Who Speaks For All Things Marathi In Mumbai Now?

A stone’s throw away from Mumbai’s famous Shivaji Park, revered as much by politicians as budding cricketers, sat the low-rise building Kadam Niwas. In its modestly appointed house of the Thackerays, on a typically heavy rain day of June 19, 1966, a handful of men gathered to shape an organisation which, in their imagination, would speak for and fight for the Marathi manoos in the cosmopolitan Bombay that gave primacy to South Indians and Gujaratis.

In the room were cartoonist Bal Keshav Thackeray, accountant and organisation man Madhav Deshpande, street-level trailblazer Dhuri Master, trade unionists, culture connoisseurs and others. Today, the organisation that transformed into the political party, Shiv Sena, should have celebrated its 60th founding day with aplomb and style, led by Uddhav Balasaheb Thackeray, who uncomfortably inherited the political mantle from his father. After all, few regional or subnational parties survive this long despite rebellions and splits and despite being undermined by larger political parties.

Yet, the Shiv Sena in 2026 is, with generous help from the apex court and the Election Commission, that of Eknath Shinde’s, who claimed the party, its name, and symbol in June 2022.  This, we know, considerably weakened Uddhav Thackeray, who watched the party shaped by his father and others getting snatched away from under his feet. The rump left with him—an elongated name, a different election symbol, and considerably reduced influence—has come under a dark cloud on the eve of the original party’s 60th anniversary. Six of his party’s Lok Sabha MPs—twothirds of the nine elected in 2024— are possibly on their way out to support the ruling party. Sensational allegations have been made by his trusted lieutenant and Rajya Sabha MP Sanjay Raut that Rs 15 crore of the Rs 50 crore promised were allegedly sent to each of the six turncoat MPs.

This chapter, like the Shinde-led one in June 2022, will run its own course. It may well be that Uddhav Thackeray is left with an even smaller rump; the organisation is far from small or finished. The disconnect between the elected turncoats and the grassroots organisation was brought out in a pithy message circulated among observers who have closely watched the Shiv Sena for decades. Phodal tar sampaal (if you break away, you will be finished), it went. The three words harked back to a time when turncoats were treated to a mix of disdain, public humiliation, and violent acts— wholly inappropriate but in full Shiv Sena mode.

The party functioned on the strength of its enviable organisational network across Mumbai and, initially, in the urban Mumbai Metropolitan Region, including Thane, and later across rural belts of the state. That network of shakhas with burly young and committed old men— women’s wings existed too—was embedded in the city’s rhythms. They rose to the occasion during festivals as well as calamities, provided the first-responder support, offered vigilante justice even when heavily condemned for it, dug up cricket pitches to protest playing against Pakistan, and so on. Shiv Sainiks, who preferred violence to dialogue—and revelled in it—believed they were, indeed, the ‘sons of the soil’ representing Maharashtra, Mumbai, and all Maharashtrians.

It is for political scientists to aver whether the parochial voice was needed or not, but it existed. And occupied a large political space in Mumbai, in MMR, from the municipal corporations to the Assembly and the Parliament. That political space, that presence of a regional outfit, is now at stake for the second time in four years. Each existential crisis that Uddhav Thackeray faces, each worse than the previous one, raises at least two questions that he will find uncomfortable. What was his imagination, or reimagination, for the party when he took over in 2003-04 after cousin Raj Thackeray had proposed his name at the party’s Mahabaleshwar conclave? How did he envision that the Shiv Sena would continue to ally with the growing national party, the BJP, and yet hold the space to represent regional interests or speak for the Marathi manoos, as it were? In fact, on his watch, Mumbai became a terrible city to live in and decidedly less Maharashtrian.

His lack of clarity has cost him heavily. Also, over the years, accelerated in the past five years, the lack of a strong ideological anchoring other than the self-contradictory combination of Marathi and Hindu interests and the subduing of the strong second-rung leadership committed to the party’s founding mantra have meant that local leaders with political heft— Shinde is an example—believed they deserved more than what Uddhav Thackeray could even promise. These dyed-in-Sena-saffron leaders committed to the late Thackeray became sitting ducks for the ruling party to woo elected MLAs and MPs—with threats of legal cases, raids by central agencies, and benefits of power— to switch loyalties. That this trading, now blatant and brazen, has been normalised is a large blot on India’s political democracy. In Maharashtra itself, the BJP repeated this with the Nationalist Congress Party. While the BJP carries on with the reprehensible method to cut down opposition parties, a part of this problem comes back to regional leaders, in this case Uddhav Thackeray. In 2019, when he decided to dump the BJP to ally with the Congress and the NCP, his political rivals for decades, the lack of an ideological anchor and contradictions showed up.

If any party should have read the BJP closely and correctly, it should have been the Uddhav-led Shiv Sena given their 30-year alliance. The Marathi vote still exists—in the Assembly elections of 2024, Shinde’s and Thackeray’s Senas together, at 22.4%, were barely four percentage points less than the BJP—but the existential question goes beyond the numbers. Given how cosy Shinde is with the BJP, which organisation can claim to now represent the Marathi manoos and in fact all things Marathi from schools to language and culture in the political arena? The belligerent Shiv Sena was not the most ideal, but it existed. At 60, it should have matured; instead, it is thinning out, most of it co-opted and the rest targeted for erasure. If anyone could, Uddhav Thackeray should have seen it coming.

Smruti Koppikar, an award-winning senior journalist and urban chronicler, writes extensively on cities, development, gender, and the media. She is the Founder Editor of the award-winning online journal ‘Question of Cities’ and can be reached at smruti@questionofcities.org.

Published on: Thursday, June 18, 2026, 10:00 PM IST