Maha Vikas Aghadi (MVA) minister Nawab Malik’s arrest has taken the Shiv Sena-Bharatiya Janata Party conflict on expected lines as the BJP is playing the Hindutva card loud and clear, challenging CM Uddhav Thackeray to not defend a minority leader, who is alleged to have links with Dawood Ibrahim, a fugitive don and mastermind of Mumbai’s serial bomb blasts of 1993, after which the Sena became a force to reckon with in the state and came to power in alliance with the BJP in 1995. The BJP has tried to put the Sena in a fix by invoking the CM’s late father and Sena founder Balasaheb Thackeray, a fierce Dawood critic. Thackeray senior had side-tracked the Sena’s Marathi Manoos agenda and embraced a new political line to become the champion of Hindutva.

In the wake of Malik’s arrest, the BJP has reiterated, very aggressively, a charge against Uddhav that he has completely departed from the Hindutva that was his father’s hallmark. It says Malik is fit for removal from the Cabinet, whereas the MVA thinks otherwise. Malik will not resign until the ‘politically motivated’ charges against him are proved, the MVA has said. Uddhav Thackeray’s recent outburst made clear that as far as the law enforcement actions against the MVA colleagues and their associates are concerned, there is no way out but to fight legally as well as in the democratic manner of electioneering. He seems to have challenged the BJP to bring it on—the BJP’s plank of the Hindu-Muslim polarisation in the civic election of Mumbai, where one in every four people is a Muslim. The Sena has been extending an olive branch to the minorities, particularly Muslims, who split their loyalty between the Congress, which has maximum MLAs from the community, followed by the NCP and Samajwadi Party in the 2019 elections. The AIMIM lost a seat to the Sena. NCP city president Malik is one of the Muslim MLAs who has returned to the house repeatedly.