As a leader of Samyukta Maharashtra Samiti, Keshav Sitaram ‘Prabodhankar’ Thackeray worked to create a modernised non-Brahmin society in Maharashtra, which was to be free from the social evils of caste, ignorance and superstition. However, with the rise of Shiv Sena under the leadership of his son Bal Thackeray and its alliance with Hindutva forces, the cause of a distinctive Marathi modernity based on progressive values of ‘prabodhan’ (enlightenment) took a back seat. Hindutva in Maharashtra is thus against the very idea of Maharashtra as imagined by its founding figures such as Mahatma Phule, Babasaheb Ambedkar and Prabodhankar Thackeray.
The Samyukta Maharashtra Chalwal (United Maharashtra Movement), a progressive movement that led the formation of the state of Maharashtra, needed a political body to express itself in the Twenty-First Century. The MVA as an alliance did help to express the sentiment, but there needs to be a party for its full materialisation. The strength of the MVA comes from its identification with the spirit of Marathi enlightenment. Its weakness stems from the fact that the MVA does not have a Prabodhankarite party at its core as an embodiment of the idea of a progressive Maharashtra.
Uddhav Thackeray’s rupture with the saffron alliance must be seen in the context of this foundational contradiction between the parochialism of Sangh’s Hindutva and the enlightenment spirit of Marathi modernity. The resilience of democracy is explained partly by one of its special features: it forces a reckoning with the principal contradiction in a society every five years or so, either prominently or diminutively.
The MVA took birth as a patchwork alliance during the furious early hours of this new conflict in 2019. One could not have thought of Congress, NCP and Shiv Sena coming together before that moment. But the alliance stayed resilient for five years—simply because it represented one pole of a basic ideological polarisation in Marathi society. A split between Marathi aspirations that seek a break from the superstitious past and an invasive brand of Hindutva that elevates a utopia about the glorious past.
There is no party called Shiv Sena (Prabodhankar). But it exists as a lack, a presence in absence. In other words, the spirit of Shiv Sena (Prabodhankar) exists, but it has yet to find a concrete form in reality. The MVA came into existence against the wishes of all its constituencies. None of them anticipated it, none of them wanted it — still, it became a reality. It was as if they sleepwalked into a new political alliance, haunted by an unknown spirit.
Uddhav Thackeray had at one point realised that he had metaphorically founded Shiv Sena (Prabodhankar) while inviting Prakash Ambedkar to join hands in his fight against the BJP’s Hindutva. A staunch opposition to Brahminism and equally staunch support for Marathi subnationalism characterise the Prabodhankarite tradition, which guides the actions of Uddhav.
The overt Prabodhankarite experiment failed rather quickly. The alliance of “Prabodhankar Shakti” of Shiv Sena and “Bhim Shakti” of Prakash Ambedkar’s Vanchit Bahujan Aghadi did not materialise. Uddhav Thackeray made the pragmatic choice of siding with the big parties of Congress and NCP (Sharadchandra Pawar) rather than riding the wave of Ambedkar-Prabodhankar nostalgia. Well before the assembly elections, the alliance was called off. The rise of the Prabodhankarite spirit in Maharashtra was, anyway, not paralleled by a rise in the Ambedkarite spirit.
But the opposition committed suicide by not recognising its founding event, Uddhav Thackeray's ontological break up from imperial Hindutva and his reclaiming of the Prabodhankar legacy, and the metaphorical foundation of Shiva Sena (Prabondhankar). The values of Shiv Sena (Uddhav Balasaheb Thackeray) are effectively the values of civility and enlightenment.
At this historical juncture, Uddhav Thackeray stands as the most significant symbol of the enlightenment tradition in Maharashtra, even if he is not consciously articulating it. His failure is that he is not going beyond being a symbol, towards the materialisation of the spirit in a new party. He lost the old party to the Shinde faction, and then he merely retained the remaining faction. He could have founded a new Shiv Sena (Prabodhankar) for the cause of the continuation of Marathi enlightenment in the Twenty-First Century.
Marathi society is a relatively enlightened one, although it has received bad press for the Bombay riots, with Shiv Sena too taking a deserved share of the blame. But apart from such exceptional situations, Marathis are hardly a fanatical people. Precisely that character separates Marathi Hindutva from its pan-Indian variant.
Even Bal Thackeray’s fascism was partly fictional. True, it had its terrible moments, but in terms of scale or intensity, it cannot be compared to any fascist movement elsewhere in the world. It was too tame to even qualify as fascism—it was anti-immigration in speech, while many nativist societies like Kerala and Tamil Nadu are anti-immigration in act, while inclusive in speech. Mumbai remained cosmopolitan during Bal Thackeray, and it has remained so since. This relative civility, which survived despite Bal Thackeray, is a product of Marathi enlightenment.
Uddhav perfectly represents the strain of Hindutva birthed in this society—he is humane and gentle, a soft-spoken patriarch who is nonetheless commanding; Uddhav is first and foremost an heir of an intellectually and artistically accomplished family. He is the grandson of Prabodhankar Thackeray, the great enlightenment figure, more than he is the son of Bal Thackeray, who himself was a cartoonist.
This Marathi enlightenment tradition was at stake in the election—that was the principal contradiction. The MVA failed to foreground both Uddhav and the contradiction that he symbolises. It is understandably difficult to see a flesh-and-blood human walking amongst us as a force larger than life; yet, this recognition is precisely what is demanded in such moments. Sometimes, leaders are involuntarily representative.
The question naturally arises: wouldn’t the opposition have won if they campaigned better on local issues? Weren’t they defeated as much by the little things which went against them? Certainly, such factors cannot be discounted. Yet, the MVA had many such “little things” going for them too. Was not the Maratha reservation issue a burning question, and wasn’t the ineffectiveness of the Mahayuti government on public display? What explains the effectiveness of some of these minor factors, and not others?
Such “little things” could have coalesced into a wave if the principal issue had been addressed.
What worked for Shinde was that he was an ordinary Maratha, who used to ply his trade as an auto driver, as opposed to the typical feudal Maratha symbolised by NCP and Congress, who run a satrapi system under the guise of democracy. In this sense, he was a product of Marathi modernity, in spite of his alliance with Hindutva.
The provincial satraps of the Congress and the NCP (Sharadchandra Pawar) ought to shoulder the major share of the blame for the electoral defeat, whose significance goes well beyond the next five years. Their regional parochialism prevented them from recognising the great sacrifice of Uddhav in breaking Hindutva and making the MVA.
They fought this election as if it was any other regional election—even the elections in which Congress has done well recently, the success was in part due to the reining in of such regional satraps. Such fiefdoms and chieftains may be the base of the Congress network of power, but they need not always have their way. In Maharashtra, where such reining was most necessary, the Congress High Command failed spectacularly, to command.
In effect, Uddhav was the victim of two coups, both by those whom he thought were his allies. Eknath Shinde perpetrated the first with the help of the BJP, pitting hardcore Hindutva against Uddhav’s gentle Hindutva. The Congressi satraps perpetrated the second, pitting their feudal power against Prabodhankarite modernity.
Whatever Uddhav’s future, he ought to be celebrated by those who write the histories of struggles against politics of persecution. Like Oskar Schindler, he operated as a man of conscience and fought against evil, from the vantage point of his unique position, when it was demanded of him.
He is now understandably shaken, but he can take consolation from one fact—this was the defeat of the MVA as an electoral formation, not of the Prabodhankar spirit in Maharashtra politics. Marathis are likely to again have a Mahayuti government that is forced to reckon with this spirit, thus severely limiting its Hindutva impulses.
This could not have happened without Uddhav’s rebellion of civility against the BJP. His act of rebellion opened up the possibility for a new Praodhankarite Shiv Sena that could free Maharashtra from the clutches of imperial Hindutva. The only option left for Uddhav Thackeray is to refound his own party.
[Kuriakose Mathew teaches politics and international relations at P P Savani University, Surat. He holds a Ph.D. from the Indian Institute of Technology Bombay, Mumbai. Arjun Ramachandran is a research scholar at the Department of Communication, University of Hyderabad. Viplov Wingkar is an assistant professor of philosophy at B K Birla College (Autonomous), Kalyan. This is an opinion piece. The views expressed above are the author’s own. The Quint neither endorses nor is responsible for them.]