And of his two successors, the one who follws/copies/apes the yesteryear Bal Thackeray is clearly Raj —from the way he dressed in those days, hand gestures, personal jibes at opponents and so on. Not Uddhav. However, one cannot brush aside the influence Thackeray continued to hold over his followers even in his death. As he parts, he may have given Sena the last push it needs to resurrect and go beyond holding the BMC (which incidentally is better than holding many small states).
In times of economic downturn, increasing crime rates and extreme poverty will the ideology become redundant or more forceful? One of the channels was showing a clip from Bal Thackeray saying, “There are only two castes, the rich and the poor. Don’t make the rich poor but make the poor rich.” If that was really what he believed in, I wonder how he left behind a much fractured city with a mind-numbing rich and poor divide. A city that houses more poor than anywhere else (albeit more rich than most places, too). A city, where Muslims still cannot find houses in residential housing societies. A city, where Marathis continue to move to farther suburbs of Thane district.