If any of the exit polls projections come true, it is Uddhav Thackeray who would stand tall as a mass leader among the several claimants to that position.

There are two stories that emerge from the several exit polls aired last night.

One is that Uddhav Thackeray, whose decision to stay firm on seat sharing ratio with ally Bharatiya Janata Party and accept severance of an old tie, has emerged into his own. If the forecasts hold true, the number of seats he wins could well be better than the best won for the party ever in an alliance.

The second is that while the Bharatiya Janata Party emerges the single largest party, with the possibility of even winning a majority on its own, it has shown to the Shiv Sena that the past arithmetic of the latter being a dominant party is no more valid. It is no more to be seen as a party benefiting from the Sena’s strength in Maharashtra. Their parting could well be final.

That apart, the comparison between the Thackeray cousins, Uddhav and Raj, the later MNS founder, can end. Both have been claiming the legacy of the party’s founder, Balasaheb Thackeray. Raj, despite his him-against-all is indicated as likely to perform the worst. If Raj Thackeray targeted the ruling parties for non-performance, he also held the opposition as weak, and claimed he was best suited to be either.

Exit polls are accurate only if the results on counting day match or come quite close to the numbers thrown up. However, despite the variation in numbers thrown up as predictions, BJP will clearly be the dominant party in the Maharashtra state Assembly. And since all the exit polls have got the same descending order of numbers each party could get, it appears certain that Shiv Sena is potentially the second largest party.

The story is not so much the decline of the Congress and the Nationalist Congress Party; it was foretold. The crux is the narratives the BJP and the Sena present, vis-à-vis each other. One, despite absence of a worthwhile grassroots organisation in most part of the state where it had never contested, BJP is telling the former partner that it is not going to have to ever be politically beholden to it to win elections.

The second, and a remarkable one at that, is the perceived performance by the Shiv Sena which makes Uddhav Thackeray the hero of the electoral narrative. He battled the worst odds, resolutely faced the onslaught of a confident, recently elected Prime Minister, Narendra Modi. He alone matched the number of the rallies, the size of the audiences the major opponent managed. He gave no quarter, nor sought one. Nor lose his nerve.

Sena is projected to win 59 constituencies on the lower end and 77 on the higher end. It is quite a performance for a party that had won 73 in 1995 which helped form an alliance government, unseating the Congress. In 1999, again in alliance, Sena bagged 69. In 2004 it took 62 and in the next elections, went to a low 44. Its fortunes as well as that of the BJP had run parallel in their 25 years of relationship.

Though Sena claimed credit for shoring up the fortunes of the BJP in every election so far, till the outcome of the 2014 Lok Sabha showed that it was Modi, and thus the BJP that mattered, the common view was that the two had been mutual beneficiaries all along. The Sena never accepted the mutual-prop proposition ever; it was always the big brother which dictated the terms.

Uddhav’s strategy made it almost a binary fight, and did not allow any overarching issue to dictate the poll-time discourse, and turned it into a quest for legitimacy. The common thread was its angst at the “betrayal” by the partner. He risked a fragmented Assembly while a saved alliance would have given them a massive mandate. The sum of BJP and Sena’s projected seats are 195 at the lowest and 222 at the highest in the four exit polls.

Such a mandate would have been unheard of in the history of Maharashtra legislature after the initial days of Congress’ one-party dominance, which ended around the time Sena stepped into the scene as a political party with electoral ambitions. Between them, the two parties had developed leads in as many as 232 Assembly segments in the Lok Sabha constituencies earlier this year.

When fighting against each other in a mostly five-cornered contests, if the BJP and Sena can manage to score as high, it speaks of a new possible polarisation between the two former allies. That is, if they decide not to form a government together after 19 October. If the Sena is forced to sit in the Opposition, it deprives the Congress and the NCP even the status of a leading opposition.

If any of the four exit polls projections come true, it is Uddhav Thackeray who would stand tall as a mass leader among the several claimants to that position in Maharashtra across party lines. He would have outdone Sharad Pawar whose popularity is sometimes judged as high without reference to electoral gains or losses. Pawar, as numbers thrown up by the exit polls show, seems set to fare very poorly indeed.

BJP has to find or groom a leader now on the strength of its single-largest party status, fill the gap left first by the death of Pramod Mahajan and then his brother-in-law, Gopinath Munde. There is none of their stature now, and the wins by the BJP would have to be attributed to Narendra Modi’s push, carried forward from the Lok Sabha elections. Probably he who becomes the chief minister from that party stands to get an opportunity.