Sena-BJP battle heats up: Uddhav launches Modi sarkar-style campaign

“We won Delhi, now let’s win Maharashtra.” That’s the opening line of the Shiv Sena’s new posters and promotional material doing the rounds of social media, each bearing a photograph of Shiv Sena party boss Uddhav Thackeray in an aggressive pose. While the Congress is once again dousing internal fires and internecine rivalries, the Shiv Sena appears to have launched its campaign for Maharashtra. Much of this soft-launched Sena campaign is reminiscent of the early days of the Modi campaign. [caption id=“attachment_1429175” align=“alignleft” width=“380”]  Uddhav Thackeray in this file photo. AFP[/caption] One image has the same design as the Modi sarkar posters – a single person pointing at the reader, a crisp message in bold font, the party symbol bringing up the tail. The poster also asks people to give a “missed call” to a given number, to join the party’s activities, another leaf straight out of the Mission 272 book. By the end of the campaign, Team Modi reported that over 1 crore missed calls had been received from prospective volunteers. It’s early days still, but it does appear that the Sena is crafting – much asModi did – a campaign built around the candidate and not the party. An Uddhav campaign more than a Sena campaign. The timing and tenor of the campaign are interesting. Just last week, the Shiv Sena president Uddhav Thackeray first indicated his willingness to assume the role of the Sena-BJP alliance’s chief ministerial candidate in Maharashtra. This may be unusual given that the Thackerays have never stood for elections or accepted positions in government. But the times have changed and on Sunday, hours after his counsin Raj Thackeray declared that he will contest the coming Assembly elections in Maharashtra, Sena MP Sanjay Raut reportedly told mediapersons that Uddhav will be the Sena’c CM candidate, though they haven’t decided just yet if he will take the rough and tumble route of an election into the legislature. Raut made the declaration despite the party’s senior alliance partner, the increasingly aggressive Maharashtra unit of the Bharatiya Janata Party – which hopes the Modi wave will also sweep the Assembly elections in October – announcing that the alliance will go into the polls without a CM candidate. Needless to say, the BJP (which won 23 of the 48 LS seats in Maharashtra while the Sena won 18) wants to again outdo its regional ally  and grab the chief ministership. As the monsoon session of the Maharashtra Legislative Assembly gets underway today, the Sena-BJP alliance is not basking in the afterglow of the big Modi mandate at the centre. If anything, the rift between the two allies has become more pronounced than ever. The Sena first madeapparent its unhappiness at being given only one berth in the Narendra Modi council of ministers and then not taking charge of that one ministry until the Sena was mollified, apparently with the carrot of a Cabinet expansion soon. The Sena may have had no choice but to climb down from their sulk over Anant Geete’s being given a “light” portfolio of heavy industries in comparison to the power ministry the party was reportedly eyeing. But the party appears to have not forgotten the snub of not being invited to Modi’s first rally in Mumbai after he was anointed PM candidate of the NDA. At a grand event to celebrate the party’s success in the Lok Sabha polls, Uddhav chose not to mention the BJP even once. He thanked the party’s supporters for helping it post its biggest ever success in the first election they contested after the death of Bal Thackeray. Countless Shiv Sainiks and Yuva Sena activists led by Aditya Thackeray, and the blessings of Balasaheb, he said, led them to victory. He made a quick, sharp reference to the Cabinet berth allotment controversy too: “They ask me how many Cabinet berths Sena will get at the Centre. I say the Shiv Sena is more interested in revamping Mumbai city,” he said. Monday’s edition of Sena mouthpiece Saamna carried a quick repartee to the BJP’s apparent confusion regarding a CM candidate from the party. “After Modi’s win, people began to say that it could be Narendra in Delhi and Devendra in Mumbai,” an editorial said, referring to Devendra Phadanvis, the Maharashtra BJP president. His name had begun doing the rounds as a likely CM candidate before the BJP officially said they will go to polls under the leadership of senior leader Gopinath Munde. Some shades of the Munde Vs Nitin Gadkari rivalry in the BJP clearly remain, and the Sena was quick to point it out candidly. Whoever the name, there is little doubt that the BJP would want one of its men in the Maharashtra CM’s office – Rajiv Pratap Rudy, who’s in charge of the BJP’s electoral campaign in Maharashtra, has been reportedly asked to ensure that the BJP outdoes the Sena convincingly. But before that, the tussle over seat-sharing is most likely to be a bitterly fought one. In the 2009 assembly election, the Shiv Sena and BJP contested 171 and 117 assembly seats respectively. The BJP now wants the larger pie of seats to contest. It will be a complex seat-sharing battle – what was once just a partnership between the Shiv Sena and the BJP is now a grand alliance or ‘Mahayuti comprising the Sena, BJP, MP Raju Shetty’s Swabhimaani Paksh, the Ramdas Athavale-led RPI and the Rashtriya Samaj Paksha of Mahadev Jankar, the man who gave Supriya Sule a bit of a scare in the Baramati Lok Sabha constituency, and the Shiv Sangraam led by Vinayak Mete who has just switched over from the NCP to the BJP. Through the end of 2011 and early part of 2012, as elections to municipal councils and corporations took place across the state, the one easy-to-read verdict was that the main contest across the state was not really between the Congress-NCP and the Shiv Sena-BJP any longer. The Congress and the NCP, never really in a happy marriage in the state government, contested against each other rather fiercely in some of these councils, making for some colourful local politics. Those two parties will continue to bicker, no doubt, but the unhappy alliance that’s making news now is the Sena and BJP’s fraying relationship.