The Maharashtra political drama has been hit by a plot twist in a manner which no political analyst was able to predict. The BJP has managed to stun everyone as it has formed the government with Ajit Pawar who was sworn in as the Deputy CM and claims to have the support of 35 NCP MLAs. The biggest loser of the Maharashtra political circus is undoubtedly the Shiv Sena who not only did lose the chair but also their ideology.
It is one thing to form a post poll alliance in the case of a hung assembly, but completely another when a pre-poll alliance is ditched for a post-poll one clearly for selfish gains. The magnitude of ‘betrayal’ that the Sena resorted to is said to have effectively triggered the beginning of it’s end.
Ever since the Maharashtra election results came out, the Shiv Sena changed its tunes in the greed of having a Thackeray occupy the Chief Minister’s chair directly contradicting the stance of the late Balasaheb Thackeray. Sanjay Raut irritated the entire state with his constant tirades and incessant statements claiming that the next CM will be from Shiv Sena. Uddhav Thackeray assumed a false sense of bravado and claimed that he didn’t an Amit Shah or Devendra Fadnavis to have a Shiv Sena CM.
A plethora of insults were hurled at the BJP and its leaders and the BJP maintained a stoic silence throughout. It seems that it was just the calm before the storm as the party was waiting for the Shiv Sena to completely expose itself before pouncing at the right time and the Shiv Sena didn’t disappoint by gleefully falling into an Amit Shah sized trap.
The Shiv Sena, in pursuit of the Chief Minister’s chair chose to shed its ideology as it desperately sought an alliance with the NCP and the INC who made the erstwhile Virat Hindu party dance to their tunes. Uddhav Thackeray cancelled his scheduled visit to Ayodhya post the historic Ram Mandir verdict in a bid to not upset the pseudo-seculars in the Congress.
The Shiv Sena completely went against the ideology and the teachings of Balasaheb Thackeray and laid their heads at the feet of Sonia Gandhi. Despite Sena’s initial apprehensions of using the word ‘secular’ in the Common Minimum Program of the NCP-Congress-Sena, the NCP and Congress made it a point to make Sena dance to the tunes of ‘secularism’ and engage in minority appeasement as the Sena even agreed for a 5% Muslim quota which was abolished by the Fadnavis government after coming to power in 2014.
The Sena completely went against its decades’ old ideology and that too at the worst possible time as the Ram Mandir finally became a reality. The party did nothing but backstab its voters who voted for the Sena for its unrelenting stance on Hindutva which Uddhav sacrificed just for the CM chair.
The Shiv Sena even agreed to drop the name of ‘Shiv’ from the alliance as the alliance was renamed ‘Maha Vikas Aghadi’ upon the orders received from 10, Janpath. When a Maharashtrian party agrees to drop the name of Shiv, its destruction is a given and the ‘Shiv’ Sena is headed for a vertical split thanks to the greed and incompetence of Uddhav Thackeray. For now, Shiv Sena has lost the chair of Deputy Chief Minister, Arvind Sawant’s Union Minister position which he resigned from, and the political relevance that it enjoyed in the state of Maharashtra, only because the party sacrificed its ideology for greed.