Do we like Uddhav Thackeray?
Our score: 6 out of 10. Decent record in office and a green call on Aarey, but a contested Godhra remark, Marathi-first politics and no record found on LGBTQ+ issues.
Uddhav Thackeray ran Maharashtra as chief minister until he resigned on 29 June 2022, just before a floor test, when Eknath Shinde's rebellion tore the Shiv Sena apart. The Quint's farewell piece notes that early on, even old Sena opponents warmed to him, with Omar Abdullah tweeting that he “has been a revelation”. The record I could open on his early life is thin, so this is the story from the top job down.
The 2026 chapter has been rough. In June, six of his nine Lok Sabha MPs went across to Shinde's Sena, in what Shinde's camp called Operation Tiger. Thackeray accused the defectors of “selling themselves after increasing their value post-election”, while some rebels said opposition life had cut their seats off from development funds. He's since kicked off a statewide outreach tour starting in the rebels' home turf.
Earlier in the year he teamed up with cousin Raj Thackeray's MNS after two decades apart for the Mumbai civic polls. The early counting trends had the BJP-led alliance well ahead, and the cousins well behind. Thackeray told the Free Press Journal that you can erase a written line but not something engraved in people's hearts, which is a brave face if ever there was one.
On the harm check: nothing I found shows him campaigning against women, migrants or the planet, and I found no statement from him on LGBTQ+ rights either way, so that's a gap, not a pass. The flashpoint is September 2023, when he warned that after a government-organised trip for the Ram Temple opening, “an incident similar to that in Godhra may occur”. BJP leaders slammed it as shameful; it can be read as a warning or as a provocation, depending on your view. His party says it opposes forced Hindi, not Hindi speakers, and he says he hasn't abandoned Hindutva, only the BJP's version.
The recent noise is a 2020 death case. The Week reported that the Bombay High Court ordered a CBI probe on 2 September 2026 after a petition from the woman's father, and the CBI registered a case without naming any accused. Thackeray says his family has no connection to it, called the claims politically motivated and threatened legal action. Nothing has been decided, so treat it as an allegation and a denial.
The good stuff is real, if small in the record I could verify. Within a year of taking office, he moved the Metro car shed out of Mumbai's Aarey forest to Kanjurmarg, declared 800 acres of Aarey as forest and withdrew cases against the protesters. In the same October 2020 address he was urging people to wear masks as Covid spread. Shinde reversed the Aarey call as soon as he took over, according to another report I saw in search results.