To revitalise wing, Yuva Sena seeks new faces

The tour comes at a time when core committee members, Purvesh Sarnaik and Samadhan Sarvankar – both former corporators – joined the Eknath Shinde faction of the Shiv Sena, when the party split in June

Mumbai: A core group of Aaditya Thackeray-led Yuva Sena members, including its secretary Varun Sardesai, started a state-wide tour on Saturday to induct new members and revitalise the working of the youth wing of the Shiv Sena.

Mumbai, India - August 18, 2022: MLA Aaditya Thackeray during the monsoon session at Vidhan Bhavan, in Mumbai, India, on Thursday, August 18, 2022. (Photo by Anshuman Poyrekar/ Hindustan Times) (Anshuman Poyrekar/HT PHOTO)

On Saturday, Sardesai launched the Yuva Sena’s ‘Nirdhar Abhiyan,’ which will cover 48 assembly constituencies in eight districts of Marathwada region as well as parts of Buldhana in Vidarbha region. The yatra is expected to continue till September 20.

“We want to create a new team of youth through this tour,” Sardesai said, adding that cousin Aaditya Thackeray’s tour of Maharashtra in the past few months garnered a good grassroots response. “There are some young activists who are doing good work at the grassroots. We want to associate with them and build a new team by giving them responsibilities (in the organization),” he said.

Sardesai, accompanied by Suprada Phatarpekar, another core committee member, will be joined by others enroute. The campaign will eventually cover other areas of the state including Konkan, Western Maharashtra, Vidarbha and North Maharashtra.

The tour comes at a time when core committee members, Purvesh Sarnaik and Samadhan Sarvankar – both former corporators – joined the Eknath Shinde faction of the Shiv Sena, when the party split in June. Their legislator fathers, Pratap Sarnaik and Sada Sarvankar respectively, are also in Shinde’s camp. There are also speculations that more members including Ameya Ghole, Yuva Sena treasurer and former Brihanmumbai Municipal Corporation (BMC) health committee chairperson, and Amol Kirtikar, general secretary of Yuva Sena, may also join forces with Shinde. The chief minister has formed a parallel Yuva Sena with Purvesh Sarnaik and Pune’s Kiran Sali as core committee members; the latter was appointed secretary, recently. This would certainly help bolster Shinde’s ongoing efforts to portray his faction as the “real” Sena.

On the other hand, Yuva Sena functionaries are banking on the opportunity for upward mobility created by these desertions. For instance, Kunal Darade, the son of MLC Narendra Darade, who was a Yuva Sena functionary, was appointed district chief of Shiv Sena in Nashik after a massive erosion of the ranks following Shinde’s rebellion. Kirtikar, who is the son of Mumbai North West MP Gajanan Kirtikar, was appointed deputy leader of the Sena.

The Yuva Sena has also decided to contest the senate elections in varsities outside Mumbai, like at the Punyashlok Ahilyadevi Holkar Solapur University, Sardesai said. This is a departure from the past when Yuva Sena focused on university and college elections only in Mumbai and Thane.

The Yuva Sena, which replaced the Shiv Sena’s student wing, the Bharatiya Vidyarthi Sena (BVS), was formed in the backdrop of growing support among the youth for Raj Thackeray’s Maharashtra Navnirman Sena (MNS). Raj Thackeray had been appointed as the chief of the BVS in 1988, and walked out with most of the organization in 2005 to form his MNS the next year.

Aaditya was launched in politics as the head of the Yuva Sena at the party’s Dussehra rally in 2010 by his grandfather, late Shiv Sena supremo Bal Thackeray. Though there were complaints about the upper echelons of the organization being staffed by the children and relatives of senior Sena leaders, the Yuva Sena prevented the second-generation of Sena cadre from joining the MNS by giving them a political opening.

Shinde’s partisans claimed that the political and administrative interference of some Yuva Sena leaders during the Maharashtra Vikas Aghadi’s regime had bred a lot of resentment among the party’s rank-and-file.