Dighe, who died in 2001 at the age of 49, was to the people of Thane almost what Bal Thackeray was to the people of Mumbai. He was largely credited with expanding Shiv Sena’s roots in Thane and its neighbouring regions, namely, Kalyan, Dombivli, Ambernath, and Bhiwandi, among others.

The sequel shows Shinde’s ascent from his humble roots as an auto-rickshaw driver to a near shadow of Dighe, and someone who attempts to take over the legacy of Shiv Sena founder Bal Thackeray.

Ahead of the assembly polls, the biographical political drama, produced by Marathi actor Mangesh Desai under the banner of Zee Studios and directed by Pravin Tarde, spends a lot of time justifying Shinde’s 2022 rebellion.

Shinde had walked out of the Uddhav Thackeray-led Shiv Sena, toppling the Maha Vikas Aghadi (MVA) government that the Shiv Sena had formed with former rivals Congress and the Nationalist Congress Party (NCP), with a majority of MLAs in tow. He then formed a government with the BJP with himself as chief minister, claiming to be leading the real Shiv Sena.

The film comes at a time when the Shinde-led Shiv Sena desperately needs to prove that Maharashtra’s voters see it as the real Shiv Sena, something it failed to do emphatically in the Lok Sabha elections earlier this year. 

The Shinde-led Shiv Sena won 7 of the 15 seats it contested, while the Shiv Sena (Uddhav Balasaheb Thackeray) contested 21 seats and won 9. 

In the 13 seats where they were in a one-on-one contest, both emerged as near equals with the Shiv Sena (UBT) winning 6 and the Shinde-led Shiv Sena winning just one more, though with a wafer thin margin of 48 votes.

For Shinde, that certificate of being seen as the real Shiv Sena is important not just in his battle to outfox Uddhav as legatee of Shiv Sena founder Bal Thackeray, but also to improve his bargaining power within the Mahayuti and have a real shot at being chief minister again. 

Mahayuti comprises the Shinde-led Shiv Sena, the Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) and the Ajit Pawar-led Nationalist Congress Party (NCP).

Sanjay Patil, a researcher at Mumbai University, told ThePrint, “There is a large base of Shiv Sena workers and supporters who may have stayed with Uddhav Thackeray, but who have some sympathy towards Shinde and his stated viewpoint about Hindutva as a Shiv Sainik. This is the mass of people who got influenced by Bal Thackeray’s Hindutva and did not like Uddhav Thackeray’s decision to tie up with the Congress and the NCP. The timing of the movie seems like an attempt to whip up that sentiment of sympathy.”

Shinde has been constantly trying to be in the limelight, advertising the state government’s schemes and infrastructure projects, said Patil.

Adding, “The BJP had underestimated him a lot when Shinde became CM. Now, the way he is getting everyone’s work done right from a mighty builder to a grassroots karyakarta and promoting the government’s work as his work, coupled with his attempts to whip up sympathy for his actions, is aimed at hurting not just Uddhav Thackeray but also the BJP.”

The first part of the film on Shinde’s mentor Dighe hit the screens on May 7, 2022, just over a month before the rebellion.

Speaking to reporters at the film’s premiere Thursday, Deputy CM Devendra Fadnavis said the first part informed people more about leaders who were inspired by Dighe, as well as Shinde’s political journey.

“Then there was a political earthquake under his leadership and there was a demand to have Dharmaveer 2. This movie is not just for entertainment but in a way it is a story of an agitation,” Fadnavis said. On questions about whether there’s likely to be a political thriller based on the BJP leader too, Fadnavis laughed it off, saying, “I will write the script for Dharmaveer 3.”

On the other side of the aisle, speaking to reporters,  Shiv Sena (UBT) Rajya Sabha MP Sanjay Raut slammed the film as an attempt by the BJP and Eknath Shinde to project Dighe as larger than Bal Thackeray. “Bal Thackeray’s followers across Maharashtra don’t follow Eknath Shinde, so there is an attempt to create a new icon. Anand Dighe was a loyal Shiv Sena district chief. There were leaders closer to Dighe in Thane than Shinde.”

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‘Who is Eknath Shinde?’

The sequel to Dharmaveer shows Shinde in many hues, from a passionate Hindutva advocate, a politician whose foremost job is to protect his karyakartas, to someone who wears a PPE kit and sits with COVID-19 patients to give them hope and a leader who arranges for oxygen cylinders overnight when a hospital in Thane is running low.

Each of these avatars of Shinde are juxtaposed by something similar Dighe had done as a mass leader when he was alive.

Ever since the vertical split in the Shiv Sena, Shinde and his followers have constantly attacked Uddhav for allegedly abandoning Hindutva by forging an alliance with ideological rivals Congress and NCP.

In this backdrop, Dharmaveer 2, before anything else, first seeks to bolster Shinde’s image as a Hindutva leader. The film opens with the alleged lynching of two sadhus by a mob in Maharashtra’s Palghar district in 2020 and Shinde, who was at the time a minister in the MVA government, being shown as deeply disturbed by the incident as the soul of Dighe haunts him for sitting in the government with “leftists and liberals”. 

The scene is juxtaposed with how Dighe led a protest to the Haji Malang Dargah in Kalyan, which is claimed to be an old Hindu shrine, with a much younger Shinde marching next to him. In January this year, Shinde had at a religious gathering promised to “liberate” the Haji Malang Dargah. 

In another scene, Dighe, under arrest for leading protests at the Haji Malang Dargah, sends a handwritten letter to one of his karyakartas who is on a hunger strike demanding Dighe’s release. In another scene, Shinde is shown struggling to put together money to release his karyakartas arrested by the police for staging demonstrations after Dighe’s death.

Back at Mantralaya during the tenure of MVA, when Shinde narrates the story about Dighe’s handwritten letter, an actor playing MLA Sanjay Shirsat says, indirectly referring to Uddhav’s leadership, “This was the value of karyakartas back then, look at how we are being treated now.”

In certain scenes, there’s zero subtlety in showcasing Shinde as Dighe’s successor. For instance, as Shinde helps out an ailing COVID-19 patient, the patient sees an aura of Dighe and bows down to him. 

Dighe’s aura smiles, shakes his head and points at Shinde.

‘Don’t go alone, take Hindutva and Shiv Sena with you’

Ever since the split, leaders of the Shiv Sena (UBT) have accused the Shinde-led Shiv Sena of attempting to steal their party and its founder, Bal Thackeray. 

Dharmaveer 2 attempts to show that Dighe himself showed a disgruntled Shinde the way, telling him not to walk out alone and form his own party like Raj Thackeray did, but to take Hindutva and the organisation along.

The sequel is peppered with suggestions of how Shinde and the MLAs who support him—Sanjay Shirsat, Bharat Gogawale, Abdul Sattar, Tanaji Sawant, Dada Bhuse, Shambhuraj Desai and so on—were disillusioned with the Uddhav’s leadership and the alliance with ideological rivals Congress and NCP. It shows how they had to allegedly let issues that hurt the Shiv Sena, slide, such as the Palghar lynching or Congress leader Rahul Gandhi’s comments on Hindutva ideologue Vinayak Damodar Savarkar.

At one point, a voter bans Shinde, then an MVA minister, from visiting his house for a religious function saying he voted for the BJP-Shiv Sena alliance, but the Shiv Sena duped him by allying with Congress and NCP.  

Referring to the splintering of the alliance of BJP and undivided Shiv Sena and formation of the MVA, one MLA from the Shinde camp is seen saying, “What our party did was like killing our sibling and then asking the outsider neighbours to come live with us as a joint family.”

Dharmaveer 2 hits all the high points of Shinde group’s stated reasons for the rebellion. It shows Shirsat’s disillusionment when he is asked to wait for hours outside Varsha, the CM’s official bungalow when Uddhav was holding the post, for a meeting. MLA Shirsat mentioned it in a letter to Uddhav after the rebellion. It talks about how a “party spokesperson” scuttled Shinde’s request for Z+ security, alluding to Sanjay Raut, who was blamed by a third of rebel MLAs for the split.

“We are in an aghadi (alliance), but it is actually a bighadi (dysfunctional),” Shinde is seen saying.

Moments after the lady with the notepad asks, ‘Who is Eknath Shinde?, the leader has a flashback of him sleeping in his auto-rickshaw. His friends are mocking him, saying one day he will become the chief minister. 

In the days that followed, those words did come true. 

However, amid the power tussle within the Mahayuti and the rival MVA’s solid performance in the Lok Sabha polls when it won 30 of Maharashtra’s 48 seats, retaining the position is an uphill battle.

(Edited by Amrtansh Arora)

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