The Election Commission of India has allotted the name Shiv Sena and its symbol of Bow and Arrow to the party faction led by Maharashtra Chief Minister Eknath Shinde.
The Election Commision said it based its decision on the vote share MLAs backing Shinde got in the 2019 Assembly polls in Maharashtra. Shinde’s MLAs got some 76% voteshare polled while the Thackeray camp MLAs bagged 23.5%. The Shiv Sena won 55 MLA seats in the 2019 polls.
The two rival factions, one led by Shinde and the other by Uddhav Thackeray, have been engaged in a legal battle for the bow and arrow symbol since Eknath Shinde, now the Maharashtra Chief Minister, revolted against Thackeray last year and unseated him from the CM’s chair.
The Election Commission of India came up with the current order after observing the constitution of the Shiv Sena is completely undemocratic. The ECI was convinced that the appointment in the party have been has mutilated to undemocratically appoint people from a coterie as office bearers even when there has been no elections. EC said that such party structures was failing to inspire confidence, it said in a statement.
It was in June 2022 that the party split into two factions after the Eknath Shinde coup. The EC also noted that the constitution of the Shiv Sena, which was amended in 2018, was not given to it.
With the new constitution, the amendments had undone the act of introducing democratic norms in the Party Constitution of 1999, brought by late Balasaheb Thackeray at the insistence of the Commission.
The poll body observed that the undemocratic norms of the original constitution of Shiv Sena, which had been not accepted by the Commission in 1999, are now been brought back in a surreptitious manner further making the party akin to a fiefdom.
Eknath Shinde welcomed the development which is seen as a setback for the Uddhav Thackeray camp.