At a time when he could have slammed the Congress-NCP coalition in the state left, right and centre, he failed to rise to the moment. He even failed to take advantage of the BJP-Shiv Sena split.
When Maharashtra Navnirman Sena debuted in state assembly elections in 2009, Raj Thackeray and his team won 13 out of 288 seats.
His party polled 11.88 percent of the votes in all the 143 seats that the party contested.
In Mumbai the MNS had received around 24 percent of the city’s votes, far ahead of the Shiv Sena and emerged as the second largest party in Mumbai with six seats. It had ensured the defeat of Sena-BJP candidates in 11 of the 36 constituencies in Mumbai and prevented the alliance from winning 26 of the 36 seats in the Mumbai, Thane region.
The party also ate into the BJP-Shiv Sena alliance by splitting the votes during the 2009 Lok Sabha elections.
Raj was immediately taken as a serious contender in the Maharshtra politics. He was seen as a man who could take on the Shiv Sena and legacy of Balasaheb whose son Uddav was nowhere near the charisma he exuberated.
This assembly elections, when Bhartiya Janata Party decided to go solo and discard its second fiddle position, MNS was standing in an arena with four corners already defined. It was a difficult task to find its footing but not impossible.
The MNS won just one seat in the battle. And now Raj Thackeray faces an existential crisis.
The reason behind his small stardom is his lack of an ideology different from Shiv Sena. The party failed to reinvent on the Marathi agenda and its ‘Marathi Manoos’ card failed due to the anti-incumbency against Congress and NCP.
In addition to this, Raj had an ambiguous stand on BJP. One day he was slamming the party, other day he was praising their leader.
Also, he played a bait which the Thackeray clan has never done. The MNS chief declared he would contest the Assembly elections. After Uddhav failed to rise to his bait, he changed his mind saying, “The entire state of Maharashtra is my constituency and I do not want to limit myself to just one constituency.”
At a time when he could have slammed the Congress-NCP coalition in the state left, right and centre, he failed to rise to the moment. He even failed to take advantage of the BJP-Shiv Sena split.
Now Raj Thackeray is left with one seat while BJP and Shiv Sena won the battle.
