Bal Thackeray is no more. The Shiv Sena supremo Bal Thackeray passed away on Saturday after protracted illness at his home ‘Matoshree’ in suburban Mumbai.
Thousands of Shiv Sainiks who had converged outside the Thackeray residence in Bandra (East) broke into tears on hearing the news and started chanting ‘Jai Shivaji’ in honour of their leader who championed the cause of ‘Marathi Manoos’ cries.
The passing away of 86-year-old ‘Balasaheb’, as Thackeray Senior was fondly called, has created a void that will be difficult to fill for the Shiv Sena, which has always revolved around him. To party workers he was more like the family patriarch and not just the founder of the Shiv Sena.
Bal Thackeray was born on January 23, 1926 to Ramabai and Keshav Thackeray, a social reformer and journalist. Thackeray, the eldest of nine siblings, lost his mother when he was young and he had to abandon his studies because of financial difficulties.
Thackeray started his career as a cartoonist with the Free Press Journal newspaper in Mumbai. Following differences with the newspaper’s management, he quit and started his own magazine called Marmik which he used to highlight the “injustice being done to sons of the soil” in jobs available in Mumbai.
Thackeray had been keeping unwell for some time and had been under the care of a team of doctors from the Leelavati Hospital.
At the Sena’s Dussehra rally in Mumbai recently, he addressed party workers via a recorded video message, asking them to support his son Uddhav and grandson Aditya. “I have collapsed physically… I can’t walk… I am tired,” he said.
Hundreds of policemen and RAF personal have been deployed in the area and elsewhere in the city as a precautionary measure.