The history of the Shiv Sena in Maharashtra is usually told as a story of three men: Bal Thackeray, who founded the party in a Bombay park in June 1966; Uddhav Thackeray, who inherited its leadership and carried it into a coalition with its oldest enemies; and Eknath Shinde, who walked out with most of its legislators in June 2022 and was handed the party’s name and symbol by the Election Commission in February 2023. That telling is accurate in its facts and inadequate in its explanation. Read across fifty-eight years, the Shiv Sena’s history is a sequence of four distinct political architectures, each built to solve the problem the previous one created, and Maharashtra’s fragmented party system after 2014 is the residue of those architectures colliding. This article defends that long-arc reading against the two framings that dominate commentary on the party, the personality narrative and the ideological-shift account, and it does so on the dated record: election results reported by the Election Commission of India, the Justice B. N. Srikrishna Commission’s report of February 1998, court judgments, and the scholarly literature from Vaibhav Purandare’s biography of Bal Thackeray in 2012 to the essays of Suhas Palshikar.

The State the Sena Inherited: Maharashtra after 1960

Maharashtra was six years old when the Shiv Sena was founded, and the state’s founding settlement explains both the space the party entered and the idiom it spoke. The state had been created on 1 May 1960, when Bombay State was divided along linguistic lines after a decade of agitation in which the Samyukta Maharashtra Samiti mobilised Marathi speakers against the bilingual Bombay State recommended in the mid-1950s. The States Reorganisation Commission, appointed in December 1953 and reporting in September 1955, had proposed keeping Bombay city in a bilingual state; the agitation that followed, the police firing on demonstrators in Bombay in January 1956 in which more than a hundred people died, and the electoral punishment the Congress suffered in 1957 forced the Union government of Jawaharlal Nehru to concede a unilingual Marathi state with Bombay as its capital. The politics of the linguistic reorganisation of the Indian Union thus delivered Maharashtra, but it delivered it to the Congress, and the Congress of Yashwantrao B. Chavan, the state’s first chief minister from 1960 to 1962, converted the new state into the most complete single-party dominance anywhere in India.

Chavan’s Maharashtra rested on institutions that reached below the level of elections. The cooperative sugar factories of western Maharashtra, the district cooperative banks that financed them, the zilla parishads created by the Maharashtra Zilla Parishads and Panchayat Samitis Act of 1961, and the agricultural produce market committees together formed a lattice through which Congress politicians, overwhelmingly drawn from the Maratha caste cluster, controlled credit, cane crushing, local office and government contracts across the countryside. Scholars of the state’s politics described the arrangement as a Congress system adapted to a dominant caste: the Maratha elite held the cooperative commanding heights, and the party held the Maratha elite. The settlement enacted in the States Reorganisation Act of 1956 and completed in 1960 had therefore produced a paradox that a young Bombay cartoonist could read clearly. Marathi speakers had won their state, yet the capital city’s commanding heights, its textile mills, its shipping and trading firms, its white-collar clerical employment and its municipal services, were staffed and owned in large measure by Gujarati, Marwari, Parsi and South Indian capital and personnel, while the Marathi-speaking clerk, millhand and taxi driver experienced the new state as a promise redeemed in the countryside and deferred in the city.

Bombay in 1966 was a city of five million people, the financial capital of India, and a labour market organised by language. The textile industry concentrated in Girangaon, the mill district of central Bombay, employed roughly a quarter of a million workers, most of them Marathi speakers from the Konkan and western Maharashtra, but the mills’ ownership lay with Gujarati, Marwari and Parsi houses, and the supervisory and clerical grades leaned toward South Indian and Gujarati employees who had arrived earlier in the colonial city’s service economy. The Communist trade unions, the All India Trade Union Congress and later the Bharatiya Mazdoor Sangh and the independent unions of Datta Samant’s generation, organised the mill floor; the Congress organised the state; nobody organised the Marathi-speaking lower-middle class of job seekers queueing outside the employment exchanges. The Shiv Sena was founded to organise exactly that queue, and its founder understood his audience because he had spent six years addressing it in print. Bal Thackeray, born in Pune on 23 January 1926 and trained as a cartoonist at the Free Press Journal, had launched the Marathi weekly Marmik with his brother Shrikant Thackeray on 13 August 1960, months after the state he would spend a career contesting came into existence. Marmik’s cartoons and its celebrated lists of senior officials and businessmen with non-Marathi names gave the city’s Marathi readers a weekly arithmetic of their own exclusion, and by 1966 the readership was a constituency waiting for an organisation.

A Cartoonist’s Army: The Founding at Shivaji Park, June 1966

The Shiv Sena was founded on 19 June 1966 at Shivaji Park in Dadar, Bombay, at a public meeting addressed by Bal Thackeray, and the founding was a considered act of political construction rather than a spontaneous outburst. The name, suggested by Thackeray’s father Keshav Sitaram Thackeray, a veteran of the Samyukta Maharashtra movement and of the social reform circles of the non-Brahmin tradition, invoked Chhatrapati Shivaji, the seventeenth-century Maratha king whose forts and campaigns supplied Marathi political memory with its central heroic figure; the Sena, the army, would be Shivaji’s army re-formed as a political organisation. Vaibhav Purandare’s Bal Thackeray and the Rise of the Shiv Sena, published in 2012 and still the fullest biographical-organisational account, records the deliberateness of the construction: a name carrying the deepest available charge of Marathi pride, a tiger as the emblem, a saffron flag, and a structure of neighbourhood branches, the shakhas, each under a shakha pramukh who answered upward to the founder. The first Vijayadashami rally at Shivaji Park on 30 October 1966 drew a crowd that filled the ground, and the Sena’s annual calendar, its rally on Dussehra and its foundation day each June, dates from that first season.

What did the Shiv Sena demand for Marathi speakers in 1966?

The founding programme demanded preference for Marathi speakers in Bombay’s employment: eighty per cent of jobs in state government, municipal services and private firms were to go to local Marathi speakers, South Indian and Gujarati dominance of clerical and managerial employment was to be broken, and Marathi was to be the language of the city’s public life.

The programme was deliberately economic before it was anything else. The slogan of the founding season, rendered from the Marathi as Bombay belongs to Maharashtra, asserted a claim of ownership over the city by the state’s linguistic majority, and the Sena’s earliest campaigns operationalised the claim through intimidation and organisation in equal measure. South Indian restaurants, the Udupi hotels that dotted the city’s mill districts and suburbs, were attacked in the party’s first years; Marmik’s lists named the executives whose firms were pressed to hire Marathi clerks; the Sthaniya Lokadhikar Samiti, the local rights committee the Sena promoted inside firms and government offices, converted the demand for preference into a standing machinery of pressure on employers. Thomas Blom Hansen, whose Wages of Violence: Naming and Identity in Postcolonial Bombay, published in 2001, remains the most penetrating analytical account of the Sena’s first decades, read the founding appeal as a politics of recognition addressed to young Marathi men who experienced the city’s modern economy as a daily humiliation: the Sena offered them a collective name, a uniform idiom of aggression, and an enemy who could be identified by language and surname. Critics of the founding, including the Communist and socialist parties whose mill-floor constituency the Sena was raiding, described the same organisation as a lumpen militia raised by industrialists to break working-class solidarity, and both descriptions capture part of a record that the sections below trace through dated events rather than through either camp’s rhetoric.

The founding settlement contained the seed of every later phase. The Sena was built as a command organisation in which authority descended from one man through appointed branch chiefs, and it never developed internal elections, a written programme beyond its founding demands, or a mechanism for choosing a successor. That architecture was a strength in the party’s insurgent decades, because a shakha pramukh could be installed in a new suburb in a season and a campaign could be switched on by a single speech at Shivaji Park. It was also a structural wager: the organisation’s coherence depended entirely on the founder’s person, and the question of what the Sena would be when its founder was gone was deferred, unanswered, for forty-six years. The long arc this article traces is, in substantial part, the record of that deferred question working itself out through the Hindutva turn of the 1980s, the government experience of the 1990s, and the succession and split of the years after 2012.

Phase One: Marathi Manoos Politics, 1966 to 1985

The first phase of the Sena’s evolution is the one the personality narrative remembers best and explains least, because the striking feature of the years from 1966 to 1985 is the gap between the party’s street power and its electoral record. The Election Commission’s statistical reports for the Maharashtra Vidhan Sabha record the Sena’s assembly tally across the phase in single figures: one seat in 1972, five seats in 1978, no seat in 1980, one seat in 1985. A party that could shut Bombay down with a bandh call, whose founder was courted by chief ministers, and whose branch network reached into every Marathi neighbourhood of the Bombay-Thane belt held, at its phase-one peak, five of the assembly’s 288 seats. The phase’s substance lies in that gap. The Sena spent its first nineteen years building an organisational architecture that elections did not yet reward, and the architecture, not the seat tally, is what the later phases inherited.

The early returns already showed the design at work. In the Thane municipal elections of 1967 the Sena won 17 of 40 seats in the first election it contested, and in the Bombay municipal elections of 1968 it won 42 of the corporation’s 140 seats, displacing the Communists as the principal opposition voice in Marathi Bombay within two years of its founding. The victories rested on the shakha, the neighbourhood branch, which Mary Fainsod Katzenstein’s organisational studies of the Sena in the 1970s identified as the party’s defining institution: a fixed local office, staffed each evening, that mediated between residents and the municipal bureaucracy, found jobs and school places, settled disputes, ran festivals and gymnasiums, and could put a crowd on the street within hours. The shakha pramukh was appointed, not elected, and his authority came from Matoshree, the Thackeray residence in Bandra, which functioned as the party’s court and headquarters from the founding onward. Katzenstein’s reading stressed what the design meant: the Sena was not a cadre party of the Communist type, recruiting through doctrine, nor an electoral machine of the Congress type, distributing office downward; it was a patronage-and-protection network held together by one man’s arbitration, and its local strength could survive electoral defeat because it was never principally about elections.

How did the Shiv Sena organise its strength in Mumbai’s neighbourhoods?

Through the shakha, a permanent neighbourhood branch office under an appointed shakha pramukh, which handled residents’ dealings with the municipal corporation, pressed employers for Marathi jobs, organised festivals and welfare work, and could mobilise a crowd on a few hours’ notice when the leadership called a protest or a bandh.

The phase’s violence dated the architecture’s growth. In February 1969 Thackeray was arrested during the agitation over Belgaum, the Marathi-speaking border district assigned to Mysore state in 1956, after Sena demonstrators blocked the route of the visiting deputy prime minister Morarji Desai; it was the only imprisonment of his career, and the arrest certified the Sena as the militant wing of the Marathi cause the Samyukta Maharashtra generation had left behind. In February 1970 Krishna Desai, the Communist Party of India legislator from Parel, was murdered in his mill-district constituency; Desai’s party and the Bombay press attributed the killing to Sena activists, no conviction followed, and in the by-election of October 1970 the Sena’s Wamanrao Mahadik defeated the widow the Communists had fielded, becoming the party’s first member of the state assembly. The sequence, a Communist stronghold leader dead, his seat taken by the Sena within the year, announced the transfer of Girangaon’s loyalties that the next decade completed. The Sena’s labour arm, the Bharatiya Kamgar Sena, contested the Communist unions mill by mill, and Thomas Blom Hansen’s Wages of Violence documented how mill managements encouraged the Sena as a counterweight to the left unions, paying a price in industrial peace for a workforce divided by language. The party that claimed to speak for the Marathi worker was simultaneously the instrument by which Bombay’s mill owners weakened the Marathi worker’s strongest organisations, and Hansen’s account holds both facts together: the Sena’s appeal to its recruits was genuine, and its utility to capital was real.

The Emergency of 1975 to 1977 tested the architecture against the state, and the Sena chose accommodation. Thackeray publicly backed Indira Gandhi’s Emergency regime, the Sena kept out of the underground opposition, and when elections returned in 1977 and 1978 the party reaped the limited reward of a tolerated organisation: five assembly seats in 1978, won in a state where Sharad Pawar’s defection of July 1978 had shown that Congress factions, not new parties, were the alternative pole of power. In the assembly election of 1980, held after Indira Gandhi’s return to office in Delhi, Thackeray directed the Sena to back Congress candidates and the party contested almost nowhere, returning no member at all. The returns of the phase close there: the party of the streets had twice dissolved its electoral effort into the Congress’s, and its independent tally across four assembly elections stood at seven seats in total. Suhas Palshikar’s essays on Maharashtra’s party system draw the correct conclusion from the phase: the Congress system in Maharashtra was not defeated by the Sena in these years but was instead slowly hollowed by it, because the Sena monopolised the language of Marathi grievance that the Congress had owned since 1960, while leaving the Congress in undisturbed possession of the state government.

The textile strike of 1982 to 1983 was the phase’s last defining episode, and it displayed the architecture under maximum strain. On 18 January 1982 Datta Samant led roughly a quarter of a million Bombay mill workers out on a strike for wages and bonus that lasted more than a year and ended in the industry’s ruin. The Sena opposed the strike: the Bharatiya Kamgar Sena counselled a return to work, Thackeray denounced Samant’s leadership, and the party aligned itself with the Congress state government’s refusal to concede. The stand cost the Sena dearly in Girangaon, where its first cadres had been recruited, and it marked the limit of the Marathi manoos appeal when that appeal was set against a Marathi workforce’s own chosen union leadership. Yet the strike’s aftermath cleared the Sena’s ground. The mills never reopened in their old form, the Communist and independent unions withered with the industry, and the mill lands of central Bombay began the long conversion into real estate that would remake the city’s politics around land, housing and redevelopment, questions on which a neighbourhood machine with a reputation for settling disputes was better equipped than a factory union. Phase one thus ended in 1985 with the party’s assembly presence negligible, its Bombay organisation intact and hardening, and its founding idiom, the economic grievance of the Marathi speaker, in need of a wider constituency if the Sena was ever to govern the state whose capital it already half governed.

Phase Two: The Hindutva Turn, 1985 to 1995

The second phase opened with a municipal victory that changed the party’s horizon. In the Bombay municipal elections of 1985 the Shiv Sena captured the Municipal Corporation of Greater Bombay, the richest civic body in India, and Chhagan Bhujbal, a shakha organiser from Mazgaon who had joined the party in its founding decade, became mayor of Bombay for 1985 and 1986. Control of the corporation gave the Sena what two decades of agitation had not: a budget, contracts, postings and a governing record in the city it claimed as its own, and it gave the party’s neighbourhood machine a municipal administration to mediate. The same years carried the Sena beyond the Bombay-Thane belt into the Maharashtra hinterland, where its branches appeared across Marathwada and the western districts, frequently opening, as the scholarly record of the 1986 violence in Panvel, Nashik and Aurangabad shows, in the wake of communal confrontation. The expansion required an idiom wider than the Marathi manoos. A party recruiting in Aurangabad and Nanded could not organise solely against the South Indian clerk of Bombay memory; it needed a boundary that worked in every district, and the boundary the Sena adopted in the second half of the 1980s was the Hindu one.

The turn was executed through dated decisions rather than drift. On 23 January 1988 the Sena launched Saamana, its own Marathi daily newspaper, with Bal Thackeray as founding editor, giving the party a daily instrument that answered to no proprietor outside the leadership; Saamana’s editorials became the authoritative statement of the Sena line for the next three decades. Through 1987 and 1988 Thackeray’s speeches recast the party’s enemy: the threat to the Marathi speaker was folded into a claimed threat to Hindus, the party’s rallies took up the Ram Janmabhoomi cause, and Thackeray accepted and popularised the title his followers gave him, Hindu Hriday Samrat, emperor of Hindu hearts. The electoral instrument of the turn was the alliance with the Bharatiya Janata Party, negotiated through the BJP’s Pramod Mahajan, a Maharashtrian who understood both organisations, and formalised in 1989 ahead of the Lok Sabha election of that year. The alliance’s meaning within the Sena’s own trajectory is best read against the post-1989 explicit-Hindutva phase context of the BJP’s national history: the BJP brought the Sena a national frame and a claim on Hindu voters beyond Maharashtra, and the Sena brought the BJP a mass organisation in India’s richest state at the moment the BJP still held only two seats in the Lok Sabha, its tally at the 1984 election. In the Maharashtra assembly election of March 1990, the first the alliance contested together, the Sena won 52 seats and the BJP 42, and the partners took their places as the principal opposition to Sharad Pawar’s Congress government.

When did the Shiv Sena turn to Hindutva?

Across the middle 1980s, with the decisive markers falling between 1985 and 1989: the capture of the Bombay municipal corporation in 1985 widened the party’s ambitions, its expansion into the Maharashtra hinterland required a Hindu rather than a linguistic boundary, Saamana’s launch in January 1988 gave the turn a daily voice, and the 1989 BJP alliance sealed it electorally.

The turn was tested almost immediately by the Mandal shock. When the V. P. Singh government implemented the Mandal Commission’s recommendations for Other Backward Classes reservations in August 1990, Thackeray denounced the decision and the Sena positioned itself against caste-based reservation in central employment, a stand that collided with the party’s own social base, since the Sena’s shakha cadres and much of its vote were drawn from Maratha and Other Backward Classes households. In December 1991 Chhagan Bhujbal, the party’s most prominent Other Backward Classes face and a former mayor of Bombay, defected to the Congress with twelve Sena legislators, citing the leadership’s position on Mandal and the closing of the party’s inner circle. The defection was the largest single rupture of the Sena’s first twenty-five years, and it confirmed the cost of the Hindutva wager: a unified Hindu electorate was the turn’s promise, but caste remained the electorate’s internal structure, and the party’s Maratha-OBC base could be peeled away by a leader who spoke caste against the Sena’s Hindu idiom. The alliance’s strategists accepted the cost because the Ayodhya mobilisation was delivering the compensating asset. L. K. Advani’s Rath Yatra of September and October 1990, read in Maharashtra against the post-1990 Hindutva mass-mobilisation context, passed through the state with Sena organisation at its service, and Sena volunteers joined the kar seva campaigns at Ayodhya in 1990 and 1992.

On 6 December 1992 kar sevaks demolished the Babri Masjid at Ayodhya. Thackeray’s stated position, given in interviews in the demolition’s aftermath, was that if Shiv Sainiks had brought the structure down he was proud of them, a claim his critics cite as an admission and his party cites as defiance of a hostile press; either way, the claim fixed the Sena’s identification with the demolition in the public record, and the consequences ran through the 1992 demolition’s institutional-electoral phase context directly into Bombay’s streets. Riots broke out in Bombay in December 1992, initially around protests against the demolition and police firing on Muslim demonstrators, and returned in a second, organised phase in January 1993 in which Sena activists, in the finding of the subsequent commission of inquiry, led attacks on Muslim homes, shops and places of worship, frequently with police connivance or police participation against the victims. The Justice B. N. Srikrishna Commission, established by the Congress state government of Sudhakarrao Naik on 25 January 1993, recorded in its report of February 1998 that 900 people were killed in the violence of December 1992 and January 1993, of whom 575 were Muslims and 275 Hindus, with 2,036 injured; it indicted thirty-one policemen, and it described Thackeray’s direction of the January violence in the metaphor of a veteran general commanding loyal troops. On 12 March 1993, between the riots and the reckoning, a series of bomb blasts organised by the Dawood Ibrahim network killed 257 people across Bombay, an atrocity its perpetrators presented as revenge for the riots and which the Srikrishna Commission was later also charged to examine. The Sena government elected in 1995 terminated the Commission in January 1996; public protest and a petition by the People’s Union for Civil Liberties forced the Union government to press for its revival, and the Commission was reinstated in May 1996, reporting two years later to the government whose leader it had indicted. That sequence, an inquiry scrapped by the accused party in office and revived under pressure, belongs to the phase’s record and conditioned the governance phase that followed.

Hansen’s Wages of Violence supplies the analytical verdict on the turn that the long-arc reading adopts. The Sena’s Hindutva, in Hansen’s account, was never the doctrinal Hindu nationalism of the Rashtriya Swayamsevak Sangh translated into Marathi; it was a plebeian idiom of masculine assertion, neighbourhood sovereignty and theatrical violence, which borrowed the Sangh’s enemy while keeping the Sena’s own organisation, rituals and command structure untouched. The distinction matters for everything after 1995. Because the turn was idiomatic rather than organisational, the Sena entered government in 1995 with its phase-one architecture intact beneath a phase-two vocabulary, a party whose local machine still answered to one man’s household and whose Hindu idiom still had to be renegotiated at every election against the caste arithmetic that Bhujbal’s defection had exposed. The phase closed with the alliance’s victory in the assembly election of February and March 1995, and the Sena stood at the threshold of the thing its founding architecture was least designed for: the routine exercise of state power.

The Organisation between Elections: Shakhas, Saamana and the Festival City

Elections mark the phases, but the Sena’s continuity ran through institutions that operated on the days between elections, and no account of the long arc is complete without them, because the fragmentation of 2022 was executed through these institutions and not through the party’s electoral machinery. The first was the shakha, whose evening routine Julia Eckert documented in The Charisma of Direct Action, her 2003 study of the Sena’s power in Mumbai’s neighbourhoods. The branch office opened in the evening, the shakha pramukh held a grievance hour at which residents brought the paper failures of the municipal state, a water connection refused, a ration card delayed, a hospital admission blocked, a son denied a job interview, and the branch intervened by telephone, by deputation or by the implied arithmetic of the crowd it could assemble. Eckert’s central finding was that the Sena’s authority in such localities did not rest on ideology delivered from above but on this repeated experience of efficacy: the branch acted while the state filed, and its charisma was the charisma of direct action, renewed case by case. The party’s labour arm, the Bharatiya Kamgar Sena, and its office-floor committees, the Sthaniya Lokadhikar Samitis, extended the same promise into workplaces, while shakha-run ambulances and the party’s intervention in housing society and slum disputes carried it into the intimate infrastructure of the city’s life. Hansen’s Wages of Violence described the complementary visual occupation: the Sena’s posters, banners, arches and cutouts saturated Mumbai’s public space, so that a resident moved through the founder’s gaze from the railway station to the chowk, and the city’s calendar itself was re-authored, with the party’s foundation day, its Dussehra rally and its Shivaji commemorations standing as public festivals of sovereignty.

The second institution was the party press, which functioned as the command channel of an organisation without internal elections. Marmik had performed the role in the founding years, its lists of officeholders a weekly lesson in the arithmetic of exclusion. Saamana, from its launch on 23 January 1988, performed it daily and at state scale. The paper’s editorials, written under Bal Thackeray’s name and direction through his lifetime and under the leadership’s thereafter, were read inside the organisation as instructions and outside it as the party’s authoritative voice, and they retained that function into the coalition decades, when a Saamana editorial attacking the Bharatiya Janata Party was understood by ministers of both parties as a move in the alliance’s permanent negotiation. A command party needs a channel through which the commander’s word reaches the last shakha without passing through a committee, and Saamana was that channel in print; its editorials of June 2022, denouncing the rebels as traitors to the founder’s memory, and the rebel camp’s counter-claim that it, not the editorial office, embodied the founder’s party, showed the channel and the organisation separating in the split, each faction thereafter publishing to its own following.

The third institution was the festival and the rally, the Sena’s theatre of numbers. The annual Dussehra rally at Shivaji Park, held from the founding season of 1966, was the party’s parliament and its policy occasion: the leader’s speech reviewed the year, named the enemies of the season, announced the line on alliance, reservation and government, and was reported across Maharashtra as an act of state. Bal Thackeray’s Dussehra speeches were the Sena’s budget speeches and party congresses combined, delivered by a man who held no office to followers who held many, and Uddhav Thackeray inherited the ritual with the leadership in 2013, addressing the same ground each October. The duplicated Dussehra rallies of the split years, the Uddhav faction at Shivaji Park and the Shinde faction on an alternative ground in October 2022, were more than scheduling: they were two organisations performing the founding ritual to rival congregations, each claiming the undivided inheritance the ritual embodied. Around the rally stood the wider festival economy the Sena had made its own in Mumbai, the public Ganesh celebrations in which shakhas and their mandals organised the city’s largest immersions, the Dahi Handi pyramids of the Janmashtami season at which Sena leaders presided and prizes were announced, the Shiv Jayanti processions that carried the founder-king’s image through the mill districts his namesake party had inherited from the Communists. None of this was decoration on the politics. It was the mechanism by which an organisation with a negligible assembly tally for its first nineteen years remained the most visible political presence in its capital, and the asset whose division, between a faction holding the name and a faction holding the founder’s ground, the Election Commission was asked to settle in 2023.

Phase Three: Government, Coalition and Strain, 1995 to 2019

The assembly election of February and March 1995 converted the Sena’s three decades of opposition into Maharashtra’s first elected non-Congress government. The Sena won 73 seats and the BJP 65 in the 288-member assembly, and on 14 March 1995 Manohar Joshi, a former mayor of Bombay and the Sena’s most institutionally seasoned leader, was sworn in as chief minister, with the BJP’s Gopinath Munde as his deputy. Bal Thackeray held no office. His own description of the arrangement, repeated in interviews through the government’s life, was that the remote control of the Maharashtra government remained in his hands at Matoshree, and the phrase entered the state’s political vocabulary because it was substantially accurate: ministers were Sena appointees answerable to the founder, Joshi’s continuation depended on the founder’s confidence, and when that confidence was withdrawn Joshi was replaced on 1 February 1999 by Narayan Rane, a former shakha pramukh from Kankavli whose rise through the organisation personified the phase-one architecture in office. The government nonetheless governed. It renamed Bombay as Mumbai in 1995, fulfilling a founding-era demand through ordinary state action, and Victoria Terminus became Chhatrapati Shivaji Terminus in 1996. It cancelled the Dabhol power agreement with the Enron Corporation in August 1995, amid a campaign charge of corruption and colonial-style terms, and then renegotiated a revised Dabhol contract within a year, an arc that taught the Sena the difference between the rhetoric of refusal and the arithmetic of a power-deficit state. It tabled the Srikrishna Commission’s report in the assembly in August 1998 accompanied by a government memorandum disputing the report’s central conclusions, and it absorbed the judicial reckoning of the phase’s other inheritance when the Supreme Court’s December 1995 judgment in the Prabhoo case, arising from speeches at a 1987 by-election, grounded an Election Commission order of 1999 that barred Thackeray from voting for six years.

The alliance lost the state in October 1999, when the Sena won 69 seats and the BJP 56 but the Congress and the newly broken-away Nationalist Congress Party of Sharad Pawar combined to govern, and the Sena’s national position partly compensated for the state defeat. The party sat in Atal Bihari Vajpayee’s National Democratic Alliance government in Delhi, in the arrangement whose architecture is traced in the 1998 NDA’s coalition-architecture context, and Manohar Joshi moved from Mumbai to the Union cabinet in 1999 and then to the Speaker’s chair in the Lok Sabha in May 2002, the highest constitutional office a Sena member has held. The opposition years that followed, stretching with a single interruption to 2014, exposed the deferred succession question in instalments. Thackeray, ageing and in indifferent health, elevated his son Uddhav, a photographer by training who had been drawn into the organisation’s management through the 1990s, to the working presidency of the party in 2003. Raj Thackeray, the founder’s nephew, a cartoonist of genuine talent whose oratorical style most closely reproduced the founder’s, read the elevation as his own exclusion. Narayan Rane was expelled in July 2005 after challenging Uddhav’s leadership and joined the Congress. On 27 November 2005 Raj Thackeray announced his resignation from the party his uncle had founded, and on 9 March 2006 he launched the Maharashtra Navnirman Sena, carrying the founder’s manner and the Marathi manoos idiom into a rival organisation. In the assembly election of 2009 the MNS won 13 seats and split the Sena’s Mumbai-Thane vote in constituency after constituency; the Sena fell to 45 seats, behind the BJP’s 46, and the senior partner of 1995 sat as the junior member of its own alliance in opposition.

On 17 November 2012 Bal Thackeray died in Mumbai, aged eighty-six, and was cremated the following day at Shivaji Park, the ground of the founding, with state honours. The succession that followed was orderly on its surface: at a party conclave at Mahabaleshwar on 17 January 2013 Uddhav Thackeray was elected president of the Shiv Sena, taking the title his father had held, and the organisation’s appointed machinery transferred its obedience without a contested vote. Suhas Palshikar’s essays on the succession made the analytical point the long arc requires: the Sena had reproduced, in the moment of succession, exactly the architecture its founder had built, a leadership transmitted by designation within a family and ratified by acclamation, and the party thereby answered the question of 1966 by declining to change it. The costs arrived within two years. In the Lok Sabha election of May 2014, fought in alliance, the Sena won 18 of Maharashtra’s 48 seats inside the BJP’s national sweep; the BJP, which had watched its own Maharashtra tally transform under Narendra Modi and Devendra Fadnavis, demanded a renegotiation of the assembly seat-sharing on terms of parity. The Sena insisted on the seniority it had exercised since 1990, when it had contested the larger share. On 25 September 2014, days before nominations closed, the BJP ended the twenty-five-year alliance, and the partners contested the October 2014 assembly election against each other.

Why did the Sena and the BJP break their alliance in 2014?

Over seat-sharing arithmetic after the BJP’s 2014 Lok Sabha sweep. The BJP demanded parity, claiming entitlement to contest half the assembly’s seats as the larger force in Maharashtra; the Sena insisted on the seniority formula it had held since 1990. Neither leadership yielded, and the BJP announced the rupture on 25 September 2014.

The election of October 2014 returned the BJP with 122 seats and the Sena with 63, and after weeks in opposition the Sena entered Fadnavis’s government in December 2014 as a junior partner, holding ministries without the chief ministership it regarded as its alliance entitlement. The arrangement institutionalised the phase’s central strain: the Sena’s founding architecture assumed a subordinate ally, while the post-2014 BJP architecture context describes a BJP that no longer accepted subordination anywhere in India. Relations between the partners were conducted as a permanent negotiation conducted partly in public, through Saamana editorials attacking the government the Sena itself served. In the Bombay municipal elections of February 2017, contested separately, the Sena held the corporation with 84 seats against the BJP’s 82, a margin that preserved its city while demonstrating that the ally of 1989 had become its principal rival on its own ground. The alliance was re-stitched for the elections of 2019, with the seat-sharing announced in February 2019 by Fadnavis, Uddhav Thackeray and Amit Shah together; the Sena won 18 Lok Sabha seats again in May 2019, and in the assembly election of October 2019 the partners won 105 and 56 seats respectively, a combined majority that should have renewed the government automatically. Instead the verdict opened the phase’s terminal crisis, because Uddhav Thackeray publicly claimed that the February understanding had included a fifty-fifty sharing of power extending to a rotation of the chief ministership, and Fadnavis publicly denied that any such rotation had been promised. The dispute was about a sentence spoken or not spoken in a closed meeting, but its substance was architectural: the Sena’s phase-one constitution knew only one arbiter of such disputes, and he had died in 2012.

The governance phase also left the Sena a material legacy in its city, and the legacy deserves record because it explains the loyalty the machines carried into the split. The signature programme was slum rehabilitation: the Joshi government’s scheme of 1995, administered from 1997 by a Slum Rehabilitation Authority, promised free tenements in redeveloped buildings to slum households resident before the eligibility cutoff, financed by giving builders saleable floor space on the cleared plots. The Sena claimed the programme as the founding promise kept, housing delivered to the Marathi and migrant poor of the informal city by the party of the streets, and its leaders cited figures in lakhs of families rehoused. Housing scholars and activists answered, in a criticism that ran through the scheme’s whole life, that the builder-led model enriched developers, displaced the poorest households whose papers fell outside the cutoff, and converted public land into private towers with a minority of rehabilitation tenements attached. Both accounts are true of different buildings, and the scheme’s political effect is independent of the audit: in hundreds of Mumbai localities the Sena’s shakha was the broker of rehabilitation, the office through which a family’s claim to a flat was pressed, verified or lost, and that brokerage, renewed building by building for twenty-five years, was durable organisational capital. When the party split, the Shinde faction’s strength in Thane and the eastern suburbs and the Uddhav faction’s retention of the old mill-district and Dadar belt mapped closely onto where each camp’s brokers stood in this economy of claims.

The phase’s other inheritance from the founding idiom appeared outside the city. When the state’s industrial policy of the 2000s proposed a vast special economic zone across Raigad district, the Maha Mumbai SEZ promoted by the Reliance group, the project-affected farmers of the Pen and Uran talukas resisted acquisition of their paddy lands, and the Shiv Sena under Uddhav Thackeray took the farmers’ side, reviving the idiom of 1966 in a new key: the soil of Maharashtra, the party argued in its rallies and in Saamana, was not for sale to a corporation over the heads of the sons who farmed it. A referendum conducted in the affected villages in September 2008 returned an overwhelming vote against the acquisition, the state government let the project lapse, and it was formally abandoned by 2011. The episode is the governance phase in miniature: the founding demand for the Marathi claim on Maharashtra’s economic assets, translated from jobs to land, deployed by a party in opposition at the state level against a Congress-led government, and successful because the architecture of shakhas and local brokers could still be turned out, village by village, forty-two years after the founding. It also marked the idiom’s limit, for the same party in the same years governed Mumbai in partnership with the development model the Raigad campaign had defeated, and the contradiction between the Sena of the mill lands and the Sena of the paddy fields was one more deposit the fragmentation phase would collect.

The Other Maharashtra: The Sena against the Cooperative Order

The Sena’s long arc ran through only part of its state, and the boundary of that part explains both the party’s ceiling and the manner of its breaking. Maharashtra has always contained two political worlds. The first is the world of the cooperative order: the sugar factories, district banks, milk federations and market committees of the western districts, Kolhapur, Sangli, Satara, Pune and Ahmednagar, through which the Congress, and after 1999 Sharad Pawar’s Nationalist Congress Party, organised the Maratha countryside into a durable machinery of credit, crushing seasons, school trusts and local office. The second is the urban and semi-urban world of Mumbai, Thane, Nashik and Aurangabad, of mills, municipalities, transport unions and redevelopment plots, in which the Sena’s shakha architecture grew. Suhas Palshikar’s essays on the state’s party system return repeatedly to this division: the Sena conquered the second world without ever storming the first, and its alliance with the Bharatiya Janata Party, whose strength lay in Vidarbha and the towns, was among other things a treaty between parties that held different Maharashtras. The arithmetic of the phases reflects the division exactly. At its 1995 peak the Sena’s 73 seats were concentrated in Mumbai-Thane, the Konkan and Marathwada; the sugar belt returned Congress and later Nationalist Congress Party members through every Sena advance, and the party that governed Maharashtra from 1995 did so without a machine in the districts where the state’s agrarian power was headquartered.

Sharad Pawar is the counter-pole of the Sena’s whole career, and the rivalry’s dates trace the arc from outside. Pawar had become chief minister in July 1978, at thirty-eight, by splitting the Maharashtra Congress and gathering the fragments into his Progressive Democratic Front government, the state’s first great act of legislative engineering; he was the chief minister the Sena-BJP alliance displaced in March 1995, ending his third term; and when the Congress expelled him in 1999 over Sonia Gandhi’s foreign origin, the Nationalist Congress Party he founded on 10 June 1999 with P. A. Sangma and Tariq Anwar became, within months, the instrument that kept the Sena out of office despite its 69 seats, as Pawar joined the Congress he had just left in a post-election government under Vilasrao Deshmukh. The pattern repeated across two decades: the Sena’s surges broke against the cooperative order’s capacity to reassemble a majority from fragments, because that order’s politicians owned assets that survived electoral defeat, while the Sena’s politicians owned followings that had to be fed from office. Pawar’s own political longevity rested on the same structural fact, and it is not accidental that when fragmentation came to Maharashtra after 2019 it struck his party second, in July 2023, along the identical seam: a nephew who controlled a portion of the machine against a founder whose name owned the whole.

Two further boundaries of the Sena’s Maharashtra deserve record. The first is Vidarbha, the cotton-growing east whose separate statehood demand the Sena, committed to a united Marathi state by its founding inheritance from the Samyukta Maharashtra movement, consistently opposed, defending the 1960 settlement against the region where its own organisation was thinnest and the Bharatiya Janata Party’s strongest; the party’s Maharashtra-wide claim thus rested heavily on districts it did not organise. The second is the Maratha question inside the Sena’s own ranks. The founder was a member of the Chandraseniya Kayastha Prabhu community, his first chief minister a Brahmin, his party’s cadres and voters overwhelmingly Maratha and Other Backward Classes, an arrangement that worked while the leadership’s authority was personal and unquestioned. When the Maratha reservation agitation of 2016 to 2018, the silent marches of the Maratha Kranti Morcha that drew lakhs across the state’s cities, made caste the explicit currency of Maharashtra politics again, the Sena’s stated position supported the Maratha demand for reservation, and the Fadnavis government in which it sat enacted the Socially and Educationally Backward Classes Act of November 2018 granting it, a statute the Supreme Court struck down in May 2021. The episode displayed the phase-three Sena in its late form: a party whose Hindu idiom required it to stand above caste, whose social base required it to deliver caste’s central demand, and whose junior position in government left it claiming credit for a statute it had not authored and could not defend in court. The organisation that entered the crisis of 2019 was therefore narrower than its legend: hegemonic in a capital it no longer governed alone, shallow in the countryside that decided the state’s majorities, and led by a succession settlement that had resolved the command question while leaving every other question, of caste, of region, of the ally’s growth, to be settled by events.

Phase Four: The Fragmentation of the Sena, 2019 to 2024

The Maharashtra assembly verdict was declared on 24 October 2019, and for a month the state had no government. The Sena refused to join a Fadnavis ministry without a written acceptance of its reading of the fifty-fifty formula; the governor, Bhagat Singh Koshyari, invited the BJP, then the Sena, then the Nationalist Congress Party to form a government and each failed; President’s rule was imposed on 12 November 2019. In the early morning of 23 November 2019, in one of the most startling episodes in the state’s political history, President’s rule was revoked on the Union cabinet’s recommendation and Devendra Fadnavis was sworn in as chief minister with Ajit Pawar, who claimed to carry the Nationalist Congress Party’s legislature party with him, as deputy chief minister. The government lasted eighty hours. Sharad Pawar reasserted control of his party, Ajit Pawar resigned on 26 November 2019 hours ahead of a Supreme Court-ordered floor test, Fadnavis resigned the same afternoon, and on 28 November 2019 Uddhav Thackeray was sworn in at Shivaji Park as chief minister of the Maha Vikas Aghadi, a coalition of the Shiv Sena with the Nationalist Congress Party and the Indian National Congress, the two parties against which the Sena’s founding and Hindutva phases had alike been defined. The Sena had broken a thirty-year alliance over the chief ministership and taken the office from the hands of its ideological opposites, and both facts were true at once.

The Maha Vikas Aghadi governed for two and a half years, through the COVID-19 pandemic of 2020 and 2021, with Uddhav Thackeray’s televised addresses to the state marking a governing style, measured, familial and administrative, that commentators contrasted with his father’s theatrical command. The government’s internal stresses, however, accumulated along the lines the long arc predicts. Eknath Shinde, the Sena’s senior-most organisational leader after the Thackerays, a former autorickshaw driver from Thane who had built the party’s strongest district machine and held senior portfolios in both the Fadnavis and Thackeray governments, found himself, on the account his camp gave after June 2022, progressively excluded from decisions, denied funds for his legislators’ constituencies by the finance ministry held by Ajit Pawar, and blocked from access to the chief minister by the secretariat around Uddhav and Aaditya Thackeray. The Uddhav camp’s account of the same months held that Shinde acted under sustained pressure from the Bharatiya Janata Party and the threat of central investigative agencies, whose actions against Maharashtra’s governing politicians, the arrests of the state ministers Anil Deshmukh in November 2021 and Nawab Malik in February 2022 among them, formed the backdrop against which the rebel camp’s grievances and the loyalist camp’s suspicions each acquired plausibility. The Bharatiya Janata Party’s stated position throughout was that the Sena’s crisis was internal to the Sena. What is settled is the sequence. After the legislative council elections of 20 June 2022, Shinde left Mumbai with a group of Sena legislators for Surat in Gujarat and then for Guwahati in Assam, his numbers growing as the days passed to roughly forty of the party’s fifty-five assembly members. Governor Koshyari directed a floor test for 30 June 2022; the Supreme Court declined on 29 June to stay the test; and Uddhav Thackeray, rather than face a vote his numbers could not survive, announced his resignation that evening.

Why did Uddhav Thackeray resign in June 2022 without facing a floor test?

Because the arithmetic had already decided the test. Eknath Shinde’s camp held roughly forty of the Sena’s fifty-five legislators, the Supreme Court declined on 29 June 2022 to stay the governor’s floor-test direction, and Uddhav Thackeray chose resignation over a recorded defeat that would have formalised the loss of his own legislature party.

On 30 June 2022 Eknath Shinde was sworn in as chief minister of Maharashtra, with Devendra Fadnavis, to the visible surprise of Fadnavis’s own party workers, as his deputy. The struggle then moved to the question of which organisation was the Shiv Sena. The Election Commission froze the party’s bow-and-arrow symbol on 8 October 2022 pending its decision, allotting the flaming torch to the Uddhav faction, which took the name Shiv Sena (Uddhav Balasaheb Thackeray). On 17 February 2023 the Commission delivered its final order: applying the test of legislative majority, it found that the Shinde faction commanded the support of forty of the party’s fifty-five legislators and the larger share of its parliamentary party, and it recognised the Shinde-led organisation as the Shiv Sena, entitled to the name and to the bow-and-arrow symbol. On 11 May 2023 a Constitution Bench of the Supreme Court held that the governor had erred in calling the June 2022 floor test on the material before him, but declined to restore Uddhav Thackeray, who had resigned voluntarily, and left the disqualification petitions arising from the split to the Speaker of the assembly, a reference to a larger bench of the questions raised by the Nabam Rebia precedent included in its order. On 10 January 2024 Speaker Rahul Narwekar, deciding those petitions, recognised the Shinde faction as the real Shiv Sena for the purposes of the disqualification proceedings and dismissed the petitions of both camps. The fragmentation meanwhile generalised across the state’s party system: on 2 July 2023 Ajit Pawar split the Nationalist Congress Party and joined the Shinde government as deputy chief minister with eight colleagues, taking the larger part of that party’s legislators with him, and the Election Commission in February 2024 recognised his faction as the Nationalist Congress Party, as it had recognised Shinde’s. Maharashtra entered the 2024 election year with both of its great regional parties divided into a recognised government faction and a dispossessed opposition faction bearing the founder’s name.

The Vidhan Sabha election of November 2024 tested the fragmented architecture and returned a verdict of unusual clarity. The Mahayuti, the governing combination of the Bharatiya Janata Party, the Shinde-led Shiv Sena and the Ajit Pawar-led Nationalist Congress Party, won a sweeping majority: the BJP took 132 of the assembly’s 288 seats, the Shinde Sena 57 and the Ajit Pawar party 41. The Maha Vikas Aghadi was reduced to fragments: the Shiv Sena (Uddhav Balasaheb Thackeray) won 20 seats, the Congress 16 and the Nationalist Congress Party (Sharadchandra Pawar) 10. On 5 December 2024 Devendra Fadnavis was sworn in as chief minister for a third time, with Eknath Shinde and Ajit Pawar as his deputies, an arrangement in which the two leaders who had split Maharashtra’s regional parties sat as junior partners beneath the national party their organisations had once balanced. The post-2024 settlement therefore poses, in the sharpest available form, the question the adjudication below takes up: whether the fragmentation of 2019 to 2023 was a contingent drama of personalities, a dispute over a chief ministership, a revolt of the excluded, a defection purchased or pressured, or whether it was the working out of structural conditions that the Sena’s long arc had been assembling since the alliance politics of 1989 and the succession settlement of 2013 made the party simultaneously indispensable to Maharashtra’s governments and incapable of renewing the architecture that had made it so.

The Sena in Delhi: A Regional Party at the Centre

The long arc has a national dimension that the state narrative alone understates, because the alliance of 1989 made the Sena a governing party at the Centre a decade before it could hold Maharashtra on its own terms, and the Delhi experience shaped the expectations the party carried into its later crises. The Sena backed Atal Bihari Vajpayee’s thirteen-day government of May 1996, entered his cabinet when the National Democratic Alliance returned to office in October 1999, and held the Heavy Industries portfolio under Manohar Joshi, who moved in May 2002 to the Speaker’s chair of the Lok Sabha, presiding over the lower house of Parliament until 2004. Anandrao Adsul served as a minister of state in the finance ministry in the same government. For a party whose founder never contested an election and whose writ ran in one state, the occupancy of the Speaker’s chair by its senior leader was the alliance system’s certificate of arrival: the Sena had become one of the constituent powers of the Union government while remaining, in organisation and idiom, a Maharashtra party. Its electoral forays outside the state returned nothing of consequence, and the asymmetry defined its national position ever after. Its ideology was national, its organisation provincial, its Delhi weight entirely derivative of its Maharashtra tally and its alliance value.

The derivative character of the Delhi position stored up a grievance that ran through phase three’s later years. In Narendra Modi’s first government of May 2014 the Sena received a single cabinet seat, Heavy Industries for the veteran Anant Geete, and Sena leaders complained publicly and repeatedly that the party was treated as a decorative partner in Delhi while being asked to accept junior status in Mumbai as well; the party’s members of Parliament were directed more than once to absent themselves from government business as signals of displeasure, and the lone-ministry arrangement survived unaltered to 2019 because the Sena’s eighteen Lok Sabha seats were valuable to the alliance’s arithmetic but not indispensable to its majority. The two parliamentary episodes of 2019 display the derivative position snapping. In August 2019, still the Bharatiya Janata Party’s ally, the Sena voted in both houses for the reorganisation of Jammu and Kashmir and the reading down of Article 370, a cause its Hindutva phase had made its own, and its spokesmen claimed a share of the achievement. Four months later, governing Maharashtra with the Congress and the Nationalist Congress Party, the Sena voted for the Citizenship (Amendment) Bill in the Lok Sabha on 10 December 2019 and then walked out of the Rajya Sabha on 11 December before the vote, its leadership explaining that its questions on the bill had gone unanswered and its new partners making no secret of their pressure. The founder’s party, which had built its second phase on an uncompromising Hindu idiom, abstained on the decade’s signature Hindutva statute because a coalition of four months’ standing required it, while the Hindu idiom itself continued to be professed by both the leadership that abstained and, later, by the rebels who cited the abstention among their proofs that the leadership had deserted the founder’s path.

The Delhi record matters to the adjudication for one structural reason. When the party split in 2022 there existed no national Sena, no all-India council, no federal party constitution under which the dispute could be heard; there was a Maharashtra organisation, a parliamentary party whose members divided between the factions, thirteen of its eighteen Lok Sabha members aligning with Shinde on the Election Commission’s reckoning, and a symbol registered in Delhi. The tests that settled the party’s ownership were therefore tests of the only organisation the Sena had ever built, the Maharashtra machine, counted legislator by legislator. A party that had sat in the Union cabinet and the Speaker’s chair for a generation had never converted national presence into national structure, and when its crisis came it was resolved, fittingly and completely, by the arithmetic of the state assembly its founder had entered with a single member in October 1970.

The Electoral Record, 1967 to 2024: A Step Function in Four Plateaus

The four-phase reading stands or falls on the record, and the Election Commission’s statistical reports supply a series clean enough to test it. In the municipal arena where the Sena began, the debut was immediate: 17 of 40 seats in Thane in 1967, 42 of 140 seats in Bombay in 1968, the mayoralty of Bombay held by a Sena corporator as early as 1973 through a coalition, and outright capture of the Bombay corporation in 1985, after which the party held India’s richest municipality, alone or with its ally, through every subsequent term including the narrow verdict of 2017. In the assembly arena the series divides exactly where the phases divide. Across the four elections of the Marathi manoos phase the Sena returned one member in 1972, five in 1978, none in 1980 and one in 1985, a combined tally of seven seats in nineteen years. The Hindutva turn moved the party onto a new plateau within one electoral cycle: 52 seats in 1990 on the alliance’s first joint outing, then 73 in 1995, the phase’s peak and the figure that carried Manohar Joshi into the chief ministership. The governance phase held the plateau with a slow decline: 69 seats in 1999 in defeat, 62 in 2004, 45 in 2009 after the Maharashtra Navnirman Sena cut into the party’s urban base, a recovery to 63 in the solitary campaign of 2014, and 56 in 2019 in the restored alliance’s victory. The Lok Sabha series tells the same story at the national level: four seats in 1991, fifteen in 1996, six in the fractured verdict of 1998, fifteen again in 1999, twelve in 2004, eleven in 2009, and eighteen in both 2014 and 2019, the party’s parliamentary ceiling.

The fragmentation phase redistributed the inheritance rather than destroying it, and the 2024 figures are the proof. In the Lok Sabha election of May and June 2024 the Uddhav faction won nine of Maharashtra’s forty-eight seats and the Shinde faction seven, a combined sixteen close to the undivided party’s eighteen of 2019. In the assembly election of November 2024 the Shinde Sena won 57 seats and the Uddhav Sena 20, a combined 77 that exceeds the 56 the undivided party had won in 2019. A personality narrative of collapse cannot carry these numbers: organisations in collapse do not return a larger combined seat tally five years after their destruction. What the numbers describe is a transfer of the party’s accumulated electoral capital, the shakha networks, the municipal machines, the Marathi and Hindu voter loyalties assembled across the first three phases, into two successor organisations whose relative shares were settled by the Election Commission’s legislative test and by the alliance arithmetic of 2024, in which the recognised Sena contested as a Mahayuti partner in winnable seats while the dispossessed faction contested as the junior face of a defeated opposition. The step function of the series, single figures, then the fifty-to-seventy band, then redistribution between two claimants, is the quantitative shadow of the four architectures, and it is the first exhibit in the adjudication that follows the map.

The Four-Phase Sena Evolution Map

The artifact of this article is the four-phase Sena evolution map, set out in the table below and cited here by that name. The map compresses the argument into a citable form: each phase is defined by the political architecture the Sena operated, the positioning that architecture produced, the dated milestones that mark its boundaries, and the governing arrangement it sustained. Read down the milestones column and the long arc narrates itself, from a park in Dadar in 1966 to a swearing-in at the Azad Maidan in December 2024 at which the party founded in that park sat divided, one half in office as a junior partner and the other half in opposition under its founder’s name. Read across any single row and the phase explains itself: the Marathi manoos row shows why a party with seven assembly seats in nineteen years could not be ignored, because its column of governing arrangement, municipal power without state power, names the asset the next phase monetised; the governance row shows why 2019 detonated, because an architecture built on alliance seniority had no procedure for the day the ally refused seniority and no internal forum in which the refusal could be arbitrated.

Phase	Years	Defining positioning	Named milestones	Governing arrangement
One: Marathi manoos	1966 to 1985	Linguistic and economic preference for Marathi speakers in Bombay and Maharashtra	Founding at Shivaji Park, 19 June 1966; Bombay municipal debut, 42 of 140 seats, 1968; first Sena legislator, October 1970; capture of the Bombay corporation, 1985	Municipal power in Bombay and Thane; assembly tally in single figures
Two: Hindutva turn	1985 to 1995	A Hindu idiom layered over the Marathi claim; alliance politics	Saamana launched, 23 January 1988; BJP alliance formalised, 1989; assembly breakthrough, 52 seats, 1990; riots recorded by the Srikrishna Commission, December 1992 to January 1993	Principal opposition in Maharashtra; municipal government in Bombay
Three: Governance and coalition	1995 to 2019	Alliance government under Sena seniority, later junior partnership	Manohar Joshi sworn in as chief minister, 14 March 1995; Bombay renamed Mumbai, 1995; Uddhav Thackeray elected party president, 17 January 2013; alliance rupture, 25 September 2014	State government, 1995 to 1999 and 2014 to 2019; partner in the National Democratic Alliance at the Centre
Four: Fragmentation	2019 to 2024	Two claimants to one inheritance: the recognised organisation and the founder-line faction	Maha Vikas Aghadi government formed, 28 November 2019; Eknath Shinde split, June 2022; Election Commission order recognising the Shinde-led Sena, 17 February 2023; Mahayuti verdict, November 2024	Maha Vikas Aghadi government, 2019 to 2022; Shinde-led Sena inside the Mahayuti government from June 2022

Two features of the map deserve emphasis before the adjudication proceeds. The first is that the phases are dated by architecture, not by leaders: the boundary of 1985 is a municipal capture and an organisational expansion, the boundary of 1995 is the assumption of state office, and the boundary of 2019 is the collapse of the alliance constitution under which the party had operated for thirty years. The second is that the map’s fourth row is the only one in which the party’s name itself appears in the milestones as a contested object, which is the map’s quiet way of registering the long arc’s destination: an organisation built to make one man’s name synonymous with a movement ended by litigating the ownership of that name before the Election Commission and the Supreme Court, and the litigation was decided, in February 2023 and January 2024, by tests of organisational strength.

Shiv Sena History Reconsidered: Personality, Ideology, or Architecture

Three framings compete to explain the record set out in this article, and the adjudication among them is the article’s analytical business. The personality narrative, whose fullest vehicle is Vaibhav Purandare’s Bal Thackeray and the Rise of the Shiv Sena of 2012, treats the party as the extended biography of its founder: the Sena rose because Bal Thackeray willed it, spoke a language no rival could imitate, and held millions in a personal bond renewed at every Shivaji Park rally; it faltered when age, succession and lesser heirs diluted the founder’s authority; and it split when ambition, in the person of Eknath Shinde, met weakness, in the person of a successor judged unable to command. The narrative’s evidence is formidable. The Sena never held an internal election that mattered; its programme was whatever its leader announced; Purandare’s biography documents a half century in which lieutenants rose and fell, Bhujbal, Rane and Raj Thackeray among them, by the single test of the founder’s confidence. Any account that minimises the founder’s centrality falsifies the record, and the long-arc reading does not minimise it. What the personality narrative cannot explain is the timing and the mechanics of the denouement. If the party was its founder, it should have dissolved or been captured at his death in 2012; instead it transferred its leadership by acclamation within two months, won eighteen Lok Sabha seats in 2014 and 2019, held Bombay’s corporation in 2017, and took the chief ministership in 2019, seven years after the personality had left the scene. Nor can biography explain why the split of 2022, when it came, ran where it ran: not between the founder’s family and an outsider claimant to his charisma, but between the family’s political household and the organisation’s senior-most machine politician, along the seam between the party’s symbolic leadership and its district-level organisational leadership. That seam is a structure, not a personality.

The ideological-shift framing, the second competitor, reads the Sena through its doctrines: a nativist party of the 1960s that exchanged the Marathi boundary for the Hindu boundary in the 1980s, rode the Ayodhya mobilisation into office, and was thereafter progressively absorbed into the national Hindutva project whose senior proprietor was always the Bharatiya Janata Party, so that the fragmentation after 2019 merely completed the absorption. This framing also commands real evidence, and this article has relied on its strongest scholarly statements: Thomas Blom Hansen’s Wages of Violence of 2001 showed the Sena’s Hindutva to be a plebeian politics of assertion distinct from the Sangh’s doctrinal nationalism, and Suhas Palshikar’s essays charted the party’s passage from linguistic regionalism into the saffron alliance and the strains the passage stored up. The framing fails at the same point as the biography, from the opposite direction. Between November 2019 and June 2022 the Sena’s ideology did not change at all: the party that governed with the Congress and the Nationalist Congress Party professed the founder’s Hindutva throughout, retained his portraits and his vocabulary, and split in 2022 into two organisations that profess that same Hindutva in nearly identical words, display the same portrait, and litigate over the same symbol. An explanation that holds ideas constant cannot explain an event that divided the idea’s carriers against themselves, and the absorption thesis is further embarrassed by the verdict of November 2024, in which the supposedly absorbed party’s two halves together took seventy-seven assembly seats, the larger half as the recognised Shiv Sena inside the winning coalition. Ideology supplied the Sena’s public language in every phase, and the language mattered, but the language was the architecture’s instrument rather than its master: the founder adopted the Hindu idiom when the Marathi idiom’s constituency proved too narrow for state power, exactly as he had adopted accommodation with the Emergency state when defiance would have destroyed the organisation, and his successors kept the idiom because it remained the brand under which the machines had been built.

The long-arc reading defended here absorbs what both competitors establish and explains what neither can. It holds that the Sena is best understood as a sequence of political architectures, each a working solution to the previous phase’s binding constraint, and each depositing the constraint its successor would face. The founding architecture, a command organisation of appointed shakhas under one arbiter, solved the problem of building a political force outside the Congress system of 1960s Maharashtra without money, office or a press empire, and it deposited the succession problem, because a command organisation has no legitimate procedure for replacing the commander. The Hindutva turn solved the problem of the founding idiom’s narrowness, exchanging a constituency of one city’s clerks and millhands for the state’s Hindu majority and acquiring in the Bharatiya Janata Party an ally whose national frame magnified the Sena’s weight, and it deposited the seniority problem, because the alliance’s unwritten constitution, sealed in the seat-sharing of 1990, presumed a Sena permanently senior in Maharashtra to a partner whose all-India trajectory pointed the other way. The governance phase solved the problem of opposition’s sterility, converting street power into office, a chief ministership, a renamed capital and a Speaker’s chair in Delhi, and it deposited the entitlement problem, because a party that had once supplied the chief minister by right of seniority experienced the junior partnership after 2014 as a standing humiliation, and the succession settlement of January 2013, designation ratified by acclamation, left the organisation with no forum in which disappointed ambition could be pressed short of exit. The fragmentation of 2019 to 2024 is the phase in which the deposited constraints matured together: the seniority claim produced the rupture over the fifty-fifty formula and the improbable Maha Vikas Aghadi; the succession settlement produced a leadership whose authority over the organisation’s machine politicians was personal rather than procedural, so that when Eknath Shinde’s grievances, over funds, access and standing, found no internal remedy, the machine he had built obeyed the man who had built it and walked out; and the command architecture itself determined the split’s resolution, because the Election Commission’s test of legislative majority and the Speaker’s proceedings of January 2024 rewarded exactly the organisational strength the founding design had always prized. On this reading the claim of this article holds: the Shiv Sena’s long-arc evolution traces Maharashtra’s post-2014 architectural fragmentation, and neither the personality narrative nor the ideological-shift framing can capture the architectural substance.

The strongest counter to the long-arc reading must be faced at full strength, and it has two heads. The first holds that June 2022 was a personality episode pure and simple: an ambitious man with a price or a grievance, a chief minister whose aloof style alienated his legislators, a governor and a national party ready to assist, and that to call the episode architectural is to dress contingency as destiny. The second holds that November 2024 registered not the Sena’s evolution but the Bharatiya Janata Party’s weight: 132 seats won on a national party’s organisation, welfare delivery and leadership, with the Shinde faction’s 57 seats a derivative of the Mahayuti’s arithmetic rather than a product of Sena architecture. Both counters identify real forces, and the long-arc reading concedes them: personalities supplied the occasions, Shinde’s ambition and organisation, Uddhav Thackeray’s governing temperament, Devendra Fadnavis’s persistence, and the Bharatiya Janata Party’s electoral machine supplied the verdict’s scale. The concession does not reach the explanation. Occasions require channels, and the channels of 2022 were architectural at every joint: the grievances ran through a finance ministry and a chief minister’s secretariat because the Maha Vikas Aghadi’s structure had placed the Sena’s legislators under partners their party had spent decades opposing; the revolt succeeded because the Sena’s district machines were personal followings built by their commanders, of whom Shinde’s Thane organisation was the strongest, rather than branches answerable to an elected party centre; the succession of 2013 had concentrated legitimacy in a household while leaving organisational loyalty distributed among the machine’s builders, so the party in 2022 had two kinds of authority and they separated. As for 2024, the Bharatiya Janata Party’s weight is itself a datum of the long arc rather than an alternative to it: the alliance of 1989 had normalised the BJP’s growth inside the Sena’s own strongholds for thirty years, the rupture of 2014 and the reunion of 2019 had each enlarged the BJP’s independent Maharashtra organisation, and the fragmentation of the Sena and the Nationalist Congress Party after 2019 converted a competitive party system into one in which the national party arbitrated among regional fragments. Maharashtra’s settlement, read through the four-dimensional comparative framework that organises this pillar’s comparison of state party systems, moved from Congress dominance through a two-alliance competition into a fragmented field under a hegemonic national party, and the Sena’s four phases are the mechanism by which the state travelled that road.

A comparison sharpens the point. Bihar’s politics, as the analysis of the three-party-architecture comparator shows, recombined the same three parties for three decades without any of them splitting, because each rested on a caste substrate that no leader could carry out of the party and no rival could absorb; governments changed partners while parties endured. Maharashtra’s parties rested on different foundations. The Sena was a leader-anchored machine, the Nationalist Congress Party a network of district cooperative baronies gathered under one founder, and when the anchors came under strain the recombinations of 2019 to 2024 took the form of splits, each faction carrying away the portion of the machine its leader had personally built. The contrast is the comparative payoff of the long-arc method: party systems fragment along the lines of their parties’ internal constitutions, and the Sena’s internal constitution was written at Shivaji Park on 19 June 1966.

The adjudication can be tested, and future scholarship will test it, against the primary record the phases deposited: the Shiv Sena’s organisational documents preserved at Sena Bhavan, the Maha Vikas Aghadi’s internal coordination correspondence of 2019 to 2022, the Election Commission’s statistical reports for every election the party contested, and the Srikrishna Commission’s two volumes. Such holdings survive as mixed bundles of scanned spreadsheets, typed drafts and presentations, and researchers assembling them into evidence read across formats with instruments as ordinary as an office file viewer for Excel, DOCX and PPTX files. The test the record will sustain or break is precise. If the long-arc reading is right, the documents of the Maha Vikas Aghadi years will show a coalition whose Sena component was governed from a household while its district machines answered elsewhere, the Election Commission proceedings of 2022 and 2023 will show organisational strength deciding a question of political identity, and the post-2024 Maharashtra party system will continue to organise itself as fragments arranged around the national party that the Sena’s own alliance first brought into the state’s politics in 1989. The founder promised his followers an army. What he built, across four architectures and fifty-eight years, was something more consequential and less obedient: the template on which his state’s politics broke and reassembled itself.

What the Sena’s Arc Proves about India’s Regional Parties

The Sena’s evolution is a Maharashtra story with an all-India lesson, because the tests that decided its fate were national tests, devised for earlier splits in other parties, and the pattern of its breaking is legible across the regional party system. When the Election Commission recognised the Shinde faction in February 2023 it applied a framework descended from its own adjudication of the Congress split of 1969, the Sadiq Ali proceedings in which the Commission weighed organisational and legislative strength to decide which claimant owned a divided party; the doctrine that emerged from that era, that a party is where the majority of its legislators and organisation stand, has governed every major split since. The doctrine has a bias built into it, and the Sena’s case exposes the bias cleanly: it rewards the faction that carries the machine in being, the sitting legislators and officeholders, against the faction that carries the name, the memory and the founding family. For cadre parties with elected internal structures the bias is defensible, since the machine and the membership roughly coincide. For command parties of the Sena’s type the doctrine converts a leadership dispute into a census of the founder’s appointees, and since the appointees’ loyalty was always to advancement within the machine rather than to a doctrine or a dynasty, the census will ordinarily be won by whichever claimant the incentives of office favour. The Sena was not unlucky in its adjudication. It was adjudicated exactly as its architecture dictated.

The comparative evidence of this pillar underlines the point. Tamil Nadu’s Dravidian parties, the subject of the state study that accompanies the comparative hub in this series, survived successions and a major split because their leaderships institutionalised the transfer of power through party offices, general councils and a mass membership enrolled under written constitutions; the AIADMK’s convulsions after Jayalalithaa’s death in 2016 were severe, yet the party’s ownership was never litigated away from its organisation to a rebel ministry. The Sena, by contrast, reached 2022 with a constitution that was, in effect, a household: a president for life in practice, officeholders by appointment, a newspaper as the channel of command, and a founding myth as the title deed. Regional parties across India divide along this line more reliably than along any ideological line. Those built as movements with constitutions, the Dravidian parties, the left parties of Kerala and Bengal in their strong decades, transmit leadership and survive their founders diminished but intact. Those built as courts, around a founder’s arbitration and a family’s custody of the name, face at the founder’s exit the Sena’s sequence: an uncontested succession that settles nothing, a machine that learns to shop for a sovereign, and a split adjudicated by counting legislators. Maharashtra’s post-2014 fragmentation, in which both great regional parties arrived at that destination within sixteen months of each other, is the regional system working out the logic of courts in an era when a hegemonic national party stands ready to house whichever faction the counting favours. The Sena’s long arc, from the park in Dadar to the Commission’s order of February 2023, is the fullest documented run of that logic in Indian politics, and it is why the party’s history, properly read, is the history of the state’s party system in miniature.

Frequently Asked Questions

Q: Who founded the Shiv Sena?

Bal Thackeray founded the Shiv Sena on 19 June 1966 at Shivaji Park in Dadar, Bombay. Thackeray, born in Pune on 23 January 1926, was a cartoonist who had worked at the Free Press Journal before launching the Marathi weekly Marmik with his brother Shrikant in August 1960, and Marmik’s campaign for Marathi preference in Bombay’s employment built the readership he converted into a party. The name Shiv Sena, the army of Shivaji, was suggested by his father Keshav Sitaram Thackeray, a veteran of the Samyukta Maharashtra movement, and the organisation adopted the tiger as its emblem and the saffron flag as its standard. Thackeray never contested an election and held no public office in his life; his authority rested on the command structure of appointed shakha pramukhs and on his unmatched hold over Marathi public oratory. He led the party without interruption or internal election for forty-six years, anointed his son Uddhav as his organisational successor in 2003, and died in Mumbai on 17 November 2012, after which the party cremated him at Shivaji Park, the ground of its founding, with state honours.

Q: What is Marathi manoos politics?

Marathi manoos politics is the politics of the Marathi person, the sons-of-the-soil doctrine on which Bal Thackeray founded the Shiv Sena in 1966. Its founding claim was that Maharashtra’s creation in 1960 had given Marathi speakers a state but not control of its capital’s economy, since Bombay’s mills, trading houses, clerical grades and municipal services were dominated by Gujarati, Marwari, Parsi and South Indian owners and employees. The programme that followed demanded preference for Marathi speakers, stated at the founding as eighty per cent of employment in government, municipal and private establishments, the use of Marathi in the city’s public business, and the removal of the linguistic outsiders who were said to monopolise opportunity. Its instruments were the neighbourhood shakha, which pressed individual employers case by case, and the Sthaniya Lokadhikar Samiti, the local rights committees planted inside firms and offices. The doctrine’s targets shifted across the decades, from South Indian clerks and restaurateurs in the 1960s to Gujarati and Marwari capital, then to Muslims in the Hindutva phase and to north Indian migrants in the campaigns of the 2000s, but its structure never changed: a Marathi in-group defined against an outsider held responsible for its blocked advancement.

Q: When did the Shiv Sena ally with the BJP?

The Shiv Sena and the Bharatiya Janata Party formalised their alliance in 1989, ahead of the Lok Sabha election of that year, in negotiations conducted for the Sena by Bal Thackeray and for the BJP principally by Pramod Mahajan, the BJP’s leading Maharashtra organiser. The partners had cooperated informally earlier in the decade, and the Sena had backed individual BJP candidates, but 1989 converted the understanding into a standing seat-sharing alliance that endured, with one interruption, for thirty years. Its first joint test in Maharashtra was the assembly election of March 1990, in which the Sena won 52 seats and the BJP 42, taking the partners to the opposition benches together. The alliance won Maharashtra in 1995, sat in Vajpayee’s Union governments from 1998, broke over seat-sharing on 25 September 2014 and contested that year’s assembly election separately, reunited in government in December 2014, renewed its seat-sharing in February 2019, and finally collapsed in November 2019 when the Sena left to head the Maha Vikas Aghadi. From June 2022 the alliance’s form survived its Sena partner’s division, since the recognised Shiv Sena of Eknath Shinde governed and then fought the 2024 elections inside the BJP-led Mahayuti.

Q: Why did the Shiv Sena split in 2022?

The Shiv Sena split in June 2022 because the grievances of its senior organisational leader, Eknath Shinde, found no remedy inside a party whose constitution concentrated authority in the Thackeray household, and because the Maha Vikas Aghadi’s structure gave those grievances substance. Shinde’s camp stated that Sena legislators were starved of constituency funds by a finance ministry held by the Nationalist Congress Party, that ministers of the Congress and the NCP treated Sena members as junior intruders, and that access to Chief Minister Uddhav Thackeray was blocked by his secretariat and his son Aaditya. The Uddhav camp answered that Shinde acted under Bharatiya Janata Party pressure and the threat of central investigative agencies, which had arrested two Maharashtra ministers in the preceding months. After the legislative council elections of 20 June 2022 Shinde left Mumbai with a growing body of legislators, reaching roughly forty of the party’s fifty-five assembly members; Uddhav resigned on 29 June rather than face the governor’s floor test; and the Election Commission’s order of February 2023 converted the legislative split into a division of the party’s name and symbol, completing a rupture that both factions continued to describe as a defence of Bal Thackeray’s legacy.

Q: Who is Eknath Shinde?

Eknath Shinde, born on 9 February 1964 in Satara district, is the leader of the Shiv Sena recognised by the Election Commission in February 2023 and the man whose June 2022 revolt split the party. He came to Mumbai’s twin city Thane as a young man, drove an autorickshaw, and rose through the Sena’s shakha organisation as a follower of Anand Dighe, the party’s formidable Thane district chief, building the strongest district machine in the organisation. He was elected to the state assembly from Kopri-Pachpakhadi in Thane in 2004 and held the seat at every subsequent election, served as a senior minister in Devendra Fadnavis’s BJP-led government from 2014, and held the urban development portfolio in the Maha Vikas Aghadi government while nursing the grievances his camp later cited. On 30 June 2022, eight days after leaving Mumbai with his rebel legislators, he was sworn in as chief minister of Maharashtra at the head of a Sena-BJP government. The Election Commission recognised his faction as the Shiv Sena in February 2023, the Speaker confirmed the position in January 2024, and after the Mahayuti’s victory of November 2024 Shinde became deputy chief minister under Fadnavis.

Q: What is the Maha Vikas Aghadi?

The Maha Vikas Aghadi, the Maharashtra Development Front, is the coalition of the Shiv Sena, the Nationalist Congress Party and the Indian National Congress that governed Maharashtra from 28 November 2019 to 29 June 2022. It was assembled by Sharad Pawar after the Shiv Sena broke with the Bharatiya Janata Party over Uddhav Thackeray’s claim that the partners’ pre-election understanding of February 2019 had promised a fifty-fifty sharing of power including rotation of the chief ministership, a claim Devendra Fadnavis publicly denied. The three parties, ideological opposites for most of their histories, adopted a common minimum programme, and Uddhav Thackeray was sworn in as chief minister at Shivaji Park on 28 November 2019, days after an eighty-hour Fadnavis government propped up by Ajit Pawar collapsed. The Aghadi governed through the COVID-19 pandemic, frayed under the arrests of its ministers by central agencies and the Sena’s internal discontents, and fell when Eknath Shinde’s revolt removed its majority in June 2022. The three parties, with the Sena’s Uddhav faction in place of the undivided party, continued as an opposition alliance into the elections of 2024, in which they were comprehensively defeated by the Mahayuti.

Q: Who is Uddhav Thackeray?

Uddhav Thackeray, born on 27 July 1960, is the younger son of Bal Thackeray and the leader of the Shiv Sena faction that bears his name, the Shiv Sena (Uddhav Balasaheb Thackeray). Trained as a photographer and long associated with the party daily Saamana, of which he served as editor, he was drawn into the organisation’s management through the 1990s as his father’s health declined, was appointed the party’s working president in 2003 in preference to his cousin Raj Thackeray, and was elected president of the undivided Shiv Sena at the Mahabaleshwar conclave of 17 January 2013, two months after his father’s death. He led the party through the alliance rupture and reunion of 2014 to 2019, became chief minister of Maharashtra on 28 November 2019 at the head of the Maha Vikas Aghadi, took a seat in the legislative council in May 2020, and governed until his resignation on 29 June 2022 in the face of Eknath Shinde’s revolt. The Election Commission’s order of February 2023 denied his faction the party’s name and bow-and-arrow symbol, allotting it the flaming torch instead, and he led that faction to twenty assembly seats in the defeat of November 2024.

Q: What was the Samyukta Maharashtra movement?

The Samyukta Maharashtra movement was the campaign of the 1950s for a unilingual state of Marathi speakers with Bombay as its capital. When the States Reorganisation Commission reported in 1955 in favour of a bilingual Bombay State joining Marathi and Gujarati districts, the Samyukta Maharashtra Samiti, founded in February 1956 under leaders including S. M. Joshi and N. G. Gore, mobilised the Marathi districts in protest; police firing on demonstrators in Bombay in January 1956 killed more than a hundred people, whose memory the Hutatma memorial preserves. The Congress paid for the bilingual experiment at the elections of 1957, and the Union government conceded the demand: on 1 May 1960 Bombay State was divided into Maharashtra and Gujarat, with Bombay city going to Maharashtra and Yashwantrao B. Chavan continuing as chief minister. The movement’s veterans staffed the new state’s politics, Keshav Sitaram Thackeray among its propagandists, and its idiom of Marathi pride cheated of its prize passed to the next generation. Bal Thackeray’s Shiv Sena, founded six years after the victory, was in large part the movement’s second act, arguing that the state won in 1960 had yet to be delivered to the Marathi speakers of its own capital.

Q: Who was Manohar Joshi?

Manohar Joshi, who lived from 1937 to 2024, was the Shiv Sena’s first chief minister and its most institutionally accomplished leader. A schoolteacher who built the Kohinoor technical institute into a large education business in Mumbai, he joined the Sena in its founding years, served as a Bombay corporator and as mayor of Bombay in 1976 and 1977, sat in the state legislative council, and was elected to the assembly from Dadar in 1990. When the Sena-BJP alliance won Maharashtra in 1995, Bal Thackeray, who held no office himself, chose Joshi to head the government, and he was sworn in on 14 March 1995 as the head of the state’s first elected non-Congress ministry, serving until Thackeray replaced him with Narayan Rane on 1 February 1999. Joshi then moved to Delhi as Union minister for heavy industries in the Vajpayee government in 1999 and was elected Speaker of the Lok Sabha in May 2002, presiding over the lower house until 2004, the highest constitutional office held by any member of his party. His career demonstrated the Sena’s governing wing at its most capable, and his removal in 1999 on the founder’s decision demonstrated its limits within the command architecture.

Q: Why did Raj Thackeray leave the Shiv Sena and found the MNS?

Raj Thackeray left the Shiv Sena because the succession to Bal Thackeray was settled on his cousin Uddhav in a manner that closed his own path to the leadership. Raj, born on 14 June 1968, was the founder’s nephew, a cartoonist like his uncle, and for years the party’s most electric speaker, widely regarded inside the organisation as the natural inheritor of the founder’s mantle and manner. The appointment of Uddhav Thackeray as working president in 2003 told him otherwise, and the friction widened as Uddhav’s appointees displaced Raj’s followers in the organisation’s posts. After two years of public coldness Raj announced his resignation from the party on 27 November 2005, stating that he could not work in the atmosphere the new leadership had created, and on 9 March 2006 he founded the Maharashtra Navnirman Sena with a blue flag and a railway engine as its symbol, claiming the original Marathi manoos inheritance against a cousin he portrayed as its dilution. The MNS won thirteen assembly seats in 2009 and split the Sena’s urban vote across Mumbai and Thane, but it never built a state-wide machine, and its tally collapsed in the elections that followed.

Q: What is Saamana and who founded it?

Saamana is the Marathi daily newspaper that serves as the Shiv Sena’s official voice, launched on 23 January 1988 with Bal Thackeray as its founding editor. A Hindi counterpart, Dopahar ka Saamana, followed in the 1990s. The paper was created to free the party from dependence on proprietors outside the organisation: where Marmik, the weekly Thackeray had run since 1960, had campaigned for a party that did not yet exist, Saamana spoke daily for a party in being, and its front-page editorials were read by Sainiks as the leadership’s line and by rival parties as authoritative statements of Sena intent. Under Bal Thackeray the editorials were events in themselves, announcing alliance decisions, anointing and destroying ministers, and conducting the party’s feuds in public; Sanjay Raut, the paper’s executive editor in its later decades and a Rajya Sabha member, continued the institution as the Uddhav leadership’s chief public voice. During the coalition years Saamana’s attacks on the Bharatiya Janata Party, delivered while Sena ministers sat in BJP-led governments, became a standing feature of Maharashtra politics, and in the split of 2022 the paper’s denunciation of the rebels as traitors marked the moment the command channel and the organisation’s majority parted company.

Q: What is the Mahayuti?

The Mahayuti, the grand alliance, is the governing combination of the Bharatiya Janata Party, the Shiv Sena led by Eknath Shinde and the Nationalist Congress Party led by Ajit Pawar that has ruled Maharashtra since 2023 and won the state election of November 2024. The combination took shape in two stages: Shinde’s Sena entered government with the BJP on 30 June 2022 after the split that destroyed the Maha Vikas Aghadi, and Ajit Pawar’s faction joined on 2 July 2023 after splitting the Nationalist Congress Party, bringing the two recognised successors of Maharashtra’s historic regional parties into one cabinet under BJP leadership. In the assembly election of November 2024 the Mahayuti won more than 230 of the assembly’s 288 seats, the BJP taking 132, the Shinde Sena 57 and the Ajit Pawar party 41, against a Maha Vikas Aghadi reduced to forty-six seats in total. Devendra Fadnavis was sworn in as chief minister on 5 December 2024 with Shinde and Ajit Pawar as his deputies. The Mahayuti is thus the institutional form of Maharashtra’s post-2014 settlement: a hegemonic national party governing through the recognised fragments of the regional parties it displaced.

Q: What happened during the Maharashtra government formation of November 2019?

The Maharashtra verdict of 24 October 2019 gave the BJP 105 seats and the Shiv Sena 56, a clear majority for their alliance, yet no government took office for five weeks. Uddhav Thackeray demanded acceptance of the fifty-fifty power-sharing understanding he described, including rotation of the chief ministership; Devendra Fadnavis denied any such promise had been made; the governor invited each party in turn and none could assemble a majority, and President’s rule was imposed on 12 November. In the early hours of 23 November President’s rule was revoked and Fadnavis was sworn in as chief minister with Ajit Pawar, claiming the Nationalist Congress Party’s legislators, as his deputy. Sharad Pawar reasserted control of his party within hours, the Supreme Court ordered an immediate floor test on 26 November, Ajit Pawar resigned that morning and Fadnavis in the afternoon, and on 28 November Uddhav Thackeray was sworn in at Shivaji Park as chief minister of the Maha Vikas Aghadi of the Sena, the Nationalist Congress Party and the Congress. The episode remains the sharpest demonstration in the state’s history of how completely its politics turned on the Sena’s internal settlement.

Q: What did the Election Commission decide about the Shiv Sena name and symbol in 2023?

The Election Commission decided, by its final order of 17 February 2023, that the faction led by Eknath Shinde is the Shiv Sena, entitled to the party’s name and to its reserved bow-and-arrow symbol. The Commission had frozen the symbol on 8 October 2022 while the dispute was heard, allotting the Uddhav Thackeray faction the temporary name Shiv Sena (Uddhav Balasaheb Thackeray) and a flaming torch as its symbol. In its final order the Commission applied the test of legislative majority, finding that the Shinde faction commanded forty of the party’s fifty-five members of the state assembly and the larger share of its parliamentary party, and it treated that majority as decisive of the party’s identity, declining to rest the decision on the rival claims of organisational membership which both sides had documented. The Uddhav faction challenged the order in the Supreme Court, whose Constitution Bench judgment of 11 May 2023 faulted the governor’s conduct of June 2022 but left the Commission’s recognition standing, and the Speaker of the assembly, deciding the disqualification petitions in January 2024, likewise treated the Shinde faction as the real Shiv Sena. The founder’s party thus passed, by counting, to the founder’s rebels.

Q: What did the Srikrishna Commission find about the Shiv Sena’s role in the Mumbai riots of 1992 and 1993?

The Commission of Inquiry under Justice B. N. Srikrishna, established by the Congress state government on 25 January 1993, reported in February 1998 that the Bombay riots of December 1992 and January 1993 killed 900 people, of whom 575 were Muslims and 275 Hindus, and injured 2,036. It found that the second phase of the violence, in January 1993, was organised rather than spontaneous, that Shiv Sena activists led the attacks on Muslim homes, businesses and places of worship, and that Bal Thackeray directed the campaign in terms the report compared to a veteran general commanding loyal troops; it indicted thirty-one policemen for offences including biased conduct and participation in the violence, and it criticised the police leadership and the state government. The Commission’s history became part of the record: the Sena-BJP government terminated it in January 1996, public protest and litigation forced its revival in May 1996, and when the report was tabled in August 1998 the same government accompanied it with a memorandum disputing its conclusions. Successive governments acted on few of its recommendations, and prosecutions arising from its findings remained rare, a record its defenders and its critics cite for opposite verdicts.

Q: When did the Shiv Sena first form a government in Maharashtra?

The Shiv Sena first formed a government in Maharashtra in March 1995, in alliance with the Bharatiya Janata Party. In the assembly election concluded that month the Sena won 73 seats and the BJP 65, together crossing the majority mark in the 288-member house, and on 14 March 1995 Manohar Joshi was sworn in as chief minister, with the BJP’s Gopinath Munde as deputy chief minister, at the head of the first elected non-Congress government in the state’s thirty-five-year history. Bal Thackeray held no office and described his position as holding its remote control from Matoshree, his Bandra residence, a claim the government’s conduct bore out. The ministry renamed Bombay as Mumbai, cancelled and then renegotiated the Dabhol power contract, and governed until the alliance lost the election of October 1999, Joshi having been replaced by Narayan Rane in February of that year. The Sena’s earlier participations in power had been municipal, in Bombay’s corporation from the 1970s and in outright control from 1985, and its later returns to state office, from December 2014 to 2019 and within the Maha Vikas Aghadi and Mahayuti thereafter, were all as a junior alliance partner.

Q: How did the two Shiv Sena factions perform in the 2024 Maharashtra assembly election?

In the Maharashtra assembly election of November 2024 the recognised Shiv Sena of Eknath Shinde won 57 seats and the Shiv Sena (Uddhav Balasaheb Thackeray) won 20, a combined tally of seventy-seven that exceeded the fifty-six seats the undivided party had won in 2019. The contexts of the two figures differed sharply. Shinde’s party contested as a partner of the victorious Mahayuti with the Bharatiya Janata Party and the Ajit Pawar Nationalist Congress Party, converted a high share of its contests in the Mumbai-Thane and Marathwada belts, and retained the government, its leader moving from the chief ministership to the deputy chief ministership under Devendra Fadnavis. The Uddhav faction contested inside the defeated Maha Vikas Aghadi, emerged as that alliance’s largest component ahead of the Congress with sixteen seats and the Nationalist Congress Party (Sharadchandra Pawar) with ten, and held the old Sena belt of central Mumbai while losing ground across the suburbs and the hinterland. In the Lok Sabha election earlier that year the factions had won seven and nine of Maharashtra’s forty-eight seats respectively. The combined record is the fragmentation phase in numbers: the inheritance divided, the larger share priced by alliance with the state’s hegemonic party.

Q: What role did the Shiv Sena play in Bombay’s textile mill politics?

The Shiv Sena was the principal antagonist of the Communist trade unions in Bombay’s mills from its founding, and its rise is inseparable from Girangaon. The party’s labour arm, the Bharatiya Kamgar Sena, recruited among the quarter-million mostly Marathi mill workers whom the Communist unions had organised for generations, offering the shakha’s neighbourhood services against the unions’ factory-floor discipline. Thomas Blom Hansen documented the arrangement’s other face: mill owners encouraged the Sena as a counterweight to the left, tolerating its violence against union activists, a campaign whose landmark was the February 1970 murder of the Communist legislator Krishna Desai, attributed by his party to Sena activists and never judicially resolved, after which the Sena won Desai’s Parel seat at the October 1970 by-election. When Datta Samant led the textile strike of January 1982, the Sena opposed it, counselled a return to work and aligned with the Congress government’s refusal to concede; the strike collapsed after more than a year, the mills never recovered, and the Sena inherited a mill district whose industry was dying and whose land would become the city’s great redevelopment prize, brokerage over which passed to the party’s shakhas.

Q: Why was Bombay renamed Mumbai in 1995?

Bombay was renamed Mumbai in 1995 because the Shiv Sena had demanded the Marathi name of the city since its founding and acquired the state power to enact it. Mumbai derives from Mumba Devi, the goddess of the Koli fishing community indigenous to the islands, whose temple stands in the old city, and it was the name Marathi speakers had always used in their own language, while Bombay, from the Portuguese Bom Bahia, was the name of the colonial port and of its English and Gujarati public life. For the Sena the discrepancy was the founding grievance in miniature: the capital of the Marathi state conducted its affairs under an outsider’s name for its own city. Bal Thackeray’s governments-in-waiting had promised the change for years, and the Sena-BJP government of Manohar Joshi carried it through in 1995 with the Union government’s approval, the new name entering official use across the state’s institutions; the University of Bombay became the University of Mumbai in 1996 and the city’s airport and railway terminus took Chhatrapati Shivaji’s name, while the High Court retained its historic title. The renaming remains the most durable single artefact of the Sena’s first government.

Q: Did the Shiv Sena support the Emergency of 1975 to 1977?

Yes. Bal Thackeray publicly supported Indira Gandhi’s Emergency regime of June 1975 to March 1977, praised the discipline it imposed and expressed admiration for Sanjay Gandhi’s campaigns, and the Shiv Sena kept out of the underground opposition that the Janata movement assembled against it. The Sena was nearly alone among Bombay’s significant political organisations in this position, and it was a considered one: the Emergency state had the power to dissolve a street organisation whose strength lay in visibility, and Thackeray’s accommodation preserved the shakha network intact through the regime’s twenty-one months while the Communist and socialist organisations that competed with the Sena in the mill districts were driven underground or into prison. The party emerged from the Emergency with its machinery unbroken, won five assembly seats in 1978 under the Janata government at the Centre, and in 1980 directed its followers to support Congress candidates on Indira Gandhi’s return, returning no assembly member of its own that year. Scholars read the episode as the earliest evidence of the party’s ordering of priorities, in which the organisation’s survival outranked every doctrinal position, a hierarchy the Hindutva turn and the alliance career repeatedly confirmed.