Mumbai: Shiv Sena and the BJP, former friends, ideological twins and now, bitter opponents in the Maharashtra Assembly polls are going at each other hammer and tongs.

A day after the reported comments of the Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) chief Amit Shah comparing the Shiv Sena to a rat, Sena president Uddhav Thackeray hit back on Friday saying that foreign attackers always mistook people of Maharashtra to mice and they always failed.

“We made a tiger out of a rat and that tiger is now trying to scare us. But we need to show these rats there right place,” Mr. Shah had said without naming anyone in an election campaign rally at Sillod in Aurangabad.

Attacking Mr. Shah, Mr. Thackeray taunted him that even Afzal Khan had called Chhatrapati Shivaji a ‘rat,’ when he attacked Maharashtra in 17th century. “Someone called us rat yesterday. Even Khan had come with large number of soldiers. Let me remind that despite all that, Shivaji killed him,” Mr. Thackeray said at a rally in Bhosri in Pune district.