It’s come to where it does not matter if the slip is showing. The fiery Shiv Sena seems to be reconciled to paralysis, incapable of protecting its own from the trepidations of CBI and ED. Chief Minister Uddhav Thackeray is as if nowhere in the picture. The question is shouldn’t the Shiv Sena return to the guerrilla tactics of Shivaji Maharaj, or has Modi succeeded in remapping the Shiv Sena’s dna, replacing fiery missal-pao with vanilla ice cream, protest with acquiescence?
Sharad Pawar has taken up the role in Maharashtra which Balasaheb once played. Pawar’s style of politics and Balasaheb’s are poles apart. Even if Uddhav Thackeray’s temperament agrees with that of Pawar, the fact remains that Pawar’s cold war-type politics has eaten into the marrow of the marauding Shiv Sena tiger, rendering it inert to provocations and, worse, challenges.
A couple of more swipes and thrusts from the CBI and the ED, and the Shiv Sena will likely fold. By now, especially after the ED’s actions against Uddhav’s brother-in-law and Sanjay Raut’s properties, the Shiv Sena should have gone ballistic, hit the streets like it owned them and jolted the life out of the BJP. But no, it’s like the ED and the CBI had found nothing but tomatoes in Raut’s wife’s kitchen garden!
But that does not deter the former Chief Minister Devendra Fadnavis from going ahead with his plot to unseat Uddhav whom he thinks as an usurper. The chair rightfully belongs to him, feels the young BJP leader who is close to both Narendra Modi and Amit Shah. He has drawn his own road map for bringing about the fall of the MVA ministry and he is following that. The state Governor is there to help him, when needed, apart from the central agencies.
That being said, the Shiv Sena in Maharashtra is formidable, especially because of the Hindutva factor. The ED and CBI may have gotten a couple of Sena bigwigs in trouble, but that still does not make the Shiv Sena any less Hindutva. It will take just one election announcement for the Sena to go all ballistic Hindutva; shriller than even the BJP, especially at a time when Modi’s “Muqtar Abbas Naqvi-spearheaded Muslim appeasement” is roiling the BJP’s saffron hordes.
Add to that the looming threat from the AAP, especially in the context of Gujarat, where elections are due later this year and in which Prime Minister Narendra Modi has a lot to lose, if the ‘Gujarat Model’ comes up for discussion and diatribe. Modi’s aging ‘Gujarat Model’ will not be let off unchallenged by AAP’s ‘Delhi Model’.
The army of the AAP, after sweeping Delhi and Punjab, is massing up to hit Gujarat and Himachal Pradesh. If initial forays are to go by, it will be a battle royal, guaranteed to hit Modi where it hurts most on his way to 2024. Arvind Kejriwal’s ‘Delhi Model’ a.k.a ‘Mohalla Clinic Model’ was a winner in Punjab, and Gujarat could be next with Himachal as a bonus.
The BJP’s success so far, as far as Maharashtra is concerned, has been that it has prevented the MVA, the Shiv Sena and Chief Minister Uddhav Thackeray in particular, from building and implementing an “MVA Model” to rival the Gujarat and the Delhi models. And already half the MVA’s tenure is ‘khalaas’.
Look over the shoulder, and Shiv Sena’s path, since it joined the government in Maharashtra, is littered with bits and pieces of pockmarked skin. Starting with SSR and Disha, zeroing in on Aryan Khan followed by Anil Deshmukh and Nawab Malik, the central probe agencies have played their part. And, as if testing the waters, a swipe was also taken at Thackeray “relatives”, which elicited a lukewarm protest.
Now, it is the turn of Raut’s relatives and there are only assertions and reassertions from certain suspect quarters of how much stronger the Shiv Sena is at the street-level than the BJP will ever be. It is as if the Shiv Sena is being induced to turn back to its old leaf, hit the streets and raise ruckus.
The latest is to pit loudspeaker Raj Thackeray against soft-spoken Uddhav Thackeray and compare their temperaments with that of Balasaheb Thackeray. There are moves to dig up nostalgia of the Balasaheb Thackeray era— how life used to be under the Hindu Hriday Samrat!
That original Thackeray brand has taken a beating. This was apparent when Sanjay Raut stood up in the Rajya Sabha and rue the fact that the Criminal Identification Bill would make rakshasa’s out of the police, begging the question, since when did Shiv Sainiks start fearing the police? The reality is, there is palpable fear in politicians of arrest and imprisonment and the Shiv Sena’s politicians are no different.
The ED can attach properties and the CBI can park RAF outside ministers’ residences. No party is immune to the impunity. Kejriwal’s AAP lodged a police case against BJP’s Tejinder Singh Bagga in Punjab and the ED attached the immovable properties of AAP health minister Satyender Kumar Jain in Delhi. Toppling the MVA Government is only waiting to happen. There is muted talk that the BJP and Modi wouldn’t mind Maharashtra going to polls with Gujarat. (IPA Service)
The post Shiv Sena Thwarts The BJP From Bringing Down The MVA first appeared on IPA Newspack.
