Eknath Shinde: The True Heir

THERE WAS NO motorable road leadingto Irshalwadi, a remote village in Raigad district near the foothills of the Sahyadri hills where heavy rainfall triggered a mas­sive landslide on July 20, 2023, flattening most homes. It was still pouring when the National Disaster Response Force (NDRF) reached and began pulling out bodies and survivors. Six­teen people died and several others were injured and the state ad­ministration was left grappling with the magnitude of the tragedy.

It is in such situations that Shiv Sena volunteers in Maharash­tra, despite the reputation they carry as a rough and ready lot, are known to plunge into rescue efforts without hesitation. If the native Maharashtrian identity and Hindutva are its calling cards, so were the Sena’s once-ubiquitous ambulances in Mumbai and its volunteer spirit. This time, too, a Shiv Sainik trudged through the slippery and steep terrain, his trademark white trousers stained by slush. Then Chief Minister Eknath Shinde was at ground zero, just as an ordinary Sainik would.

Drenched despite his jacket and hoodie, Shinde took in the carnage and made sure the administrative machinery got into high gear. That single initiative transformed Shinde’s image, making him someone people could identify with. Till then, for a year after he rebelled against Uddhav Thackeray’s leadership and took 40 Sena MLAs with him to become chief minister of a Sena- Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) government, he had faced attacks for being a gaddar (traitor) who switched loyalties for the loafs of office. The criticism did not stop but lost much of its sting. Amid the political jousting and legal cases over which Sena was the real one, Shinde scored with his muddy walk.

Shinde showed the smarts to outmanoeuvre the Thackerays—the clan is known for clever play on words—redefin­ing ‘CM’ as ‘Common Man’. Uddhav Thackeray, on the other hand, was portrayed as the ‘Facebook CM’ and distant from the masses. Thackeray’s tendency to remain closeted in his ‘Matoshree’ resi­dence, delivering empty sermons, contrasted with Shinde as being one of and among the people. The man who lost his party was paint­ed as an entitled dynast. Shinde, however, was a farmer with roots in Satara and a former autorickshaw driver who rose by toiling in Sena shakhas in Thane under the party’s Thane boss Anand Dighe.

A significant feature, and differentiator, of Shinde’s style is the ‘open door’ at the chief minister’s official residence. When Thackeray led the Maharashtra Vikas Aghadi (MVA) between late 2019 and mid-2022, entry was strictly restricted and many Sena MLAs and functionaries complained they could not meet the leader. Now, almost anyone could walk in and Shinde would meet people at odd hours, gaining a reputation for being awake until 3AM to interact with citizens.

Shinde played the role of the ordinary Marathi Manoos (man) with aplomb and pronounced himself the real legatee of Bal Thackeray’s Hindutva politics, saying that the mantle cannot be claimed only on the basis of family ties. Helped by the Uddhav Sena’s conundrum of having to seek Muslim votes, Shinde pre­sented himself as the ideological inheritor and his faction being the outfit Sena founder Balasaheb had envisioned. Declaring his commitment to Hindutva, Shinde said he was a saamanya (ordi­nary) Sainik as against a leader born to privilege and unaware of the struggles of the common man.

In seeking power in the company of Congress and Nationalist Congress Party (NCP) leader Sharad Pawar, Thackeray misread the typical Shiv Sainik, who is not pro-Congress or pro-NCP, ir­respective of claims that the party initially rose under the patron­age of Congress to cut Mumbai’s once-dominant communists to size. The Sena grew in a very limited way in the 1970s and faced an existential crisis by the early 1980s. It was when Bal Thackeray embraced Hindutva in the mid-1980s and after he openly advo­cated the cause in a bypoll for the Vile Parle seat in Mumbai in 1987 that the Sena grew in leaps and bounds. The outfit took upon itself the role of ‘defender’ of Mumbai’s Hindu community in the 1992-93 communal riots and wrested power from Congress in the state in alliance with BJP in 1995. This is the bedrock of the Sena’s identity, one that Sainiks swear by.

Uddhav sought to cast the Sena in a very different mould. The lynching of sadhus in Palghar on his watch as chief minister did not inspire confidence; rather it caused distress to his core con­stituency. His party either did not protest or did so feebly when Congress attacked the principal theorist of Hindutva, freedom fighter Vinayak ‘Veer’ Damodar Savarkar. At a recent Assembly poll rally, Thackeray said Chhatrapati Shivaji sacked Surat be­cause he wanted to target the British factory rather than because it was the principal trading centre of the Mughal Empire.

The Uddhav Sena relied on the ‘Marathi-plus-Muslim’ combine to win seats in the Lok Sabha elections, and constituencies such as South Central Mumbai, Mumbai South and North East Mumbai saw minority consolidation tilt the scales in favour of its candidates, often overturning handsome leads National Democratic Alliance (NDA) candidates obtained from Hindu-majority areas. Uddhav believed this to be good enough to offset the losses his Sena suffered because many traditional Marathi votes slipped away. There were warning signs like the loss of Ratnagiri Sindhudurg to arch foe Narayan Rane and the unflattering results in match-ups with the Shinde Sena. But Thackeray failed to see the cultural divergence from the Sena template or a likely counter-mobilisation.

Shinde renamed Aurangabad as Sambhajinagar, a demand aggressively pursued by Bal Thackeray, and Uddhav offered no enthusiastic endorsement, afraid to annoy his new Muslim sup­port. Osmanabad was renamed as Dharashiv. Further, Shinde suc­cessfully pursued the longstanding demand for classical status for the Marathi language. He got the state administration to remove encroachments near the Adil Shahi general Afzal Khan’s tomb on the foothills of Fort Pratapgarh, encroachments that were a sore for Shivaji’s followers who visited the fort. For long, the annual pilgrim­age to Pandharpur has been a premier cultural event with lakhs of devotees of Bhakti poet-saints across castes and communities undertaking 21 days of walking in long dindis or processions. These warkaris, as they are known for the annual wari or pilgrimage to the temple of Lord Vitthal, received a pension for senior citizens among the warkaris and Shinde announced `20,000 for each group and provided amenities along the route. Shinde touched a raw nerve in the Marathi Manoos constituency when he accused Uddhav of failing to check the exodus of Marathi-speaking families from Mumbai and promised to bring them back.

Thackeray became apologetic about Hindutva and the Marathi ethos. He claimed he had not abandoned Hindutva but represented a ‘progressive’ version, failing nevertheless to define what that meant. Statements such as “the Muslim community is with us because it knows that if we attack, we do so from the front, not from the back” were unconvincing. Shinde accused him of appeasement and said the real Sena would never ally with Congress. Again and again, Shinde highlighted the statement made by Bal Thackeray that he would “never allow the Sena to become Congress”. The Sena founder had also said, “If it did, I will dissolve the Sena but would not make it into another Congress.”

The shakha is an intrinsic part of the Sena’s organisational principles that every legislator stays in touch with. In Worli, one of the complaints of shakha members, according to a Sena functionary, was that the local legislator and Uddhav’s son Aaditya Thackeray, who was elected enthusiastically in 2019, was not in regular touch with the shakha network. Aaditya won by a narrow margin of 8,000-odd votes, a sharp fall from the 60,000- plus lead he had enjoyed in 2019. Meanwhile, Shinde cannily reached out to Sena shakhas where he knew people by name, asking about their families and assisting people in need.

Shinde showcased himself as the son of the soil and the Ladki Bahin scheme won him the tag of ‘Ladka Bhau’ (favourite brother). In the saffron Sena brotherhood that counts for a lot.

Assembly elections 2024Devendra FadnavisEknath ShindeMaharashtrapoliticsSharad PawarUddhav Thackeray