Declawing The Tiger: How BJP Dismantled Shiv Sena’s Dominance in Maharashtra Politics

To understand the politics of Maharashtra, one must rewind to the sweltering summer of 1995. Decades after the formation of the state, the Congress party had treated the Maharashtra Legislative Assembly like a personal fiefdom. But on that victory day in 1995, the unthinkable happened. The Assembly complex echoed with the guttural roar of ‘Jai Maharashtra’.

The Shiv Sena, the firebrand regional outfit founded by cartoonist-turned-demagogue Bal Thackeray, had reached its zenith. Alongside its ally, the Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP), the Sena had stormed to power, winning 73 seats of its own in the 1995 Assembly elections. The alliance’s total crossed the majority mark, and Manohar Joshi became the first non-Congress chief minister of the state and from the Shiv Sena. For Bal Thackeray, sitting in his bungalow Matoshree in the heart of Bandra, this was the ultimate coronation. He wasn’t just a fringe player anymore; he was the Hindu Hriday Samrat (Emperor of Hindu Hearts) who held the remote control of the state government.

In the crowded chawls and mills of Mumbai and the industrial belts of Thane, the Sena perfected the art of the Marathi manoos (Marathi people). The party promised jobs, housing and dignity for the local population against the perceived onslaught of migrants from North India and the dominance of Gujarati and Marwari businessmen in the city’s commercial hubs.

“The Sena’s rise was fundamentally a rebellion of the Dalit and Other Backward Classes (OBCs) Marathis against the upper-caste Brahminical and Marwari control of Mumbai’s economy,” says Prakash Pawar, professor, political science, Fergusson College. “Balasaheb gave the common rickshaw-puller and the mill worker a sense of pride, clad in a khaki uniform. He wielded a sword and demanded respect.”

The vote bank was a churning mix. At its core was the Marathi-speaking Hindu, cutting across caste divides, from the powerful Maratha peasants to the impoverished Dhangar (shepherd) and Mali (gardener) communities. They were united by a shared linguistic pride and the fear of being overrun by outsiders. By controlling the Brihanmumbai Municipal Corporation (BMC) for decades, the Sena had turned the country’s richest civic body into a patronage machine, cementing its grassroots power.

While the Sena was the aggressive big brother in the 1990s, the BJP played the patient, strategic younger sibling in Maharashtra.

The BJP’s entry into serious electoral politics in Maharashtra wasn’t a sudden explosion; it was a slow, deliberate stitching of social fractures. In the 1980s, while the Shiv Sena was busy with their agitation against the migrants, the Rashtriya Swayamsevak Sangh (RSS) ideologue Vasantrao Bhagwat was doing serious maths. Bhagwat is often known as a mentor to top BJP leaders in the state, including Gopinath Munde and Pramod Mahajan, and developed the Ma-Dha-Va pattern to expand the party’s base among OBC communities.

Bhagwat realised that the Congress was the natural home of the Marathas. The BJP could not beat the Marathas directly. So, he activated the Ma-Dha-Va pattern, a strategic outreach to the Ma-li, Dha-ngar, and Va-njari (semi-nomadic trader) communities. These were the OBCs who felt ignored by the Congress.

If the Sena won through muscle and emotion, the BJP won through organisation. “The BJP played second fiddle to the Sena for years, swallowing their pride because they needed Balasaheb’s charisma to survive,” recalls Pawar. While the Sena held Shivrajyabhishek ceremonies, the BJP built shakhas in the rural hinterlands of Vidarbha and Marathwada, areas where the Sena’s Marathi manoos slogan didn’t work because the outsiders didn’t exist in those regions.

The alliance of convenience always had a power imbalance. The Sena treated the BJP as its B-team in the state. But the general elections of 2014 changed everything.

Narendra Modi became the prime minister, and for the first time, the BJP didn’t need the Sena’s crutch. For the Maharashtra Assembly polls that followed, the BJP decided to go it alone. The move shocked the Thackerays and the results were a political earthquake. The BJP won a staggering 122 seats in the 2014 Assembly elections. The Shiv Sena was reduced to 63 seats.

For the first time, the BJP successfully cracked the Maratha code. Devendra Fadnavis, a Brahmin, managed to pull the Maratha votes away from the Congress, while retaining the core OBC Ma-Dha-Va formula. They presented Modi not as a regional satrap, but as a national development icon. The Sena’s aggressive regionalism suddenly felt small, parochial and dated compared to Modi’s vikas purush image.

The Shiv Sena’s strength was always concentrated in the Konkan coast and the urban centres of Mumbai and Thane. Their vote bank was essentially the Hindu Marathi umbrella.

At the core of this support were the Marathi-speaking OBCs, along with the lower rung of the powerful Maratha caste. These were people who felt insecure about migration from North India and saw the Sena as their protector.

However, the Sena had a major weakness. It never had genuine rural penetration. In the sugarcane belts of western Maharashtra, which are the heartland of the Maratha caste, the Sena was always treated as a guest, never as the owner. This urban-centric focus meant that while the Sena could dominate the city corporations, it could never claim to speak for the entire state.

In contrast, the BJP built a much wider Hindu umbrella that was demographically and geographically more diverse. First, the BJP captured the upper castes, including the Brahmins and the Chandraseniya Kayastha Prabhus. These communities had always disliked the Sena’s reputation for aggressive street politics, but they deeply loved the Sena’s Hindutva ideology. The BJP offered them a cleaner, more respectable version of the same religion-based politics.

Second, the BJP mastered the art of OBC consolidation. It successfully convinced communities like the Dhangars and the Malis that the Shiv Sena was using them merely as foot soldiers for rallies, but was denying them proper election tickets and real political power. The BJP promised them representation in the legislature and a seat at the table.

Third, the BJP cleverly exploited the split in the urban Marathi vote. By 2014, Raj Thackeray’s Maharashtra Navnirman Sena (MNS) had eaten into the Sena’s most hardcore, extremist Marathi manoos base. While the Sena and the MNS were busy fighting each other over who was more loyal to the local Marathi identity, the BJP quietly walked away with the urban aspirational voter, the middle-class professional, who wanted development, roads and jobs, not just slogans about migrants. This three-pronged strategy allowed the BJP to break the Sena’s once unshakeable hold over Maharashtra’s politics.

The Sena never recovered from the 2014 jolt. Even when they patched up, the equation was reversed. The BJP was the senior partner.

In 2019, when the Sena refused to accept the junior role and demanded a rotational chief ministership, the BJP did the unthinkable. They let the government fall. In a stunning power play, the BJP orchestrated a split in 2022. Eknath Shinde, a Sena leader, broke the party and walked away with the majority of MLAs to join hands with the BJP.

The tiger had been declawed and the BJP didn’t just defeat the Shiv Sena; they dismantled it from within. Today, the original Shiv Sena (Uddhav Balasaheb Thackeray) sits in the Opposition corner, watching the BJP and the Shinde faction rule. The peak days of the 1990s are a distant memory, replaced by a hard reality.

In the game of Indian politics, the national bulldozer has no permanent friends, only permanent ambitions.

Jinit Parmar is a senior correspondent, outlook. He is based in Mumbai