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)

Khaps are our Taliban, crush them before it is too late

After decades of deafening silence or being hand-in-glove with caste councils (khaps), the politicos seem to muster courage to speak out against these kangaroo courts, if Congress president Sonia Gandhi’s forays can be considered as an indicator.

Political parties have banked on caste votes to fuel their journeys to power and therefore it is natural that they don’t tread on the turf of their benefactors. This is not purely an India-exclusive phenomenon. At the zenith of Nazi power, the Catholic Church maintained silence on German atrocities in return for sparing the interests of the Church. Spain’s brutal dictator Franco too enjoyed similar privileges.

Haryana is not the nucleus of the menace of khaps — its tentacles reach the nook and corner of the country. Even while public outrage against khap-ordered atrocities, especially against women, are on the rise, political leaders are very measured in their response — Sonia too is no exception to this unspoken rule. Though she condemned the rise in crimes against women and called for the severest punishment for rapists, her response to a question regarding the ‘authority’ of khaps was surprisingly mild. She said only the government and courts have the authority to prosecute people. The statesman-like statement did not directly attack khaps nor did it say the kangaroo courts need to be done away with.

Khaps are nothing but an Indian version of Taliban, which has been instrumental in crushing the lives of millions of women in Pakistan and Afghanistan. The colour of the flags may differ, but the obsolete and suppressive ideologies are same.

The khap advisory to get girls married off at the age of 16 to curb rapes is not much different from the logic of proponents of female genital mutilation that physically and mentally scars millions of women across the world.

The primitive justification of male superiority and importance has over the decades created a demographic disaster across the country with plummeting sex ratios. The result has been an overdose of testosterone in social life. Coupled with the tradition of glorifying suppression of women’s rights, an environment dangerous for the fairer sex has been created.

Though our politicians take umbrage at comments on a wide range of matters and their wisdom spans from personal etiquette to art, philosophy, and literature, no one has the courage to take on the scourge of these extra-constitutional cancers that have been gnawing away at the core of ideals of democracy and liberty — ironically, guaranteed by the Constitution and reinforced by court rulings.

Mahatma Gandhi once said that India lives in its villages. And if the women in our villages are forced to live under the reign of khap terror, what kind of rule of law can we boast of?

Unlike the urban folk, the rural heartland turns out to vote in large numbers. When they exercise their electoral franchise, they hope their representatives will create a better future for them. However, our democratic model has remained a pathetic failure in this department.

When a country cannot protect its women (No, locking them inside houses and teen weddings are NOT solutions); when it cannot ensure freedom of choosing life partners for its youths; when law and order machinery fails to do its duty, we are no different from the failed states that are our neighbours.

(This article was published as the editorial column in Postnoon on October 10, 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)