It will be premature to assess Chief Minister Uddhav Thackeray as an administrator and policy maker, but in his first-ever legislative session in Nagpur he has made an impression, that he will take head-on the Bharatiya Janata Party-led Opposition's political bid of cutting him a sorry figure. Thackeray came to the winter session with the handicap of zero experience in transacting legislative business. When he was accused of not following legislative norms, he defused criticism admitting that he was still learning the process and swiftly switched to attacking the BJP through playing-to-the-gallery speeches. If we take out the verbal exchange between Thackeray and ex-CM Devendra Fadnavis from the Nagpur session, there was nothing else to write about.

BJP kept hammering its anti-Sena agenda throughout the session. It attempted to project that the Sena had breached the people's trust and mandate to go with the election ally by entering into an 'unholy' alliance with the Congress and Nationalist Congress Party who sat in the treasury benches under the banner of Maha Vikas Aghadi. It challenged Thackeray's Hindutva over a pact with secular parties and the Savarkar issue, and also probed the frenemy's nationalism over the Citizenship Amendment Act. Sena had already invited Congress's ire by voting for CAB in the Lok Sabha and later did some risk management through a symbolic gesture of abstaining from voting in the Rajya Sabha. It was a balancing act, which not only gained the Sena some Hindutva points, but also saved it a showdown with the Congress, which has been trying to tell the world that it would have Sena's saffron DNA under control by holding the on-off switch to the MVA. Essentially, the BJP has been trying to create a rift between the Sena and Congress. In the Savarkar controversy, Sena outsmarted BJP by posing some uncomfortable questions that have gone unanswered in the past, too.