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By:

Quaid Najmi

4 January 2025 at 3:26:24 pm

Jai Maharashtra!

Mumbai bids adieu to Uddhav’s 25-year rule ‘Thackeray Brand’ replaced with ‘Fiery Fadnavis’   Mumbai : The bitterly fought Brihanmumbai Municipal Corporation (BMC) election results were on anticipated and decisive lines – with sobering lessons for all the players.   The Shiv Sena (UBT) led by ex-Chief Minister Uddhav Thackeray is poised to meekly hand over the keys to the country’s richest civic body – over which it lorded for three decades - to the Bharatiya Janata Party-Shiv Sena combine.  ...

Jai Maharashtra!

Mumbai bids adieu to Uddhav’s 25-year rule ‘Thackeray Brand’ replaced with ‘Fiery Fadnavis’   Mumbai : The bitterly fought Brihanmumbai Municipal Corporation (BMC) election results were on anticipated and decisive lines – with sobering lessons for all the players.   The Shiv Sena (UBT) led by ex-Chief Minister Uddhav Thackeray is poised to meekly hand over the keys to the country’s richest civic body – over which it lorded for three decades - to the Bharatiya Janata Party-Shiv Sena combine.   The impending disaster loomed for days, the series of exit polls and sentiments of bookies – more than Rs One Lakh-Crore was pledged on the Mahayuti victory – plus, confident body-language of the Mahayuti leaders, that damned the fragmented Maharashtra Vikas Aghadi.   A leering BJP, which gunned for the ‘Thackeray brand’, is partly vindicated, considering SS (UBT)’s performance. The break-up of Shiv Sena engineered through Eknath Shinde in June 2022 paid rich dividends later, pushing Uddhav Thackeray out of power in the Assembly and now, even the BMC.   Deserting the BJP in October 2019 to later ally with Congress-Nationalist Congress Party as the MVA, Uddhav’s stars shone bright when he became the ‘reluctant CM’, flew high with his work during the Covid-19 Pandemic years, and even hinted for a ‘national role’ - till an eclipse on his regime suddenly started from Thane.   A betrayed Uddhav immediately threw away the trappings of power and promptly vacated ‘Varsha’ (CM official residence), as emotional supporters lined the route to ‘Matoshri’ (his private home), mourning the ‘death’ of the 30-month-old administration.   The MVA government fell, but the alliance grew in stature by humbling the BJP-NDA in the 2024 Lok Sabha elections. Owing to various factors, again the tide turned in the Assembly elections that year when the MVA was virtually erased by the BJP-led Mahayuti triumvirate.   For the past year, hectic preparations were on by all parties for the series of civic elections across the state – touted as a ‘mini-referendum’. The BJP, armed with the divided Shiv Sena-Nationalist Congress Party factions on its side, prepared for its final assault on the daunting ‘Thackeray brand’.   Genesis Of Nemesis Brushing aside concerns and allies, Uddhav hurriedly patched up with his cousin and Maharashtra Navnirman Sena President Raj Thackeray, to grapple with the Mahayuti on his home-ground, Mumbai, where the Shiv Sena was founded by Balasaheb Thackeray.   A cocky Uddhav insisted on including MNS into the MVA, but the Congress stoutly refused and even parted ways to ally with Vanchit Bahujan Aghadi (VBA) of Prakash Ambedkar.   Several SS (UBT) bigwigs confided to  The Perfect Voice  how they had warned Uddhav on the MNS tie-up and its potential detrimental effects he airily shooed them off.   The partnership left the minorities, particularly Muslims who bore the brunt of Raj Thackeray’s mosque loudspeakers offensive, and large sections of non-Marathis in Mumbai – like UP-Biharis, Gujaratis, Marwaris – for the compulsion of speaking Marathi or shopkeepers must display Marathi signboards.   Though the final polls data will emerge over the coming days, Uddhav may have lost quite a chunk of crucial votes from the non-Marathis and minorities, who had accepted him as an unlikely ‘messiah’, till the Raj partnership was born.   Lessons For All The BMC results indicate that the SS (UBT) notched a respectable defeat, the MNS proved an embarrassment and beneficiary, the Congress performed on expected lines, and Shiv Sena of Eknath Shinde is bereft of the much-coveted ‘Balasaheb Thackeray legacy’.   The SS (UBT) has catapulted as the second-largest party in the BMC, Shinde’s party - facing a gradual decline – stands third; the BJP is the single-largest party but way short of the magical 114-midway mark in the 227-member BMC house.   “Akin to 2019 and 2022, political jugglery of the weird kind is not ruled out. If, by some quirk of fate, the SS (UBT), Congress and Shiv Sena were to join forces, they can keep the BJP’s hands off the BMC…!” said a Congress leader.

Thackeray Twilight

For nearly six decades, Mumbai’s municipal politics revolved around a single surname. The Brihanmumbai Municipal Corporation (BMC), India’s richest civic body and the city’s real seat of power, was less an institution than a Thackeray fiefdom. That era now looks decisively over.


With the BJP, in alliance with Eknath Shinde’s Shiv Sena emerging dominant in the most keenly-contested civic body, the verdict is unmistakable: the Thackeray cousins’ reunion has failed, and with it the illusion that legacy alone can still command Mumbai’s streets.


The cousins had hoped that their dramatic reunion after nearly 20 years of acrimony would revive the Thackeray brand and consolidate the ‘Marathi Manoos’ vote. Instead, it exposed how thin that nativist brand has become. Mumbai’s voters, long accustomed to civic decay and political theatre, were unimpressed by appeals to wounded pride by a family whose scions have lived in ostentatious luxury. Besides empty rhetoric, neither Uddhav nor his flashy cousin Raj had any answers to Mumbai’s potholes, flooding, transport chaos or housing problems.


The Thackerays’ fought a campaign heavy on identity and light on governance. They warned darkly that Mumbai’s soul was under threat, casting themselves as the city’s last authentic custodians. Yet they conspicuously avoided sustained attacks on the Shiv Sena administration’s civic record as such scrutiny would have invited uncomfortable comparisons with their own long years in charge.


They were precedents to the BMC disaster. In last year’s BEST Workers’ Credit Society election, the combined Thackeray brand failed to win a single seat. It only showed that grassroots machinery, once the Bal Thackeray-led undivided Shiv Sena’s great strength, had visibly rusted. The BMC results are a mere confirmation of a long decline in the Sena and the MNS headed by Uddhav and Raj Thackeray respectively in form of drifting cadres, thinning networks and faltering street-level mobilisation.


The results prove that in modern Mumbai, pride without performance is no longer sufficient. The city’s electorate is more fragmented, more transactional and more impatient than the Thackeray cousins appear to have grasped.


With an annual budget exceeding Rs. 74,000 crore, the BMC is not merely a civic body but a financial colossus. Losing it deprives the Thackerays’ of their last major institutional foothold.


The BJP, for its part, fought with a discipline the Thackerays’ could neither match nor counter. Its campaign in Mumbai was notable as much for who stayed away. The party carefully kept its North Indian heavyweights out of the campaigning, effortlessly stripping the Thackeray cousins identity-heavy rhetoric of the intrusive North Indian and deflating their ‘Marathi Manoos’ plank.  


The deeper problem for the Thackeray cousins is strategic. Uddhav Thackeray remains cautious to the point of inertia; Raj Thackeray’s trademark flamboyance has reduced to the level of political vaudeville. Together, they offer neither administrative credibility nor ideological renewal.


Dynasties decay when they mistake inheritance for entitlement. For the Thackerays’, the BMC was once a birthright. ‘Maximum City’s’ voters have proved them otherwise. 


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