Raj Thackeray demands Aurangabad be renamed

Maharashtra Navnirmal Sena chief Raj Thackeray on Sunday urged Prime Minister Narendra Modi to bring the Uniform Civil Code at the earliest and also to bring a law on population control. At a rally in Pune, held after the MNS chief cancelled his Ayodhya visit, Raj Thackeray said Aurangabad should be renamed Shambhajinagar. Talking about his Ayodhya visit, which he recently cancelled, Raj Thackeray said a trap was laid out for him by those who did not like his loudspeaker protest. "But I did not fall for this trap as I did not want my MNS activists to go to jail," Raj Thackeray said.

On Friday, Thackeray announced that he had temporarily deferred his forthcoming visit to Ayodhya on 5 June 2022. The decision came amid protests by certain Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) leaders and activists in Uttar Pradesh and even other northern states. They were demanding Thackeray's unconditional apology for the treatment meted out to north Indians during the MNS agitation in 2008.Talking about the Hanuman Chalisa row, Raj Thackeray said he had asked his party men to play Hanuman Chalisa if the Maharashtra government failed to remove illegal loudspeakers from mosques. "But the Rana couple wanted to go to Matoshree and recite Hanuman Chalisa. Why? Is Matoshree a mosque? And then after all this, the couple were seen eating together with Shiv Sena's Sanjay Raut," Raj Thackeray said.The MNS chief hit out at Maharashtra chief minister Uddhav Thackeray's 'our Hindutva-their Hindutva' remark and said, "What is this real Hindutva, fake Hindutva thing? Are we selling washing power?"