THE MAHA COUP

UDDHAV THACKERAY WAS ALWAYS AN UNLIKELY LEGATEE. The comparison with the man in the portrait on the wall behind him was never going to be favourable. And not just in the eyes of the faithful. In terms of the undefinable substance that creates a political persona—call it aura, charisma or the X-factor—Uddhav’s personality was such that he would always walk in the shadow of his father. Bal Thackeray, the cartoonist who redrew Bombay as Mumbai, was larger than life. Mixing demagogic speechifying with crackling wit, blending visceral nativist pride with unbridled Hindutva, and infusing ideology with enormous amounts of street cred, Bal Thackeray was almost a planet unto himself. The Shiv Sena was without doubt something he had sired—a party that drew on the deep taproot of Marathi cultural and political history like no other before it. Uddhav inherited that party structure, but worked with a primary complication. As a personality, he was cut of a different cloth: soft-spoken, almost demure by comparison. As a politician, his ideology was less extravagantly stated, more indeterminate. To his credit, he did not shirk from attempting the impossible—owning the legacy, but steering it in his own way, tying up with ideological opposites, talking Hindutva but dialling it down in practice. But, in the ultimate analysis, his primary handicap was that he was always going to be what someone once called him: a Thackeray who was not Thackeray enough.

That may or may not be what felled him—there were several other failings that came to the fore during his 31-month helmsmanship of the Maharashtra Vikas Aghadi (MVA) government, which ended on the night of June 29 with an emotional valediction on Facebook Live and a subsequent self-driven car ride to the Governor’s bungalow to put in his papers. Even at that stage, indeed till two hours before the scheduled oath-taking ceremony the next day, the whole world expected the BJP's Devendra Fadnavis to rise for his third coronation. But in a last-minute stunner, Fadnavis declared that Sena rebel-in-chief Eknath Shinde would be chief minister. Logic? Compellingly simple. One, having gotten them down, try to finish off the Thackerays for good, wresting the Sena from their patent mark—turn the coup d’etat into a coup de grace, without inviting the charge that the BJP had betrayed another saffron party. Two, get a pliant CM in the chair while holding the real power, and