Sena learns to go to battle without its street fighters

Its IT cell, a pliant government machinery, powerful unions and sharp lawyers are Sena’s new stormtroopers.

Months after Chhagan Bhujbal was appointed the leader of the opposition in the upper house by the Congress, a murderous gang of Sainiks descended upon his official cottage near Mantralaya and tore to pieces anything they could lay their hands on as they went around looking for him. Years later, Bhujbal told an interviewer that he would have been lynched had he not hid in a bathroom. His offence was a speech delivered in the legislative council attacking the Sena and its Manohar Joshi-led government.

That was July 1996. Bal Thackeray was alive. And this was the only way Shiv Sainiks knew of dealing with an attack – political or otherwise.

Today, as another Sena chief minister, this time a Thackeray, is under relentless attack from the party’s former partner, the BJP, there have not been any violent reactions by Sainiks. The only aberration – the beating up of a former Naval officer who had forwarded a cartoon lampooning Uddhav Thackeray on a WhatsApp group – was just that, an aberration.

The attackers did not have the top leadership’s sanction and were following orders of a shakha pramukh acting out of his league.

But the Sena is fighting back. It is fighting back in the mould of its new leader who has worked very hard to reshape the party’s image of thuggery into that of a progressive, inclusive organisation focused on development. So, the fight back is not bare knuckled, it is not naked aggression. It is not the Sainiks taking on its detractors. It is the Sena, a party in power, hitting back.

Over the past couple of weeks, the party’s IT Cell has been filing cases against those who defame the CM or his son, Tourism and Environment Minister Aditya Thackeray; cops have arrested TV journalists who allegedly tried to trespass into the Thackeray family’s farm house in Raigad; breach of privilege motions have been filed against shrill TV channel editors; a BMC demolition squad (BMC is controlled by Sena) demolished alleged illegal constructions at actor Kangana Ranaut’s office after she compared Mumbai to Pakistan-occupied-Kashmir; a Mumbai police team picked up a man in Kolkata for issuing threats to Sena spokesman Sanjay Raut; a Sena-controlled union of cable operators is seeking blackout of a TV channel whose editor-anchor challenged Raut to face him in an interview; and an old suicide of an architect where this TV editoranchor is an accused is being raked up.

That is the new Shiv Sena fight-back. The only old tool of offence that is being used in this fight-back is the party’s newspaper Saamna, which screamed in glee ‘ukhad diya’ when JCBs wrecked Kangana’s office.

But this a big test of the old vs the new. The BJP, still smarting from being denied a second term in Mantralaya, has been relentless. What has hurt Sena the most is its attempts to link Aaditya with actor Sushant Singh Rajput’s death by suicide. Stories are being floated that Aaditya spends time partying with the Bollywood.

In ways reminiscent of the BJP’s ‘pappu’ campaign caricaturing Rahul Gandhi, Aaditya is being called a ‘baby penguin’. The reference is to Aaditya’s pet project of bringing penguins to Byculla zoo, but the aim is to paint him as an ‘indulgent, entitled’ dynast who is more interested in ‘nightlife’ than any meaningful social, political work.

The attack, among others, is being led by BJP MLA Nitesh Rane. After the Supreme Court allowed the Bihar police to take over the Sushant Singh Rajput case, Rane tweeted – ‘Ab baby penguin toh giyo!!! It’s SHOWTIME!”. On August 11, he tweeted again -- “Wouldn’t it be fair if the Maharashtra cabinet minister who was named today in the apex court shud resign so there is a fair trial in the SSR case? Or Rthe rules different here??”

The only other time when Shiv Sena was under such intense attack was during the Ramesh Kini murder trial in mid-1990s. In July 1996, just one year after the first Shiv Sena-BJP government came to power in the state, the body of Ramesh Kini, a resident of Dadar, was found in a cinema hall in Pune. His wife Sheila accused Raj Thackeray, who was then the second-in-command after Bal Thackeray in the party, of conspiring with the owner of the building, where Kini family had an apartment, to get her husband killed.

The case was first taken up by social activist and academician Pushpa Bhave and later Bhujbal. Though the CBI cleared Raj, his political career was dented, giving Uddhav a chance to rise.

Rajya Sabha member and Sena spokesman Sanjay Raut said Sena workers have shown exemplary restraint after Uddhav’s swearing in as CM. “There is no shortage of aggression in the Sena. But when you are in power, there are certain limitations. Maharashtra is a state where there is a rule of law and it will remain that way. The Shiv Sena is committed to ensuring that there is rule of law. The opposition is testing our patience. But we will not let them provoke us,” he said, adding the fightback will be political, legal and ideological.

“We are not filing complaints against anyone and everyone. We have filed complaints against those who are repeatedly peddling fake news, hate speech and morphed photos of the CM. The police have registered FIRs which show that there was merit in our complaints,” said Yuva Sena functionary Varun Sardesai.

If Bal Thackeray is watching from his perch above the September monsoon skies, one can be sure he does not approve of the Sena’s soft approach. But back in the day when his Sainiks would routinely ransack newspaper and television channel offices, this animal called social media did not exist. Also, in those days no Thackeray occupied an office in Mantralaya. Today, two do.