Eye on Maharashtra: Uddhav one up with barb on caretaker opposition

I wonder at times if Devendra Fadnavis realises he is fighting a losing battle against Maharashtra Chief Minister Uddhav Thackeray.

Last week, at an event to mark his father Bal Thackeray’s 94th birthday, Uddhav launched a blistering attack on BJP’s ‘power-hungry Hindutva politics’ and said, “BJP used Hindutva only to gain power and we rotted under them. I will soon step out and tour Maharashtra and show all those who are worried about my health what the true power of saffron is like. This caretaker opposition will soon self-destruct.”

It was a multi-layered attack. Uddhav Thackeray has long been attempting to reinvent the Shiv Sena without losing its twin essences of the Marathi manoos and Hindutva. Even in its alliance with the Congress and the Nationalist Congress Party, it is clear the Sena retains its core voter base of the Marathi manoos. But from an earlier apology in the Maharashtra Assembly for his party mixing religion with politics and his post-Maha Vikas Aghadi visit to Ayodhya and donation of Rs one crore to the temple, it remains to be seen if he is able to reinvent the Shiv Sena’s Hindutva in the mould of what most liberal secular Hindus might find credible and more acceptable– being devout Hindu without wishing to lynch or rid the nation of Muslims.

That is something that neither Fadnavis nor Narendra Modi nor even the RSS is likely to fathom. For, unlike them, Bal Thackeray’s shift to Hindutva in the early 1980s was born out of a shrewd assessment of the shift in the political mood of the nation rather than any ideological conviction. By most accounts, there is a subtle and as yet not very discernible shift in the mood of Hindus again, with the OBCs setting themselves apart from the exploitative upper castes who make no bones about their wish for a return to the old social order.

Many conservative Hindus are by now sick and tired of their lives being reduced to binaries of Hindu-Muslim, India-Pakistan, halal-jhatka, shamshan-kabristan, Mandir-Masjid, Diwali-Eid and other such futile distinctions that do not add any value to their existence.

Fadnavis should note that after the 2002 Gujarat riots, Thackeray Sr. had already begun to sense that the issue would not play out forever and, in a level playing field without Modi’s bending of the media and other institutions to his will, the BJP and RSS would not have got even this far on this singular issue.

So, if Uddhav were to dignify Fadnavis’s query with an answer, he might say, “No, the Shiv Sena did not decay under Balasaheb’s alliance with the BJP. But it became capable of winning more than just the one Assembly seat it did for years under Balasaheb’s stewardship to leading a government in Maharashtra.”

The Shiv Sena complains that it has been used by the BJP, and badly at that; but Fadnavis would do well to contemplate how his party even today cannot do without the Shiv Sena, even if it is only to keep itself relevant in Maharashtra by continually targeting Uddhav Thackeray. For it has been noticed of late that the BJP in Maharashtra does not take on the Congress or NCP much any longer. No wonder Uddhav calls it a caretaker opposition.

Someone with a college education like Fadnavis (there are only a few in the BJP today who have gone beyond middle school), I would have thought, would ask the Shiv Sena chief to specify how he proposes to redefine saffron to its erstwhile saffron ally. Instead, Fadnavis’s retort was limited to boasting that BJP had changed the name of Allahabad to Prayagraj, presumably proving that its Hindutva is more saffron than the Shiv Sena’s, for the latter is unable to change the name of Aurangabad to Sambhajinagar or of Osmanabad to Dharashiv as Bal Thackeray had wished.

If Fadnavis thought he was putting Uddhav in a cleft stick, I wonder if he thought how vulnerable that would leave him to the query, “Why did you not change those names when you were chief minister while the Sena was on board with you?” as Sanjay Raut has already asked.

For that matter, Uddhav could then also put Modi on the mat for being unable to change the name of Ahmedabad despite being both a powerful chief minister and a strong prime minister. Would he rather say that name of Allahabad was changed by Yogi Adityanath?

This entire contretemps makes me believe that such foolish retorts as have been made by Fadnavis in this battle of saffron versus saffron, could - in view of the Dharma Sansad and call for a genocide which had also subtly targeted Modi for his ineffectiveness in this regard - swiftly descend into an internecine war between the saffron forces.

Perhaps Uddhav Thackeray has spotted the rumblings of an internecine war in the BJP and is making his escape in the nick of time, leaving Fadnavis to shoot himself in the foot.

(The writer is Consulting Editor of National Herald at Mumbai)

(This article was first published in National Herald on Sunday)