Periodically, the BJP tried to spread rumours of the mismanagement of Corona cases in the state. However, the figures were high only because Maharashtra government was not hiding them unlike other states like Gujarat or Uttar Pradesh.
Unlike those other states, again, he provided for the migrant labour both food and shelter, and when the second wave arrived, the oxygen crisis in other states showed up the efficiency of his administration which did not allow a single patient to suffer or die because of the lack of that resource.
Then, again, when Devendra Fadnavis, in his usual fashion hit below the belt (as he had with Sharad Pawar earlier) declaring him too old and sick to govern, Uddhav rose from his spinal surgery to take over the reins of the government again and it was business as usual with no crisis before or after.
It says much of him that he did not cave in to threats by the ED. Clearly, there was not much to be found personally against him or his family, including distant relatives who were constantly harassed by the central agency. He also did not sway from his redefinition of Hindutva as a liberal Sarva Dharma Sambhav kind of Hinduism. This is what frightened the BJP most because, married to the sentiment of Marathi pride, the BJP could lose a substantial chunk of its Hindutva vote.
What is Bal Thackeray’s Hindutva that Eknath Shinde talks about and what he wants his party to follow? It was an opportunistic kind of ideology. Thackeray went rabid about Hindutva when he sensed Hindu ire with Muslim appeasement, he called for a school or hospital to be built in Ayodhya instead of a temple when he found Muslims voted for his party despite its involvement in the Bombay riots, he called for the disenfranchisement of Muslims when he discovered they had stopped voting for his party for its association with the BJP after the 2002 Gujarat riots and, unable to break up the alliance, he did the next best thing – defied the BJP and voted against its–and for the Congress’s– presidential candidate, both in 2007 and 2012.
Uddhav has now taken away the opportunity to label him as anti-Hindutva by renaming both Aurangabad and Osmanabad as Sambhajinagar and Dharashiv respectively. It was his last cabinet decision and that the Congress and NCP went along with it says much about the growing feeling among all non-BJP parties that they must resist BJP’s Hindutva and avoid charges of Muslim appeasement.
