International Breaking News

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.