The BJP brass were on Tuesday huddled with Devendra Fadnavis in Delhi as the Shiv Sena rebellion unfolded in Maharashtra, with party insiders already hinting at “another Operation Lotus”, a term denoting the ouster of a non-BJP government through defections.

Although the BJP officially claimed it had nothing to do with the Sena revolt, party leaders said in private they had not forgotten the “backstabbing” by the once loyal ally and were ready for revenge.

The BJP had in recent years wrested power in Karnataka and Madhya Pradesh by engineering defections by MLAs of the ruling party or coalition.

Following a script reminiscent of those editions of “Operation Lotus”, an estimated 21 Sena MLAs led by minister and rebel Eknath Shinde have left Maharashtra and checked into a hotel in a BJP-ruled state, Gujarat in this instance.

BJP sources underlined that the MP of Surat, where the rebels are holed up, is C.R. Patil, a Marathi who heads the Gujarat BJP and is considered “extremely close” to Prime Minister Narendra Modi.

“We are closely monitoring the developments but we have nothing to do with whatever is happening in the Shiv Sena,” Maharashtra BJP president Chandrakant Patil said in a media address in Mumbai.

“Eknath Shinde’s decision (to revolt) is not the BJP’s game plan.”

Fadnavis, former Maharashtra chief minister and now leader of the Opposition in the state, had rushed to Delhi in the morning to “brief the leadership and seek directions”, party insiders said.

They claimed that Fadnavis, who had been trying to destabilise the Sena-NCP-Congress coalition government for over two years, had engineered the revolt and assured the central leadership that the BJP would soon govern Maharashtra and control the country’s financial capital, Mumbai.

The Sena had fought the 2019 Assembly elections in alliance with the BJP. But the alliance came apart after the polls when the Sena claimed the BJP had promised it the chief minister’s chair and the ally denied it. The Sena dumped the BJP and formed a coalition government with the NCP and the Congress.

The Sena rebellion comes after the BJP, boosted by cross-voting in the Maharashtra Assembly, won a fifth seat in Monday’s legislative council elections.

With 106 members in a 288-strong Assembly, the BJP had the numbers to win just four of the 10 seats up for grabs, but eventually garnered 134 votes and five seats. The Sena-NCP-Congress has a combined strength of 152 MLAs.

On Tuesday, BJP sources cited Monday’s results and the ongoing rebellion to claim their party was within striking distance of forming the government in Maharashtra.

“After Maharashtra, the next target will be Jharkhand,” a BJP leader said.

In Madhya Pradesh and Karnataka, resignations by Congress and JDS lawmakers had brought the House strength and majority mark down, allowing the BJP to form the government and later bring the turncoats back into the Assembly through by-elections.