After his rebellion led to a split in Shiv Sena and catapulted him to the chief minister’s post, one of the unlikely men now tasked with stemming any further erosion in the party ranks in Eknath Shinde’s stronghold is Rajan Baburao Vichare.
The two-term Lok Sabha MP from Thane has been appointed as the chief whip of Sena in the lower house, replacing Bhavana Gawali, who is considered close to Shinde and his coalition partner, the Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP).
When most of the leaders in the party’s Thane unit deserted Uddhav Thackeray, 61-year-old Vichare stood firmly with him. On Thursday, 66 corporators in the Thane Municipal Corporation (TMC) led by Mayor Naresh Mhaske joined Shinde. The only corporator who has remained steadfast with Sena so far is Vichare’s wife Nandini.
Thackeray is looking up to Vichare to rebuild the party in Thane.
Like Mumbai, the satellite city of Thane too is central to its politics. In 1967, just a year after its launch, Sena got its first municipal chief in Maharashtra from Thane — Vasantrao Marathe. It was Thane district that gave Sena some of its first-generation frontline leaders like Anand Dighe, Satish Pradhan, Ganesh Naik, and Shabir Shaikh.
A senior Sena leader said a sizeable section of party workers is still with Thackeray, but they need to have a face in Thane so that those who have chosen not to go with Shinde could work under their leadership to revive the local unit. Either Vichare could be the face or he could handle the situation on ground, the leader added.
There are many parallels between Shinde and Vichare. Like Shinde, Vichare too was among the Shiv Sainiks mentored by the late strongman Anand Dighe whose larger-than-life image looms over the party and its politics in Thane even today. The two also cut their teeth in municipal politics.
Like Shinde, who was an autorickshaw driver, Vichare too began as a blue-collar worker before rising in the ranks and became a corporator in 1992. The four-term corporator was Mayor of Thane in 2005, and in 2009, was elected to the assembly.
However, this is where the similarities end — Shinde has a stronger mass base than Vichare.
“Though Vichare does not have a mass following, he may help lessen the damage to the party in Thane and nearby areas. There is a section in Sena which was upset at Shinde’s single-handed dominance over its affairs in the region, and they may coalesce around Vichare… around 80% of the organisation in Thane has left with Shinde, but the city is the epicenter of this revolt. The damage is lower in areas away from the city,” a Sena functionary, who did not wish to be named, said.
He also said that so far, Gopal Landge and Prakash Patil, Sena’s district chiefs for Thane and rural Thane respectively, and former Kalyan Rural MLA Subhash Bhoir had still been with Thackeray.
After Dighe’s demise in a road accident in 2001, Raghunath More was made the district chief of the party. It was then that Shinde and Vichare began asserting themselves. Even later, the two were said to be in a cold war for control of the party’s local affairs, with Owala-Majiwada MLA Pratap Sarnaik, who is now with Shinde, being the third point in this axis. Shinde eventually trumped over Vichare and Sarnaik with Thackeray’s support as the casting vote in this intra-party war.
In 2014, Vichare trounced Sanjeev Naik of the Nationalist Congress Party to get elected to parliament from Thane, though this victory was largely attributed to the Narendra Modi wave. Shinde’s son Shrikant was contesting from the neighboring constituency and Sainiks loyal to Vichare grumbled how men and resources from Thane had been diverted to Kalyan for this election.
In 2015, Vichare found himself in the news when he force-fed a Muslim catering supervisor during the month of Ramzan to protest the quality of food at the New Maharashtra Sadan in New Delhi.
When Shinde launched his rebellion on June 20, it was believed that Vichare would stand by him as all six assembly constituencies in his Lok Sabha segment are represented either by MLAs from the BJP or those supporting Shinde. However, Sena’s decision to nominate Vichare as the chief whip shows that he is with the party and its president.
A senior Sena leader, requesting anonymity, said Vichare was unlikely to join Shinde as he considered himself his senior in the organisation. “Vichare was actually closer to Dighe than Shinde. In 2001, when Shinde was appointed as the leader of the house in the TMC, he replaced Vichare. This was because Shinde had lost two of his children and Dighe wanted him to overcome that personal tragedy,” he said.