The Maharashtra Navnirman Sena (MNS), in its push for the Marathi identity agenda, has issued a threat amid the ongoing language row in the state. MNS Mumbai president Sandeep Deshpande on Saturday said that those who do not want to speak Marathi can leave Maharashtra and called people residing in the state but not speaking Marathi “traitors”.
Taking to social media platform X, Deshpande posted, “Those who show that they will not speak Marathi while living in Maharashtra are traitors to Maharashtra. Those who do not want to speak Marathi can leave Maharashtra. Otherwise, we will show the traitors of Maharashtra their worth.”
Earlier on Friday, Maharashtra Chief Minister Devendra Fadnavis said that it is not wrong to insist on the use of the Marathi language, but when doing so, if people take the law into their own hands, it will not be tolerated. His remarks came against the backdrop of the aggressive promotion of the state's official language by MNS.
Ahead of civic polls in the state, including in big corporations like Mumbai, Thane, Pune, Nashik and Nagpur, MNS is pushing the Marathi language agenda. The Raj-Thackeray-led party has been seeking to enforce the Marathi language in banks and other institutions in the state.
MNS asks bank staff to communicate in Marathi
In the past weeks, MNS workers had confronted two bank managers of different banks in Thane and Pune districts for not using the Marathi language while communicating with customers. The videos of the workers confronting the bank staff gained widespread views on social media platforms.
At a rally on the occasion of Gudi Padwa, Raj Thackeray had stressed his party’s stand of making Marathi compulsory for official purposes and warned that those who deliberately don't speak Marathi will be “"slapped".