Eknath Shinde walks out — and eventually walks off with the Shiv Sena itself

Eknath Shinde, a senior Shiv Sena minister in Maharashtra's Maha Vikas Aghadi government (Shiv Sena, NCP and Congress, led by Chief Minister Uddhav Thackeray), left Mumbai in late June 2022 with a large bloc of Shiv Sena MLAs, first to Surat and then to Guwahati, in a public break with the party leadership over its alliance with the Congress and NCP.

With his majority in the Assembly gone, Uddhav Thackeray resigned as Chief Minister on 29 June 2022, ahead of a floor test he was expected to lose. Eknath Shinde was sworn in as Chief Minister the next day, 30 June, at the head of a new government with the BJP.

Both camps then claimed to be the authentic Shiv Sena. The Election Commission first gave each an interim name and symbol in October 2022 — Shinde's faction as “Balasahebanchi Shiv Sena,” Thackeray's as “Shiv Sena (UBT)” with a flaming-torch symbol — before ruling on 17 February 2023 that Shinde's faction was entitled to the Shiv Sena name and its bow-and-arrow election symbol outright, based on its majority among the party's elected legislators.