SC To Hear Uddhav Thackeray’s Plea For Use Of ‘Shiv Sena’ Name, Symbol In Local Polls On July 14

The Vacation Bench has scheduled the hearing for July 14 as Shiv Sena (UBT) leader Uddhav Thackeray approached the Supreme Court on Wednesday July 2, 2025, to urgently hear an application to let his faction use the party name ‘Shiv Sena’ with its reserved symbol of ‘bow and arrow’ and the ‘saffron flag with two horizontal conical ends’ with the emblem of ‘roaring tiger’ for the forthcoming Maharashtra local body elections.

He made an urgent citation before a Vacation Bench of Justices M.M. Sundresh and Vinod Chandran, senior advocate Devadatt Kamat for Thackeray, said the State Deputy Chief Minister Eknath Shinde and his group must be restrained from using the party name, the reserved symbol and the flag with the emblem.

Kamat submitted that voters consider these emblems as the “pious” markings of the original ‘Shiv Sena’ party.

In an application to the Supreme Court, Uddhav Thackeray stated that the symbols ‘bow and arrow’, the ‘saffron flag’, and the ‘roaring tiger’ represent the  essence of the original Shiv Sena since 1985, a party that has consistently earned public support.

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After Eknath Shinde and his supporters split from the undivided Shiv Sena, then led by Thackeray, the Election Commission of India (ECI) assigned the party name and its reserved symbol to Mr. Shinde’s faction in February 2023. 

Thackeray challenged this decision, and the case has been pending in the Supreme Court for two years.

On July 2, 2025, Thackeray filed an application urging the apex court to instruct the ECI to give a different name and symbol to Shinde’s faction for the upcoming local elections in Maharashtra, covering 27 municipal corporations, 232 municipal councils, and 125 nagar panchayats.

Senior advocate Kapil Sibal, representing Thackeray, cited a similar precedent from the Nationalist Congress Party (NCP) case. In that matter, the Supreme Court had permitted Ajit Pawar’s breakaway faction to use the original ‘clock’ symbol, provided a public notice clarified that the dispute over the symbol’s allocation was still under judicial consideration. 

Sibal argued that a similar temporary arrangement should be made in the Shiv Sena case, given the approaching elections. He stressed that once elections are notified, changes to symbols cannot be requested and urged the court to hear the application by next week.

Meanwhile, the counsel for Shinde countered that both Lok Sabha and Vidhan Sabha elections had already been conducted without any change to the symbol or name, and that the court had refused a similar plea from Thackeray on May 7.

Notably, the Supreme Court had earlier, on May 6, directed that the long-pending local body elections in Maharashtra be delayed due to litigation on OBC reservation and must be completed within four months. 

Following this, the state government, on June 6, instructed officials to begin drafting ward boundaries for 27 municipal corporations, marking the start of the election process.