Eknath Sambhaji Shinde (born 9 February 1964) is an Indian politician who was the twentieth Chief Minister of Maharashtra, from June 2022 to December 2024, and has since been a Deputy Chief Minister of the state. Once an auto-rickshaw driver in Thane, he rose through the Shiv Sena and in 2022 led the rebellion that divided the party and brought down the government of Uddhav Thackeray. He leads the faction recognised as the Shiv Sena.
Quick Facts
| Full name | Eknath Sambhaji Shinde |
| Born | 9 February 1964, Dare, Satara district, Maharashtra |
| Age | 62 |
| Party | Shiv Sena |
| Offices | Deputy Chief Minister of Maharashtra (since December 2024); Chief Minister (2022–2024) |
| Constituency | Kopri-Pachpakhadi, Thane |
| Mentor | Anand Dighe |
| Spouse | Lata Shinde |
| Children | Shrikant Shinde |
Early Life
He was born in the village of Dare in the hills of Satara district into a Maratha farming family. When he was a child the family moved to Thane, the city next to Mumbai, in search of work. He left school after the eleventh class to earn a living, worked in a brewery and a fish business, and drove an auto-rickshaw.
Into Politics
In the 1980s he joined the Shiv Sena, drawn by its founder Bal Thackeray and, above all, by Anand Dighe, the party’s powerful chief in Thane, who became his mentor. He was jailed during an agitation on the Maharashtra–Karnataka border dispute.
In 2000 two of his three children, a son and a daughter, drowned in a boating accident near his village. He withdrew from public life in grief; Dighe persuaded him to return. Dighe himself died the following year, and Shinde inherited his following in Thane.
Career
Legislator and minister
He was elected to the Thane municipal corporation in 1997 and to the state assembly in 2004, and has won every election since. He was briefly Leader of the Opposition in 2014, then Minister for Public Works in the BJP–Sena government, and Minister for Urban Development under Uddhav Thackeray from 2019.
The rebellion
On the night of 20 June 2022, after a legislative council election, he left Mumbai with a group of Sena legislators for Surat and then Guwahati. Their number grew to about forty, two-thirds of the party’s strength in the assembly. They said that the alliance with the Congress and the Nationalist Congress Party had betrayed Bal Thackeray’s ideology of Hindutva.
Uddhav Thackeray resigned on 29 June. The next day Shinde was sworn in as Chief Minister with the support of the Bharatiya Janata Party, whose leader Devendra Fadnavis became his deputy. In February 2023 the Election Commission recognised his faction as the real Shiv Sena.
Chief Minister
His government pushed infrastructure projects in and around Mumbai, among them the coastal road and the Atal Setu sea bridge, and in 2024 launched the Ladki Bahin scheme, a monthly payment to women of poorer households, which was widely credited with the alliance’s success at the polls.
Since 2024
In the assembly election of November 2024 the ruling alliance won a very large majority, and his party took fifty-seven seats. The BJP, by far the largest partner, claimed the chief ministership. After some days of suspense Shinde agreed to serve as Deputy Chief Minister under Fadnavis, and was sworn in on 5 December 2024. He holds the urban development and housing portfolios.
Personal Life
He is married to Lata Shinde. Their surviving son, Dr Shrikant Shinde, an orthopaedic surgeon, is a member of the Lok Sabha for Kalyan. In his fifties Shinde went back to his studies and completed a degree. He still spends time farming at his village.
Featured image: Eknath Shinde, Deputy Chief Minister of Maharashtra. Photo by Real96kmaratha, licensed under CC BY-SA 4.0, via Wikimedia Commons.
