Don’t canonise Bal Thackeray

Death has strange effects on people. Look at what it has done for late Shiv Sena supremo Bal Thackeray.

Eleven days have passed since the demise of the man who was a power to reckon with in Maharashtra politics, and every passing day is seeing more praises being sung for him — an outstanding posthumous
achi­eve­ment for a man who demonstrated to the country, with ruthless efficiency, how to perfect the politics of hate.

From mid-1960s, when a nascent Shiv Sena began its vitriolic campaign against non-Maharashtrians, the outfit grew in strength. With the brutal crushing of Leftist trade unions, allegedly with money and muscle backing of industrialists, the Sena assumed the monopoly of violent enforcement — and Bal Thackeray was the guiding light and ideologue.

The violent ‘lungi bhagao’ campaign of Shiv Sena targeting South Indians and their establishments unleashed a reign of terror, with the law and order establishment looking the other way.

Political leaders have been trying to outdo each other in showering praises on a man who has made no bones about his admiration for Nazi leader Adolf Hitler ‘for his talent as an artist, orator and a man who was the master of the mob’. He found a lot of aspects common between himself and the German dictator – who, with his lebensraum (living space) call, might have inspired Thackeray’s Marathi manoos war cry.

For a man, whose organisation literally rewrote workers’ rights and fought tooth and nail to destroy the cosmopolitan nature of Bombay (oops... Mumbai), the eulogies reflect the insensitivity of the political class in the name of political correctness and social niceties.

There isn’t a major incident of communal trouble in Mumbai that doesn’t have Shiv Sena and Bal Thackeray written all over it. Thackeray’s skill in discovering a communal angle to every incident of consequence was unparalleled. The party mouthpiece Saamana, with regular inputs from Thackeray, made sure that there was never any dearth of venom for public consumption.

The Sri Krishna Commission too pointed fingers at Thackeray and his outfit for inciting the pogrom against Muslims in the aftermath of the 1993 serial blasts in Mumbai.

For unemployed and frustrated Marathi youths who were looking for a punching bag, Bal Thackeray and Shiv Sena provided a platform for unfettered thuggery in the name of a ‘glorious cause’ — not to mention the massive cash inflow through extortion from businesses that weren’t deferential enough.

With no arm of the government being able to challenge the might of Shiv Sena in Mumbai-Thane belt, the outfit assumed the extra-constitutional power of censorship. From literature, art, sports and cinema, there is no area untouched by Sena diktats — forcibly enforced in most cases.

For a political career spanning more than four decades, Bal Thackeray has left behind nothing but a bitter aftertaste — let us not even talk about Raj Thackeray and Uddhav Thackeray. The toxic politics that divides people and fills their minds with hatred has done tremendous damage to the social and political fabric of Maharashtra in general and Mumbai in particular. With son and nephew jostling to bear the torch, Mumbai has more pain in store.

Let us not allow death to be the pretext for granting sainthood to Bal Thackeray.

(This article was published as the editorial column in Postnoon on November 28, 2012)

Mumbai isn’t a tale of three Thackerays

Not long after Maharashtra Navnirman Sena chief Raj Thackeray termed migrants ‘infiltrators’, his estranged cousin and Shiv Sena heir apparent Uddhav Thackeray, not wanting to be outdone in vitriolic diatribe, has said that migration from Bihar must be kept under check through permit system.

It was barely 80 years ago that a short young politician popularised the concept of lebensraum (roughly translates as ‘living space’) to ascend to power in Germany. Yes, your guess is right, we are talking about Adolf Hitler, who considered anyone non-German sub-human. People of Slavic origin, Gypsies and Jews were persecuted, imprisoned, tortured, deported — and in the case of Jews, massacred to the best of his ability.

The more the Thackerays (including Shiv Sena satrap, the ageing but definitely not mellowing, Bal Thackeray) unleash their polarising venom, the more it sounds like a desi version of Mein Kampf. And if one were to analyse their organisations’ agenda, it is only the lack of unchecked power that is preventing them from carrying out similar pogroms.

To understand Raj’s tirades and Uddhav’s attempt to whip up ‘sons of soil’ passions, we should go back to Bombay (wasn’t Mumbai then) of the 1970s. Bal Thackeray’s Shiv Sena was carrying out a vitriolic (and violent) campaign against South Indians, who, according to him, were taking away the jobs and opportunities of Marathi manoos.

It was under the wing of Bal Thackeray that nephew Raj and son Uddhav cut their teeth in the toxic politics of regionalism. Raj, a firebrand orator, always had more visibility in Shiv Sena and many thought he would take over from Bal Thackeray. However, it was not to be.

As the worried uncle started relegating him to the margins to give more space and visibility for Uddhav, the cousins drifted apart and two factions emerged. And finally in 2006, with no more maneuvering space left within the fold of the same party, Raj walked out and formed the MNS.

Ever since, Raj and his followers embarked on a Marathi chauvinism campaign; shriller, more poisonous, more violent and better organised — designed to outdo his uncle’s outfit in the same department, on his home turf. And it is working.

The audacity with which the MNS is able to continue with its politics of thuggery is an insult to our democracy and the rights guaranteed to all citizens under the Constitution.

Despite its violent campaigns targeting migrant workers, especially autorickshaw and taxi drivers, the MNS boss is a free man and continues his trade with impunity.

While several cases have been registered against the MNS chief and his outfit, thanks to our legal system, the bigot has never had a reason to worry or curtail his activities.

Mumbai is what it is today because it has attracted and made maximum out of the best talents from across the country. It is the migrants who form the fabric of cheap essential services that keep the city running. If people from other states were to be taken out of India’s financial capital, it would be reduced to an empty shell.

South Indian, North Indian, Bihari or Bengali... anyone who is a citizen of this country has the right to travel, live and ply his trade and maintain his identity anywhere in the country.

Organisations like Shiv Sena and MNS are a blot on our culture and have little difference from the Third Reich. They must be crushed before these cancer cells inspire more of their kind elsewhere and become malignant to our civilisation.

(This article was published as the editorial column in Postnoon on September 5, 2012)