The six men, all loyal to the flaming torch symbol of Shiv Sena (Uddhav Balasaheb Thackeray), came in a luxury vehicle to a bungalow in Malabar Hill in Mumbai on a scorching Monday afternoon in June, and in a couple of hours redrew the arithmetic of Maharashtra. They had joined with Eknath Shinde, the deputy chief minister who first broke the party's front four summers ago. Having never been one to underplay a coup, Shinde dubbed it as such. Now he said he had six tigers in his camp an earlier litter of turncoats of which he jeered. His operatives had been referring to it for weeks as Operation Tiger and he declared it to be complete and successful.

For the man who bore the Thackeray name, it was the third amputation in four years and perhaps the cruelest, as it was aimed at Parliament itself. The party had sent nine members to Delhi in 2024 and only three of them Arvind Sawant, Anil Desai and Rajabhau Waje attended the mandatory meeting convened by the party leadership. The other six avoided it, picked up their show cause notices and soon enough were photographed at Shinde's door. In the jargon of the rebels themselves Sanjay Jadhav, Bhausaheb Wakchaure, Omprakash Nimbalkar, Sanjay Dina Patil, Sanjay Deshmukh and Nagesh Patil Ashtikar had “returned” to the “real” Sena.

The defectors gave an explanation, one that's worth analyzing, not dismissing, since it's now the usual Indian floor-crossing cop-out. At least three of them some openly had jumped to raise money and development for their constituencies, the message being that an opposition MP cannot do it, a ruling-side MP can. It's a neat argument, it's a corrosive argument. It sanitises the violation of a mandate in the guise of good governance, and it subtly informs voters that if they vote for the opposition, they can be assured of neglect. To put it in a different way, all of these MPs were elected as opposition to the ruling alliance on a platform created by the Maha Vikas Aghadi and the entire INDIA bloc, with Congress and Sharad Pawar's NCP campaigning with the Sena. They were sold overnight, said Greed, and for the price of greed.

The figures tell why it's no coincidence. The strength of the National Democratic Alliance in the Lower House goes up to around 319 with the six inductions. The government is expected to reintroduce a constitutional amendment this monsoon session, which will resume in mid-July, of a similar nature to that which it failed to get a two-thirds majority for last year. In order to break that bar in a Full House, the ruling coalition must move towards 360. When viewed from Delhi, the Mumbai six defections are not a regional skirmish, rather they are a part of a project that is happening across the country. That is the first thing that a reader outside Maharashtra should understand. The drama is local but the prize is the threshold in the Constitution.

There is a second lesser-known prize, and it is in rupees. The Sena was never a party of MPs; it was the machinery which operated Mumbai and Mumbai is not an ordinary city to operate. The Brihanmumbai Municipal Corporation, the civic body that was under the undivided Sena's grip every year since 1997, has presented a budget of 74,427 crore rupees for 2025-26, which is nearly nine billion dollars, a fifth more than the previous year. That's the finances of one municipal corporation which is bigger than the annual budgets of the states of Goa, Tripura, Manipur and Arunachal Pradesh, and, by some estimates, bigger than the gross domestic product of a series of small sovereign countries from Bhutan to the Maldives to Fiji. It generates over 5,000 crore for the Government through property tax. Wherever there is a BMC there are the contracts for the road paving of the coastal road, the desalination plants and the link roads of the country's financial capital. That is the engine that got the Sena going for 25 years; the election for civic office in January saw the break in the party's four-decade domination and the transfer of the mayoralty to the Bharatiya Janata Party for the first time in over 40 years.

Add up the losses, and it's a bleak trajectory for the family. Their government was overthrown in the 2022 uprising. Shinde received the bow-and-arrow and party name in 2023 from Election Commission. The Mahayuti swept away the opposition in the assembly elections in 2024. In January, the BMC was decreased. Now the parliamentary side has decided in favour of them by a vote of two against one. The Lok Sabha member Shrikant Shinde, the son of Shinde, drove the knife in further this week, telling a TV reporter that Uddhav Thackeray had “lost his ground”, that more leaders would walk because the chief was inaccessible even to his own legislators and that the picture, as the Hindi cliché goes, was far from over.

But the obituary men should put down their pens. There are three things the seat-count hides, which form the case for the defence, and not without cause, the Thackeray camp is building.

The first is law. The anti-defection mechanism of India does not allow the use of the shield "split" anymore, because the definition of split had been removed by the ninety-first amendment in 2003. The only thing that is left is merger, and merger has a high bar. Even so, the floor leaders of the Sena (UBT) have already written to the Speaker Om Birla, saying that as the parent organisation had not merged with the original party, any independent action by these MPs means that they have given up their membership, making them liable to disqualification under the Tenth Schedule and the Supreme Court's 2023 verdict in the Subhash Desai case. If the Speaker fails to act, the party would exhaust the parliamentary route and then move on to the apex court, the party says. Birla will make a decision on the issue before the session. The rebels have reportedly signed the Letter of Intent to merge and submitted it; a verification process for the signatures is reportedly currently underway. None of this is final and if they're ousted as they could be it would turn six victorious defectors into six jobless ex-MP's running for re-election. That fight, in his familiar inflammatory tone, is what Sanjay Raut, the party's grummiest voice, has vowed to fight, promising that the rebels will be given a good thrashing, adding that they will have to be protected even to enter their own constituencies.

The second one is the brand. The Thackeray name still evokes a strange loyalty among the foot soldiers of Mumbai and its environs; one that cannot be bequeathed by any symbol allotment. Maybe Shinde inhered the bow and the arrow, but the emotional legacy of Bal Thackeray's movement the shakhas, the local strongmen, the sense of Marathi grievance that the family has played with for six decades does not travel well with a man the cadre still considers the man who walked out. The party's strength will not be diminished by the split, and that Aaditya is capable of taking it forward, is no mere bravado; it's a bet that organisation and sentiment outweigh a fortnight of bad headlines.

The third is the ambivalence of the BJP itself, and this is where the global lesson lies. Top leaders in the ruling alliance privately admit that Operation Tiger is a double-edged sword. It tears the opposition to shreds in the SR and stuffs the numbers in Delhi. In the long term, a corpulent Shinde Sena will be difficult to control and Shinde never concealed his lust for the chief minister's chair that he was forced to give up to Devendra Fadnavis. Sources in the BJP concede this is a simple case of BJP chief Shinde cutting off Thackeray's head; a stronger regional ally is the strongest rival in the tent. This is the paradox that accompanies engineered defections in South Asia and everywhere else, from the floor-crossings of post-colonial democracies to the party-hopping that hollows out legislatures from the region: the patron who cheaply bought loyalty is surprised to learn that it is nothing more than price.

In turn, the opposition is reading from a familiar script. Congress leaders claim the entire process is with the approval of Delhi and have challenged the defectors to step down and ask people to re-elect them which they won't. Sharad Pawar and his deputy Supriya Sule say that no single one of their MPs will cross, even as one of their MPs spouts the opposite. The Maha Vikas Aghadi is bruised, but it's also perversely being handed a narrative: the ruling machine won, not by persuading voters, but by buying its representatives after the election.

So what's the honest opinion? That the Sena under Uddhav Thackeray is smaller, poorer and more peripheral than ever before in his father Bal Thackeray's lifetime, and that the family's instinct of unbroken strength sometimes comes off as denial. But also that a party does not consist merely of MPs and a budget line: that it is a habit that a voter either establishes or dispels at the ballot box and that has yet to happen. It will take the next municipal cycles and the next general election, not a bungalow in Malabar Hill, to decide if the torch continues to draw a crowd. Six seats have been taken by Operation Tiger. The answer of this question is not with Eknath Shinde, but with Maharashta.