Addressing a public gathering in Kolhapur, Maharashtra, on Saturday, Union Home Minister and BJP leader Amit Shah said what Eknath Shinde’s camp had been striving for for four years. “Earlier, people had to say Shiv Sena-Shinde faction after Eknath Shinde ji’s name,” Shah said, speaking in Hindi. “Now there is no faction anymore…there is only one Shiv Sena.”
The statement came as six of the nine Lok Sabha MPs of Uddhav Thackeray’s Shiv Sena (UBT) party skipped a parliamentary meeting in Delhi and submitted a letter to Lok Sabha Speaker Om Birla seeking to form a separate caucus. The merger into the Shinde-led Shiv Sena is expected to be formalized soon, thus bolstering the BJP-led NDA regime at the Center under Prime Minister Narendra Modi.
For Amit Shah, whose party has discreetly supported moves that have eroded Uddhav Thackeray’s organizational strength since Shinde’s breakaway in 2022, the announcement in Kolhapur was a statement of strategic completion.
This was not the first time that Shah had framed the Shinde Party – which takes on the name and symbol of the Shiv Sena and was founded by Uddhav’s father, the late Bal Thackeray – as the true heir to Bal Thackeray’s legacy.
At an event in Mumbai, Shah said: “Shinde has shown everyone what the real Shiv Sena is.” Uddhav’s Sanjay Raut joked that this is like saying the Republican Party in the US belongs to Ramdas Athawale (who has his own party by that name in India). “Everyone knows that Amit Shah owns the Shinde party,” Raut said.
The position of the Bharatiya Janata Party
The BJP has openly kept its distance from Shinde’s ‘Operation Tiger’. Maharashtra Revenue Minister Chandrashekar Pawankole of the BJP said his party has nothing to do with the developments and Uddhav Thackeray’s MPs are leaving the party on their own.
But according to senior Sena leaders who spoke to Hizb ut-Tahrir, the division plan was drawn up soon after the 2024 Maharashtra Assembly elections and was triggered when the delimitation bill was defeated in Parliament because the Modi government did not have the required two-thirds strength. Eknath Shinde and his son, MP Kalyan Shrikant Shinde, have reportedly convinced the BJP leadership at the Center that the Sena can add to the NDA’s numbers by convincing the Sena’s UBT MPs to switch.
The move, along with the rebellion within the TMC in Bengal, is seen as an attempt by the BJP to shore up support for the demarcation bill. There are reports that the monsoon session of Parliament has been brought forward by a few days from July 21 to ensure the passage of the demarcation bill as a precondition for the 33% women quota being operationalized.
“The BJP is behind this entire plan, but Eknath Shinde has become a figurehead,” UBT Sena leader Ambadas Dhanvi told news agency PTI. “This plan has been implemented to increase the number of NDA members in Parliament so that they can pass the delimitation bill. The BJP is afraid of losing its mandate in the 2029 Lok Sabha elections,” Dhanvi said.
Lok Sabha leader Arvind Sawant has sent a letter to Speaker Om Birla urging him not to recognize any rebel faction, terming the developments as part of the BJP’s “attack on the opposition” after its failure to pass the demarcation bill on April 17.
Cena who stays
The rebellion also completes a long arc of the BJP-Shinde relationship. When Shinde launched his revolt in June 2022, he framed it in Hindutva terms — tweeting #HindutvaForever from Guwahati and calling the MVA an “unnatural alliance” that must be broken for the Sena’s survival. The BJP provided political cover and eventually offered the then Prime Minister’s chair to Shinde.
The Election Commission ruled in 2023 that Shinde’s faction had the right to use the name “Shiv Sena” and the bow and arrow symbol.
What remained of Uddhav’s party was renamed the Sena (UBT) and was given a burning torch as a symbol.
