Not many would be  'charitable' to Thackeray who has now been left with a mere rump of Shiv Sena, which is restricted to only commercial Capital Mumbai, writes Deepak K  Upreti

Can Uddhav Thackeray who quit as Chief Minister of Maharashtra, be justified in saying “Et tu Brute ?” to Shiv Sena breakaway group leader Eknath Shinde? Will the average Shiv Sainik buy his allegations that Shinde conspired with the BJP to kill his  ‘Maha Vikas Aghadi’ government?

Not many would be that ‘charitable’ to Thackeray who has now been left with a mere rump of Sena that is restricted to only commercial Capital Mumbai.

Now that Shinde is in the saddles of the Chief Minister, Uddhav will face an enormous challenge in keeping his hold over the cadres of the Shiv Sena. It may seem a tall order for a man who failed miserably in keeping his legislature party united and faced the mortification of seeing two-thirds of his MLAs deserting him.

The Uddhav-led Shiv Sena, which a few months ago had a plan to go national and contest elections outside Maharashtra, is now fighting for its survival as a political party within the western state.

While the question which is the  “real Shiv Sena” would be decided by the Election Commission and the court, the Sena of Uddav Thackeray is gasping for Oxygen on its own political turf that has been successfully invaded by the new-age Shiv Sainik, steered cleverly by a buoyant BJP leadership.

The lightning strike by ‘Shinde-Sena’ in the last 10-days and cloak and dagger drama that spread and unfolded in Mumbai, Ahmedabad to Gauwhati have made the Shiv Sena ‘panth pradhan’ poorer with as many 39 MLAs, leaving him to lead a largely Mumbai-based organization.

But in Mumbai, too, newly-anointed chief minister and rebel leader Eknath Shinde himself has a strong base in Thane, his long-time constituency.

Thackeray may find his Mumbai base further squeezed with several Mumbai MLAs- Sada Sarvankar, Prakash Surve, Yamin Jadhav, Mangesh Kudalkar- going along with Shinde.

Several senior Shiv Sena MLAs who have rebelled and moved with Shinde have deep district and panchayat-level political roots of decades in north Maharashtra, Vidarbha, and the Konkan region and thus would make it very difficult for Thackrey to re-grow his party outside Maharashtra.

Is Thackrey culpable of complacency and living in his ivory towers and dreaming big without working on the ground ?.

As they say coming events cast their shadows before. The straws in the wind were there for all to see, but the Sena chief turned blind eye to the omen. In the hindsight, he looked to be deep in slumber after a two and a half-year run as Chief Minister in ‘Varsha Bungalow’, cut off him from ‘’ Matoshree”, the house built by Bal Thackeray, where common Shiv Sainik, corporators, or MLAs would in the past go and get redressal of their grievances on a day-to-day basis.

Shiv Sena lost its second Rajya Sabha seat to the BJP in the recently concluded Rajya Sabha elections with its candidate Sanjay Pawar failing to get nine requisite votes.

Team Uddhav then publicly blamed six of its erstwhile supporters for “betraying” the Sena but failed to set its house in order,  which was simmering with charges of “inaccessibility “ of Thackeray.

The disconnect was too visible to be ignored by coalition partners. Nationalist Congress Party leader Sharad Pawar said he had “warned” Thackeray to watch out lest he is caught by sudden surprises.

Ignoring the deft moves made by BJP leader and former Chief Minister Devendra Fadnavis who cleverly ‘tapped’ the unrest within Sena, Thackeray allowed Raut, a loudmouth and part of his coterie, to make unproductive comments like”Give us control of the ED for two days and we’ll get even Devendra Fadnavis to vote for us.”

This is the lowest point that the Thackerays have seen since senior Bal Thackeray first entered an alliance in 1989 with the BJP for Lok Sabha and came into power for the first time in 1995 with Manohar Joshi, prominent Shiv Sena leader becoming the CM of the state. Narayan Rane was another Shiv Sainik (who is now with BJP) who occupied the CM post.

Uddhav is seen to have committed a cardinal sin and a tactical blunder in 2019 by himself stepping into Chief Minister’s post and not nominating someone from Shiv Sena, a tradition set by his father who continued to be in the hallowed ‘Matoshree’, seen to be the final court of Justice for all Shiv Sainiks until he died in 2012.

Thus, Uddhav lost the ‘moral authority that the senior Thackeray held over Shiv Sainik by ‘abstaining’ from power.

But a much greater blunder that Uddhav has been accused of committing is tailoring the “Hindutva agenda” to suit his power goals and joining hands with “secularists” in the MVA coalition government.

It would be difficult for Uddhav to answer the charges of Shinde-led Shiv Sainik that it is he “who has betrayed” the ‘ideals’ espoused by his father and not them “who continue to fight for a Hindu cause”.

With  Shinde now occupying the office of the Chief minister, his camp may, as of now, have an edge in convincing  average Sainiks that they are battling to save the “real Shiv Sena” from the clutches of those someone whose strings were pulled by  ‘secular-left-liberal enemies’.

The success of mass mobilization by two Shiv Sena rival factions would depend on as which side can convince the Sena voters on the “betrayal theme”.. However, Shinde, a Maratha,  may be counted on to make a dent in Sharad Pawar’s Maratha vote bank. This could give his faction added fillip at the time of election and also serve the BJP in cutting down Pawar to size,

Amidst all these high voltage political theatrics, it will be interesting to see if the BJP  astutely ropes in the mercurial Maharashtra Navnirman Sena (MNS) leader Raj Thackeray as the third party in the new ruling combination in Maharashtra.

If the breakaway Shiv Sena Group is to be merged into MNS it would gain the respectability of the Thackeray title o counter cousin Uddav and further legitimize its existence in the eyes of Shiv Sena workers.

Raj Thackeray who has been interacting with top BJP leadership has, for some time, been warning against loudspeakers in the mosques with ‘Hanumanchalisa’ in Mumbai.

Though Raj Thackrey is doing BJP’s bidding vis-vis his cousin, the saffron party yet does not have full confidence in him and is wary of his political intentions. But as of now, though not ‘trusted and tested’, the other Thackeray may have a place in the BJP game plan for Maharashtra.

The first trial with the fire of Thackeray, post his exit from power, to prove the substance of his side of Shiv Sena to the people of Maharashtra as against the ‘Shinde Shiv Sena’ would come soon in the BMC, Thane, and Kalyan-Dombivili civic polls.

Uddhav will need to reinvent his politics and prove its ‘Hindutva credentials after he has taken the “secular dip”. It is not an easy task after his two and half years of company with MVA allies.

His move to rename Aurangabad city as Sambhaji Nagar and Osamabad city as Dharashiv has come too late with the obvious intent already read.!

(The writer is a special correspondent of The Pioneer)