It is all a matter of perspective. The Bharatiya Janata Party-Shiv Sena relationship has turned acrimonious not because the former suddenly feels embarrassed by Hindutva or regards Sharad Pawar as a more reliable ally. Nor is it because Balasaheb Thackeray has developed qualms overnight about consorting with a party which finds itself hemmed in by one scandal after the other despite having proclaimed itself to be 'different'. The issue at stake is neither Hindutva nor corruption, but self-preservation. For Thackeray, the doles from Atal Bihari Vajpayee, such as the power and heavy industry ministership, for his members of parliament are just crumbs thrown at him. With the Democratic Front government systematically cracking down on Mumbai's extortion network - suspected to be created and expanded with great finesse by the Shiv Sena - and threatening to implement the Srikrishna commission's recommendations, the Shiv Sena leadership is apparently in big trouble. Nearly two years out of power, Thackeray has lost some of his key activists in gangland violence and some of his own lung-power as well. The roar, which had Muslims fleeing for their lives in the early Nineties, has given way to tame warnings sounded through the pages of the party's mouthpiece, Samna. When the sainiks did have a go at communal violence in Mumbai last year, the Democratic Front government put it down immediately. For Thackeray, the repository of power is not South Block but Mumbai. As the de facto ruler of Maharashtra from 1995 to 1999, he could order the mighty Enron power company to leave his state and then return on his terms. He could make and unmake populist projects, much to the BJP's unhappiness. With Maharashtra slipping out of his hands, it looks as though Thackeray's pervading authority is slowly but surely eroding. Getting back into the state government may be the only way to preempt a political eclipse. This sense of desperation explains why Thackeray made no effort to hide the fact that he was unhappy with the BJP for its refusal to play ball when he was keen to overthrow the Vilasrao Deshmukh government with the help of the Nationalist Congress Party. The BJP openly revels in Thackeray's predicament. A political leader of Maharashtra, who was once his confidant, candidly spoke of how the BJP should not give up this 'opportunity' to pull down Thackeray once and for all. The BJP was smart enough to forsee that retrieving the BJP-Shiv Sena government in the state would be on Thackeray's terms and not theirs, which meant a Sena chief minister and a Sena agenda. Both are unacceptable to the BJP, which has realized the hard way that while Hindutva may be a short-cut to a partial victory in the elections, once ensconced in power, it could be an albatross even around the neck of the most saffronized sanghi. On the other hand, power in Mumbai would expectedly give Thackeray just the elbow space he needs to extract concessions - tangible and ideological - from the Centre. What could such concessions be? An absolute no to a dialogue with Pakistan, no resuming ties in sports, renaming cities and towns, scrapping the minorities commission, banning cow slaughter and, of course, reconstructing the Ayodhya temple. The BJP had indulged the Shiv Sena on quite a few of these demands when they ruled Maharashtra together, but as the head of an ideologically disparate coalition in Delhi and, more importantly, as the central pole in Indian politics, Vajpayee, L.K. Advani and company are more acutely aware of the responsibilities that this primacy has thrust on them than the gentleman residing in Matoshri. Turning its back on Pakistan can happen only at the cost of upsetting the United States, while banning cow slaughter would deprive not just Muslims but also Dalits of beef, the cheapest of all available meats. Indeed, Thackeray's campaign against the India-Pakistan test series in 1991 was the first flashpoint in the BJP-Shiv Sena tie, which goes back to 1989. His sainiks forced the Centre's hand on January 18, 1999, when they vandalized the office of the Board of Control for Cricket in India in Mumbai's Brabourne Stadium. The home minister, Advani, who was in Mumbai on an official visit, warned the Shiv Sena chief minister, Manohar Joshi, not to allow things to spin out of control. But Thackeray was in no mood to listen. He decided to despatch a band of sainiks to Chennai to disrupt the first test, at which point Advani directed him to call off the agitation or risk losing the Maharashtra government. The tiger was caged for the moment. However, ideology is not the only source of contention between the two. In August 1998, there was a public feud between the Maharashtra deputy chief minister, the BJP's Gopinath Munde, and the Shiv Sena's minister for housing, Sureshdada Jain, over a new Rs 10,000 crore housing scheme which envisaged building two lakh low-cost houses for slum-dwellers. The BJP boycotted cabinet meetings and swore not to return until Jain's housing policy was redrafted. Two months later, in October 1998, while addressing his annual Dussehra rally in Mumbai, Thackeray got back at Munde by announcing that power tariffs for 24 lakh farmers would be waived off. Munde was the power minister. Worse was to follow. In January 1999, the Sena chief ordered his chief minister to hike cotton procurement prices, although the Maharashtra government purchased them for Rs 5,000 more per quintal than the other states and lost Rs 1,300 crore annually as a result. Later, Thackeray opposed the Centre's bid to disinvest in Air India and Maruti, prompting a cabinet minister to remark that whether it was Hindutva or the economy, Vajpayee's most consistent critic was not the Congress or the left but Thackeray. The last straw was Sanjay Nirupam's allegation against the prime minister's family in the Unit Trust of India scandal. At this point, a beleaguered BJP decided to call Thackeray's bluff, even if it meant breaking off from its oldest ally. Under pressure from his ministers and other MPs, for once the supremo had no choice but kowtow to its wishes. Where does the alliance stand? The BJP privately admitted that it had no love lost for the Shiv Sena. Indeed, its leaders seem more inclined to teaming up with Pawar, given the captive caste base he has among the Marathas and his own image as one of the more durable politicians Maharashtra has produced. In contrast, the BJP claimed that Thackeray's following in the urban areas and among the rural backward castes had slipped in the months the Shiv Sena was out of power and the Sena chief had 'failed to deliver anything substantial'. Besides, there was a feeling that Thackeray's rhetoric did not go down well with the public at a time it was thought that the economy had to be brought back on the rails before all else. And who could do that better than Pawar, the BJP suggested. Clearly, the tiger has no choice but retreat in his cage and wait for better days.