Shiv Sena leader Bal Thackeray died
at his home in Mumbai on Saturday after months of illness. He was 86.
He breathed his last at 3:30pm, his doctor declared. Thackeray had not
been keeping well since July when he was admitted to the Lilavati
Hospital where he was being treated for
ailments related to both the lungs and pancreas.
Bal Thackeray was born on January 23,
1926 to Ramabai and Keshav Thackeray, a social reformer and journalist.
Thackeray, the eldest of nine siblings, lost his mother when he was
young and he had to abandon his studies because of financial
difficulties.
Thackeray started his career as a
cartoonist with the Free Press Journal newspaper in Mumbai. Following
differences with the newspaper’s management, he quit and started his own
magazine called Marmik which he used to highlight the “injustice being
done to sons of the soil” in jobs available in Mumbai.
In 1966, Thackeray formed Shiv Sena to
further his ‘Marathis first’ agenda. The Sena came in for severe
criticism for its violent agitations and was accused of parochial
politics. Using the Marathi card, Thackeray managed to build a vote
bank. His party emerged as a formidable political force when it won
power in the Mumbai civic body in 1973. The next two decades saw the
Sena spreading in neighbouring cities.
In the late 1980s and early 1990s as the
Sangh Parivar stepped up its Hindutva agenda, Thackeray hopped on to
the bandwagon and adopted a hardline Hindu ideology. As the incumbent
Congress government in Maharashtra became unpopular in the early 1990s,
the Sena and its ally the BJP won power in the 1995 assembly elections.
However, the saffron combine lost power in 1999 and has failed to win it
back since then. Thackeray suffered a setback when his nephew Raj
Thackeray split from the Shiv Sena in 2006 to form the Maharashtra
Navnirman Sena. Raj’s party took away a large chunk of Sena’s Marathi
votebank.
An unhappy Thackeray wanted his son Uddhav, the Sena’s executive president, and Raj to reconcile.
On October 24, during a Dussera rally in
Mumbai, the Sena chief had addressed Shiv Sainiks in a pre-recorded
video address where he announced his retirement from public life.
Too sad to hear.the great tiger lost his life.may god bless the real tiger of maharashtra...he has created a history....