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)