Rebel Shiv Sena MLA Gulabrao Patil said party president Uddhav Thackeray did not give enough time to the party legislators during his tenure as Maharashtra chief minister. The former minister also said that Thackeray should get rid of the coterie of party leaders around him.

"A 'sarpanch' (elected village head) ought to give audience to every elected representative of the local governing body. When Thackeray was just the party head, we could raise our complaints against a minister if he or she did not cooperate," Patil told a regional new channel. "But after he became the chief minister, there was no one whom we could turn to for taking up our complaints of works not getting done. He should have given enough audience to the legislators," he said. Several rebel Sena leaders have earlier blamed party's chief spokesperson Sanjay Raut for the strain in ties between the Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) and Sena.