When Uddhav Thackeray took oath as the 18th chief minister of Maharashtra on November 28, 2019, he proclaimed that he had fulfilled his late father’s wish to have a ‘Shiv Sainik’ seated in the highest executive office in the Government of Maharashtra. It surprised many to see members of the Thackeray family taking up a constitutional post as Uddhav’s son, Aditya, followed him into the council of ministers. For over four decades since he founded the Shiv Sena as a political party, Bal Thackeray never aimed to hold any office. He had proudly claimed he that was the “remote control” that controlled the actions of the chief minister when the Shiv Sena and BJP had formed the government between 1995 and 1999. The Thackeray dynasty, until 2019, was seen as the force behind the scenes, one that had full authority but no answerability.
Bal Thackeray, one among the eight children of writer and social reformer Prabhodhankar or Keshav Thackeray, founded the Shiv Sena on June 19, 1966. He had started his career as a cartoonist in the Free Press Journal and later went on to publish Marmik, a weekly in Marathi. A cartoonist par excellence and journalist, Thackeray used his weekly to comment on social and political issues and started his career in public life by leading a movement against migrants and fighting for the rights of the sons-of-the-soil. Therein lay the birth of the Shiv Sena, a party that later went on to scale great heights and reach the chambers of power in the Centre and in the state.
Thackeray anointed Uddhav as his heir in January 2003 at the party’s conclave. He took over as the ‘pakshapramukh’ and after Raj’s departure from the party, Sena workers rallied around Uddhav. In 2010, Thackeray launched his grandson Aaditya at a grand party event and handed over the reins of the Yuva Sena or the youth wing of the party to him.
The father-son duo kept their flock together in elections even after the death of the senior Thackeray in 2012, winning the cash-rich Mumbai municipal corporation and state elections with the BJP. In 2019, in a surprise turn of events, Uddhav was named Chief Minister of Maharashtra as part of a post-poll alliance with the Congress and Nationalist Congress Party.
His party split when senior leader Eknath Shinde walked away with legislators in 2022.
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