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'The margin of victory or loss would make both camps rethink their strategies for the 2024 assembly election in Maharashtra.'
With the Uddhav Balasaheb Thackeray Shiv Sena (SS-UBT) having nominated Rutuja Ramesh Latke -- the wife of its former legislator Ramesh Latke -- for the Andheri (East) November 3 bypoll necessitated by Latke's death in May and the Bharatiya Janata Party, likely to nominate its former corporator Murji Patel, the contest between the two saffron friends-turned-political-enemies is set to get even more intense.
The November 3 bypoll will be fought in the shadow of many firsts.
This will be the first time that Uddhav's newly named party will fight an election using the stop-gap symbol of Mashaal (flaming torch) allotted to it by the Election Commission of India pending its final decision on the dispute between Thackeray and Chief Minister Eknath Shinde over who is the rightful owner of the original Shiv Sena and its election symbol Dhanushya Baan (bow and arrow).
This will also be the first time that the SS-UBT will test its electoral fortunes among the people after Shinde whisked away 39 party MLAs, broke ranks with the parent Shiv Sena and joined hands with the BJP to topple the Maha Vikas Aghadi government led by Thackeray and formed a government with the BJP under Shinde's leadership.
The Shinde faction that has been allotted the Dhaal and Talwar (two crossed swords and a shield, a symbol associated with the Marathas when they fought the Mughals) as its election symbol and the moniker 'Balsahebanchi Shiv Sena' is devoid of the weight that the word 'Thackeray' carries in Maharashtra, more so in the state's urbanised belts.
Equally interestingly, the 39 MLAs, who rebelled against party president Uddhav Thackeray and joined Shinde, have been making every effort to prove that they are the real inheritors of the Shiv Sena's late founder and Uddhav's father Bal Thackeray's legacy of strident Hindutva, but still couldn't get the Thackeray surname in its party's name.
"What they (the Shinde faction) have now is just Balasaheb (in the party name alloted by the Election Commission)," the SS-UBT's fiery Guhagar MLA Bhaskar Jadhav tells Prasanna D Zore/Rediff.com.
"We got the maan-niya (honourable) 'Thackeray' name. Any true Shiv Sainik addresses Balasaheb as 'Hinduhridaysamray Shiv Sena Pramukh maan-niya Balasaheb Thackeray'," adds Jadhav with pride.
Counters a cabinet minister from the Balsahebanchi Shiv Sena camp: "For us the word Balasaheb is the most sacrosanct and we are proud of what Balasaheb Thackeray did for Hindus and Hindutva in the country. We are glad the Election Commission gave us the name of our choice. We leave it to the people of the state to decide who truly represents Balasaheb's Hindutva."
It is this backdrop, and the fact that Mumbai and other municipal corporations in the state where the Shiv Sena holds sway, will be up for grabs in the days ahead, that the November 3 bypoll is likely to test the durability of political realignments in the state between the constituents of the MVA -- the SS-UBT, the Congress and the Nationalist Congress Party -- on one hand and the dynamics between Shinde's BSS and the Devendra Fadnavis-led BJP.
How the November 3 bypoll result pans out could also have an impact on the 2024 assembly election in Maharashtra, which NCP supremo Sharad Pawar believes could be advanced and held simultaneously with the Gujarat elections later this year.
This, though, may seem a distant possibility right now given that the BrihanMumbai Municipal Corporation -- India's richest municipality -- is also overdue for an election this December, political commentators add.
"There is not enough time. Either the Election Commission will have to postpone the BMC election so that assembly elections in the state and Gujarat could be held simultaneously. If that happens the BJP in the state could suffer a heavy setback. The people in Maharashtra would then see through the BJP's machinations. I doubt if the central BJP leadership will take such a bold gamble when already the sympathy factor favours Uddhav," says a political observer.
"We (the BJP and BSS) are all set to trounce Uddhav Thackeray and his Shiv Sena in the BMC election. Why should we engage in histrionics that will backfire on us?" asks a Mumbai MLA from the Shinde faction over-ruling the possibility of simultaneous assembly elections in Maharashtra and Gujarat.
This MLA, however, seemed reluctant to bet on the BJP-BSS winning the Andheri (East) November 3 bypoll. "Let's see," he says, when asked to predict the bypoll result.
This reluctance stems from how the SS-UBT, at the micro-level, is grounded in the assembly segment that will see a colourful, yet bitter, contest between Rutuja Latke and Murji Patel.
In the 2019 assembly election, which incidentally was jointly fought by the SS-BJP alliance, Latke's husband Ramesh, who died due to a heart attack in Dubai in May, trounced Patel from this seat by a margin 17,000 votes in a quadrangular contest then between the Shiv Sena, Murji Patel, Congress and Prakash Ambedkar's Bahujan Vanchit Aghadi.
The Congress' Amin Jagdish Kutty polled roughly 28,000 votes with NOTA standing at over 4,000 votes.
Murji Patel, who ditched the Congress and joined the BJP in 2015, had contested and won the 2017 BMC election, along with his wife Kesarben, as BJP candidates. But as the assembly seat fell into the Shiv Sena's lap for the 2019 assembly election, Patel contested as an Independent and lost to Latke.
"The NCP and Congress have voluntarily decided not to field a candidate in this election and that says it all," a confident Bhaskar Jadhav says about who he thinks is likely to win the bypoll.
"It will be interesting to see how many Shiv Sena voters vote against (Rutuja Ramesh) Latke just because she will also get votes from the Congress and NCP supporters. If she wins with a landslide, then the Shinde camp and BJP will have to rethink their strategy of cornering Uddhav over sidelining Balasaheb's Hindutva legacy," says the afore-quoted political observer.
"But what if she loses to Patel?" asks the Mumbai MLA from the BSS camp. "Then it would be Uddhavsaheb's turn to rethink their unholy, unnatural, nexus with the Congress and NCP."
"Nobody knows the mood of the people in the state right now. It's too early to call it, but whoever wins the November 3 bypoll may not necessarily reflect how Shiv Sena supporters look at the two-and-half-year MVA government or their coming together for the Andheri (East) election," says one astute observer of Maharastra politics.
"But the margin of victory or loss would definitely make both camps rethink their strategies for the 2024 assembly election in the state," he adds.
"I see a groundswell of sympathy in Thackeray's favour," declares an MLA from SS-UBT camp.
"The people of the state will vote for Uddhavji's Shiv Sena overwhelmingly given the way Balasaheb's legacy is being decimated -- the name of the party he founded, its election symbol being frozen -- by the Election Commission of India under political pressure," he says.
"The freeze was shocking," says Jadhav reacting to the EC's decision. "We will fight the election (November 3 bypoll with Mashaal as the symbol) but the EC has done a grave injustice and we will fight it out in court," adds Jadhav about the SS-UBT's plea in the Delhi high court against the ECI freeze.
"Everybody knows who is responsible for such humiliation of Balasaheb's Hindutva and legacy," says Jadhav.
"This is somewhat a blessing in disguise for us. The Shiv Sena is a cadre-based party; we immediately started our Mashaal processions; we will fight out this injustice," he adds.
Arvind Sawant, the Shiv Sena's Mumbai South MP, is more strident in his criticism of the EC.
"It (the freeze over party symbol) was expected. But it was shocking they (the EC) even froze the party name," says Sawant.
"One more institution has been destroyed by the BJP. We had told the EC that it was the BJP's plan to have our party name and election symbol frozen," says Sawant. "Why freeze our symbol when the Shinde camp is not fighting the (November 3) election?"