The double-edged sword of ideology strains Shiv Sena's survival

A bitter 'ideology versus family loyalty' battle between the two factions of the Sena is in the offing

Ideology is a double-edged sword. It is a powerful tool to mobilise a people to one's cause and catapult a political party to power or keep it robust even when out of office. But when holding the reins of power, its practical realities often compel a party to deviate from its core principles and promises to the people to embrace the new. If such a transition is gradual, the party can sidestep the trap of betraying its core support group. But if abrupt, the party could endanger its very existence.

We are currently witnessing the unfolding of such an ideological upheaval in Maharashtra. The Shiv Sena risked an abrupt U-turn in November 2019 and now faces an internal revolt 31 months later. The architect of the U-turn, Uddhav Thackeray and his family, have now lost power and control of most of their party's MLAs, who have rejoined the Hindutva forces.

The recent political developments in Maharashtra were sudden but perhaps not unexpected. Contemporary international and Indian political history is a pointer to it. The fall of the erstwhile USSR best exemplified the sudden disruption in ideology or a system based on it. After that, communists failed to be an influential political force in democratic Russia. But China avoided the trap by slowing the process and limiting it only to the economic sphere.

It happened with the Indian Left too. First, the CPI, a promising force in the 1950s, embraced an existential crisis after aligning with the Indira Gandhi government during the Emergency and has been relegated to being a marginal force ever since. The Left stepped into a trap again when it resorted to forcible land acquisition in Bengal at the fag end of its 34-year-long rule. A decade later, it failed to win a single seat in the Bengal Assembly polls held in 2021.

The Samajwadi Party (SP), too, paid a heavy price in Uttar Pradesh under Akhilesh Yadav when it joined hands with the Congress in the 2017 Assembly polls. The SP is an offshoot of the Lohiaite socialist legacy that pegged the Congress as its main rival when it raised the slogan of 'picchde pavein saath bhag' (the backward castes will have sixty per cent) in the 1960s. Akhilesh Yadav quickly realised his mistake and severed his party's alliance with the Congress but is struggling to recover lost ground.

In a way, at the national level, the Congress, too, had suffered for its overemphasis on secularism and appeasement of Muslim fundamentalists (by reversing the Shah Bano verdict and banning Salman Rushdie's book). It was not part of its earlier centrist mixed bag of ideology. In turn, it provided the BJP with the much-coveted space to bring to the forefront the Hindutva ideology that never had takers beyond ten per cent of voters in the first four post-independence decades.

But Uddhav Thackeray ignored the lessons of history when he betrayed the Hindutva camp after the 2019 Assembly polls in Maharashtra, which the Sena and BJP had contested as allies.

Blatant betrayals of people's mandate do not go down well with the electorate. For example, Nitish Kumar betrayed the mandate of 2015 to join the NDA later, and his party shrunk in the subsequent edition of the Bihar Assembly elections in 2020 so much that his party failed to win even half of the seats it contested.

However, Uddhav Thackeray not only betrayed the mandate but also went against the party's legacy and his father, Bal Thackeray, entrenched in radical Hindutva, often much more radical than the BJP's. Uddhav Thackeray walked out of the Hindutva camp and embraced the secular fold for the chief ministerial chair. It restricted his space to stay as an exponent of Hindutva. With history replete with examples, such a sudden U-turn was dangerous for the party's survival and maintenance of its traditional support base.

What must have added another dimension to this danger in the minds of many of the MLAs, perhaps its MPs, is that this decision was taken when the party was already shrinking. Its strike rate in the 2019 Assembly elections was less than 50 per cent, which is a sign of rejection by the people. The MLAs and MPs had to worry about their future.

Now, by giving Eknath Shinde the CM's chair, the BJP has tried to strengthen the rebel Shiv Sena faction. By getting Devendra Fadnavis to be Shinde's deputy, the BJP has signalled that the posts of the CM and his deputy could be interchangeable between Fadnavis and Shinde in future.

But would the senior partner's dramatic gestures work to reinvigorate the rebel Shiv Sena? If the Thackerays do not give up, and there is no reason for father Udddhav and son Aditya to do so, it will be a bitter 'ideology versus family loyalty' battle between the two factions of the party. Perhaps there will be no winner in this battle, as far as the Shiv Sena is concerned.

(Diptendra Raychaudhuri is a journalist and author based in Kolkata)

Disclaimer: The views expressed above are the author's own. They do not necessarily reflect the views of DH.