To achieve this aim, the BJP’s brains trust has come up with the idea of a memorial to Shivaji on 16 hectares of reclaimed land in the Arabian Sea, including a 192-metre tall statue – twice as high as the Statue of Liberty – 3.5 km off the Mumbai shoreline.

While doing so, the party and its government in Maharashtra have ignored protests about the mammoth expenditure on the project and from fishermen worried about the impact of years of construction work on and near the reclaimed land on the fishing sites.

No one knows whether or not the BJP would have gained if the estimated Rs 3,700 crore meant for the memorial was spent on health care or the education sector or saving Mumbai from waterlogging on its potholed roads every monsoon.

But what is undeniable is that the party need not have been in a hurry for courting the local populace if only because it faces no immediate political challenge. For one, there is little likelihood of the Shiv Sena once again reclaiming its position as the No. 1 party in the state as in the 1990s when a Sainik was the chief minister.

For another, the other Sena – the Maharashtra Navnirman Sena of Raj Thackeray – appears clueless at the moment on how to upstage its main competitor in the Thackeray clan – Uddhav Thackeray’s Shiv Sena. Having tried unsuccessfully to make its presence felt by intimidating and assaulting Biharis and others from north India, the MNS is now focussing on playing the patriotic card by targeting Pakistani actors in Bollywood. But it is unlikely to emerge as a major player in Maharashtra in the foreseeable future.

For a third, the Congress and the Nationalist Congress Party (NCP) are yet to recover from their setbacks in the last assembly election and more recent municipal polls which have seen the BJP come out on top despite the belief among its opponents that the party will be hurt by demonetisation.

The BJP, therefore, has nothing much to worry about. The refurbishing of its image via the memorial could have awaited a closer look the cost and the disruption of fishing. Unless, of course, the party believes that paying homage to Chhatrapati is the best way to calm those sections of the Marathi manoos who are clamouring for reservations.

As is known, the rape and murder of a Maratha girl by suspected Dalits sparked off the demand for reservations for the Maratha community as a means to marginalize the Dalits and backward castes who are benefitting from the quota system for them in jobs and education.

There was also a demand for amending the Atrocities Act, which is meant to protest the Dalits from the upper castes but has been misused, according to the pro-reservationists.

This is not the first time that a demand for quotas for the Marathas, who comprise nearly 35 per cent of the state’s population, has been made. A few months before the assembly election, the Congress-NCP government had sought 16 per cent reservations for the Marathas, and five per cent for the Muslims, but the proposal was rejected by the Bombay high court.

In any event, the initiative did not yield any electoral dividends for the two parties for the people recognize cynicism when they see it. However, that has not prevented the present Devendra Fadnavis government from saying that it supports the idea of quotas for the Marathas.

It is no secret, however, that the Marathas have long been resentful of their inability to play a more dominant role in Maharashtra’s economic life – a factor which once made Raj Thackeray call for 80 per cent reservations of jobs for the Marathas in the state’s 26,000 private companies.

Indeed, a law was enacted to this effect in 1973, but was never implemented presumably because the government of the time and also those which came later were reluctant to take a potentially hugely disruptive step which might have led to a flight of capital as in West Bengal in the 1970s.

The Thackeray family, however, must find it unacceptable that the Maratha community has not benefitted as much as it should have from the fact that Mumbai is India’s financial capital and also constitutes the hub of the Hindi film industry. There is little doubt, therefore, that it is a booming metropolis.

Yet, the failure of the Marathas to reap the fullest benefit from these commercial and cinematic advantages led to the rise of the parochial Shiv Sena in the mid-1960s, shortly after the division of the erstwhile Bombay state into Maharashtra and Gujarat. Among the leading lights of the movement for a separate state was Uddhav and Raj Thackeray’s grandfather, Keshav Sitaram alias Prabodhankar Thackeray.

Since Shivaji is a national icon, it is unfortunate that his name is being evoked by the BJP government in Maharashtra to serve a partisan political purpose. (IPA Service)