"We mean no disrespect nor have anything against any community living in Mumbai. Moreover, India is a largest democracy in the world and the stand taken by the political parties is not only against Sandesh, Gujaratis but against the entire media fraternity," Patel said in a late night statement.
This is the second time within a fortnight that the Gujarati-Marathi relations have come to the fore in Mumbai.
May 1, the Gujarati community was targeted in a sharp editorial in the Shiv Sena mouthpiece Saamana, but later top leaders of the party, including Subhash Desai, Uddhav Thackeray and Aditya Thackeray expressed regrets over it.
The editorial asked whether the Gujaratis, who support Bharatiya Janata Party's prime ministerial candidate Narendra Modi, would rally behind the Shiv Sena-led Grand Alliance in the 2014 state elections.
It went to the extent of alleging the Gujaratis and other non-Marathi businessmen have extracted a lot from Mumbai, virtually using it like an "attractive prostitute" to construct their own Dwarkas (cities of gold).
As the Shiv Sena appeared to distance itself from the controversial editorial, NGO Swabhiman Sanghatana leader Nitesh (Narayan) Rane supported Saamana editor and Sena spokesperson Sanjay Raut.
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