How Uddhav Thackeray, cousin Raj are basing grassroots revival on Gen Z angst

After a series of electoral setbacks, reverses and defections since 2024, the Thackeray cousins are banking on Gen Z angst to shore up support at the grassroots in Maharashtra. On October 4, Uddhav Thackeray, president of the Shiv Sena (Uddhav Balasaheb Thackeray), and Maharashtra Navnirman Sena (MNS) president Raj Thackeray mobilised the party cadre with a morcha in Mumbai against the Election Commission (EC).

The ‘Virat Garjana Morcha’, organised on the half a km route from Metro cinema to Azad Maidan, saw the Thackerays call for the resignation of chief election commissioner (CEC) Gyanesh Kumar. It came on the backdrop of purported differences between Kumar and the two other election commissioners over the Special Intensive Revision (SIR) of electoral rolls, which has led to millions of names being deleted from voter lists across the country.

The Thackerays were joined by leaders of the Congress and Nationalist Congress Party (Sharadchandra Pawar) or NCP (SCP)—both allies of the Shiv Sena (UBT) in the Maha Vikas Aghadi (MVA).

The Cockroach Janata Party (CJP) has already held an agitation at Mumbai’s Shivaji Park on October 2 (Gandhi Jayanti) to seek the CEC’s resignation.

Raj demanded that the SIR in Maharashtra be scrapped and electronic voting machines (EVMs) be replaced with ballot papers. In the past, the MNS chief has questioned why leaders of the ruling BJP were rushing to defend the EC whenever questions were raised against its functioning. Raj pointed to how it has been claimed that a key purpose of SIR was to do away with Bangladeshi infiltrators in voters lists. He questioned how many of these illegal immigrants had been detected so far.

The protest comes after a series of setbacks for the Shiv Sena (UBT) and MNS. The Lok Sabha elections of 2024 saw the MVA win 31 of 48 seats in Maharashtra, but the alliance faced a drubbing in the subsequent assembly polls as the Mahayuti (the alliance of BJP, deputy chief minister Eknath Shinde’s Shiv Sena and NCP) garnered 237 of the 288 assembly segments. The MNS faced a massive embarrassment after Raj’s son Amit lost from Mahim to the Shiv Sena (UBT).

Political expediency forced the two politically-estranged cousins to bury the hatchet last July. The platform chosen was the Mahayuti government’s plan to make Hindi the third language in state-run schools from Class I onwards—a move questioned by language activists and educationists.

However, the two parties lost to the BJP-Shinde Sena in the Brihanmumbai Municipal Corporation (BMC) polls this year, in what was seen as a do-or-die contest for the two Thackeray-led parties. Then, in June, six MPs of the Shiv Sena (UBT)—Sanjay aka Bandu Jadhav (Parbhani), Sanjay Deshmukh (Yavatmal-Washim), Nagesh Patil Ashtikar (Hingoli), Bhausaheb Wakchoure (Shirdi), Omraje Nimbalkar (Osmanabad) and Sanjay Dina Patil (Mumbai North East)—split from the party’s nine-member Lok Sabha cohort to join Shinde’s Shiv Sena.

There is speculation over whether Shinde will similarly split the 21-member Shiv Sena (UBT) bloc in the Maharashtra legislative assembly as well as its team of corporators in the BMC, which is India’s richest civic body. Shinde is thought to be keen to get his man as Mumbai’s mayor when the term of incumbent Ritu Tawde ends in mid-2028. Already, Sachin Ahir, MLC and a former minister considered close to Uddhav’s son Aaditya Thackeray, has thrown in his lot with Shinde. He is now deputy chairperson of the state legislative council.

Sena (UBT) leaders acknowledge that their party and the MVA are yet to recover from the scale of the assembly poll defeat. The Sena (UBT) leadership had chosen to focus solely on Mumbai during the local body polls held this year. This led to grassroots party workers looking out for greener pastures.

A former worker of the Bharatiya Vidyarthi Sena, the student wing of the undivided Shiv Sena that later merged with the Yuva Sena, noted that the Shiv Sena (UBT)’s meltdown owed a lot to it losing its bite as an organisation and evolving more into a run-of-the-mill party.

The Thackerays are also up against the changing demography of the megapolis. In 1960, when Maharashtra was formed, Maharashtrians constituted around 45 per cent of Mumbai’s population. This is estimated at around 35 per cent now as the city’s unaffordable real-estate market and an increasingly-gentrified society pushes the Marathi working class—the core Sena support base—beyond the margins. The rise of the political Hindu has also led to some Marathi voters shifting allegiance to the BJP and Shinde’s Sena.

However, the Shiv Sena (UBT) and MNS leadership are now looking at the agitation launched by the CJP against CEC Kumar to shore up ground support. Uddhav has said they would support the CJP’s protest that began in Mumbai from October 2.

In July, the Thackerays had organised a joint protest in Dadar over the NEET (national medical entrance) paper leak. This was converted into a ‘victory march’ following the resignation of Dharmendra Pradhan as Union education minister in the wake of the CJP-led Jantar Mantar agitation in Delhi.