On birth centenary, Shinde, Uddhav vie for Thackeray’s legacy

“If you understand what kind of a party the Shiv Sena is, and if you have limited ambition, you can survive in it,” former Maharashtra chief minister Manohar Joshi once told the media after leaving office.

- HT Correspondent

Joshi, who became the first-ever CM of the Shiv Sena-BJP combine in 1995 was summarily sacked by his boss Bal Thackeray after only three years in the job, and replaced by Narayan Rane.Joshi, in keeping with his view on ambition, chose to remain with the party until his death in 2024.

Eknath Shinde, unfettered by any such notion of modesty, not only split Bal Thackeray's Shiv Sena, taking over the party’s name and symbol in 2022, but has since also staked claim to his legacy.

‘On Friday, the day marking the start of Bal Thackeray's birth centennial year, Shinde was in Colaba to garland the patriarch’s statue; he then visited the Thackeray memorial in Dadar to pay homage; and still later in the day, at Mantralaya to announce a slew of government schemes to mark the occasion.

“On the birth centenary of the great Balasaheb Thackeray, we pay tribute to a towering figure who profoundly shaped Maharashtra’s socio-cultural landscape...” wrote Prime Minister Narendra Modi on X.

Balasaheb Thackeray may have died in 2012, but his outsized presence looms over Maharashtra politics. And even though the party he founded in 1966 has splintered, its son-of-the-soil rhetoric still exerts a strong emotional pull in the state.

“There was not a single comparable leader in India,” journalist and former member of Parliament Kumar Ketkar once said. The Shiv Sena was India’s first city-centric party, and Thackeray, who never contested an election, coined the term remote control for himself when his party swept to power with the BJP in 1995.