Maharashtra: Can Uddhav Thackeray teach ‘Kamlabai’ a lesson again?

The contretemps between the Shiv Sena and the BJP is now at a point of no return. The Sena played an audacious trick on the BJP by pinching both its Lok Sabha seat and the son of its deceased Member of Parliament and putting him up in the Palghar constituency bypoll. The Sena had expected to win the seat. Now Sena president Uddhav Thackeray blames the complicity of the Election Commission with the BJP for the defeat of Shrinivas Wanga. But apart from the usual complaints of EVM malfunctions, his charge is startling—that overnight there was an increase of one lakh voters in the constituency. Those names could not have come up in a few short hours without the EC being in cahoots with the BJP, he has charged.

“The friendship between us is over,” he has said.

Chief Minister Devendra Fadnavis’s response effectively has been to ask the Shiv Sena to get lost. So will the Sena exit the Maharashtra state government? This doesn’t seem likely for two reasons. One, Uddhav Thackeray is not his father. And two, there are 18 months remaining in the term of the Maharashtra government.

For the past year now, Fadnavis has been asking Uddhav to put up or shut up. Uddhav has been putting up even if not shutting up. When Narayan Rane broke away from the Congress and was slated to join the BJP, Uddhav had warned of serious consequences if Rane were made a minister in the government. Uddhav was the reason Rane had earlier quit the Shiv Sena to join the Congress and his position would have become untenable if Rane had been co-opted into the same government. But BJP leaders, not wishing to upset the applecart at a time when they were losing allies like Chandrababu Naidu, compelled Rane to form his own party and later sent him to the Rajya Sabha on their quota.

But now with Sena’s defeat in Palghar at the hands of the BJP, which caused a war of bitter words between the two parties, Uddhav Thackeray's humiliation is complete. However, he still is dilly-dallying over a hard decision. Contrast it with the time in the mid-1990s when the BJP, certain of its victory after putting together the National Democratic Alliance at the Centre, had decided it will not accord Bal Thackeray the stature of Big Brother any more. Consequently, it refused to give the Sena the number of seats it was demanding in the 1998 Lok Sabha polls. Thackeray appealed to LK Advani who, similarly, asked him to put up or shut up.

When Bal Thackeray bested Kamlabai

What happened next was of almost comic proportions. Thackeray trotted off to Aurangabad In a huff and at a rally there told his party workers and supporters that he was calling off the alliance. “The time has come to teach Kamlabai a lesson,” he said.

'Kamlabai' was a reference to the BJP on account of its lotus symbol. There was an upsurge of support for Thackeray and even before he had returned to Mumbai, Pramod Mahajan and Gopinath Munde were cooling their heels in the common waiting room at Matoshree. Thackeray went straight upstairs without even giving them a look-in. Hours of waiting yielded no results, so Mahajan appealed to Advani who, too, was kept waiting in the same manner. Thackeray's excuse was that he was too tired to meet anyone and was “resting" after a hard campaign in Aurangabad. Mahajan knew it was a desperate time that needed a desperate measure, so he appealed to Atal Behari Vajpayee to fly down to Mumbai. Thackeray could not keep a former prime minister waiting endlessly in his lounge and agreed to see him. But as a price for the BJP’s earlier intransigence and arrogance, he extracted more seats from the party than he had originally wanted. The BJP ended up losing more than it would have gained had it not thought itself superior to the Shiv Sena and tried to put Bal Thackeray in his place.

The Shiv Sena is at a similar crossroads today but Uddhav Thackeray does not seem to have either the heart or the courage of his father to teach ‘Kamlabai’ another lesson. He is poised at a very advantageous position—the BJP is now already on the edge of being in minority in the Lok Sabha, The Sena has 18 MPs. Pulling out from the government would lead to a precarious situation for the BJP and, perhaps, this time bring Narendra Modi hotfooting it to Matoshree. But Uddhav seems under pressure from his own ministers in the Maharashtra government who wish to complete their term. How dependent he is on their resources will determine whether or not he has the capacity to change the course of history.

As for the Congress and Nationalist Congress Party, little needs to be said except the fact that these bypolls have proved the advantage of unity beyond doubt. They fought the Bhandara-Gondia bypoll together. Union minister Nitin Gadkari was managing the election for his party. Fighting his resources was a big issue for the two parties. Yet NCP candidate Madhukar Kukde defeated the BJP by a handsome margin, unlike in Palghar where opposition disunity helped the BJP win narrowly. The Congress was in fifth position in the constituency.

All indications now, however, point to the Shiv Sena willing to work out a deal with secular parties in Maharashtra. Its communal image, however, is getting in the way of this unity. It will either make strategic arrangements with the NCP and Congress, as the latter cannot afford an open alliance with the Sena. Or it might plow a lonely furrow. The third option is quite humiliating to contemplate for Uddhav Thackeray—eat crow and walk into the BJP ‘s arms again.