Making sense of Maharashtra mayhem: Why Shiv Sena MLAs rebelled against Uddhav and Son

The 2019 Lok Sabha elections, closely followed by the Maharashtra Assembly polls, gave a resounding mandate to the BJP-Shiv Sena alliance. The polls were fought with pictures of Prime Minister Narendra Modi and then chief minister Devendra Fadnavis making it to billboards in every constituency during campaigning.

Candidates from both parties touted the success of the double-engine sarkar which saw an accelerated pace of development, iron-hand grip on law and order and a strong focus on Hindutva. In the crowd-puller rallies — even the ones attended by Uddhav Thackeray, the central BJP leadership promised that if voted back again, Maharashtra would get the dynamic duo of Modi and Fadnavis back to run the government for yet another term.

However, as soon as the results were announced, Uddhav Thackeray usurped the chief ministership cobbling up an unnatural alliance with the NCP and Congress, on Sharad Pawar, Sonia Gandhi and Sanjay Raut’s prodding. Hefty, premium portfolios went into NCP and Congress’ kitty and soon Uddhav Thackeray and his son Aaditya found themselves as mere placeholders, with their allies really running the show.

Prior to 2014, for three terms Maharashtra had seen what an NCP-Congress government looks like — the frequent terror attacks, unapologetic corruption and no consideration whatsoever on enhancing the quality of life for the common man. In 2014, voters finally butted them out. They replicated their mandate in 2019 but were backstabbed by power-hungry politicians. Once again, Maharashtra’s growth came to a screeching halt as old-timers like Pawar and the Congress knew very well that the alliance was going to be short-lived and focused on milking the cow, exploiting it to their benefit to the fullest.

The Maha Vikas Aghadi (MVA) alliance, formed singularly to grab power with no real vision for the growth and development of Maharashtra, had no aspirational projects that would propel the state towards an upward growth trajectory. As a result, big-ticket projects essential for manifold growth were put on the back-burner.

The Mumbai Metro project was stalled with Uddhav Thackeray refusing to allocate the Supreme Court-approved land in Aarey to build the car shed, leaving people reeling under the menace of increased traffic due to stalled metro-constructions on essential arterial roads of Mumbai. While most work on the Samruddhi corridor connecting Mumbai to Nagpur, reducing travel time between the two cities to half, was initiated during Fadnavis’ term, the Thackeray government inched at snail’s speed towards completing even the first phase of the project. The Navi Mumbai airport too which was conceptualised two decades ago and finally saw light of day during Fadnavis’ tenure was once again pushed to the back burner by the MVA.

The Mumbai-Ahmedabad bullet train, the first of its kind in India, saw many delays since the MVA refused to speed up land acquisition required for land allocation — in comparison, Gujarat has already completed the land allocation process required for the construction to begin. As a result, several financiers, international capital funds and banks who had committed to jointly finance these projects developed cold feet and began to pull out of contracts. For instance, recently, owing to the lack of total political will in completing the Mumbai metro on time resulting in infinite delays, French mobility firm Bombardier Transportation revoked its deal to supply coaches for the Mumbai Metro Line 4.

Within months of the MVA formation, the COVID-19 pandemic hit. Uddhav Thackeray remained caged into his home throughout the two years of the pandemic. The fact that he refused to tour Maharashtra to inspect the state of affairs and only relied on some yes-men for ground updates was disturbing. Aaditya too seemed much uninterested in any matter outside of Mumbai.

As a stark contrast, Fadnavis was seen frequently jetting across districts one after the other, making his way to rural towns and several government hospitals. Most pandemic management was outsourced by Uddhav Thackeray to bureaucrats like Iqbal Chahal and the Maharashtra COVID-19 Task Force, with him making no meaningful contributions. There are reports that the tracking and attention to genomic surveillance was so weak that when the Delta wave originated, it was only when doctors in Amravati began to complain of ‘odd’ symptoms, did the government wake up to the possibility of a mutated variant. Blatant corruption in procurement of materials and tools required for pandemic management and construction of jumbo-hospitals made news very frequently.

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People began to get fed up of such a non-performing government, especially one they hadn’t elected. The frustration began to show in local polls where Shiv Sena candidates lost ground support, to NCP and Congress’ advantage. To make matters worse, Uddhav Thackeray remained inaccessible to MLAs of his own party, unwilling to pass on funds to them for development work in their respective constituencies while happily funding the NCP-Congress MLAs. NCP-Congress ministers too seemed to be quickly clearing files they had vested interests in.

The Sena MLAs began to feel slighted, cheated and all in all extremely unhappy with the new power structure. They began to see how Uddhav Thackeray bent over backwards to keep Sharad Pawar and Sonia Gandhi in good humour while compromising on Balasaheb’s ideals at the cost of Sena’s own dignity. Sena MLAs finally saw through the fog that their party — built with theirs and Balasaheb’s sweat and blood — was put on a path of self-destruction by Balasaheb’s own family. With water way over their heads, they revolted, pulled off a coup. They realised that Uddhav Thackeray’s Sena and the MVA had lost people’s confidence. While it would take decades to reverse the damage done to the party over the past two and a half years, the first step would have to be to respect the original mandate of the people and deliver the governance that was promised.

The writer is a policy and communications strategist. ‘A Nation to Protect: Leading India Through the Covid Crisis’ is her third book. The views expressed in this article are those of the author and do not represent the stand of this publication.

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