Mumbai: After a crippling defeat in the Maharashtra assembly elections, the Shiv Sena (Uddhav Balasaheb Thackeray) is reinforcing its Hindutva agenda.
Over the past fortnight, leaders of the Thackeray faction have spoken about saving temples, raked up a controversy within the Maha Vikas Aghadi (MVA) alliance by talking about the Babri Masjid demolition, and targeted the Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) over the condition of Hindus in Bangladesh. Now the party has hailed a local court’s verdict on the Durgadi Fort in Kalyan that houses a Hindu temple and a mosque.
The Durgadi Fort in Kalyan has been a bone of contention between the local Hindu and Muslim communities for decades. In 1967, Bal Thackeray, founder of the undivided Shiv Sena, hoisted a saffron flag atop the fort. With the party mostly focusing on nativism after being founded in 1966, Bal Thackeray’s protest at the fort had marked its first definitive act of concretising its Hindutva push.
On Tuesday, a Kalyan court settled the nearly five-decade-old legal dispute, dismissing a suit filed by a Muslim trust claiming ownership of the mosque inside the Durgadi Fort, and ruling in favour of the Maharashtra government.
Two days later, the Shiv Sena (UBT), in a post on X, recalled its founder’s contribution towards ensuring that the ownership of the fort remains with the state government. “It’s a historic decision by the Kalyan court. This is the success of the agitation that Hinduhruday Samrat Balasaheb Thackeray had started,” the post read.
कल्याण न्यायालयाचा ऐतिहासिक निर्णय!
१९६७ साली हिंदुहृदयसम्राट शिवसेनाप्रमुख बाळासाहेब ठाकरे ह्यांनी पुकारलेल्या आंदोलनाला यश.
दुर्गाडी किल्ला अखेर राज्य सरकारकडेच! pic.twitter.com/ylOPQ0TAhz
— ShivSena – शिवसेना Uddhav Balasaheb Thackeray (@ShivSenaUBT_) December 12, 2024
According to political commentator Hemant Desai, after its poor performance in the assembly polls, the party may be looking to change the narrative that it is backed by Muslims.
“After the Lok Sabha elections, the BJP painted the Shiv Sena (UBT) as a party of Muslims, citing how it won seats only because of Muslim votes. The party suffered a setback because of this in the assembly elections. Now with the possibility of the Mumbai civic polls likely to be held some time in the coming year, the party knows it cannot go into the election with the tag of a ‘Muslim league’. The civic polls will be crucial for it,” he said.
On the Durgadi Fort issue especially, Desai added, the Shiv Sena (UBT) is locked in a contest with the Eknath Shinde-led Shiv Sena, who as chief minister had promised to ensure justice.
Thackeray’s Sena won just 20 seats in the 288-member Maharashtra assembly against the Shinde-led Sena’s 57. In the 2019 polls, the undivided Shiv Sena had won 56 seats.
Senior party leader and former MLA Arvind Nerkar, however, strongly denied that the Shiv Sena (UBT) was taking up issues related to the cause of Hindutva as part of any political strategy.
“These issues have been part of the Shiv Sena’s ideology for years. Our Hindutva is not that of ghantanaad (temple bells) and janva (scared thread Brahmins wear around their torso). Our Hindutva is one where we pick up the cudgels whenever there is any injustice,” he remarked.
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Sena (UBT)’s plan of action
Ever since the Thackeray-led Shiv Sena splintered its alliance with the BJP and joined hands with the Congress and Nationalist Congress Party to form the Maha Vikas Aghadi (MVA), the BJP has been targeting it for allegedly deserting the Hindutva ideology.
The campaign grew stronger after the Shiv Sena split in 2022, when Shinde walked out with a majority of MLAs, saying how the other faction had forgotten Hindutva after joining the MVA.
Earlier this month, after the loss in the assembly polls, Uddhav Thackeray held a meeting with the party’s former corporators, where he instructed them to talk up the party’s Hindutva agenda and dispel any negative campaign by the rival BJP and Shinde-led Sena, party sources told ThePrint.
On 4 December, the party took up the issue of a Hanuman temple near the Dadar railways station in Mumbai that had received an intimation for demolition from the railway authorities, saying that it was unauthorised encroachment on railway land.
The party claimed that the Union railway ministry’s plans to demolish the century-old temple were scrapped only after its MP Anil Desai wrote to Railway Minister Ashwini Vaishnaw about it.
Slamming the Narendra Modi-led government and calling it “anti-Hindu”, Shiv Sena (UBT) shared the letter on X, saying that it was only because of a Shiv Sena MP that “the railway ministry’s plan was foiled”.
Then, on 6 December—the anniversary of the Babri Masjid demolition—member of the legislative council and Sena (UBT) leader Milind Narvekar posted a photo with Bal Thackeray’s blow up above a falling Babri, and images of son Uddhav and grandson Aaditya at the bottom. In the image, he quoted Bal Thackeray as saying, “I am proud of those who did this.”
The post immediately drew the ire of Samajwadi Party, the party’s ally in the INDIA bloc and MVA. SP MLA Abu Azmi said that he had decided to withdraw from the MVA due to the post.
Earlier this week, the Shiv Sena (UBT) in its mouthpiece, Saamana, accused the BJP of stalling proceedings in Parliament simply to avoid discussion on the plight of the Hindu minority in Bangladesh. It called BJP’s Hindutva “politically transactional”.
(Edited by Mannat Chugh)
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