Sena’s voter outreach drive seeks to reassert party’s ‘Hindutva’ credentials

Locked in mortal combat with its erstwhile friend-turned-bitter-foe, the Bharatiya Janata Party, the Shiv Sena’s recent voter outreach drive to rebuild its party across Maharashtra is a clear signal of the party’s assertion of its Hindutva credentials.

The four-day drive, which began on March 22 and ended on March 25, coincides with the raids on Sena chief and Maharashtra Chief Minister Uddhav Thackeray’s kin and other Sena leaders like MLA Pratap Sarnaik. The Sena, expectedly, accused the BJP of playing foul with the Centre’s flagrant misuse of Central agencies.

It also comes at a time when the BJP, buoyed by its wins in four Assembly elections including Uttar Pradesh and neighbouring Goa, has now set its sights on wresting Maharashtra from the Sena in the 2024 Assembly election.

With the battle now taken to the gates of the Thackeray household, Mr. Thackeray lashed out at the BJP for acting as the “judge, jury and executioner”.

It is against this backdrop that the ‘Shiv Sampark Abhiyan’ — the Sena’s mass contact programme — has seen the party leadership and workers fan out across 19 districts in Maharashtra’s Vidarbha and Marathwada regions where the party’s organisation has been particularly weak.

Countering BJP

One of the prime objectives of this drive has been to counter the BJP’s propaganda of the former as a minority-appeasing party owing to its 2019 alliance with the ideologically opposed Nationalist Congress Party (NCP) and the Congress to form the ruling ‘Maha Vikas Aghadi’ (MVA) coalition in the State to keep the BJP out of power.

In the recent past, the party, through its mouthpiece Saamana, has hit out at the Rashtriya Swayamsevak Sangh (RSS) and the BJP-led government at the Centre for attempting to erase the contributions of India’s first Prime Minister Jawaharlal Nehru while Sena MP and Saamana’s executive editor Sanjay Raut had repeatedly praised Congress leaders Rahul Gandhi and Priyanka Vadra ahead of the recently concluded election to five States.

According to sources, Mr. Thackeray, during a meeting at Sena Bhavan in Mumbai, exhorted his leadership to find suitable candidates to be fielded against the BJP in future civic and Assembly elections and build the Sena’s base in areas where it hitherto is without influence.

Addressing party workers gathered at Sena Bhawan on March 20 via video conference, Mr. Thackeray dubbed the BJP’s ‘Hindutva’ as one of “rank opportunism” while specifically pointing out that RSS chief Mohan Bhagwat himself had expressed the view a number of times that those who took an anti-Muslim stance were not Hindus.

The Sena chief directed his party workers to efface the BJP’s ‘toxic propaganda’ while asserting that the Sena was the party of true ‘Hindutva’ ideals in contrast to the BJP’s ‘phoney Hindutva’.

According to analysts, the drive was an attempt to do away with the ambivalence that has bedevilled the Sena over articulating Hindutva ever since it forged an alliance with the Congress and the NCP.

Seat sharing plan

During the Sena’s 25-year-old alliance with the BJP in the State, the seat-sharing arrangements between the two parties were more or less clear-cut, with the former usually not fielding candidates in areas where the BJP was strong. The Sena dominated in Mumbai city and Thane but remained stunted in other parts of the State as they had been ceded to the BJP.

Since PM Modi and the BJP’s ascendancy in the Centre in 2014, the Sena had been relegated to the role of a disgruntled junior partner in an increasingly acrimonious alliance which finally fell apart over the question of the Chief Minister’s post after the 2019 Maharashtra Assembly election.

The Sena’s voter outreach drive now aims to remedy the old arrangement between the saffron parties, given that both of them are now bitter rivals in the State.

“The Sena, with this drive, is also trying to match the BJP’s ‘Panchayat to Parliament’ stratagem in Maharashtra. The Shiv Sampark Abhiyan also signals that the party is highly unlikely to ally with the BJP in the near future,” says senior political analyst Vivek Bhavsar.

The other problem facing the Sena is the clear and present danger of rifts within the MVA owing to the urge of both the Congress and the NCP to expand in the State.

Cong., NCP factor

While the NCP is trying to retain and maximise its control over the ‘sugar belt’ in western Maharashtra, the Congress is consolidating its gains in Vidarbha, where it had its best show in 2019.

While the NCP is trying to make inroads in Vidarbha, the Sena, despite its limited presence (it has one MP from Yavatmal in the person of Bhavana Gawali) has been making attempts to expand in the region. Sena leader Eknath Shinde’s appointment as Gadchiroli’s Guardian Minister is an example of the party’s intent as is the present voter outreach drive.