The month that changed the course of Maharashtra politics

Exactly a month ago, on June 20, a group of Shiv Sena MLAs led by Eknath Shinde went incommunicado

Exactly a month ago, on June 20, a group of Shiv Sena MLAs led by Eknath Shinde went incommunicado. Later, it turned out to be a rebellion against the Uddhav Thackeray-led Maharashtra Vikas Aghadi (MVA) government.

Chief minister Eknath Shinde addresses a press conference in Delhi on Tuesday. PTI

In the next 10 days, Sena started falling apart with 40 of its 54 MLAs quitting the party in phases and joining the Shinde faction. It forced Thackeray to resign as chief minister on June 29 following which Shinde and the Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) formed the government.

While it allowed the BJP to get control over India’s financial capital and rein in its former saffron partner and a troublesome rival, it led to the decimation of Sena, a strong party in the state’s political landscape for over three decades.

One month later, the impact of the rebellion is clear on the state politics.

Sena is now facing the battle for its existence. Right from its inception, a Sena without the Thackeray at the helm was impossible.

On Monday, it was Shinde who announced a new national executive of the party keeping Thackeray as a figurehead party chief and anointing himself as mukhya neta or chief leader. With the Shinde group claiming to be original Sena with support of maximum elected representatives, it is clear that Thackeray will have to fight for keeping the party name and symbol with him.

As things stand today, both the factions are waiting for the Supreme Court’s decision on petitions filed by them against each other. While the Shinde faction has challenged the decision of Thackeray to issue notices for disqualification on Shinde and 15 MLAs, the Thackeray group has questioned the decision of Governor B S Koshyari to invite Shinde and Devendra Fadnavis to form the government.

If the apex court says the speaker would be the authority to decide everything, things could get easier for Shinde. If the court accepts the decision of deputy speaker Narhari Zirwal to recognise Ajay Chaudhary as Sena leader in the assembly, there could be proceedings of disqualification against Shinde and others for not voting as per Thackeray’s stand against the Shinde-Fadnavis government during the trust vote. Again, the role of the speaker would be important. The decision would again be subject to legal scrutiny as one of the two sides is likely to challenge it in court.

The Shinde-BJP alliance and Thackeray-led Sena will have their next showdown in the civic polls likely to be held in September. The battleground would be the Mumbai-Thane belt. While Thackeray has managed to hold on to a significant chunk of Mumbai MLAs and councilors, Shinde is gaining strength day by day and is determined to finish off Thackeray’s control of the party. His aides are also expecting help from the BJP in this.

In fact, it is the BJP that stands to gain from the current Thackeray-versus-Shinde battle in the long run. The rebellion in Sena has led to the collapse of the MVA government which was an experiment of opposition parties against the BJP. The opposition camp was hopeful of replicating this experiment in other states where the BJP was in power or hoping to win power. This will also affect the morale of the opposition as the parties have been trying to stitch together a national level coalition against the BJP for the next Lok Sabha elections.

It also means a serious setback to the Nationalist Congress Party (NCP) chief Sharad Pawar whose role in national politics gets undermined if he doesn’t have power in Maharashtra. From 1999 to 2014 when the Congress-NCP alliance was in power, Pawar called the shots and as such, had weightage in national politics. Fadnavis and the BJP tried to cut him to size during 2014-2019 when the BJP-Sena alliance was in power. He bounced back with the MVA experiment after the 2019 assembly elections and though Thackeray was the chief minister, it was always regarded that the NCP chief was doing the backseat driving. Pawar will now have to face an aggressive BJP.

For the BJP, the biggest outcome of the last one month is the decimation of Sena. Dealing with Thackerays was always a tricky business for the party as the two parties shared the same voter base. The BJP always saw Sena as an obstacle in its plan to win Maharashtra on its own. In 2014 assembly elections, the BJP riding on the Modi wave reached 114 but had to depend on other parties (first indirect support of the NCP and later support of Sena) to form the government. In 2019 elections even with alliance, the BJP could reach 104. A strong Sena in Maharashtra means either the BJP had to lose some seats to the Thackeray-led party if contesting separately (due to division in pro-Hindutva votes) or sacrifice a few seats for alliance with Sena. Whatever happens to the Shinde faction, Sena is unlikely to emerge as equally a strong force in the near future.

A month after the rebellion, several questions remain to be answered: Can Thackeray revive Sena after a severe setback? Will it be end of the road for the MVA experiment or will Sena continue its coalition with the NCP and Congress? Will Shinde manage to keep his flock together? And above all, will Thackeray retain the official name and symbol of the party if the Shinde faction is claiming to be original Sena?

The Shinde-Fadnavis-versus-Thackeray war is far from over.