Uddhav Thackeray’s two mistakes that cost him dearly

Mumbai: Former Chief Minister Uddhav Thackeray is getting into more and more trouble. First, he lost the government, and then he lost the Shiv Sena party. There is buzz that he could lose party funds as well as some offices. All this is happening after Eknath Shinde, his once trusted colleague, rebelled against him. 

Observers and legal experts believe that the current political wrangle of the Shiv Sena is due to two key mistakes Uddhav made. 

First mistake

First mistake was the change of party constitution in 2018. With this amendment, he held all the rights to decide electors for the party president election. In other words, the party president decided who the voters for his post would be. The Election Commission of India, in its order favouring Chief Minister Eknath Shinde, said that it’s against the spirit of inter-party democracy. 

Second mistake

The second mistake Uddhav made was the delay in taking action against the Eknath Shinde faction. When Shinde left for Surat in the middle of the night on June 20, 2022, immediately after voting in the Legislative Council polls, Uddhav should have expelled him and his 15 other MLA colleagues. This would have at most shrunk his party on the floor of the House, but would have saved his legacy as the expelled group could not have claimed the party as theirs. 

The delay in action gave courage to other MLAs to join hands with rebels, who later called themselves the real Shiv Sena, which has now been endorsed by the Election Commission of India. At least not making the second mistake would have saved Uddhav from the current embarrassment.