Mumbai, Oct 23
Another Thackeray son rises on the state political horizon for the upcoming November 20 Maharashtra Assembly elections.
The high-profile, 18-year-old fringe party, the Maharashtra Navnirman Sena (MNS) President Raj S. Thackeray has nominated his son Amit, 32, as the party candidate for the Mahim Assembly seat.
A Marathi stronghold, a senior MNS leader Nitin Sardesai had bagged Mahim in 2009, but in 2014 and 2019, lost out to the (undivided) Shiv Sena’s Sadanand S. Sarvankar.
Sitting 3-term MLA Sarvankar (once from Dadar and twice from Mahim) of the ruling ally Shiv Sena will again contest the seat and brace for a tough fight vis-a-vis a Thackeray ‘heir’ jumping into the fray.
This will make Amit Thackeray the fourth member from the famed Thackeray political clan to enter the heat and dust of electoral politics -- once considered a forbidden field, and shunned by the family.
In 2019, present Shiv Sena (UBT) President Uddhav Thackeray and his son Aditya Thackeray not only contested the elections but became the Chief Minister and Minister, respectively, in their maiden attempts.
Uddhav Thackeray opted to be an MLC owing to certain political circumstances prevalent then, while his young cub Aditya roared loud and romped home as an MLA from the prestigious Worli Assembly seat.
Earlier, a distant relative of Raj Thackeray, Shalini Jeetendra Thackeray -- who is MNS Vice-President -- had made her electoral forays for both Lok Sabha and Assembly, but success eluded her.
This time, the cautious MNS is toying with the possibility of an electoral understanding in Mahim to enable Amit Thackeray to cut his political teeth smoothly, particularly since Sarvankar is the Chairman of the 223-year-old Shree Siddhivinayak Ganpati Temple Trust, holding a Minister of State (MoS) status.
As far as the MNS is concerned, despite a ‘Thackeray’ at the helm, it has failed to create a major political presence though the cartoonist-orator Raj Thackeray’s election speeches create more than mere ripples during poll seasons.
In the 2019 Assembly elections, the MNS bagged just one out of 101 seats it fought, notching a more dismal record than the Uttar Pradesh-based Samajwadi Party or Hyderabad-based All India Majlis-E-Ittehadul Muslimeen (AIMIM), getting two seats, each.
When the fledgling 3-year-old MNS bagged 13 of the 143 seats it had contested in the 2009 elections, political heads turned and Raj Thackeray was referred to in hushed tones as a ‘king-maker’ before donning the crown himself in the near future.
Projected as the perpetually grimacing, impatient leader wanting to ram his ‘Steam Engine’ (MNS poll symbol) into Mantralaya, the party and Thackeray seemed to lose steam often, for a variety of reasons, and earned the sobriquet of being the most confused leader from Mumbai.
These included the shrill and violent campaigns against the North Indians in the state, a fierce pro-Marathi crusade, a series of political flip-flops vis-a-vis the Bharatiya Janata Party and Prime Minister Narendra Modi -- even during the 2024 Lok Sabha polls -- that left even his strong supporters and unabashed admirers bewildered.
For the 2024 Assembly polls, his die-hard supporters, legion of fans and probably the Mahim voters, are keeping their fingers crossed -- that Raj Thackeray sticks to his guns rather than shooting off wildly with the mouth.
