On a humid Sunday morning, just before heavy rain drowned Mumbai, Uddhav Thackeray stood before his party workers and supporters, reciting the Ram Raksha stotra. This was not an election campaign. After yet another round of desertions by his party’s Lok Sabha members, Thackeray was leading a ‘Ram Raksha andolan’ to protest the alleged embezzlement of donations by the BJP/RSS-backed trust managing the Ram temple in Ayodhya.

Standing amid saffron flags, he accused the BJP of exploiting the faith of millions of Hindus and declared that “Hindus are innocent, not foolish.” The symbolism was unmistakable: a leader who has spent the last four years fighting politically and legally to retain his party’s identity and control was returning to the ideological terrain that his father, late Bal Thackeray, had cultivated for decades. Yet beneath the chants and the verses lay a deeper anxiety.

The protest was less a confident assertion of ideology than a weak, almost desperate effort to reclaim political ground that has steadily slipped away since the rebellion of 2022 by his trusted aide-turned-bête noire Eknath Shinde. Shinde continues to eat into Sena (UBT), enticing its MLAs, MPs and foot soldiers to join his fold to enjoy the fruits of power. The latest defections — six of the nine members elected in 2024 on Sena (UBT) tickets and one MLC close to Aaditya Thackeray — underline the same trend.

Late last year, Sena (UBT) finally lost control over the prized Brihanmumbai Municipal Corporation (BMC) with the BJP–Shinde Sena–NCP (Ajit Pawar) combo sweeping the elections. Electoral losses aside, every defection or rumour that another legislator is switching sides chips away at the confidence of a party that has already lost its name, its election mascot, much of its legislative strength and a sizeable part of its organisation.

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© National Herald