The Shiv Sena (Uddhav Balasaheb Thackeray) on Wednesday urged the Supreme Court to expedite the hearing of its plea challenging the Election Commission’s move to recognize the Eknath Shinde faction as the official party and allot it the bow and arrow symbol, Live Law reported.

The party, through its lawyer Kapil Sibal, made the request a day after the court directed that Maharashtra’s local body elections be notified in four weeks and completed within four months. He argued that since the court had ordered local body elections to be held, the petition needed to be heard urgently.

Sibal cited the Supreme Court’s 2023 Constitution Bench judgment, which ruled that a legislative majority alone cannot determine the real party and argued that the Election Commission relied solely on this criterion in the current case.

However, Justice Surya Kant noted it might not be possible to hear the matter before the court’s vacation, Live Law reported.

Kant verbally highlighted that the Shiv Sena (UBT) now has a symbol and asked why it could not contest elections with it.

“Let the elections be held smoothly,” he added. “You concentrate on that. In local bodies, mostly voters don't support a symbol.”

The Shiv Sena had split in June 2022 after then-Chief Minister Eknath Shinde claimed the support of 39 out of the Shiv Sena’s 55 MLAs, in addition to 10 independent MLAs, and rebelled against Thackeray’s Maha Vikas Aghadi coalition. The Shiv Sena, the then-united Nationalist Congress Party and the Congress were allies in the government.

Shinde went on to dislodge the Uddhav Thackeray-led Maharashtra government, becoming chief minister with the support of Bharatiya Janata Party,

Both factions have since then contested who represents the real Shiv Sena.

In 2023, the Election Commission of India handed over the official name and election symbol – the bow and arrow – of the Shiv Sena to the Shinde faction.

The poll panel had said that 40 MLAs backing Shinde got nearly 76% of the votes polled in favour of the 55 Shiv Sena candidates who had won their seats in the 2019 Maharashtra Assembly polls. On the other hand, the Uddhav Thackeray faction’s 15 MLAs got 23.5% of the votes polled.

In January 2024, Maharashtra Assembly Speaker Rahul Narwekar also held that the group of MLAs headed by Shinde constituted the real Shiv Sena when rival factions of the political party emerged in June 2022.

The Thackeray-led Sena has since had a new election symbol – the mashal, or torch.

Scroll reported in May last year that ahead of the Lok Sabha elections, many voters did not know about the new symbols, possibly leading to confusion.

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