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By:

Abhijit Joshi

31 August 2024 at 3:39:24 pm

Battle for the Bow and Arrow

The Shiv Sena dispute before the Supreme Court is no longer just about MLAs and symbols, but about what legally defines a political party. AI generated image The fight over the Shiv Sena has moved well beyond Maharashtra’s familiar political theatre. In the Supreme Court, the dispute has narrowed to a question that is less dramatic on the surface but potentially far more consequential: what exactly makes a political party a political party? Is it the elected strength of its legislators? The...

Battle for the Bow and Arrow

The Shiv Sena dispute before the Supreme Court is no longer just about MLAs and symbols, but about what legally defines a political party. AI generated image The fight over the Shiv Sena has moved well beyond Maharashtra’s familiar political theatre. In the Supreme Court, the dispute has narrowed to a question that is less dramatic on the surface but potentially far more consequential: what exactly makes a political party a political party? Is it the elected strength of its legislators? The organisation outside the legislature? The party constitution on record with the Election Commission? Or some combination of all three? That question lies at the centre of the legal battle between the factions led by Eknath Shinde and Uddhav Thackeray. Two Claims Senior advocate Neeraj Kishan Kaul, appearing for the Shinde faction, has defended the Election Commission’s February 17, 2023 decision, recognising the Shinde camp as the Shiv Sena and allotting it the bow-and-arrow symbol. The Thackeray faction has challenged that decision. The bench is also dealing with challenges connected to the Maharashtra Assembly Speaker’s January 2024 decision on disqualification petitions. The Thackeray faction, represented by senior advocates Kapil Sibal and Devadatt Kamat, has drawn a sharp distinction between the political party and its legislature wing. Its argument is a group of MLAs breaking away from the legislative wing does not automatically mean that the political party itself has changed hands. The party’s organisation, structure and identity cannot simply be equated with the numbers sitting in the Assembly. The Shinde faction says the dispute was never merely about legislators walking out. According to its argument, the rupture extended into the wider political organisation, with competing meetings, resolutions and claims of support from party workers and functionaries. The legislative split was, in its telling, only one visible part of a larger party-wide conflict. That distinction determines whether the Election Commission could legitimately intervene under Paragraph 15 of the Election Symbols Order and decide which rival faction represented the recognised political party. Kaul has argued that the Commission was entitled to consider the wider organisational dispute rather than treating the matter as a purely legislative rebellion. Constitutional Tussle The courtroom fight has also brought an old Shiv Sena document back into the spotlight. Kaul has relied heavily on the constitution placed on record with the Election Commission after the poll panel raised objections to the party’s earlier structure. The material before the court says the Commission had, in the late 1990s, pushed for a more democratic organisational structure, including changes to the manner in which party office-bearers were selected. The 1999 constitution subsequently went on record. The Shinde side says the 2018 constitution represented a significant departure from that structure. Its argument is that the later arrangement concentrated substantial authority in the party chief and relied extensively on nominated or appointed office-bearers rather than elected organisational bodies. It has also questioned why its leaders participated in the organisational structure created under the 2018 arrangement and did not object to it at the time. Kaul has further argued that the 2018 constitution relied upon by the Thackeray faction was not registered with the Election Commission, while the 1999 constitution was on the Commission’s record. This has become a significant element of the Shinde faction’s case. The Thackeray faction, meanwhile, has relied on the Supreme Court’s earlier Constitution Bench judgment in the Subhash Desai matter to reinforce the distinction between a political party and its legislature party. The earlier judgment’s discussion about not conflating the political party with its legislature wing arose in the context of questions such as who could appoint the whip. It did not, according to the Shinde side, mean that the Election Commission must ignore legislative strength altogether when determining which faction represents a recognised political party. The Shinde side has also invoked the Sadiq Ali case, arguing that legislative majority remains a relevant consideration in a party-symbol dispute. The case has therefore increasingly begun to look like a legal examination of the Election Commission’s decision-making process. The Thackeray faction has questioned the Commission’s jurisdiction and the basis on which it concluded that there was a party-wide split. Its challenge effectively asks whether the Commission went too far in examining the internal structure of the Shiv Sena. The Shinde faction argues that Article 324 gives the Election Commission broad powers and that, when two groups claim the same recognised party, the Commission has to examine the party constitution, organisational structure and available evidence to identify which group represents the party. The practical difficulty is obvious. The Election Commission cannot ask every Shiv Sena member whom they support. Nor can it conduct a referendum among every booth-level worker. Kaul has therefore defended the organisational-majority approach as a workable method of assessing cadre support through recognised organisational bodies and elected representatives. The Shinde camp has also brought the events after the 2019 Maharashtra Assembly election into the argument. Shiv Sena and BJP fought the election together, but the government subsequently formed under Uddhav Thackeray was with Congress and NCP. According to the Shinde side, that political realignment created discontent among sections of the Shiv Sena organisation and contributed to the eventual split. The Thackeray faction disputes the broader narrative and maintains that the legislative rebellion cannot simply be converted into proof that the political party itself changed hands. It has also challenged the Maharashtra Speaker’s decision not to disqualify MLAs from either faction. The Supreme Court has examined questions about what could follow if that decision were set aside, including whether consequential disqualification could arise under the Tenth Schedule. Party recognition and legislative disqualification arise under different legal frameworks. The Shinde side has argued that earlier cases concerning disqualification cannot simply be transplanted into the Election Commission’s determination under the Symbols Order. The real question is no longer simply who has more MLAs. It is whether those MLAs, the party organisation, the constitution and the cadre can legally be treated as parts of the same answer. (The writer is a political observer. Views personal.)

The Last Redoubt

Correspondent
Nov 19, 2025
3 min read

The killing of Madvi Hidma suggests the long-running Maoist insurgency in Andhra Pradesh and central India is entering its terminal phase.

Andhra Pradesh
Andhra Pradesh

The recent killing of Madvi Hidma, one of the most feared commanders of the banned CPI (Maoist), signals yet another decisive turn in a conflict that has shaped the political and security landscape of India’s heartland for half a century. Hidma, who was Central Committee member, head of the People’s Liberation Guerrilla Army (PLGA) battalion in Chhatisgarh’s south Bastar and a symbol of Maoist battlefield lethality, was gunned down in the forests of Andhra Pradesh’s Alluri Sitarama Raju district. His wife, Madakam Raje, herself a senior zonal committee member in Chhattisgarh, died in the same encounter, along with four bodyguards.


For the Central government, the timing carries political significance given that Home Minister Amit Shah had set November 30 as the deadline to neutralise Hidma, and March 2026 for the dismantling of Maoism as a national security threat. Hidma was killed 12 days ahead of schedule.


To understand the implications of this encounter requires revisiting the arc of Maoism in Andhra Pradesh and the wider ‘Red Corridor.’ The state was once the ideological cradle of Naxalism outside West Bengal. In the 1980s and 1990s, the People’s War Group (PWG), the precursor to the CPI (Maoist), had found sanctuary in the northern agency areas of Andhra Pradesh. Rugged hills helped by a weak state presence and deep socio-economic grievances created fertile ground for mobilisation among Adivasi communities. The PWG perfected guerrilla tactics in these forests, pioneering the network of ‘dalams’ that would later spread across Chhattisgarh, Odisha, Maharashtra and Jharkhand.


But Andhra Pradesh also became the first laboratory for effective counterinsurgency. The Greyhounds, raised in 1989, introduced a model of high-mobility, intelligence-driven policing that chipped away at Maoist capabilities. By the late 2000s, pressure in Andhra forced the insurgency’s centre of gravity northwards, into the contiguous forests of Bastar. There, Hidma emerged as a formidable field commander.


Born in 1981 in Sukma, he rose from a tribal recruit to the youngest member of the CPI (Maoist)’s Central Committee. This was remarkable in a hierarchy long dominated by ideologues from Andhra and Telangana. His military talent did not go unnoticed. Nambala Keshava Rao (Basavaraju), the party’s late general secretary, mentored him as the future architect of the PLGA’s operations. Hidma came to be associated with some of the insurgency’s most devastating attacks: the massacre of 76 CRPF troopers in Dantewada in 2010; the Jhiram Ghati ambush in 2013 that annihilated a generation of Chhattisgarh’s Congress leadership; and numerous strikes across the Bastar region.


For all his operational brilliance, Hidma was a man fighting for a movement losing coherence. When the CPI (Maoist) was formed in 2004 by merging the PWG with the Maoist Communist Centre (MCC), it boasted around 42 Central Committee members and influence across nearly 200 districts. Today, the numbers have shrunk sharply. Barely 12 CC members remain active. This year alone, five have been killed including Basavaraju while stalwarts like Mallojula Venugopal Rao (Bhupathi) have surrendered.


Several factors explain this decline. Improved roads and mobile connectivity in formerly inaccessible forested belts have diluted Maoist control. Welfare schemes, though uneven, have expanded the state’s presence. Inter-state coordination, once patchy, has improved under initiatives such as Operation Kagar. Technology, from drones to better surveillance, has narrowed the hideouts available to leaders like Hidma.


The death of Hidma undeniably marks the end of an era. He was the last of the insurgency’s field commanders with both symbolic capital and operational skill. With his killing, the Maoist leadership’s hope of orchestrating a revival of armed struggle has dimmed considerably.


What has tipped the balance in recent years is not merely attrition within the Maoist ranks but a dramatic shift in the Indian state’s political will. Under Narendra Modi and Amit Shah, New Delhi has treated Maoism not as an inevitable, slow-burning problem to be ‘managed’ but as a national-security threat to be confronted head on.

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