Why the stakes are high for Uddhav’s Shiv Sena in Shivdi assembly seat

Ironic as it may sound, a constituency that gave the undivided Shiv Sena its first political opening in the Maharashtra assembly polls will see the Uddhav Thackeray-led faction of the party face the electoral test without its traditional bow and arrow symbol, its identity for almost 35 years.
As incumbent MLA Ajay Choudhari of the Shiv Sena (Uddhav Balasaheb Thackeray) prepares to defend his Shivdi seat from Bala Nandgaonkar of the Maharashtra Navnirman Sena (MNS), the bow and arrow symbol will be missing from the electronic voting machines (EVMs). Choudhari, who is among the 15 MLAs who stayed loyal to the Thackerays during the split in the Shiv Sena, had to fight off a challenge to his nomination by Sudhir Salvi, who heads the famous ‘Lalbagcha Raja’ Ganesh mandal.
In June 2022, Eknath Shinde split the Shiv Sena and toppled the Maha Vikas Aghadi (MVA) regime, led by then party boss Uddhav Thackeray, to become the chief minister in an alliance with the BJP. Later, the Election Commission (EC) handed over the Shiv Sena name and symbol to Shinde.
Thackeray now has the mashaal, or flaming torch, as the Shiv Sena (UBT)’s symbol. Shinde has not fielded a candidate in Shivdi, and the ruling Mahayuti has chosen to back Nandgaonkar as its best bet to wrest the seat from Thackeray’s Sena.
The Shiv Sena’s political inroads in the Shivdi seat, or Parel as it was then known, began in 1966. However, it was the murder of a communist strongman that marked the advent of the Shiv Sena as a force to reckon with in Parel and the larger Girangaon area, the textile mill belt populated largely by working-class Maharashtrians.
On the night of June 5, 1970, Krishna Desai, the CPI MLA from Parel, was with some party workers at the Lalit Engineering Works in Lalbag. A differently abled man from the neighbourhood informed that some workers wanted to meet him. It was raining lightly and pitch dark as Desai and his associates began walking towards the waiting men.
The visitors told Desai they had come for a meeting of an organisation named ‘Jai Bharat’. One of Desai’s associates, Prakash Patkar, realised at least one of the men was carrying a gupti (sword stick) and alerted Desai. However, both Patkar and Desai ended up being stabbed by the assailants. Desai died in hospital.
Fingers were pointed at the Shiv Sena, born four years ago, due to the bristling relationship between the party and the CPI and Desai.
Desai had come to Mumbai from Phungus village in Ratnagiri district as a 20-year-old to work in the Finlay mills. He joined the city’s robust communist movement in Girangaon. In the 1942 Quit India Movement, Desai began working with leaders of the underground resistance.
As his associate Dinanath Kamath writes, during the 1946 mutiny of the naval ratings, Desai led young men from Lalbag in their battles with the British troops. Desai fired at them with one of their own machine guns that he had snatched away. During the 1946 pre-Partition riots, Desai had organised retaliatory attacks against Muslim hoodlums and even attacked sword-wielding Pathans rioters with hand grenades.
Desai formed a branch of the Revolutionary Communist Party (RCP), a CPI splinter group, in Mumbai in 1947. From 1952 to 1967, he was a corporator in the Bombay Municipal Corporation (BMC). In 1967, he was elected to the Maharashtra legislative assembly from Parel as a nominee of the CPI, which he had joined in 1962.
In 1966, the Shiv Sena was launched in Mumbai on the ‘justice for the sons of soil’ plank. It soon took on the communist dominance over the labour unions, allegedly at the behest of the ruling Congress, earning it the pejorative of ‘Vasant Sena’, or private army of chief minister Vasantrao Naik. The very next year, Sainiks attacked the CPI office at Dalvi building in Parel.
Desai stood up to the Sena, often retaliating in kind. He also formed a ‘Lok Seva Dal’ as a volunteer force to take on the Shiv Sena’s storm-troopers and maintained warm relations with youngsters and the gymnasiums in Parel and Lalbag. Before his murder, tensions between him and the Sena were gradually building up. Desai had been physically attacked during his 1967 election campaign.
After his murder, the Mumbai police crime branch, under deputy commissioner of police Ramakant Kulkarni, arrested 16 men, alleged to be Shiv Sainiks. As Dipankar Gupta writes in his ‘Nativism in a Metropolis: The Shiv Sena in Bombay’ on September 10, 1967, ‘Marmik’, the cartoon weekly launched by Bal and Shrikant Thackeray that had catalysed the birth of the Shiv Sena, declared that one of the main objectives of the Shiv Sena was “the emasculation of the communists”. After Desai’s murder, Bal Thackeray, in a party gathering at the Robert Money High School on Grant Road, publicly congratulated his Sainiks.
In the October 1970 bypolls, the CPI fielded Desai’s widow Sarojini. She was supported by a front consisting of 13 parties, including the socialists and Congress (R). The Shiv Sena nominated Wamanrao Mahadik, a former BMC employee, who was backed by parties like the Congress (O), Bharatiya Jana Sangha (BJS) and Hindu Mahasabha. On October 18, when the results were announced, Mahadik became the Shiv Sena’s first MLA by defeating Sarojini Desai by a slender margin.
Mahadik went on to become the city’s mayor and a Lok Sabha MP (1989-1991). Ironically, his symbol in the 1970 bypoll was the railway engine, which is now the MNS symbol. The Shiv Sena got the bow and arrow as its symbol only in October 1989.
Since 1990, when the Shiv Sena came into its own in the state’s politics, the Parel assembly seat was represented by the party’s MLA till 2009. However, in the 2009 assembly polls, Shiv Sena MLA Dagdu Sapkal was defeated by Nandgaonkar of the Raj Thackeray-led MNS in the newly-formed Shivdi constituency. Since 2014, the Shiv Sena has held the seat, with Ajay Choudhari defeating MNS nominees.
However, Shiv Sena (UBT) leaders point to how the demography of the area is gradually being transformed as the old chawls and old and dilapidated buildings are being redeveloped. The newer constructions coming up in their place include gated communities and ‘towers’ (skyscrapers), which are priced above the purchasing power of the average Marathi manoos. Many of them are also exclusively earmarked for ‘vegetarians’, indicating that blue-blooded Maharashtrians who love their meat and fish will be denied an opportunity to live there even if they have the ability to buy these flats.
The textile mills in Girangaon went into a terminal decline since the 1980s and were gradually sold by their managements, who found it feasible to sell the lands on which the mills stood. The office complexes that came up on these lands housed service and tertiary sector units, which were unable to accommodate the blue-collar mill workers.
As Darryl D’Monte notes in ‘Ripping the Fabric: The Decline of Mumbai and its Mills’, the de-industrialisation of Mumbai began with the decline of the textile industry. Though Gillian Tindall, one of the biographers of Mumbai, argues in ‘City of Gold: The Biography of Bombay’ that the industry in Mumbai followed with a time lapse the ‘classic pattern of the developed world in moving from the centre to the outskirts, or to other towns in the region such as Poona and Nashik’, the changes were sudden and disruptive and the stakeholders had little time to prepare for them.
The dispossession led to the Shiv Sena giving the Marathi working class a sense of identity through Hindutva. Sociologists like Jan Brennan have studied how the closure of textile units in Ahmedabad after 1985 affected the social fabric and led to the communalisation of the city.
A senior Shiv Sena (UBT) leader said that perhaps a few years later, Shivdi would have a non-Maharashtrian MLA from a national party like the BJP, considering the shrinking clout of the nativist party in the area due to the falling numbers of the Maharashtrians, its core voters, and the gradual gentrification of the precinct. That some leaders of the party are said to have a stake in some over-priced realty projects in the area makes this irony starker.
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