Mumbai The first indication that Uddhav Thackeray, Maharashtra’s 19th chief minister, was thinking of quitting came on June 22, two days after several Shiv Sena MLAs had cross-voted in the legislative council elections in Mumbai, and then fled to Surat in the dark of the night.
A coup was underway, and a Thackeray could not afford to appear defeated was his logic when he first broached the idea with his party. Uddhav Thackeray, however, was not just the chief of the Shiv Sena but also the head of a coalition government. Sharad Pawar and other MVA leaders prevailed upon him to stay on and fight. Over the next week, however, a steady stream of Sena MLAs, some of whom he considered as insiders, continued to leave. Most prominent among them was Uday Samant, part of his crisis management group, who also defected to join Eknath Shinde. As his circle of confidantes grew smaller and smaller, Uddhav felt tricked and hurt, says a senior leader of the Shiv Sena (UBT).
“He was hurt by the way a majority of the MLAS had turned against him without any dialogue.”
On June 29, when the Supreme Court refused to stay then-governor BS Koshyari’s directive to take the floor test, Uddhav felt he had had enough. By this time, 38 of his MLAs had switched sides, a sufficient number to beat anti-defection provisions. Only five people knew of this decision: his wife Rashmi, his sons Aaditya and Tejas, and Sena leaders Subhash Desai and Anil Parab, who later informed others in the party. That day, Uddhav Thackeray held his last Cabinet meeting where he thanked his colleagues.
No legal advice was sought and neither did he consult NCP or Congress leaders who were trying to save his government. Ten months later, that decision would come to haunt him. The Supreme Court in its verdict on Thursday said Thackeray’s resignation meant that it would not reinstate Thackeray as chief minister under the “status quo ante” sought by his lawyers.
But Uddhav Thackeray, may have been the first Thackeray to hold a constitutional position, came from Balasaheb Thackeray’s school of emotive politics. In 1992, when Chhagan Bhujbal became the first Shiv Sainik to rebel against Balasaheb, the Sena supremo had offered to quit leading to an outpouring of support from his cadre. Uddhav, who announced his resignation as CM on social media, saying he sought no trappings of power, thought his resignation might prompt a similar outpouring of support. “In a democracy, heads are counted to show numbers. I am not interested in that. I don’t want to play these games. I had come [to power] in an unexpected manner and I am going out in a similar fashion,” he said in his resignation address.
“He thought he had been dragged into a dirty power game and he did not deserve to face allegations by the rebels on the floor of the assembly. Besides, we also suspected that a few more MLAs would cross over to the Shinde faction during the debate on trust vote. That would be insulting and embarrassing and he wanted no part of that,” disclosed the leader close to Uddhav.
On Thursday, after the Supreme Court’s verdict, NCP chief Pawar refused to publicly comment on Uddhav’s resignation, which he was so opposed to, but pointed the media to what he had already written in his recently released memoirs. “In politics, one has to move fast to retain power. But at the first hint of a political crisis, he (Thackeray) backed out,” writes Pawar in Lok Mazhe Sangati. The MVA leaders, he writes, knew that there would be attempts to destabilise their government. “We were capable of handling such attempts at our level. We did not anticipate that there would a storm within the Shiv Sena after we had appointed Uddhav Thackeray as chief minister. The Sena leadership failed to handle the rebellion in its party and the MVA lost power because Uddhav resigned without a fight.”
His resignation, in fact, complicated matters for Thackeray as Eknath Shinde did not just stop at pulling down his government but even took over the party. “This is what we had anticipated. The way the rebellion was planned, it was clear that the Shinde-Fadnavis combine did not just want to form the government but also take over the Shiv Sena, leaving Thackeray without the official party,” said a senior NCP leader after the SC verdict. “Other than Sharad Pawar other NCP leaders like Chhagan Bhujbal, Dilip Walse-Patil and Jayant Patil too had given the Sena leadership an inkling of what could be in store for them.” But for Uddhav, emotion rather than cold logic prevailed at that time.
