Mumbai: Marking 60 years of the Shiv Sena’s Dussehra rally tradition, the city on Monday hosted two rival Dussehra rallies — Uddhav Thackeray’s at Shivaji Park and Eknath Shinde’s at the NESCO Centre in Goregaon — in a vivid display of a party split that shows no sign of healing.
Shinde, addressing his supporters at Goregaon, trained his fire on Thackeray’s 2019 decision to break with the BJP and form the Maha Vikas Aghadi government. “You became the Maharashtra Chief Minister through the back door… This is a severe betrayal of the voters,” Shinde said, calling it “the biggest vote theft” — turning back on the Thackeray camp the voter-list charge it has itself been levelling.
The “back door” barb refers to the political upheaval of 2019, when the Shiv Sena and the BJP — which had contested and won the Assembly elections together as allies — parted ways, and Thackeray went on to head a coalition government with the NCP and the Congress. For Shinde, that reversal remains the original sin of the split.
Shinde also mounted a defence of the Mahayuti government’s farmer outreach amid Maharashtra’s drought distress. He cited a Rs 32,000-crore framework for a comprehensive farm loan waiver, an emergency relief figure of Rs 5,000, and said 100 tonnes of foodgrains had been dispatched to drought-hit farmers in Marathwada and Vidarbha.
At Shivaji Park, Thackeray struck a combative note of his own. He called for “regime change” in the state, attacked alleged irregularities in the voter lists and described protesting youth as “revolutionaries” — a speech pitched at the party’s traditional base as much as at the younger voters the faction hopes to draw.
The institutional arithmetic of the split is settled, at least on paper. The Election Commission recognises Shinde’s faction as the official Shiv Sena, and in the 2024 Maharashtra Assembly elections his camp won 57 of the 288 seats against the UBT faction’s 20 — a gap that underlines the scale of the divide between the two claimants.
The Dussehra rally — the Dussehra melava — has been the Shiv Sena’s signature annual show of strength for six decades, the stage from which its leadership has traditionally set the tone for the year in Maharashtra politics. Monday’s twin rallies were a reminder that the tradition now belongs, contested, to two rival claimants.
The exchanges at Shivaji Park and Goregaon suggest the battle for the Shiv Sena’s legacy — and for its voters — is far from over. Both factions used the milestone anniversary to project strength; neither showed any inclination to yield the ground, the symbolism, or the name.
