Ahead of the crucial civic polls in the State, Maharashtra Navnirman Sena chief Raj Thackeray, in party re-building mode, began a registration drive for fresh recruits in Pune on Thursday.
Mr. Thackeray, who has inched closer to the Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) in recent times short of openly allying with the saffron party, appealed to youth to join the MNS in great numbers.
“Till now, recruitment drives had been done in Mumbai. As per the rules of the Election Commission, a political party is to carry out recruitment drives every three-four years. Hence, this exercise in registrations of new members,” said Mr. Thackeray.
The MNS chief said that the new members would be getting weekly updates regarding party affairs on their mobile phones.
Cannily playing both the ‘Hindutva’ and the regional ‘Marathi manoos’ (sons-of-the-soil) cards, every registered member had a tagline in their card which said “I am a custodian of Hindutva ideals and a servant of Maharashtra”.
Just before the pandemic and the COVID-19 induced lockdown, Mr. Thackeray had attempted a similar exercise in a bid to revive his party’s sagging fortunes in the State by holding a two-day ‘conclave’ of his senior party leaders, office-bearers and party workers.
Following its rout in the 2019 Maharashtra Assembly election and its general decline in the State’s politics, the MNS had changed its ideological direction by veering towards ‘Hindutva’ politics, signalled by Mr. Thackeray’s adoption of a saffron flag incorporating Chhatrapati Shivaji’s royal seal or ‘Rajmudra’ in 2020.
Since then, Raj Thackeray’s party has moved ever closer to the BJP in an attempt to seize the ‘Hindutva’ space from the Shiv Sena led by his estranged cousin Uddhav Thackeray after the latter fell out with the BJP to ally with the ideologically opposed NCP and the Congress and form the ‘Maha Vikas Aghadi’ (MVA).
In April this year, Mr. Thackeray, continuing with his hard ‘Hindutva’ line, had caused a furore by demanding that the erstwhile MVA government dismantle loudspeakers before mosques else his MNS party workers would do so by force and play the Hanuman Chalisa.
This prompted the MVA to brand the MNS as a ‘b-team’ of the BJP – a suggestion which the latter party has vehemently denied.
“Till now, recruitment drives had been done in Mumbai”Raj ThackerayMaharashtra Navnirman Sena chief
