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.