Shinde, who by now had changed into a white safari suit that looked as fresh as he did, had to start his day again at 9.30 am.
His son and Shiv Sena MP Shrikant Shinde, who had walked in half an hour later, said it’s been like this since the past two years—when a Thane-based politician who began as an auto-rickshaw driver dislodged the Uddhav Thackeray-led government in which he was a minister to become the CM with the Bharatiya Janata Party’s (BJP) support.
From that moment onwards, according to Shrikant, the Sena leader has evidently optimised his morning hours and spent every one of them living his moment in the sun, making the adventure count with his life now being “100 percent politics”. In Shinde’s own words, his motto is “24/7 government”.
As he faces another election for another term, Shinde, who was earlier dismissed by some as the BJP’s puppet, looks more self assured than ever, whether it is about his Shiv Sena or its place in the Mahayuti alliance, especially given the Lok Sabha result in June.
“In the Lok Sabha election, people nearly gave their verdict that we are the Shiv Sena. Our vote share was more (than the Shiv Sena (Uddhav Balasaheb Thackeray)), our strike rate was better. We are taking Balasaheb Thackeray’s ideology so those who believe in that ideology are all with us,” Shinde said in an interview to ThePrint.
According to the Election Commission data, the Shinde-led Shiv Sena, which contested 15 seats and won seven, had a vote share of 12.95 percent. The Shiv Sena (UBT)’s vote share was slightly higher at 16.72 percent as it contested 21 seats, of which it won nine. The Shinde-led Shiv Sena’s strike rate was stronger at 46.6 percent as against the Shiv Sena (UBT)’s 42.8 percent, respectively.
What has further boosted Shinde is that his party’s performance was the strongest within the Mahayuti partners as well. The BJP’s strike rate was 32 percent having won nine seats of the 28 it contested, while the Ajit Pawar-led Nationalist Congress party (NCP) won one of the four seats it fought, registering a strike rate of 25 percent.
Officially, Shinde is not the Mahayuti’s CM face going into elections. He, however, talks about his government’s work, especially infrastructure development, with the authority of someone in charge of the steering wheel, notwithstanding his two heavyweight deputies—Devendra Fadnavis and Ajit Pawar.
He deftly avoided any display of his chief ministerial ambitions to ThePrint, and turned a question about any insecurity in his own three-wheeler government with his two deputies eyeing his seat, on its head.
“Why will they look at the chair? They will look in the front. There is no race for the chair among us unlike in the Maha Vikas Aghadi (MVA). I have worked with both for two years. They are very knowledgeable and mature. Devendra ji has worked as CM, Ajit dada has worked as minister and deputy CM for many years. I have worked as a minister; I have worked as CM. Our focus is on getting the majority,” Shinde said, adding he eyes a comfortable 170 tally for the Mahayuti in the 288-member assembly.
‘Brought development projects back on track’
This Maharashtra election is one that has been framed by the Mahayuti government’s populist schemes— free gas cylinders to eligible families, a youth apprenticeship scheme, free solar pumps for farmers, and the flagship Ladki Bahin scheme under which the government gives Rs 1,500 to every eligible woman. Despite the opposition’s criticism of these schemes, it has sparked a battle of freebies.
While Shinde hails these schemes as game changers, he asserts that the protagonist of this election is infrastructure development and a comparison of the progress in several marquee projects under the MVA government.
“Our government has been here for about 2.5 years. In the 2.5 years that the MVA government was there, what did it do? How many projects did it stall? It had an anti-development vision. It put speed breakers everywhere. If our Mahayuti government had not come to power, we would have gone back 15-20 years,” Shinde says, listing out projects that the Mahayuti government “brought on track”.
Some of the projects he mentions include the Nagpur-Mumbai Samruddhi expressway, Mumbai’s Colaba-Bandra-Seepz Metro corridor, the Sewri-Nhava Sheva Atal Setu, the Mumbai coastal road, the Dharavi redevelopment project, and the Vadhavan port in Palghar.
Mumbai’s Metro network, once fully ready, will be the densest in the whole world, and the Vadhavan port, for which the Union Cabinet cleared the decks in August, will be among the global top 10, he says.
Shinde also highlights how the former Uddhav Thackeray-led MVA government stalled India’s first bullet train project from Mumbai to Ahmedabad, and how it was his government that gave it steam, aiming to bring the two cities closer.
On the Shiv Sena (UBT)’s criticism of this simply being a ploy to take away businesses from Maharashtra to Gujarat, and bring Mumbai closer to Gujarat, Shinde shrugged it off.
“Isn’t Gujarat a part of India?,” he asked, before promptly pointing out how the Mahayuti government is also working on creating a grid of access-controlled highways to ease travel within Maharashtra, and how Maharashtra is a leader when it comes to foreign direct investments.
If his government gets a second term, his priority will be to fully decongest Mumbai, focusing on the Goregaon-Mulund east west connector, the Thane-Borivali twin tunnels, and the Virar-Alibaug multi modal corridor, he says.
All these projects will contribute to creating a ring route around Mumbai to allow commuters to bypass the city’s internal roads. Most of these projects were conceived over a decade ago but inordinately delayed for some reason or the other
Shinde also talks about plans of shaping the Mumbai Metropolitan Region into a $1.5 trillion economy, a dream that he says was shown to the Maharashtra government by the Niti Aayog.
“We are now trying to decentralise development region-wise. Our state is the country’s growth centre. It will be a powerhouse, fintech capital. We have potential. We have done a lot of work in two years. But, we can do much more if our government gets five more years,” he asserts.
Coordination within Mahayuti
For the last year or so, officials in Maharashtra’s Mantralaya, the state secretariat, have been a bit hassled, mostly for work purposes. Shinde likes to burn the midnight oil and often calls bureaucrats for work at even 2 am or 3 am. Deputy CM Ajit Pawar is an early bird, often known to go on site visits with officials at 5 am and reach his Mantralaya office by 8 am. The other Deputy CM Fadnavis is known to cram in a lot of work in the evening and into the night.
“Between the three of us, our government runs 24/7,” Shinde explains.
Back in June 2022 when he joined hands with the BJP, Shinde justified it as a natural alliance based on shared political ideology. He was only respecting the people’s 2019 mandate when they had given the alliance of the BJP and the undivided Shiv Sena a majority, the CM said.
However, a year later, the Ajit Pawar-led NCP joined the Shinde-led Shiv Sena and the BJP in the government, despite the party having been a traditional political and ideological rival.
“Our alliance with the BJP is that of ideology. The Shiv Sena and the BJP are parties with the same ideology. Ajit dada came with us on a development agenda, that Modi ji is taking the country forward. Earlier when our PM used to go outside the country, nobody used to know. Today when Modi ji comes, the whole world watches,” Shinde says.
The Mahayuti alliance, however, did not meet with much success in the first major election it fought. Together, it won 17 of Maharashtra’s 48 parliamentary seats as against the MVA’s 30. One seat went to an Independent, who aligned himself with the MVA.
While Shinde and other Mahayuti leaders pin their lacklustre performance on the Opposition’s “fake narrative” about the BJP wanting to change the Constitution and the scrapping of caste-based reservations, they admit that there was better coordination among the MVA parties on the ground.
“Shiv Sena and BJP vote transfer happened smoothly. Ajit dada came a bit later. It took some time for the karyakartas (workers) to meet and gel with each other. It takes some time, but it will happen in the Vidhan Sabha (elections),” Shinde says.
Who is the real Shiv Sena?
For decades, Shinde was a loyal soldier of the Thackerays, grooming the party’s bastion of Thane after his mentor Anand Dighe died in 2001. His parting with Uddhav Thackeray was not just because of the alliance with ideological rivals, but also due to a sense of being distanced from the Sena’s power centre, he had said.
Dharmaveer 2, a film on Dighe released in September, shows how an employee from a political consultancy supposedly appointed by the Thackeray-led undivided Shiv Sena once asked,’ Who is Eknath Shinde?,’ and how that was the last straw for the Thane strongman.
Over two years later, as he sits smug as Maharashtra CM, and officially heads the Shiv Sena with the party’s ‘bow and arrow’ symbol, Shinde virtually rules out any reconciliation with the Thackerays as an “if and but issue.”
“We have decided our route. It is one of Balasaheb Thackeray’s ideologies. They have taken a different route for their own selfishness,” he claims. “Our road changed for a reason. They twisted the party’s ideology, didn’t listen to the party’s legislators.”
In Shinde’s eyes, he has already proved himself as the beholder of the real Shiv Sena, not just in the Election Commission, but also in the public court.
The two factions fought 13 Lok Sabha seats against each other in the first direct electoral clash. Though the Shinde-led Shiv Sena won seven, Mumbai North West, however, came with a wafer thin margin of 48 votes. Moreover, while the Shinde-led Shiv Sena triumphed over the Thane region, the Thackeray brand prevailed over Mumbai.
The Shinde-led Shiv Sena is confident of reversing that phenomenon this election. Mumbai has 36 assembly constituencies, and there will be a direct fight between the two factions in 11 of them. Overall, the contest is direct in 47 seats.
“The Shiv Sena (UBT) only registered huge leads in Muslim-dominated assembly segments within Mumbai’s six Lok Sabha constituencies. These leads wiped out the Mahayuti’s gains in other assembly segments. But, in the state elections, each assembly segment will count on its own,” a senior Sena leader told ThePrint.
In Shinde’s own constituency of Kopri Pachpakhadi in Thane, the Shiv Sena (UBT) has fielded Kedar Dighe, the nephew of Shinde’s mentor Anand Dighe.
Shinde’s aides say he lives and breathes politics. So much so, that the former auto-rickshaw driver who was compelled to abandon his education after the 12th standard, decided to pursue his graduate and post-graduate education in politics, much after he had established himself as a hard-boiled politician.
He was preparing for his final examination for a Masters of Arts degree in politics in 2022 when the course of his career changed. The Sena leader had to take the state’s reins and put a brake on his academic aspirations.
“The government changed, and I had to give a different kind of an exam,” Shinde avers.
His result will be out on 23 November.
(Edited by Tony Rai)
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