In heated Maharashtra poll battle, Uddhav Thackeray emerges as Opposition alliance’s strike weapon

Last month, Uddhav Thackeray announced a decision that would have been unimaginable a few years ago. The chief of one faction of the Shiv Sena told reporters that when he goes out to vote in the 2024 Lok Sabha elections, he would cast his ballot in favour of the candidate of his party’s erstwhile rival, the Congress.

“Varsha tai, maje mat tula milnaar aahe,” he promised. Varsha, you will be getting my vote.

That on-camera declaration by Thackeray is one indication of the major realignment in Maharashtra politics that has been underway since 2019.

Matoshree, the home in Bandra East where the Thackerays have lived for over five decades, is in the Mumbai North Central constituency from where Gaikwad is contesting. Thackeray’s faction of the Sena has been a partner of the Congress in the Maha Vikas Aghadi alliance in Maharashtra for the past four years. The third member of the group is the faction of the Nationalist Congress Party led by Sharad Pawar.

Given the long history of rivalry – even antagonism – between the Sena and these partners, political observers have been sceptical about whether Thackeray’s followers could be motivated to campaign for candidates of its allies.

However, the public assurance to Gaikwad by the 63-year-old Thackeray has had its intended impact. The Sena’s fabled shakhas, its primary grassroots organisational unit, have been actively campaigning for Gaikwad and for its allies in other seats across Maharashtra.

Since Thackeray became leader of the Shiv Sena in 2012, he has had the reputation of being a diffident politician, uneasy with the hurly burly of politics. But as the Sena’s birthplace of Mumbai goes to the polls on Monday, that reputation has been shredded. Thackeray has emerged as a face of the Maha Vikas Aghadi across Maharashtra.

His Shiv Sena faction is contesting the largest number of seats in the alliance (21 of the 48 in the state). Sharad Pawar, who is the tallest leader in the alliance, has not been able to travel and campaign as much because of his advanced age and illness. The Congress does not have a leader who is popular across Maharashtra. As a consequence, Thackeray has been the key campaigner for candidates of all three parties.

The Maha Vikas Aghadi is up against another alliance. The Mahayuti is a compact between the Bharatiya Janata Party, the Shiv Sena faction headed by Eknath Shinde and a group of the Nationalist Congress Party headed by Ajit Pawar.

Both Shinde and Ajit Pawar lead factions that split from their original parties after 2022 and joined hands with the BJP in a saga of political intrigue that toppled the Maha Vikas Aghadi from power.

In the wake of that bruising experience, Thackeray at his rallies for the 2024 Lok Sabha elections has framed the contest as a battle for Maharashtra’s pride. Recurring talking points in his speeches include the claims that Mumbai is being looted by the BJP by moving large projects to Gujarat and that the Narendra Modi government is “giving everything away to Gautam Adani”, the industrialist perceived to be close to the prime minister.

Thackeray’s take-no-prisoners approach has drawn large crowds.

His speeches have directly targeted Modi. He has not shied away from responding to the BJP’s claims that he has abandoned the Hindutva plank of his father, Shiv Sena founder Bal Thackeray. He often declares, “Our Hindutva lights stoves in houses, the BJP’s Hindutva burns houses.”

He defends his allies and does not equivocate when countering the BJP’s charge that the INDIA alliance of Opposition parties across the country has been “appeasing” Muslims: Thackeray routinely mocks the prime minister, asking whether Modi’s frequent targeting of Muslims in his speeches is an indication that he is afraid of the outcome of the polls.

At a recent rally, for instance, Thackeray advised Modi to calm down and stop polarising voters on religious lines. He suggested that Modi apply some Patanjali oil and perform Kapal Bharati yogic breathing exercises. It drew loud laughter and cheers from the crowd.

Thackeray’s new avatar has surprised many. “Frankly, I had not expected Uddhav Thackeray to travel like this, put in all this effort to reach all constituencies,” said political analyst Prakash Akolkar, the author of a book on the Shiv Sena called Jai Maharashtra. “Uddhav’s speeches have been a capital gain for the MVA, giving the alliance the required momentum. This election has made Uddhav a pan-Maharashtra face.”

When the Shiv Sena was led by Uddhav Thackeray’s father, Bal Thackeray, the party was ferociously anti-Muslim. But this election, even Muslim women are campaigning for the party.

Sana Khan, from Mahim in Mumbai South Central, said it was Uddhav Thackeray’s actions as chief minister during the Covid-19 pandemic that convinced her to support him. “His government did their best and he did not discriminate against any community,” she said.

The loyalty that Thackeray commands among his workers was apparent in Vile Parle, one of the six assembly constituencies that make up the Mumbai North Central Parliamentary constituency.

Sandeep Naik, the Sena official in charge of the area, told Scroll that his party has taken the lead in campaigning here. One hundred percent of Shiv Sena votes in Vile Parle will go to the panja, the Congress’s symbol of a hand, he claimed.

One recent evening, as motorists and pedestrians at the busy Milan subway watched curiously, Leena Trivedi, a Mahila Shakha Sangathika, and Sneha Santosh Kadu, an Upa Shakha Pramukh, adorned with Sena election paraphernalia, huddled with their Congress counterparts to finalise the route for Gaikwad’s padyatra. All around them, party activists lined up holding the saffron flag of the Sena alongside the Congress’s hand on the tricolour.

Trivedi admitted it had taken some time to “grasp the idea of tying up with the Congress”. But she dismissed popular punditry that in the absence of a Sena candidate in the constituency, core Sena voters will back the BJP, the party’s “natural ally”.

“That was once upon a time in Mumbai,” Trivedi said with a laugh, making a reference to the title of a Bollywood underworld film series. As the last-mile contact with the voter, Sena activists have been able to reassure their core voters who are angry about what they believe is a betrayal of the Thackeray family by Shinde, she suggested.

Sneha Kadu credited Varsha Gaikwad for her effective outreach to the Sena shakhas. Gaikwad told Scroll that as a four-time legislator, direct contact with party workers on the ground has been her style of working.

“Shakhas play an important role in the life of Shiv Sainiks,” Gaikwad said. “The Sena is a new ally, so I have been going to them to ask for help and to assure them that I will always be accessible.”

Public prosecutor Ujwal Nikam, fielded on a BJP ticket, is Gaikwad’s main opponent. But the North Central seat has the highest number of candidates of any constituency in the city – 27. Of them, 16 are from minority communities.

“The idea is to split the votes of the groups that support the INDIA alliance and MVA,” political analyst Prakash Akolkar told Scroll. “I have no doubt this is a part of the BJP’s strategy.”

The Vanchit Bahujan Aghadi, the party with a strong Dalit base led by Prakash Ambedkar, has fielded a candidate. So has the All India Majlis-E-Ittehadul Muslimeen, which has Muslim supporters in several states. These two parties, in alliance in the last election, damaged the prospects of Congress-Nationalist Congress Party candidates in at least eight Lok Sabha seats.

Curiously, even as Ambedkar extended his support to select Congress and Nationalist Congress Party candidates in this election, he has chosen to field a candidate against Gaikwad, who is a Dalit woman. Gaikwad has won the Dharavi assembly seat four consecutive times.

In the Maharashtra assembly and on the streets, Gaikwad has emerged as a trenchant critic of the fact that the Adani group has secured a multi-million dollar project to redevelop Dharavi – one of Asia’s largest slum clusters. The redevelopment project has sparked great anxiety among residents and the small entrepreneurs who operate unorganised enterprises there.

Dharavi is part of the Mumbai South Central constituency. Here, Anil Desai of the Shiv Sena’s Thackeray faction is pitted against the sitting MP Rahul Shewale, who sided with Eknath Shinde in the Shiv Sena rebellion. Gaikwad and the Congress have been actively campaigning for Desai.

In the prestigious Mumbai South seat, sitting MP, Arvind Sawant who stayed with Uddhav Thackeray, is pitted against MLA Yamini Jadhav of Eknath Shinde’s Shiv Sena. This constituency includes the affluent neighbourhoods of Colaba and Malabar Hill but also encompasses areas like Sewri, Parel, Lalbaug and Worli where substantial numbers of the Shiv Sena’s core Marathi voters live.

Enforcement Directorate effect

Yamini Jadhav and her husband Yashwant reflect the phenomenon that has defined the political churn across India. They were being investigated for corruption by several federal agencies – but the inquiries stalled once Jadhav joined the BJP-led National Democratic Alliance along with Eknath Shinde.

An investigation by The Indian Express showed that opposition leaders facing corruption inquiries got a reprieve from the agencies once they crossed over to the BJP. The report underscored the fact that the bulk of the Central actions was focused on Maharashtra through 2022 and 2023, the years in which the Shiv Sena and Nationalist Congress Party witnessed vertical splits.

The carrot-and-stick approach has been so blatant that Shiv Sena politician Ravindra Waikar publicly stated last week that he had to choose between jail and joining Eknath Shinde’s party. Waikar was under investigation by the Enforcement Directorate and the state Economic Offences Wing. He defected from Uddhav Thackeray’s party in March and was rewarded with a ticket by the Mayayuti for Mumbai North West.

Waikar told reporters that the “tension and depression” caused by interrogation by agencies went away when Shinde intervened and spoke to the investigating officers. But his opponent, Amol Kirtikar of Thackeray’s Shiv Sena faction, received a summons from the Enforcement Directorate within days of his candidature being declared.

The agency has since questioned him in a so-called khichdi scam allegedly involving corruption in contracts being awarded to firms providing food for stranded migrant workers during the Covid-19 lockdown.

Amol Kirtikar’s father, veteran politician Gajanan Kirtikar is the sitting MP from the seat, but is part of the Ekanth Shinde camp.

Modi’s power play

The 48 MPs that Maharashtra sends to the Lok Sabha are the second-largest group in Parliament after Uttar Pradesh. In the 2019 election, the BJP-Shiv Sena combine won 41 of these seats. Since then, the state has seen a great churn.

Prime Minister Modi, acknowledging the significance of the state to his party’s eventual tally, has already addressed 16 rallies in the state, significantly more than the nine he headlined in 2019. The BJP’s critics say that it perhaps betrays the Hindutva party’s anxiety about the sympathy in favour of Uddhav Thackeray and Sharad Pawar over the splits engineered in their parties.

On Wednesday, Modi held his first-ever road show in Mumbai. Thousands of supporters lined the route in Ghatkopar, a traditional BJP stronghold. The area is part of the Mumbai North East constituency. Here, the BJP’s Mihir Kotecha is pitted against Sanjay Dina Patil of the Thackeray Shiv Sena. In Mumbai North, considered the safest seat for the BJP, Union Commerce Minister Piyush Goyal will make his electoral debut.

‘Real’ and ‘fake’ Sena

Modi, in his speeches in Mumbai and elsewhere in Maharashtra, has often referred to Thackeray’s party as the “nakli” or fake Sena – remarks that have raised the hackles of the Maharashtrian politician’s followers. Uddhav Thackeray, perhaps sensing the latent sympathy for his family, has responded by reminding his audience that it was his father who built the Shiv Sena and his grandfather, social reformer Prabodhankar Thackeray, who christened the party Shiv Sena, meaning Shivaji’s army.

While the Shiv Sena’s growth in other regions of Maharashtra has been limited, Mumbai and Thane have over the decades remained its strongholds. The rebellion in 2022 by Eknath Shinde, characterised by Uddhav Thackeray and his supporters as “gaddari” or betrayal, was by no means the first revolt in the Sena.

But what set this rebellion apart was the sheer number of elected representatives, including veteran Sainiks, who switched sides at all levels. In February 2023, the Election Commission ruled that Eknath Shinde’s faction is the real Sena, allowing it to use the dhanush-baan, the bow and arrow that has been the Shiv Sena’s symbol since 1989. It was the first time the party was not associated with the Thackeray family.

Akolkar admitted that the Election Commission’s decision had kneecapped Uddhav Thackeray. But, he observed, “the people’s court is greater than anything else”.

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