When Maharashtra deputy CM Eknath Shinde stood before his Shiv Sena’s workers on the original party’s 60th foundation day and called himself a tiger, he was drawing on a deep strand of imagery in Maharashtra politics. Bal Thackeray, himself a cartoonist, was often portrayed as a roaring tiger — the cherished logo of the Shiv Sena he founded. This was Shinde’s latest claim to Bal Thackeray’s iron-fist legacy.
And it came in the middle of his not-so-veiled bid to further split the Sena of his mentor’s son Uddhav Thackeray, four years after he took away most of the party’s MLAs, the name and symbol.
The roaring tiger was synonymous with the undivided party from its earliest years, as it grew from a social outfit seeking jobs for the Marathi manoos (common person) in the 1960s and ’70s into a regional political force from the 1980s onwards.
The bid now to poach six of Uddhav-led Shiv Sena (UBT)’s nine Lok Sabha MPs has reportedly been code-named ‘Operation Tiger’ by the Shinde camp. Team Uddhav’s retorts also draw from the animal kingdom.
What Shinde said, how Team Uddhav retorted
“This tiger is in front of you,” Shinde told party workers on Friday, news agency ANI reported. Then came some canine intervention. “Kuttey jhund mein aake bhaunkte hain, sher akela aata hai — dogs bark in packs, but a lion comes alone,” he further said.
Shinde also defended his decision to split the Sena in 2022-23. “People support the decision we took four years ago,” he said.
He moved to other animals at this point: “A wolf wearing a tiger’s skin does not become a tiger. Four years ago, these same wolves had threatened me saying, ‘You’ll have to come to Mumbai,’ ‘You’ll have to pass through Worli.’ Does anyone own Mumbai?”
The response from Sena (UBT) came on social media, with some biting metaphors. Rajya Sabha MP Sanjay Raut posted an image on X with Hindi text translating to: “Some people are dogs indeed, but they are not loyal.”
He captioned it: “Jai Maharashtra.”
History of references
The tiger reference has a running history in this particular political feud. When a similar ‘Operation Tiger’ scare had arisen in an earlier episode — the Shinde camp claiming several UBT MPs were in touch — it was Arvind Sawant, the party’s Lok Sabha leader, who had dismissed it with the phrase “Tiger zinda hai”, ‘the tiger is alive’, borrowing the title of the 2017 Salman Khan blockbuster in which Khan’s character, a secret agent, survives against the odds.
This time, with the rebellion no longer a rumour, Sawant’s tone also changed. “Who is the tiger? Are only incompetent people tigers? The media is creating all this hype,” he told reporters.
Uddhav’s son Aaditya Thackeray, posting on X, directed his fire at the rebel MPs without metaphors but with no dearth of adjectives.
“Once again, we are witnessing a shocking example of filthy politics,” he said. “These shameless, ungrateful, and corrupt individuals — those who won in 2024 because of certain people — are now betraying them.”
The Shinde camp’s stated explanation for the rebellion is a claim that Raut had said regional parties should join the Congress. Clarifying the theory based on Raut’s remarks on broader national opposition, Uddhav Thackeray rejected any such reading at his Friday event to mark the original Sena’s foundation. “The Shiv Sena was not born to merge with anyone,” he told party workers. “It was created to fight for the rights of Marathi people and protect Hindutva.”
The Hindutva charge sits at the core of almost everything Shinde has said since June 2022 as logic for his rebellion. Back then, posting on social media from Guwahati with the hashtag #HindutvaForever as he led the rebellion, Shinde called the Sena-NCP-Congress alliance of the time “unnatural”.
Of the MLAs with him, he’d said they had gone with him to Guwahati in BJP-ruled Assam “on their own and for their mission of Hindutva”. He’d added, “They are here for the ideals of Hindutva, ideals of Balasaheb.” The rebels’ central objection was Uddhav Thackeray’s 2019 decision to ally with the Congress and the NCP to form the MVA government, after breaking away from “natural ideological ally” BJP. Shinde argued that had compromised the Hindutva ideology championed by Sena founder Bal Thackeray. Four years on, the six rebel MPs cited the same fear — of being taken towards the Congress — as a reason for their move.
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