Eknath Sinde
Eknath Shinde sat next to Fadnavis when he appeared to the media in Maharashtra on June 30 and justified overthrowing Thackeray’s administration by telling a lie. He stated: “The BJP-Shiv Sena coalition, which had fought the election jointly under the direction of Prime Minister Narendra Modi, received a resounding victory in Maharashtra in 2019. During the election campaign, Modi-ji had stated that the BJP would have a chief minister. But Uddhav Thackeray’s Shiv Sena disregarded this mandate by forming an illegal government with the NCP and Congress.”
One must examine the ‘Shock and Awe’ tactic the United States used to invade Iraq in March 2003 in order to comprehend the significance and ramifications of what the Bharatiya Janata Party has done in Maharashtra, with astonishing instant success but long-term ignominy. American President George W. Bush, assisted by Donald Rumsfeld, his tough-talking secretary of defence, ordered the invasion of Iraq with significant military power in a blitzkrieg not seen since the end of the Second World War. The resistance to Saddam Hussein was paralysed, and in the end, the Iraqi president was slain in an embarrassing way.
The authors of this rapid dominance strategy, Harlan K. Ullman and James P. Wade, define it as a method of imposing “overwhelming level of Shock and Awe against an adversary on an immediate or sufficiently timely basis to paralyse its will to carry on… [to] seize control of the environment and paralyse or so overload an adversary’s perceptions and understanding of events that the enemy would be incapable of resistance at the tactical and strategic levels.”
This raises a significant query, the resolution of which Fadnavis would find challenging: “Why has the BJP given Eknath Shinde the position of chief minister in 2022 if the BJP and Shiv Sena had an agreement that the Chief Minister would come from the BJP in 2019? Why refused the BJP to let Uddhav Thackeray to lead a BJP-Sena coalition government in 2019? After all, the Shiv Sena’s decision to break ties with the BJP was motivated only by its assertion that the latter had consented to award its coalition partner the Chief Ministership.”
We don’t know whether the assertion and denial on the agreement between the BJP and the Sena when they jointly campaigned for office in 2019 are true. But there is one thing we can be certain of: the BJP has fully betrayed the will of the people of Maharashtra by installing Eknath Shinde as the state’s chief minister. Eknath Shinde lacks even the barest semblance of authority to lead the administration. He never had any supporters outside of Thane, his hometown. A dummy Chief Minister who can be entirely controlled by Fadnavis in Mumbai and remotely managed by Shah in Delhi has been installed by the BJP. It began by engaging in horse trade on a scale that was unusual for India and never before seen in Maharashtra.
Those who believe Uddhav Thackeray’s political career is gone and the Shiv Sena is currently wiped out are manifestly erroneous. Keeping his party together may have been one of his failings, particularly when he was absent. But because of his composed and capable leadership throughout the Covid issue, he received a great deal of praise from all corners of the social and political spectrum. Additionally, the shady manner in which his government was overthrown wounded Maharashtra’s “asmita” (socio-cultural ethos) and the pride of “Marathi Manoos” greatly. Shinde’s tenure in office won’t be long. That much is true. When that occurs, the BJP will be the one who will be astonished to see the remains of the democratic building it secretly destroyed.
