Exhorting his party cadre to begin strengthening the organisation at the ground level, Maharashtra Navnirman Sena (MNS) chief Raj Thackeray, who began his tour of the Vidarbha region on Sunday hinted that a fight against the “dominant political parties” of the region was essential if the MNS had to gain a toehold in Vidarbha.
Mr. Thackeray, who is on a five-day tour of the region, reached Nagpur on Sunday where he held closed-door meetings with MNS office bearers ahead of the crucial civic polls.
According to sources, the MNS chief, who has been making efforts to revive his party’s sagging fortunes in Maharashtra, is believed to have questioned his party workers as to why were they lagging in building the MNS in this belt which has long been dominated chiefly by the Congress and the ruling Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP).
After listening to the problems encountered by the MNS workers in building the party’s organisation in Nagpur and other districts in the Vidarbha belt, Mr. Thackeray – the estranged cousin of Shiv Sena president Uddhav Thackeray – has directed his cadre to start an intensive campaigning for the civic polls.
“Go to the voters thinking that the Nagpur Municipal elections have been announced. Get to work, we want to contest every seat,” Mr. Thackeray told his party workers. The BJP currently dominates the 151-seat Nagpur Municipal Corporation (NMC) where the MNS has virtually no presence.
In its 15-year-old existence, the MNS has never exerted much influence beyond fixed pockets in Mumbai city, Pune and Nashik. The MNS had notched up impressive performances in the 2012 polls to the Pune and Nashik civic bodies at a time when Mr. Thackeray was still considered a potent force in Maharashtra politics.
Given his present bonhomie with the BJP, Mr. Thackeray’s intent on contesting against “established parties” poses a question mark on whether the MNS chief will go it alone in the upcoming civic polls or tacitly ally with the saffron party.
A flurry of meetings between Maharashtra Navnirman Sena (MNS) chief Raj Thackeray and top Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) leaders in the past weeks had sparked widespread speculation of a possible alliance between the BJP and the MNS ahead of the high-stakes Brihanmumbai Corporation (BMC) poll and other civic bodies.
The meetings were followed by ‘Ganpati diplomacy’ which saw Mr. Thackeray and BJP leaders like Mr. Fadnavis, as well as Chief Minister Eknath Shinde of the rebel Shiv Sena faction, visiting each other’s residences for Ganesh darshan.
But this diplomacy may prove anti-climatic as the MNS general secretary earlier this week hinted that the party would field its candidates in all 227 wards for the Mumbai civic body polls, with the party going to the electorate on both the ‘Hindutva’ and the ‘ Marathi manoos’ planks.
Mr. Thackeray’s decline and fall as political force to reckon with had commenced with the MNS’ twin debacles in the 2014 Lok Sabha and Assembly elections which left the party in utter disarray, with the slide continuing through the 2017 civic polls as well as the 2019 State and national elections.
Following its rout in the 2019 Maharashtra Assembly election and its general decline in the State’s politics, the MNS had changed its ideological direction by veering towards ‘Hindutva’ politics, signalled by Mr. Thackeray’s adoption of a saffron flag incorporating Chhatrapati Shivaji’s royal seal or ‘Rajmudra’ in 2020.
Since then, the MNS has inched ever closer to the BJP in an attempt on the MNS’s part to seize the ‘Hindutva’ space from the Shiv Sena led by ex-Chief Minister Uddhav Thackeray.
Yet, the signals coming from the MNS camp show Raj Thackeray’s intent on reviving his party by fielding maximum candidates for all important civic bodies rather than tying up with the BJP or the Shinde faction.
