Junior Thackeray takes over at Dasera rally

Mumbai: Shiv Sena's executive president Uddhav Thackeray made his first speech at the Dasera Rally, an annual event dominated for the last 46 years by his father Bal Thackeray's fiery rhetoric before his supporters.

Though Uddhav, generally less belligerent than his father, does not have the charisma or witticism of his father in regaling his partyworkers, he came up strongly on serious issues like farmers' suicides as well as the Sena's age-old cliches of harping on the Marathi factor at the well-attended rally on Thursday evening in Shivaji Park.

Going on his knees and offering a 'namaskar' to the Shiv Sainiks, Uddhav's speech to end communalism and confront rural problems of water scarcity and power shortage was heard in silence.

He took a dig at a police officer who had said "Mumbai does not belong to anyone's father" and retorted that "Mumbai belongs to our fathers. No one can dare ask who Kolkata, Lucknow, Chennai and Hyderabad belongs to, then how dare they ask who Mumbai belongs to?

"I am confident of shouldering the responsibility with your support," he told Sainiks indicating that he would take over in the future from his octogenarian father. Already emerging as a chief ministerial candidate of the saffron combine, with the BJP, Uddhav, unlike his father, refrained from making anti-Muslim comments though he expressed concern over the increasing number of terror attacks in the country and the failure of home ministers at the Centre and in Maharashtra to deal with it.

"I wonder if Shivraj Patil [union home minister] is a home minister or textile minister," referring to the number of times he had changed clothes before visiting bomb blast victims in Delhi.

Age and tiredness did not however deter the senior Thackeray from attacking Muslims. "If you want to destroy Pakistan-sponsored terrorism, you should ask the military to enter the mosques," he said, adding that former prime minister Indira Gandhi did it in 1984 to flush out militants from the Golden Temple in Amritsar.

"Indirabai was a woman of supreme courage," he said. "Take a vow today. Throw the Congress out of power from everywhere in the country," he said, coughing often during his speech and being prompted a couple of times by senior leader Manohar Joshi when he faltered.

Nevertheless, he amused his fans with statements like Sonia Gandhi as a woman from Italy coming to India with a "chai ki ketli" (tea pot) and union agriculture minister Sharad Pawar as, "Indians are made to eat wheat which is as 'sadka' [rotten] as Pawar."

Remarking on his son's debut at the Dasera rally, Thackeray said, "Some say Uddhav is not aggressive enough. Today, you have heard him on this stage. Now it is for you to decide."