Clockwork saffron: BMC polls near, Raj Thackeray back, right

Lashing out at the Nationalist Congress Party (NCP), which is part of the ruling Maha Vikas Aghadi (MVA) government along with the Shiv Sena and the Congress, Thackeray said the Sharad Pawar-led party plays “the caste card from time to time and divides society”. This led Pawar to label Thackeray a vanishing political entity who “stays underground for three to four months and suddenly surfaces to give a lecture”.

The beginning and dwindling fortunes

Thackeray had announced the party’s launch in Mumbai in March 2006 after a power struggle with his cousin and incumbent Chief Minister Uddhav Thackeray in the Shiv Sena.

Eleven months later, the MNS was up and running in electoral politics as it won seven seats in the BMC elections, 12 seats in the Nashik civic polls, and put in a strong showing in other municipal corporation elections. The party gained further momentum in the 2009 Assembly elections as it bagged 13 constituencies. The party’s biggest electoral success was in the 2012 BMC elections when its tally in the 227-member civic body was 28.

Since then, the going has been tough for the MNS. In the 2014 state polls, it managed to win just one constituency. But its lone legislator Sharad Sonawane (he was elected from Junnar) quit the party in 2017. That October, in a big jolt to the party, six of its seven corporators quit and joined the Shiv Sena. Sonawane too joined the Uddhav Thackeray-led party in 2019 as the MNS again managed to win just one seat, with Raju Patil getting elected from Kalyan Rural.

The MNS’s decline reflects in its falling vote share since 2009. In its debut state election, the party secured 5.71 per cent of the votes. This came down to 3.1 per cent in 2014 and 2.3 per cent in 2019.

The MNS’s shrinking political footprint was accompanied by Thackeray’s ideological fluctuation. Initially, an ardent admirer of Modi, the 53-year-old turned into a vocal critic of the prime minister and addressed rallies in 10 constituencies in support of the NCP-Congress alliance during the 2019 Lok Sabha elections. The Opposition parties lost nine of those seats.

ED notice and rebranding

After the parliamentary polls, in August 2019, the Enforcement Directorate (ED) questioned the MNS chief for over eight hours in connection with a money laundering case filed over the IL&FS Group’s loan equity investment of over Rs 850 crore in a company called Kohinoor CTNL.

In the Assembly polls later that year, Thackeray toned down his aggressive rhetoric and in early 2020 replaced the party flag of saffron, blue and green stripes with a saffron flag with the seal of Maratha warrior-king Chhatrapati Shivaji embossed in the middle.

These changes in the MNS came at a time the Shiv Sena, after breaking ties with the BJP, came to power as part of the MVA. In recent months, a bonhomie between the MNS and the BJP has increased, with senior leaders of the saffron party such as Devendra Fadnavis, Chandrakant Patil and Nitin Gadkari pictured meeting Thackeray. At Saturday’s event, Thackeray, who has been severely critical of migrants from North India, event praised the BJP and lauded the efforts of the Yogi Adityanth government in transforming Uttar Pradesh.

While both the parties have publicly ruled out the possibility of an alliance, reports suggest that the BJP is trying to use the MNS to put the Sena under pressure in Marathi-dominated areas. For the MNS and Raj Thackeray, however, the real test lies in the BMC polls as the party tries to regain its lost support base in the city where it was born.