The MNS had put up hoardings in part of the city that they would do ‘MNS style’ agitation on those shops that do not put up the signboards in Marathi by Saturday. The MNS style protest is a MNS warning that they would vandalise and do violence in the shops.
The Mumbai Municipal Corporation has now said that they would begin fining shopkeepers from Monday if they haven’t put up signboards.
November 25 was the deadline issued by the Supreme Court for the shopkeepers to put the Marathis signboards after the Federation of Retail Traders Association had approached the Supreme Court seeking to challenge a state government order of 2022 which had made it mandatory for all shops and establishments in the state to also display Marathi signboards on their shops along with the English signboards or fonts.
- All
- Madhya Pradesh
- Rajasthan
- Telangana
- Chhattisgarh
- Mizoram
The Supreme Court had held that there was no ‘fundamental rights violation’ of the retailers and asked the shopkeepers two months’ time to put up the signboards. The two months time expires on Saturday.The issue of putting up Marathi signboards is a political issue in the state with the Shiv Sena which several years earlier raised the issue of having shopkeepers put up Marathi signboards too on their shops. The issue however petered out until Raj Thackerays’ Maharashtra Navnirman Sena that champions the sons of soil issue. The MNS blackened shops and even vandalised a few shops in 2017 for not putting up Marathi signboards.
