Reacting to the Maharashtra poll debacle, Shiv Sena (UBT) chief Uddhav Thackeray said on Saturday evening that he never thought the state would “behave with me this way”.

“I cannot believe Maharashtra, which listened to me as head of family during the COVID pandemic, will behave with me this way,” he said at a press conference in Mumbai.

Thackeray said the BJP’s landslide victory showed that “there was a tsunami, not a wave”. He said the Maharashtra assembly election results are “completely unexpected and incomprehensible”.

He said the BJP’s “batenge to katenge” slogan didn’t work for the alliance. “Some things are secular like unemployment, inflation. Everyone is affected by it. So it did not work,” he added.

Uddhav Thackeray said his party and allies would analyze the “unexpected and puzzling” results.

Thackeray said what probably went wrong for the Maha Vikas Aghadi was that “we behaved civilly.”

“But they have won now, and I have no problem congratulating them. Now I hope that all the promises they made, they complete them soon. And nobody later says that jumlas were used to win elections,” he said.

“I did not expect that my Maharashtra, for which I worked whole-heartedly, would do this to me,” he added.

The BJP-led alliance in Maharashtra has either won or leading in 231 seats. The Congress-led alliance is ahead in 49 seats.

Meanwhile, Congress MP Jairam Ramesh also said that the result was not on expected lines.

“We will analyse the result that has come. But today we can say that even those who won did not anticipate that this result would come. We were assuming that we would get the mandate. The farmers of Maharashtra are angry, and the working class of Maharashtra is against the government. And the atmosphere that was there in Maharashtra 4-5 months ago, the same atmosphere is there today too; we were assuming this and everyone accepted this. But the results that have come are opposite to this,” he said.

He called the Maharashtra assembly election results “very strange”.

“But this does not mean that we will step back from our agenda…somewhere there is a conspiracy to defeat us…The result of Maharashtra is very strange, I cannot use any other word for it, it is absolutely strange,” he added.

With inputs from PTI, ANI