Maharashtra | Chief Minister Eknath Shinde finds himself in an unenviable position

Shiv Sena leader Eknath Shinde during his oath-taking ceremony in Mumbai on June 30. (Image: PTI/File)

It is more than four weeks since Maharashtra had a new Chief Minister and Deputy Chief Minister in Eknath Shinde and Devendra Fadnavis respectively, but the state does not have a Cabinet yet, prompting many to ask if a Chief Minister without a council of ministers can even be called a government.

Such constitutional minutiae do not bother Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) leader Fadnavis who, within hours of being sworn in, overturned the previous government’s decision to stay the metro car shed at Aarey Colony in Mumbai, and ordered tree cutting; if they bother Shinde, he is careful to not show it.

It is not that Shinde, who consistently claimed to represent the ‘real’ Shiv Sena, is short of men with the inclination to be ministers; nearly every MLA who jumped ship with him in June wants a Cabinet portfolio. So, what is stopping Shinde from pulling his weight as Chief Minister and appointing his Cabinet? Two crucial factors, among others.

The first is the precarious complicated legal position of his faction of Shiv Sena. Shinde may shout at every available opportunity that his is the ‘real’ party, and claim the legacy of its founder, late Bal Thackeray. However, what he split was the legislative wing of the Shiv Sena, not the entire party with its organisational structure.

The judicial verdict on the cases filed in the Supreme Court is awaited as is the decision of the Election Commission of India. To avoid technical hurdles and tricky situations in the legal process, Shinde has apparently been advised to hold back on appointing ministers.

The second factor is the more telling one: Shinde is accused of being a puppet Chief Minister in the hands of Fadnavis — in fact, the BJP. There are any number of incidents, small and big, which show his authority, or the lack of it.

He is constantly accompanied by Fadnavis, his press conferences have Fadnavis directing him, his visit to Delhi to meet Prime Minister Narendra Modi and Home Minister Amit Shah saw him cool heels for more than 12 hours waiting for a call, he did not dare to say a word when Governor Bhagat Singh Koshyari mocked Maharashtrians for being paupers crediting Gujarati and Marwari communities for Mumbai’s success and wealth.

Shinde enjoys the status of being Chief Minister — a grouse he had nursed against Uddhav Thackeray for the last two years — but he is clearly unable to claim the stature and authority of the constitutional position. He had cited the natural ideological affinity of the Shiv Sena with the BJP, and how Uddhav Thackeray had dented it by aligning with the Congress and the Nationalist Congress Party (NCP) to form the Maharashtra Vikas Aghadi (MVA) government in November 2019, to split from the Shiv Sena in June. However, even he would have to admit that Uddhav Thackeray had more heft in that unnatural alliance than Shinde does in this association with the BJP.

Systematically, powerful Shiv Sena satraps such as Shinde and those close to the Thackerays such as Sanjay Raut — now in the custody of the Enforcement Directorate (ED) — have been targeted and harassed by central agencies, with or without genuine grounds. Raut may well be guilty of what the ED has accused him of, but the answer to whether the ED would have moved against him if the BJP and Shiv Sena were in a happy power tango tells its own story. Raut was the chief negotiator during the process of forming the MVA.

The BJP’s strategy appears to be to diminish the Shiv Sena’s political heft and relegate it to the margins of electoral irrelevance. The tactic is to lure away men such as Shinde and put away those such as Raut so that the Thackerays stand totally isolated, and helpless. BJP President JP Nadda’s statement on regional parties the other day gave the game away.

That the BJP wanted to shrink the Shiv Sena is an open secret since 2014. Uddhav Thackeray managed to hold it off initially by aligning with the BJP on the latter’s terms, and later by breaking off from it to form the MVA. However, the Shiv Sena is no match for the national party in resources and tactics.

The Shiv Sena’s political clout came from its power in influential municipal corporations such as Mumbai and Thane, among other cities, which gave it access to lakhs of crores by way of annual budgets, and from its high emotive appeal on nativist ideology. The forthcoming round of elections to these municipal corporations, in the BJP’s calculation, is the best chance to dislodge the Shiv Sena from power at all levels — and thereby hasten its decimation. This fits into the BJP’s vision of single-party rule across India; Shinde is helping fulfil it in Maharashtra.