On birth centenary, Shinde, Uddhav vie for Bal Thackeray’s legacy

“If you read what sort of a company the Shiv Sena is, and if you feature modified ambition, you can survive in it,” former Maharashtra chief minister Manohar Joshi once told the media after leaving office. Joshi, who became the first-ever CM of the Shiv Sena-BJP combine in 1995 was summarily sacked by his boss Bal Thackeray after only three years in the job, and replaced by Narayan Rane.Joshi, in keeping with his view on ambition, chose to remain with the party until his death in 2024.Eknath Shinde, unfettered by any such notion of modesty, not only split Bal Thackeray’s Shiv Sena, taking over the party’s name and symbol in 2022, but has since also staked claim to his legacy.On Friday, the day marking the start of Bal Thackeray’s birth centennial year, Shinde was in Colaba to garland the patriarch’s statue; he then visited the Thackeray memorial in Dadar to pay homage; and still later in the day, at Mantralaya to announce a slew of government schemes to mark the occasion.“On the birth centenary of the great Balasaheb Thackeray, we pay tribute to a towering figure who profoundly shaped Maharashtra’s socio-cultural landscape…” wrote prime minister Narendra Modi on X.Balasaheb Thackeray may have died in 2012, but his outsized presence looms over Maharashtra politics. And even though the party he founded in 1966 has splintered, its son-of-the-soil rhetoric still exerts a strong emotional pull in the state.“There was not a single comparable leader in India,” journalist and former member of Parliament Kumar Ketkar once said. The Shiv Sena was India’s first city-centric party, and Thackeray, who never contested an election, coined the term remote control for himself when his party swept to power with the BJP in 1995.While he was alive, Balasaheb kept an iron-fisted control over his organization -- and analysts say some of its present problems can be located in this over centralisation. The party was the only leading political outfit in India that did not have a written constitution or recognition by the Election Commission of India until 1989. (Nor was there any provision for elections within the party until 2003 when Uddhav was ‘elected’ executive president). Instead, millions of Sainiks in Mumbai would wake up every day to read their leader’s mind in the Saamna — the party-run newspaper. They would find out who was in and out of favour on a particular day. From Dilip Kumar to Amitabh Bachchan, Sachin Tendulkar to Vijay Tendulkar, and Sonia Gandhi to Enron’s Rebecca Mark to MF Husain, Balasaheb Thackeray had a view on everyone.Thackeray was the first of the post-independence politicians to use mass media to his compelling advantage. When a friend pointed out to him the number of non-Marathi speakers who wielded power in Bombay—this was in the aftermath of the Samyukta Maharashtra movement—it led to an audacious editorial gimmick. He began printing entire lists of non-Marathi names from the telephone directory under a column, ‘Vacha ani thanda basa’ (read, and sit quiet) in the cartoon weekly ‘Marmik’ that he ran with his father and brother. The column so enthused his readers that they began sending their own lists of non-natives in prominent positions to the magazine. Thackeray ratcheted up his campaign against outsiders, changing the slogan of his column to ‘Vacha, ani utha’ (read, and arise). That campaign, with its construct of ‘The Other’, laid the cornerstone of Thackeray’s political philosophy. Each time there was ‘The Other’ to attack, Thackery and the Shiv Sena flourished—be it the campaign against Tamilians, against Communists, immigrants from UP and Bihar, or Muslims during the Babri Masjid movement.The now-deceased lawyer and former party MP Adhik Shirodkar who legally defended Balasaheb in his many cases, once said: “Maharashtrians had a certain inferiority complex that manifested itself in arrogance — Balasaheb understood that and played to that.” He also had the cartoonist’s skill of the devastating put-down. When friend and bête noire, Communist leader SA Dange, railed at a workers’ rally organized by the Shiv Sena in 1984 (he was there at Thackeray’s behest) that the party did not have a theory and it was impossible for a political party to survive without a theory, Thackeray retorted: “We have survived for 18 years but how is it that despite a theory, your organization is finished?”This arrogance that his followers loved, often fanned their violent impulse. Careful never to indulge in it himself — from the beginning he had a thespian’s appreciation for the pedestal, and the ability to stay on it -- Thackeray gladly condoned it.“Don’t come to me like losers with bandaged heads, instead come to me only when you are wearing the victory pheta on your head,” he would tell his early acolytes.“It became a strategy, like the British National Party in the sixties which attacked Indian migrants for stealing their jobs, because many Sainiks kept nursing real as well as perceived grievances that they were neglected, ignored, marginalized, humiliated,” said Ketkar.Thackeray alchemised this victimhood, into Bombay’s ‘thokshahi’ (coercion) culture. In his seminal study, Urban Violence in India, academic Thomas Blom Hansen writes, “It (Sena) made a populist political idiom of the defiance of public authority as a way to protect fundamental cultural values and the chastity of women; it created a vehicle for collective action, for example the network of shakhas; it embodied a generalized cause to fight for, and finally, it promoted a charismatic leader who, in dramatic and colourful language, could turn the feeling of marginalization into a sense of power and potency merely by virtues of numbers and being a plebeian — simple, muscular, courageous.”The Shiv Sena made an early mark in the Brihanmumbai Municipal Corporation pulling off stunts like picking up uncollected garbage in trucks and depositing it at the table of the ward officers.An early acolyte, Gajanan Kirtikar, headed the Shiv Sena’s Sthaniya Lokadhikar Samiti Mahasangh, (Platform for rights of the locals) working closely with banks, insurance companies and airlines to ensure the use of Marathi and adequate representation of Marathi-speaking people in these organisations. He was charged for rioting during 1992-’93. When the Sena came to power in 1995, Balasaheb rewarded him by making him minister of state for home, and boss of all those policemen prosecuting him in the riot cases.Kirtikar, always a fan of rough-and-ready politics, was one of the 13 MPs who left with Eknath Shinde, an embodiment of the predicament that grips Balasaheb’s heirs today. The BJP’s political manoeuvring and its overarching appeal on the twin planks of Hindutva and welfarism has cut the ground from under Uddhav Thackery’s feet. Nativism, especially in the Marathi middle classes, still resonates deeply, but Uddhav Thackeray’s constitutionalism, his soberness and his political vulnerability offer the antithesis of Balasaheb’s visceral appeal.“The BJP is wrong if it thinks it can finish the Shiv Sena (UBT). It’s not a party but an idea,” the former CM told a gathering of Sainiks in Mumbai on Friday. In Balasaheb’s birth centennial year, his heir will have to find ways to reimagine and re-energise the idea of the Shiv Sena.