Uddhav Thackeray or Eknath Shinde? Shiv Sena UBT or Shiv Sena? Bow-and-arrow or torch?
The Supreme Court is scheduled this week to close one of the most consequential and controversial issues in Maharashtra politics – i.e., which faction will be recognised as the 'real' inheritor of patriarch Bal Thackeray's legacy, and be awarded the 'real' Sena name and symbol.
A bench of Chief Justice Surya Kant and Justice Joymalya Bagchi will hear final arguments over January 21 and 22, having noted in November 2025 the issue has been 'pending for a long time'.
In fact, the dispute has rumbled on for nearly four years now, from June 2022 when Shinde led 40 lawmakers from the (then undivided) Sena into an alliance with the Bharatiya Janata Party, cementing positions of power for himself and ensuring the break-up of the Maha Vikas Aghadi coalition government, a partnership Thackeray engineered after the 2019 Assembly election.
The split triggered an acrimonious squabble between the Shinde and Thackeray-led factions over rightful claims to the Shiv Sena name and the substantial political, ideological, and emotional capital it still carries, 14 years after Balasaheb's death.
But control over the name and bow-and-arrow symbol isn't just about branding, it is also about bargaining power for future polls, particularly with the 2029 federal election on the horizon.
How we got here
In 2022 Shinde came to Thackeray as the representative of a majority of the Sena MLAs – they were unhappy, he said, about the party's continuing alliance with the Congress and Nationalist Congress Party, both of which run on vastly different political ideologies compared to the Sena.
That gulf in ideology did raise eyebrows when the MVA was stitched together three years prior and those eyebrows remained raised all the way through to the Shinde rebellion.
Political machinations, including the obligatory 'resort politics', followed till Shinde and 40 Sena lawmakers walked out. They claimed the Sena name and symbol and allied with the BJP, prompting the start of twin battles – one over the Thackeray-led faction's disqualification bid and a politico-legal spat over the name and symbol, which will hopefully be settled this week.
EC verdict
The first step was the Election Commission.
In February 2023 the Shinde-led group was declared the 'real' Shiv Sena. Shinde's party has contested every election since, including the Lok Sabha and Assembly poll of 2024, as the 'real' Sena backed by the bow-and-arrow symbol on EVMs.
To the Supreme Court
Uddhav Thackeray appealed, of course. The verdict was challenged in the Supreme Court, with his Sena group arguing, among other things, the EC should not have used legislative strength to decide the 'real' Sena when disqualification petitions remain pending against Shinde's MLAs.
It was also pointed out the Thackeray faction still controlled Sena leadership bodies.
Since then the top court – which had earlier refused to pause the EC's attempt to resolve the symbol dispute while disqualifications were pending – has heard arguments on this and various related issues, including Speaker Rahul Narwekar turning down those disqualification bids.
The court has also refused to suspend the EC's ruling, i.e., awarding the 'real' Sena status to Shinde's group and listing Thackeray's faction as Sena UBT with the flaming torch symbol.
The process was sped up, ever so slightly, ahead of this month's civic body elections, which included the BMC poll, but no resolution was announced till the last hearing in November.
What is at stake now
For Shinde, retaining the symbol and name cements his faction's claim that it represents continuity and commands the original party's mandate. For Thackeray, winning it back would be a political reset — a chance to reclaim the Sena's core identity and undercut the rival camp's legitimacy in one stroke.
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