"Whenever the Shiv Sena is in political trouble, it looks for soft targets, " he says.
Raj Thackeray split from Shiv Sena, now run by his cousin, to further his own ambitions.
That fuelled the rise of Shiv Sena, which, with the MNS, wins the urban Marathi-speaking vote.
ECONOMIST: Cleaning up Mumbai and Maharashtra: The degeneration game | The
Yet their Hinduist scheme now looks stunted: the BJP and Shiv Sena have lost successive state-level and general elections.
On the television that evening, a local Shiv Sena leader energetically defended the arming of the city's female population.
In Maharashtra, the BJP and the Shiv Sena have ruled together since 1995.
But Bombay is also the capital of the only state (Maharashtra) where the hardline Hindu party, the Shiv Sena, shares power.
The knives were given away at an event held in Mumbai on the birthday of Bal Thackeray, Shiv Sena's late leader.
BBC: India Shiv Sena party gives knives to women for protection
It is also difficult to see any Shiv Sena leader emerging who can invoke the frenzy and reverence that Mr Thackeray commanded.
Police said the suspects are members of the regional Shiv Sena party.
Hindu fundamentalist politician Bal Thackeray, the founder of the right-wing Shiv Sena party, has died in Mumbai at the age of 86.
BBC: Bal Thackeray, Hindu leader and Shiv Sena founder, dies
Though the BJP led the national vote in March, the Shiv Sena lost more than half the seats it held in Parliament.
Sanjay Nirupam, a Shiv Sena member of Parliament and editor of the party newspaper, Saamna (Confrontation), leads the campaign against provocative advertisements.
The Shiv Sena continued to operate in the Mumbai region, including neighbouring towns, but had no reach in the rest of the state.
Yet, four years after it won power in the western state of Maharashtra, Shiv Sena, unlike its hero, is crumbling under popular anger.
She is a serious, self-contained woman dressed in saffron and red and frowns at my description of Shiv Sena as a party of violence.
After an audience had gathered at a posh Bombay hotel in April, Shiv Sena activists entered the auditorium, occupied the stage and began singing party songs.
Shiv Sena party president Uddhav Thackeray and Bharatiya Janata Party leader Vinod Tawde said his comments were "a cruel joke on the drought-hit population of the state".
BJP's Hindu-chauvinist face is particularly evident in Maharashtra, India's most industralised and most prosperous state, which it runs in coalition with a regional party, the Shiv Sena.
But over the years, Mr Thackeray's sheen appeared to have lost some of its lustre and the law of diminishing returns seemed to have caught up with Shiv Sena's narrow, exclusivist politics.
Mr Thackeray - his father anglicised his surname after William Makepeace Thackeray, English author of Vanity Fair - ran the nativist Shiv Sena party which excelled in populism and xenophobia over four decades.
Three years later, a coalition government of the Shiv Sena and the Bharatiya Janata Party, which had also put Hindutva on its central agenda, came into power in Maharashtra to rule for the next five years.
The reaction was more heated in Mumbai (Bombay) where Bal Thackeray, head of the ruling party, Shiv Sena, declared that he would not allow any Pakistani side to play in what has traditionally been the cricketing capital of India.
Shiv Sena and its breakaway Maharashtra Navnirman Sena (MNS), headed by Thackeray's nephew, claim to be champions of Maharashtrian issues, especially economic issues, as hundreds of thousands of migrants from a number of impoverished states are lured to Mumbai for jobs.
应用推荐