Tiger's cub

A biography of Uddhav Thackeray does not explain the new trajectory of the Shiv Sena under a brand of leadership quite different from his charismatic father's

Governing Mumbai since 1985, the Shiv Sena was founded in 1966. It began with the “Maharashtra for Maharashtrians” slogan and rooted its mobilisation strategy in seeking to define such an animal — the Maharashtrian.

But there was a problem with this strategy — it excluded linguistic groups that might have been Shiv Sena-minded but found themselves left out, such as the migrants from Gujarat, Uttar Pradesh and coastal Karnataka.

To tweak this was easy for the Shiv Sena. It retained its USP — direct action, militant vision and aggressive rhetoric — and merely expanded the constituency to which it was addressed. By