Thackeray has not fielded a single candidate of his 13-year-old party, Maharashtra Navnirman Sena (MNS), for any of the 48 Lok Sabha seats in the state. That is why BJP and Shiv Sena could not prepare for the blitzkrieg that was to come.
Mumbai: The catchphrase of “Laav re video” (play that video) has become a hit on Maharashtrian social media. The man behind that phrase even more so.
Even without contesting a single seat in the Maharashtra Lok Sabha elections, MNS chief Raj Thackeray has become the sole bone of contention and opposition for the BJP-Shiv Sena combine. His series of rallies across Maharashtra coupled with fake news busting videos and an acerbic tongue caught the incumbent government by surprise before the fourth phase of elections that concluded polling in the state.
Thackeray has not fielded a single candidate of his 13-year-old party, Maharashtra Navnirman Sena (MNS), for any of the 48 Lok Sabha seats in the state. That is why BJP and Shiv Sena could not prepare for the blitzkrieg that was to come.
Thackeray did what nobody could imagine much less execute. He single-handedly threw the BJP-Sena alliance in Maharashtra off the rails. He spoke against the Modi-Shah duo to expose their alleged lies, took on its own main opposition Shiv Sena, did not take sides or ask for votes for any opposition party and managed to keep his core constituency happy by keeping his son of the soil narrative intact while also pleasing left liberals.
After the elections wrapped in Maharashtra, BJP’s rivals invited Thackeray to hold rallies in other poll-bound states. However, he is unlikely to move out of Maharashtra. Raj Thackeray received invitations from Congress, Janata Dal (Secular), Haryana Vikas Party and a couple of community organisations in Delhi, Madhya Pradesh, Haryana, Rajasthan and Karnataka to address rallies but he has rebuffed all offers because he achieved what he set out to do- create ripples in Maharashtra politics.
“The BJP attempted to take him on but without much success. Modi can neither join his fight nor ignore it. Fadnavis attempted to fill the gap but Thackeray demolished his arguments in following rallies; education minister Vinod Tawde asked the Election Commission to check Thackeray’s expenditure on rallies but that came to a cropper because Thackeray does not have candidates or their photos on the dais. The Shiv Sena is confused because Raj, its leaders’ bete-noire, speaks everything that Uddhav wants to about Modi-Shah, but cannot,” Economic Times reported.
“Raj Thackeray has nothing to lose,” said Bharat Kumar Raut, a political analyst to Sabrang India. “He has no stake or ambition in Lok Sabha. Even if he misses out in the assembly elections, he has nothing to lose. Both Congress and NCP reached rock bottom in 2014. The only way to go now is up,” he said.
So what did Raj Thackeray do to invite such a response?
Fact checking in rallies
Thackeray first unveiled a unique pattern with his annual Gudi Padwa (Maharashtrian New Year on 6 April) rally at Mumbai’s Shivaji Park. In the following two weeks, he spoke at rallies in Nanded, Satara, Ichalkaranji, Pune, Solapur, and Raigad, and sharpened his speeches for half a dozen more towns and cities before campaigning in the state ended.
He started with video presentations on the failures of the current dispensation by naming and shaming the Modi-Shah duo. He openly accused PM Narendra Modi and BJP chief Amit Shah of lying to voters and used statistics, newspaper reports and onground interviews by his party colleagues to convey their policy failures.
In his rallies, he criticized the government for corruption (Rafale jet controversy), compromising the judiciary (the death of Justice BH Loya) and independent institutions (resignation of RBI governors), withholding data (National Crime Records Bureau and unemployment statistics) and politicising cross-border conflict. At one point, he showed a photograph of a family a BJP fan-page has claimed were beneficiaries of Modi’s anti-poverty initiatives, Economic Times reported.
He then called the family on stage and said that the BJP IT Cell stole their private photo off Facebook and used it as part of its propaganda.
“I am running this campaign because these two [Modi and Shah] are a threat to the nation,” Thackeray said towards the end. “If you vote for the BJP, you vote for these two. If you vote for the Shiv Sena, you still vote for these two. If you want to ensure that democracy survives, you need to sideline them. Don’t forget this,” he said in his rallies according to the ET report.
Thackeray also fact-checked BJPs ‘first digital village’ of Maharashtra claim from Harisal. He also invited a youth who had featured in one of the government ads for Harisal, on his campaign stage.
According to Dhaval Kulkarni, a senior political journalist who writes about MNS, Raj Thackeray is trying to ride the anti-incumbency wave before the assembly elections. “He wanted to secure a political opening. He is a charismatic leader and a great crowd puller. He used the rising resentment within the Shiv Sena ranks to his benefit without even talking about the party. The Sainiks are showing signs of disillusion with their leadership due to the constant back and forth with the BJP alliance and the lack of clarity. Many Sena leaders have admitted in private that he is the only good influential opposition right now. He obviously benefitted the opposition but what he got was what he needed the most. The reactions from the crowd,” he told Sabrang India.
“Raj had nowhere to go. Had he contested now, he would have definitely lost. He would have lost his status as a force to be reckoned with in state politics. So the first shocker came when he said that he won’t contest. He then launched a campaign against Modi and Shah. He did not even mention Sena. With his oratory and crowd-pulling power, he held 23 meetings in Maharashtra. He put up a grand show which had about one lakh spectators at each rally. He had slideshows and ‘Laav re video’ became a popular catchphrase. He calculated every move and warmed up his chances for the October assembly elections. Had he contested, he would have lost and would nowhere to hide his face. Instead, now he is the hero of the whole campaign,” Raut told Sabrang India.
Didn’t he support BJP five years ago?
“Five years ago, Thackeray had voluntarily declared his support for Modi’s bid for prime ministership. It had come after a nine-day ‘study tour’ of Gujarat. The people of Gujarat, he had said at the time, were “fortunate” to have Modi at the helm, focussed on the development of the state,” ET reported.
“The bureaucrats I met were planted there to feed me [positive] information,” he said in an interview. “The overall picture emerged only later,” he said in his rallies
“For all his disdain for PM Modi, Raj Thackeray’s politics has more similarities with the PM’s than he cares to admit. Both parties revolve around the cult of a strongman whose profile and electoral fortunes rose following violent clashes between two communities. While Modi had de-emphasised his Hindutva moorings with a high-decibel narrative on Gujarat’s economic development in the run-up to the previous Lok Sabha elections, the MNS never completely shed its anti-migrant, xenophobic politics in spite of a successful debut in the Maharashtra assembly polls in 2009. By 2014, its seats in the 288-member assembly had shrunk from 12 to one,” ET reported.
“In essence, it is impossible to overlook the hypocrisy of Raj Thackeray calling out the BJP for divisive politics. But his onstage charisma, facility for oratory, and an innate knack for salty barbs and earthy humour, reminiscent of his uncle, Bal Thackeray, helps,” the report said.
According to Kulkarni, there is also an unconfirmed suspicion that BJP is also supporting him to divide the vote bank against Shiv Sena, which helps it cement its own singular power in the state. “Sena is an impediment to the BJP expansion in Maharashtra as both of them are essentially competing for the same vote base. It would be a natural progression to move onto the more famous and vocal cousin. In Maharashtra, it is difficult to say which way the voters will swing but small parties with a committed vote base can make a difference,” he told Sabrang India.
Sharad Pawar’s Game of Thrones
Political analysts credit Nationalist Congress Party (NCP) chief Sharad Pawar for Thackeray’s recent political revival. Last month, several media outlets quoted anonymous NCP leaders on their willingness to tie up with MNS. The deal, however, fell through after the Congress, its alliance partner, opposed it on ideological grounds. Even without an outright endorsement, it’s the Opposition led by the Congress and the NCP that stand to be the biggest beneficiaries of Thackeray’s popular tirades, ET reported.
Maharashtra Chief Minister Devendra Fadnavis called Thackeray a “parrot reading out Pawar’s script”.
“Who can blame him if he gets support from Sharad Pawar? Why wouldn’t Pawar want to ally with him seeing his success recently? It would be foolish to think that Raj is so impressionable and impish that he would parrot someone else’s script,” Kulkarni said.
Raut disagreed and said that would be wrong to assume that Sharad Pawar is behind this. “It was not preconceived. He came around after seeing the initial success of the crowd pulling rallies. Seeing the response, he encouraged Raj Thackeray. Everyone else simply jumped into the bandwagon.”
“Liberals or seculars seem to be enjoying Thackeray’s splendid performance. He has done his outsourced job perfectly, thanks to Sharad Pawar who convinced him to conduct a tour against Modi-Shah. Pawar is an astute politician who understands the strength and weaknesses of friends and foes. He knew Thackeray’s charisma would do wonders. He did not disappoint him, in fact with every public meeting, his attack on Modi-Shah became sharper. Initially, Pawar wanted Raj Thackeray’s Maharashtra Navnirman Sena adjusted in the Congress-NCP alliance. But Congress did not agree by saying that it would drive away North Indian voters. Ironically, Congress leaders Ashok Chavan or former Home Minister Sushilkumar Shinde were the first to demand for Thackeray’s mesmerising meetings,” Nikhil Wagle, a veteran journalist wrote in an article.
Modi had earlier targeted Pawar in the state during his visits as he is seen as the biggest player in Maharashtra politics and also had a key role in bringing the grand alliance of Opposition parties together against the BJP at the national level.
On Raj Thackeray’s rallies, Author Keshav Waghmare, who has a good understanding of Maharashtra politics said, “Pawar and Thackeray had planned these rallies in advance. This was actually for the state elections. Thackeray’s speeches are a rehearsal of Assembly election campaign.”
“Pawar and Thackeray are helping each other according to this plan. These speeches will help NCP more than the Congress in the Lok Sabha polls. By attacking Modi, Thackeray is also defending Pawar and improving his own image too for the upcoming state elections,” he said in a report by Newslaundry.
How do these rallies help Raj Thackeray?
According to Raut, Raj has played a smart trick. “If you look at his past, he came up with a wonderful promise. He won 13 seats. In BMC he got 727 seats. All the Lok Sabha candidates from his party had received 2 lakh votes each. He won the Nashik Municipal elections. The mayor of Nashik was his candidate. But he could not sustain that pace. In 2014, MNS had just one seat in the assembly and 7 seats in the municipal corporation. Out of which 6 people in Mumbai defected to Shiv Sena. Even the one seat in the assembly had defected. The Nashik municipal corporation collapsed,” he told Sabrang India.
“In the 2009 assembly election Thackeray’s MNS got 4.8% votes, won 13 seats which went down in 2014 due to Modi wave. This year, in the Assembly elections, if MNS is able to get its 2009 vote share back, it will be an important addition to the Congress-NCP kitty and can change the number game in the state. It can reduce the 8% gap in both alliances,” Wagle wrote.
Livemint reported that in 2009, the then-fledgeling party had bagged nearly 5% of the vote share contesting only 11 Lok Sabha seats but was the only party to drop its absolute votes in 2014 when all other parties had increased theirs. In the 2009 Assembly election, the MNS won 13 seats with a 12% state-wide vote share – including six seats in Mumbai with a staggering 24% vote share in the city – but dropped to one seat and barely three per cent vote share five years later. That lone MLA too deserted the party as it many of its second-rung leaders. Thackeray and his MNS were all but written off till his Gudi Padwa rally, the report added.
The opposition space in the state has eroded and Thackeray provided some much-needed succour.
“In his utterances, demeanour, and willingness to take on the powerful, Thackeray is now the main opposition voice in Maharashtra. He is doing the work, the campaigning, the activism, and the confrontation that the Congress-Nationalist Congress Party (NCP) should have; his earlier parochialism, muscle-flexing methods, violence as a political tool are forgotten in the moment. The Congress and the NCP have, in a rare import from business to politics, out-sourced their work to Thackeray,” Livemint reported.
“That Thackeray, a political write-off in 2014, is now Maharashtra’s chief campaigner for opposition parties shows the paucity of imagination in Congress-NCP and erosion of the opposition space. In the 15 years of Congress-NCP governments till 2014, the BJP and the Shiv Sena vied with each other to be the principal opposition party. Between BJP’s Eknath Khadse and Fadnavis, and Sena leaders including Bal Thackeray and his son Uddhav, they made sure that successive Congress chief ministers were kept on their toes with exposes of scams and critique of policies,” the report said.
Maharashtra Assembly elections are only six months away and this was the best opportunity for him to revive his image and party which had all but vanished. As the Livemint report stated, if Shiv Sena sinks, he is ready to move into that space and if Cong-NCP offer him a piece of the pie, he will accept it. He has proved to be useful and showed that he still has skin in the game.
“He got more publicity than Uddhav Thackeray. His party got a second shot and his leadership came alive. On the other hand, he confused Shiv Sainiks who now don’t know where to go. Neither Congress, NCP, Shiv Sena or BJP were ready to accept him as a partner. He was a pariah and untouchable. The way he has pulled crowds, what can be said is that he will try for the Cong-NCP alliance, invisibly if need be. Congress will let MNS take the stronger seats where MNS has a stake like Thane, Nashik, Dadar, Mahim etc. Congress may field weak candidates from here,” Raut told Sabrang India.
It will be difficult to say if the crowds will convert to votes. “Even Balasaheb Thackeray was unsuccessful in turning crowds into votes. He couldn’t win a seat in elections. This time, if the Congress-NCP alliance sees any increase in votes or seats, the credit undoubtedly will go to Raj,” he said.