In Maharashtra, meter down over Marathi
If the Opposition is mired in existential crises, the burden of keeping a conflictual air alive within Maharashtra politics is borne well by the ruling Mahayuti. The running duel is between the dominant force, the Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP), and the ambitious deputy chief minister Eknath Shinde’s Shiv Sena, which is seeking to emerge as a force with a distinct imprimatur. Three episodes have brought this into sharp relief yet again: the Sena is staking claim to the Mumbai mayor’s post, it has joined the fray in elections to one of the city’s most prestigious cooperative banks, and it’s raising the ante on a language controversy.
While the first two are pure play for power, it’s the third that gives its jockeying for political space a more cultural-ideological flavour—strongly reminiscent of the old Shiv Sena’s nativist politics from the Bal Thackeray era. In a conscious cultivation of that legacy, the Shinde Sena has pitched to make functional knowledge of Marathi mandatory for taxi and auto drivers in Maharashtra. What that did, more than anything else, is bring to the fore a fundamental divergence within the Mahayuti.
The one to set it rolling was the flamboyant transport minister Pratap Sarnaik, who shares the striking fact of once having been an autorickshaw driver in Thane—like his party boss, Shinde. In July, Sarnaik declared August 15 as the deadline for taxi and auto drivers to demonstrate working knowledge of Marathi, and threatened to revoke the licences of those who lacked it. On August 12, the new Maharashtra Motor Vehicles (Third Amendment) Rules, 2026, were notified. App-based vehicles, too, were brought within its ambit, and language tests were set to begin.
This created consternation among the city’s 700,000 or so commercial passenger vehicle drivers. Roughly 60-70 per cent of them are estimated to be from ‘Hindi belt’ states like Uttar Pradesh and Bihar. Inter alia, that makes them more inclined towards the BJP, whose stakes in north India debar it from taking too provincial a stance on this count. Sure enough, the uproar soon led to chief minister Devendra Fadnavis extending the deadline by a year. A BJP leader admitted the impending election in UP was a factor.
He also had an explanation for the Shinde Sena’s sudden championing of the Marathi cause. “It realises it has little footprint among the core Marathi base of the undivided Sena in and around Mumbai, and is raking up such issues to slice into that vote,” he says. Uddhav Thackeray’s Sena UBT holds on to key segments of the legacy vote in Mumbai; Raj’s Maharashtra Navnirman Sena (MNS) is still a presence too. As much as that sibling feud within the Sena universe, though, it’s also a theme that helps sharpen Shinde’s political boundaries vis-a-vis the BJP.
That he has ambitions on that front became clearer when Shinde publicly asserted his party’s claim as the next in line for the mayor’s position in the Brihanmumbai Municipal Corporation (BMC). Setting the cat among the pigeons, the deputy CM declared in late August that a Sena nominee would become the city’s first citizen after the two-and-a-half-year term of the new incumbent, Ritu Tawde, ends in 2028.
The BMC election earlier this year saw the BJP emerge as the single largest party, with 89 seats. It still needed the support of the Shinde Sena, which got 29 seats, to surpass the majority mark of 114. The Sena got its pound of flesh—installing Sanjay Ghadi as deputy mayor. However, it’s clear that the pound is looking to get heavier, with Shinde’s claim that his party will take the residual 1.25 years in the post.
Adding fuel to the fire, Sena leader and legislative council deputy chairperson Sachin Ahir is set to lead the party’s charge in the election to the prestigious Mumbai District Central Cooperative Bank later this year. The bank, controlled by close Fadnavis aide and MLC Pravin Darekar, has a working capital of Rs 10,282 crore and disburses loans of around Rs 700 crore every year. It’s the central financial agency of all affiliated housing cooperatives in Mumbai.
A senior Shinde Sena leader confirmed the party is planning to put up a panel of its own. “It’s necessary for us to make our presence felt and avoid being swallowed up by the BJP. There’s unrest in the ranks against the BJP,” he adds. When asked, BJP spokesperson Navnath Ban fended off the idea of a contest, saying they would “fight the elections as the Mahayuti”. A party senior, however, says the competition has value, since the BJP and the Sena are deftly carving out the Marathi and non-Marathi space between themselves, edging out the Opposition. “The Sena UBT and MNS are nowhere in the picture in the language debate. The Congress, too, failed to take up cudgels for north Indian taxi drivers though it has pockets of support in this cohort. The Mahayuti has captured space on both sides of the divide,” he points out.
Political analyst Abhay Deshpande said Sarnaik’s evangelical zeal was a public stance since the policy itself was doomed from the beginning. He ascribes it to Shinde’s need to take positions that differ from that of his senior ally to show “his separate identity”.
