Eknath Shinde is now chief minister in pact with the BJP, the umbrella Hindutva party.
When Eknath Shinde and fellow Shiv Sena mutineers were still camping in faraway Guwahati -- the endgame still about a week away -- posters came up in his stronghold of Thane near Mumbai, showing him with two other men. One was Bal Thackeray -- the Sena founder whose son he has unseated, but whose ideology he lays claim to -- and the other was a man named Anand Dighe.
These are two key protagonists in the story of Eknath Shinde, a political thriller with the Hindutva-Maratha ideology as a running thread.
Eknath Shinde may now be seen as the man who divided the Sena but three decades ago he had all the elements that made the party what it is, or was. A Maratha by community, auto-rickshaw driver by profession, and a union leader who could rally people, Mr Shinde was a Shiv Sainik who could command an area, and not just win an election.
And his political rise in the 1990s coincided with Bal Thackeray embracing Hindutva to make a statewide push and gain a nationwide image. But the story -- which saw a thrilling twist today as Eknath Shinde became Chief Minister -- has a background, of the rise of a party and a leader.
Though it came a big player much later, the Shiv Sena, born in 1966 -- two years after Eknath Shinde was born in Satara district -- was powerful in the Mumbai-Thane region by the 1970s, which is when the Shinde family moved to Thane.
As a child from a family with limited means and married relatively early, Eknath Shinde worked odd jobs, including a stint as an auto-rickshaw driver that's part of his image to this day. He also managed to make a name as a union leader.
Meanwhile, Bal Thackeray was adding some sting to his union-based Maratha identity politics, embracing the new-fanged Hindutva fervour that had gripped the country from the 1980s. He even made it his primary pitch for an assembly bypoll in 1987.
An alliance with the umbrella Hindutva party, the BJP, was stitched up too, and the Sena had its first chief minister in Maharashtra, Manohar Joshi in 1995. Two years later, Eknath Shinde got his political start too. He won his first election to the Thane municipal corporation in 1997. By 2005, he had become an MLA and the Thane district president of the Shiv Sena.
But between these events, two tragedies defined his life.
In the year 2000, two younger ones of his three sons died in a boat accident. His eldest son, Shrikant Shinde, is now a two-time Lok Sabha member. At a TV channel event some years ago, Eknath Shinde said that apart from his wife Lata Shinde and the family, it was Anand Dighe who supported him in that difficult time. Their bond became stronger than ever, he said, crediting Anand Dighe with bringing out the leader in him.
Mr Dighe, a mass leader known for aggressive stances on Hindutva and whose fandom lives on, died of a heart attack in 2001. He was 50. Eknath Shinde was about half his age and became his heir.
He became MLA in 2004. The year after that, he got the powerful post that Mr Dighe once held -- Thane district president of the Shiv Sena.
He won two more elections and became leader of opposition briefly when the BJP broke up with the Sena in 2014. When they patched up days later, Mr Shinde became a minister in the BJP-Sena government. This was the year the BJP emerged on the national scene. Though anti-corruption and development were multipliers, Hindutva backers saw Narendra Modi's rise as the true emergence of the ideology on the national scene.
Bal Thackeray had died two years earlier and the Shiv Sena was a junior partner of the umbrella Hindutva party. By 2018, differences emerged and Uddhav Thackeray even claimed the party will fight elections on "genuine Hindutva". But the formal breakup was still a year away. In 2019 -- despite having fought the elections together with the BJP -- the Shiv Sena dumped the BJP to form a government with the NCP and Congress, parties seen as being from the opposite end of the spectrum.
Eknath Shinde, who had won a fourth time, became a minister in this Maha Vikas Aghadi government too, holding key portfolios. He was also the "guardian minister" for Thane.
But he claims now that the Shiv Sena had moved away from its Hindutva-Maratha ideology, and that he felt that all along.
Uddhav Thackeray's urbane outlook and a lower score on the Hindutva scale were always visibly different from those of Mr Shinde and the likes who once formed the core of the Sena.
That core was on his mind when he claimed the legacy of Bal Thackeray and Anand Dighe. And that's why he claimed that the rebels only wanted a patch-up with "natural ally" BJP.
While Uddhav Thackeray called it an alibi and chose to resign -- though not without making some last moves to claim the legacy -- Eknath Shinde vowed to further "Balasaheb Thackeray's ideology" when he embraced the BJP. At 58, he is now the chief minister and continues to claim that his is the real Shiv Sena, but that's a fight not yet over.