Pawar is running the coalition government and not the Shiv Sena leader, PTI reported.

“If any issue is to be resolved, one should meet Mr Pawar and not Uddhav Thackeray,” Patil said, speaking to reporters in Maharashtra’s Sangli city. Patil was reacting to Governor Bhagat Singh Koshyari’s reported advice to Maharashtra Navnirman Sena chief Raj Thackeray to meet Pawar over the matter of inflated electricity bills.

On Thursday, Raj Thackeray had met Koshyari over extremely high electricity bills, to which the governor advised him to meet the veteran Nationalist Congress Party leader, Mid Day reported.

“I do not know what the governor said, but if you ask me, I would say it is Sharad Pawar who is running the state,” Patil said. “What is the use of meeting Uddhav ji? Pawar and [BJP leader] Devendra Fadnavis are easily available, so people think what is the need to meet the chief minister.”

Patil claimed that in the last nine months, he has not received a single reply to his letters to the chief minister’s office.

The BJP and Uddhav Thackeray-led Shiv Sena have been at loggerheads over the past few days.

Last week, Sena’s chief spokesperson Sanjay Raut questioned the central government on not awarding a Bharat Ratna to Hindutva ideologue Vinayak Damodar Savarkar. His comments came after BJP spokesperson Ram Kadam had commented on Thackeray for not uttering “a single word of praise” for Savarkar during the party’s Dussehra rally.

Earlier this month, Thackeray and Koshyari had engaged in an exchange of letters on reopening religious places in the state amid the coronavirus crisis. Thackeray told the governor that he did not need a “certificate” of Hindutva from him, after the governor asked him if he had “turned secular”.