People in Maharashtra already missing Uddhav Thackeray, the 'accidental chief minister'

When Uddhav Thackeray first became chief minister, large sections of people curled up their nose at him and declared that he was too naive and inexperienced to run the government in such a complex state as Maharashtra.

By the time he resigned this week nearly three years later, Muslims were praying for him, liberals were supporting him, socialists stunned themselves by their acceptance of the Shiv Sena earlier known for its bigotry, and the poor, who were adequately fed during the lockdown and even after it, were lamenting his exit and wondering about their future.

It would all flummox Bal Thackeray for he never received such support ever but make him proud nonetheless of how his son steered his party from the fringes to the mainstream, without the support of the BJP.

Uddhav is being described as the best chief minister Maharashtra has seen in years and it is truly amazing how a man who had neither been part of electoral politics or had even an iota of experience in government could instinctively know what was the right thing to do at the right time.

It is quite a statement that ultimately the BJP which had been hellbent upon bringing down his government ever since it was formed, got him through the Supreme Court and not through the Enforcement Directorate. It is not as if they did not try hard over the first three years. They turned actor Sushant Singh Rajput’s suicide into murder and attempted to implicate his son Aaditya, himself a minister, in the case. But even the CBI could find no evidence of his involvement.

Then they declared he was anti-Hindutva when two sadhus were lynched in a village in Palghar on suspicion of being child lifters. Turned out that the villagers who had lynched them were all BJP supporters, including the Sarpanch of the village who had been elected on a BJP ticket.

Periodically, the BJP tried to spread rumours of the mismanagement of Corona cases in the state. However, the figures were high only because Maharashtra government was not hiding them unlike other states like Gujarat or Uttar Pradesh.

Unlike those other states, again, he provided for the migrant labour both food and shelter, and when the second wave arrived, the oxygen crisis in other states showed up the efficiency of his administration which did not allow a single patient to suffer or die because of the lack of that resource.

Then, again, when Devendra Fadnavis, in his usual fashion hit below the belt (as he had with Sharad Pawar earlier) declaring him too old and sick to govern, Uddhav rose from his spinal surgery to take over the reins of the government again and it was business as usual with no crisis before or after.

It says much of him that he did not cave in to threats by the ED. Clearly, there was not much to be found personally against him or his family, including distant relatives who were constantly harassed by the central agency. He also did not sway from his redefinition of Hindutva as a liberal Sarva Dharma Sambhav kind of Hinduism. This is what frightened the BJP most because, married to the sentiment of Marathi pride, the BJP could lose a substantial chunk of its Hindutva vote.

What is Bal Thackeray’s Hindutva that Eknath Shinde talks about and what he wants his party to follow? It was an opportunistic kind of ideology. Thackeray went rabid about Hindutva when he sensed Hindu ire with Muslim appeasement, he called for a school or hospital to be built in Ayodhya instead of a temple when he found Muslims voted for his party despite its involvement in the Bombay riots, he called for the disenfranchisement of Muslims when he discovered they had stopped voting for his party for its association with the BJP after the 2002 Gujarat riots and, unable to break up the alliance, he did the next best thing – defied the BJP and voted against its--and for the Congress’s-- presidential candidate, both in 2007 and 2012.

Uddhav has now taken away the opportunity to label him as anti-Hindutva by renaming both Aurangabad and Osmanabad as Sambhajinagar and Dharashiv respectively. It was his last cabinet decision and that the Congress and NCP went along with it says much about the growing feeling among all non-BJP parties that they must resist BJP’s Hindutva and avoid charges of Muslim appeasement.

Outside the government, Uddhav continues to have the support of a majority of Shiv Sainiks and, given the party’s constitution which gives absolute powers to the Shiv Sena Pramukh (Uddhav Thackeray), it is unlikely Eknath Shinde will have much success in seizing the party whole and soul from Uddhav.

Most Shiv Sainiks are aware that the BJP game plan is to completely destroy and finish the Shiv Sena and they are unlikely to support a man who handed BJP a stick to do so.

The fact that the rebels tried to name themselves the ‘Shiv Sena Bal Thackeray Party’ says much about the value of the Thackeray name to the Shiv Sena. For there is no Shiv Sena without a Thackeray and no Thackeray without the original Shiv Sena, with no appellations before or after it, as even Raj Thackeray, with his Maharashtra Navnirman Sena, discovered to his chagrin.

The battle is likely to move out from the House. Uddhav Thackeray is not giving up yet.

(This was first published in National Herald on Sunday)