The genesis of the electoral, ideological crisis in the Sena
The party Bal Thackeray founded is fighting for its survival after a rebellion against the chief minister. The outcome will have a profound impact on state and national politics, and change the face of Mumbai forever
The year is 1966. As the biggest city of a young state born just six years before, erstwhile Bombay is in churn. Waves of capital washing ashore cannot keep pace with the hordes of young men arriving at the city’s gates from the hinterlands in search of jobs. The first post-independence generation is reaching adulthood, unmoored by the freedom struggle and wary about their future in a socialist-leaning economy. Many are anxious that “outsiders” are better educated or work for lesser pay, thereby beating them in the employment market. Into this ferment, one rainy June morning, was born the Shiv Sena. Anchored by the charismatic but militant personality of Bal Thackeray, a cartoonist and journalist, the Sena quickly achieved success in the city and later, the state, by reinforcing Maratha pride, giving Maharashtra its first non-congress chief minister (CM) in 1995.
Fifty-six years on, and a decade after Thackeray’s death, the Sena faces an existential crisis with the largest rebellion – on three separate occasions earlier, top leaders have left the party, but none since the death of Bal Thackeray – it has ever suffered. With 38 of its 55 legislators deserting CM Uddhav Thackeray and backing urban development minister Eknath Shinde, the party is in freefall and the coalition government it heads on the brink of collapse. Irrespective of the direction this crisis takes – it will likely end up before the courts, unless Uddhav works out a truce, creates enough pressure on the rebels for some of them to return to the fold, or resigns – it is clear that the Maha Vikas Aghadi (MVA), the coalition that was forged purely as a political checkmate to the Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP), is on borrowed time. It is also clear that no matter who is left in charge of the Sena, Thackeray or Shinde, the tumult will mark the beginning of a new phase for the party, if it survives at all.
There are several immediate reasons for the turmoil, but at its root are two contradictions, electoral and ideological. To understand this, one has to go back to 2014 – the first election the Sena faced without its charismatic founder, and the first that its erstwhile junior partner the BJP did with its own charismatic new leader Narendra Modi. Contrary to speculation, the death of the senior Thackeray provided little emotional boost to the Sena, and the party only saw a modest three percentage point rise in its vote share. Modi’s campaigning, on the other hand, propelled the BJP to register a 14 percentage point increase in its vote share and nearly triple its seat tally. Suddenly, the crown of Maharashtra’s Hindu samrat, or emperor, passed on from the Thackeray family to Modi, whose appeal could sway communities that had remained cold to the Sena’s militant ways. It marked the end of the Shiv Sena’s reign as the big brother of the saffron alliance in Maharashtra. It inaugurated a period of unrest in the coalition – the Sena left, came back, and then left again – but the underlying anxiety about Hindutva, and whether the Sena could take on the BJP on what was once its own turf, was never resolved. Uddhav’s decision to insist on the CM’S chair in 2019 and his walking out of the alliance can be understood in this context – the Sena was feeling squeezed as a more stridently Hindutva party was taking the ideological plank away from the Thackerays, limiting their base to Mumbai-thane, the Konkan coast, and pockets in Aurangabad.
This ideological crisis coincided with an electoral stalemate for the party that grew out of low-income, Maratha-dominated suburbs of Mumbai and Thane, and struggled to grow in the interior districts, especially in regions where a presence was not already established during the Bal Thackeray years. Uddhav’s attempts to carve out his own ideological space (by breaking ties with the BJP) ironically created more problems for the Sena worker, who found it difficult to reconcile decades of enmity with the Congressncp. It also did not give the party a foothold in the countryside where the Congress-ncp was dominant, and the BJP was rapidly growing. This problem was evident in the 60-odd seats where the three MVA partners were in direct contest before October 2019.
The Sena’s response to the dual contradiction was to lower the pitch on Hindutva and dial up its development and governance agenda. As this rebellion shows, the strategy was devoid of both mass connect – the core
Sena voter’s concerns about hardline ideology and everyday livelihood didn’t square with the more urbane image projected by the newer crop of leaders who sought to gain elite approval and intra-party appeal, with the old guard feeling abandoned by newer leaders and alienated by the perceived abandonment of the street-fighter mode. Combined with the demands of an extreme alliance, the rebels felt that the NCP was able to strengthen its organisation through distribution of posts in state-run corporations and government bodies and the constant aggression of the BJP, which was not above nudging central agencies to create pressure on the unwieldy alliance, and it became a political tinderbox that exploded on Monday.
Despite the fluidity in the political situation now, the Sena’s attrition will transform Maharashtra’s politics. The clear benefactor is the BJP, which has not only avenged its humiliation post the 2019 polls but has also emerged as the de-facto Hindutva mainstay in the state. It is now in a position to either absorb the rebel leaders or snatch Sena strongholds in the next election with the Thackerays likely to be bogged down in protecting their fief in Mumbai (Thane will be difficult given Shinde’s hold on local men and corporators). The NCP should also be in a relative position of strength, having used two years to strengthen its cadre, place key office-bearers in plum posts, and nurture its citadel of western Maharashtra, and parts of Marathwada and north Maharashtra.
For national politics, it leaves a lesson and a question. It shows that for political parties, organisational strength should be valued above everything else (especially for outfits challenging the BJP). The shakha and vibhag in the Sena functioned well under the aadesh (order) culture of Bal Thackeray, who created an aura of mystique and power. Uddhav’s public office removed the mystique, and later his isolation – he blamed poor health and the rebels blamed a coterie of leaders – meant that the organisation wilted under the pressure of expectation.
But it also underlines the dilemma of regional parties, which have often shown more electoral effectiveness in taking on the BJP than the Congress but also grapple with the decision of whether to be co-opted by the national hegemon or oppose it. As the experience of Nitish Kumar and now, Uddhav Thackeray shows, either choice can be thorny – the BJP’S political machine may eat up political and ideological oxygen while in alliance but facing it as an adversary can decimate the party. For a resource-starved Opposition that is staring at losing control of India’s richest state two years before the general elections, these questions will be crucial if it wants to put up a fight in 2024.
But ultimately, politics is about people. And the Sena’s crisis will have no bigger imprint than in the place where it all began – Mumbai. For almost half a century, 227 Sena shakhas have quasi governed the city, acting as a local government to solve citizens’ problems, or as lobby groups helping constituents get admission into school or secure a government job. As the node of civic, cultural and social life in large swathes of the city, especially its cramped chawls and sprawling slums, the shakha ran on the implicit diktat of the most important political address in the city – Matoshree in Bandra East. But with the Sena wobbling, Matoshree in hushed despair, and rebels eyeing party corporators, is India’s financial capital headed for yet another round of churn? Whether the Sena survives or reinvents itself, it now seems that the era of authority inaugurated that wet June morning in 1966 is coming to an end.