Bend With The Wind

The coronavirus runs wild, migrant crisis deepens, a cyclone blows in, BJP calls him a failure—Uddhav Thackeray rallies allies, steers shaky ship

- Giridhar Jha

They say the tree breaks if it doesn’t bend in a storm—or gets uprooted. An old cliché. Shiv Sena chief Uddhav Thackeray knows when to bend and how much, yet stand upright. He won’t be leading the Maha Vikas Aghadi (MVA) government in Maharashtra if he didn’t. It’s a coalition of arch-rivals whose ideological fountains spring from completely different fonts of wisdom. Opposites attract but the chief minister’s predecessor, Devendra Fadnavis of the BJP, is confident such friendships don’t last long. “Aisi sarkaren kabhi paanch saal chali hain? (Have such governments ever lasted five years?),” he said in a recent interview. His is not the solitary voice portending the Shiv Sena- Congress-Nationalist Congress Party (NCP) government’s premature end. Its downfall, naysayers believe, will come from the internal contradictions within the coalition over the coronavirus crisis and issues before the pandemic.