The Maharashtra assembly election on 20 November provides a climax to a political drama that began five years ago, when, in the aftermath of the last election, the Shiv Sena broke an alliance with the Bharatiya Janata Party and joined hands with its longtime rivals, the Congress and the Nationalist Congress Party, to form the Maha Vikas Aghadi. The MVA government subsequently collapsed, when over two-thirds of the Sena’s legislature party—the threshold specified in the Constitution (Fifty-Second Amendment) Act for differentiating between defections and a party split—extended support to the BJP. The party’s president, Uddhav Thackeray, resigned as chief minister, and the leader of the rebels, Eknath Shinde, took over. Several politicians alleged that the BJP had used the threat of investigations in order to induce many legislators to rebel.
The Shinde faction retained the rights to the party name and symbol, a bow and arrow, while the Shiv Sena (Uddhav Balasaheb Thackeray) was allotted a flaming torch as its electoral symbol. During the 2024 general election, candidates from the two factions faced off in 13 Lok Sabha seats, of which the SS(UBT) won seven. The assembly election features 49 such contests, accounting for a sixth of all constituencies. As Thackeray and Shinde fight over the Sena’s legacy, the battle lines seem to reflect the vertical nature of the split, with the elected representatives who joined Shinde’s rebellion, many of whom have strong support bases of their own, facing a cadre-driven SS(UBT) that continues to control most of the undivided party’s widespread system of shakhas—branches. The shakha system involves empowering local party offices in each locality, tasked with grassroots mobilisation and outreach. This battle is most intense in Mumbai, where the two parties are up against each other in 11 of the 36 constituencies, and especially in the Sena strongholds of Mahim and Worli.
“Balasaheb Thackeray’s soul resides here,” a local SS(UBT) leader told me at the Mahim party office, referring to Uddhav’s father, the founder of the Shiv Sena. The Mahim constituency, in many ways, symbolises the struggle of the two factions to claim the legacy of Bal Thackeray. The SS(UBT) has retained control of Sena Bhawan, the headquarters of the undivided party, which is located in the suburb. The constituency also includes the neighbourhoods of Prabhadevi and Dadar—the latter is the site of Shivaji Park, a ground that has memorials to Bal Thackeray and Vinayak Damodar Savarkar, as well as Chaityabhoomi, the final resting place of BR Ambedkar. The Shiv Sena has fielded the two-term incumbent, Sada Sarvankar, while the SS(UBT) has nominated the former shakha leader Mahesh Sawant.
The undivided Shiv Sena won Mahim in six of the last seven assembly elections, dating back to 1990. The lone exception was 2009, when it voted for the Maharashtra Navnirman Sena, which emerged out of the last big Sena split, three years earlier. Led by Bal Thackeray’s nephew Raj, the MNS narrowly lost Mahim in 2014, despite the BJP and Sena contesting separately before coming back together after the election. It improved its vote share in 2019 but lost by a bigger margin. This time, Raj’s son Amit is the MNS candidate.
On the final day for withdrawing nominations, Sarvankar was the biggest holdout from the Shiv Sena. A Shiv Sena member told me that Shinde and the deputy chief minister, Devendra Fadnavis, had tried to convince him to pull out of the race. “His nomination will probably end up helping Amit,” they said. The BJP had put its weight behind Amit’s candidature, with Fadnavis and the party’s Mumbai chief, Ashish Shelar, openly supporting him. “As far as we are concerned, we are the Mahayuti candidate,” Sarvankar’s son Samadhan told me.
Locals I spoke to, including Madhav Patil, who has a tea stall behind Siddhivinayak temple in Prabhadevi, worried that the contest is too close. “We don’t know who to vote for,” Patil said, adding that all three candidates were well known to the residents of the area and have had long associations with the Shiv Sena.
A Shiv Sena leader told me that Shinde had given them instructions not to go against the wishes of party workers. All but one of the rebels were renominated in their seats. “One of Shinde’s achievements has been to keep all the MLAs with him,” Sanjay Patil, a researcher and political scientist, told me. “At the time of the split, many thought that those who had joined him will not get re-elected, but the situation has changed.” He said that both factions had one common trait: they rewarded loyalty.
According to Patil, the undivided Shiv Sena had always derived its strength from its shakhas. It ensured that that the party organisation and its legislators could work independently. Shakha leaders and their regional supervisors commanded considerable clout. “The system ensured that there were no middlemen between the cadre and the Thackeray family,” Patil said.
The 2022 split was unlike the earlier splits that the Shiv Sena had faced. Over the years, key leaders—most notably Chhagan Bhujbal, Narayan Rane, Raj Thackeray—had left the party either to join a rival or to set up their own party, but this one involved a supermajority of the party’s elected representatives deserting the Thackeray family, even as most of the cadre remained. “The split should never have happened,” the SS(UBT) leader at the Mahim office told me. “It reached a point of no return.” They said that although Mahesh Sawant was not as well-known as a sitting legislator, he was still “one of them.” Because of his record administering the shakhas, they added, “he is known to the cadre, and they are ensuring that the people who vote for us know who he is. Let’s not forget, Sarvankar was with us when he won.”
In seats with an SS(UBT) incumbent, the Shiv Sena’s strategy has been to field known faces who have joined the party, such as Milind Deora, a former chief of the Mumbai Congress. Deora’s father, Murli, was a former mayor and member of several union cabinets. Having himself served as a junior minister in the Manmohan Singh government, Milind joined the Shiv Sena earlier this year and was elected to the Rajya Sabha. He is the party’s candidate in Worli, where he faces Uddhav’s son Aaditya, who won the seat in 2019 with almost seventy percent of the vote.
“Aaditya has been missing from this constituency,” Kiran Pawaskar, who is in charge of the Sena’s Mumbai campaign, told me. “He doesn’t even have an office here.” Suseiben Shah, a close aide of Deora, said that housing was key issue in the constituency. During a speech while inaugurating Deora’s party office, Shinde said that one of the party’s goals was to bring back Mumbaikars who were “forced” to leave the city, referring to the demographic shifts that areas such as Worli have seen over the last decade.
The Worli constituency, which includes the neighbourhoods of Parel and Lalbaug, has been a Shiv Sena fortress for decades. The undivided party drew its strength from Worli’s Marathi-speaking residents, who worked in the textile mills of Mumbai. Aaditya’s 2019 campaign was the first time that a Thackeray had contested an election—Bal Thackeray preferred to wield power from his Bandra home, while Uddhav would join the Vidhan Parishad after becoming chief minister.
However, the textile mills and working-class chawls that defined the neighbourhoods have given way to bustling shopping malls and sprawling high-rise apartments. Many residents who lived in these neighbourhoods have moved out or had their homes redeveloped. Others have sold their smaller apartments and relocated outside the city, as they were unable to afford larger homes in their area. Patil noted that the neighbourhoods of central Mumbai, and the metropolis as a whole, have seen huge demographic shifts over the past decade. However, with the last census conducted in 2011, there is no concrete data to suggest which party has benefitted from these shifts.
Local leaders of the SS(UBT) and the Congress argued this was likely one of the factors behind the Shiv Sena nominating Deora. Meanwhile, Aaditya was reaching out to the residents of the new high-rise housing societies. An SS(UBT) member told me that he would face a tough contest, while others believed that, since many residents were probably not registered to vote, the condominium vote might not have a major impact. Sandeep More, a Congress leader from Worli, said that these residents might vote for Prime Minister Narendra Modi in a general election, voting patterns were different in an assembly poll.
The SS(UBT) enjoys the support of shakhas from across the city, but the situation in the outskirts of Mumbai is different. In Thane, the two factions are fighting to claim the legacy of Anand Dighe—a senior Shiv Sena leader who mentored many of the present leaders in both factions, including Shinde and the SS(UBT)’s Rajan Vichare. Posters of Dharmaveer 2, a biopic of Dighe portraying him as the saviour of Hindutva and Shinde as his chosen heir, dot the city. The SS(UBT) has pitted Dighe’s nephew Kedar in Kopri–Pachpakhadi, which Shinde has represented since the constituency was created, in 2009. “You can advertise to a certain level,” Kedar told me while campaigning in Thane’s Wagle Estate. “There are some moral boundaries while campaigning. They have exploited his name and his image. While he was a proud of his religion, he never looked down or discriminated against other faiths or castes.” He said that those who knew Dighe know that the movie was made purely for propaganda purposes.
During the general election, the Shiv Sena handily defeated the SS(UBT) in Thane by over two hundred thousand votes, with Shinde’s son Shrikant winning the neighbouring Kalyan seat by a similar margin. Maval, another neighbouring seat, also went to the Sena, which led in 15 of the 18 assembly segments included in the three Lok Sabha constituencies. The leaders who joined Shinde brought with them cadre who were faithful to them, but the size of these contingents varied from region to region. Outside of Mumbai, many Shiv Sena leaders continue to enjoy the support of core grassroots workers in addition to the vast resources at their disposal. Sanjay Patil said that this was because, over the last fifteen years or so, these leaders had also taken control of their local shakhas, becoming regional satraps who were not necessarily beholden to the Thackerays.
Perhaps the starkest example was the Aurangabad Lok Sabha constituency, which the undivided Sena had won in seven out of eight consecutive general elections before losing it to Sayed Imtiaz Jaleel of the All-India Majlis-e-Ittehadul Muslimeen in 2019. The SS(UBT) renominated Chandrakant Khaire, who had won Aurangabad four times in a row before losing to Jaleel, in the 2024 general election. However, Khaire finished third, behind both Jaleel and the Shiv Sena’s Sandipanrao Bhumre, who won the seat by over a hundred and thirty thousand votes.
At a campaign rally in Chhatrapati Sambhajinagar, as Aurangabad is now known, Uddhav made an emotional pitch to the voters before the assembly election. “One thing is for sure,” he said. “Modi and [Amit] Shah can’t make me sit at home. But I will retire if you decide not to stand by me.” The SS(UBT) has responded to the loss of cadre support by fielding BJP defectors such as Raju Shinde in Aurangabad West and Unmesh Patil in Chalisgaon.
Both parties benefited from their alliance partners in the general election and will likely continue to do so. SS(UBT) leaders in Mumbai told me that their cadre and voters would support candidates from their partners regardless of their religion or caste. Shiv Sena leaders said that the SS(UBT) had benefited hugely from Muslim votes—what they and the BJP term “vote jihad”—during the general election but speculated that it would struggle to replicate that support on 20 November.
The battle between the two Shiv Sena factions may well provide a glimpse into what motivates and influences the traditional Shiv Sena voter. Eknath Shinde’s poll pitch has been that Uddhav Thackeray strayed from the path of Hindutva, and that his own rebellion was true to the ideology of Bal Thackeray. In contrast, Uddhav’s attempts to portray himself and his party as proponents of a reformist Hindutva is a narrative that will also be tested in this election.
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