Uddhav-Pawar to share dais with Raj, Fadnavis?

MUMBAI: Estranged cousins Uddhav Thackeray and Raj Thackeray could share the stage on Saturday to inaugurate the statute of Shiv Sena founder Bal Thackeray at Colaba on the occasion of the late leader’s 95th birth anniversary.

This would be first time that Uddhav and Raj, who heads the Maharashtra Navnirman Sena (MNS), would share a stage after the former became the chief minister (CM) of the state. The CM had interacted with Raj, along with other Opposition leaders, when he had convened an all-party meeting to discuss the Covid-19 situation in May 2020 via videoconferencing.

Apart from the Thackeray cousins, the other heavyweights of state politics, including Nationalist Congress Party (NCP) chief Sharad Pawar and former CM and current Opposition leader from the Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) Devendra Fadnavis have also been invited by the Mumbai civic body for the event.

The leaders are expected to share a stage probably for the last time before the Sena, NCP, BJP and MNS descend in the election-mode to control the Mumbai civic body that goes to poll in February 2022.

The statue of Bal Thackeray, a project of the Sena-controlled Brihanmumbai Municipal Corporation (BMC), will be the first in Mumbai, the city where he established his political organisation.

Covered behind a green cloth tucked on bamboos, the bronze statue is being prepped to be unveiled by the CM, who is the late leader’s son on Saturday.

The nine-feet-tall statue will be placed on an 11-feet pedestal at a traffic island near Regal Cinema. Local residents have opposed the installation of the statue, citing a 2013 Supreme Court order that stated no statues would be installed on public roads.

Bal Thackeray, who was born in 1926, shared a great equation with Pawar despite being political opponents. He forged the alliance with BJP, giving his party a new direction towards a wider issue of Hindutva in the late 1980s. While his nephew Raj was seen as his political heir, Bal Thackeray chose his son Uddhav to lead the party in 2003. Raj then quit the Sena and launched MNS in March 2005.

Workers give final touches to the traffic island, where Bal Thackeray’s statue will be unveiled, at Colaba.