Now, it has gone a step further, caricaturing Rane in Tuesday’s issue as a wrestler, saying he has “lost the battle against Chief Minister Vilasrao Deshmukh but still claims he is the winner.”

Saamana on Tuesday front-paged a large sketch of Rane as a wrestler, taunting him for “returning to work at Mantralaya despite the earlier bravado of resigning as a minister.”

The bravado lasted barley 20 days, the Sena mouthpiece said.

In June, a comic dimension was added to the state politics when the Sena mouthpiece parodied Rane, caricaturing him as a newly-wed bride, in response to Deshmukh’s light-hearted remark equating Rane to a “newly-wed, confused daughter-in-law” in Congress.

The satire led to sporadic incidents in which some alleged supporters of the Revenue Minister -- who has made no secret of his chief ministerial ambitions since he left the Sena and joined Congress in 2005 -- attacked the paper’s office in Pune and burnt its copies in other parts.

When asked to react to Rane’s seemingly unending trips to the national capital to plead his case with the party high command for the top post in the state, Deshmukh had equated Rane with a “confused new daughter-in-law in the house” (Congress).