 "Uddhav Thackeray")
It was a vindication of sorts for Shiv Sena chief Uddhav Thackeray, 57, when BJP President Amit Shah met him last week to mollify the ‘Tiger’, who only days before had dubbed the ruling party his biggest political enemy.
This has sent out at least one message: That Thackeray, often described as a “soft (spoken) leader of a hardline Hindutva party” is no pushover. Uddhav’s surprise move last month to field a Sena candidate in the Palghar Lok Sabha bypoll delivered a blow to the BJP, which scraped through in a seat it had won by more than 200,000 votes in May 2014.
The Sena leader got leadership on a platter from his father, the late Bal Thackeray, who founded the Sena in the 1960s. Uddhav has shown that the judgement of his father, who died in 2012, to anoint him successor was a good one.
After Uddhav was made successor, his cousin Raj Thackeray left the party to form the Maharashtra Navnirman Sena (MNS), which has become a laggard owing to the laid-back attitude of its leader.
Though lacking the charisma and the firebrand style of his father, Uddhav has not only steadied the Sena ship but has also shown flexibility in tactics.
Uddhav has ensured that the Sena plays the role of the opposition despite being part of the BJP-led government at the Centre and in the state. It is playing the role more effectively than the Congress or the Nationalist Congress Party.
It is said that Uddhav is impressed by the fighting spirit of Trinamool chief Mamata Banerjee, who ousted the Left from power in West Bengal virtually single-handed, and wants to emulate her example. Six months ago, Uddhav and his son Aaditya, the rising star in the Sena, met the West Bengal chief minister at a hotel in Mumbai.
After the Sena ruptured its alliance with the BJP in the civic polls in Mumbai early last year, Uddhav had made a strong pitch for forging a grouping of regional parties to take on the BJP.
Last month, while campaigning in Palghar against the BJP, he appealed to all including the Congress and the Communists to unite to save the country from “calamity”, which was seen as the most strident attack on the Modi dispensation by an ally.
Uddhav had undergone an angioplasty some six years ago and after that Aaditya’s involvement in party affairs has grown.
The past four years have been the most challenging for Uddhav because instead of getting recognition as the leader of the second-largest party in the NDA, he faced marginalisation from the BJP.
Trouble started in the run-up to the Assembly polls in Maharashtra, held just five months after the May 2014 Lok Sabha polls. Uddhav was forced to fight separately by a resurgent BJP, which was no longer ready to play second fiddle to the Sena. At that time, Uddhav fought valiantly in the face of a campaign blitzkrieg of Prime Minister Narendra Modi and scuttled the BJP’s plans to get a majority in the House of 288. He ensured 63 seats for the Sena and restricted the BJP to 122 seats, 23 short of majority, at a time when the Modi wave was still visible.
The journey since then has showed that Uddhav, though not authoritarian like his father, has intelligently led the outfit. The way he deals with the BJP in the coming days will decide which way the politics of Maharashtra is going to change.
