THE small-statured warrior king Shivaji is credited with bringing about the downfall of India's Mughal dynasty with nimble guerrilla tactics. Raj Thackeray, who rules Mumbai as the city's unanointed prefect in the name of Shivaji, may not quite succeed in wrecking the present republic, but he may have succeeded to a large extent in undermining the idea of India.
Though the facts about Shivaji's successes and failures are a matter of conjecture depending largely on the chronicler or historian you quote, there is little doubt that the Maratha armies his legend inspired did succeed in controlling vast swathes of India, becoming perhaps the only post-Mughal Indian group to attempt to ascend the throne of Delhi. Marathas are notionally a part of India's middle castes that have become assertive in its largely caste-based contemporary politics.
The Thackeray family, headed by Raj's estranged uncle Bal Thackeray, though technically of the Chaandrsenia Kayastha Prabhu caste a notch above the Marathas, but a bit below the Brahmins has sought to infuse militancy in the caste equation to neutralise the hold of other Maratha contenders in the fray. They include Agriculture Minister Sharad Pawar and Home Minister Shivraj Patil who belong to different corners of Prime Minister Manmohan Singh's delicately-balanced coalition. Raj Thackeray's faction of the family is believed to be clandestinely shored up by the Singh government.
Bal Thackeray is aligned with the Hindu revivalist BJP.Bal Thackeray and his son Udhav run the Shiv Sena. Newphew Raj Thackeray has formed the breakaway Maharashtra Navanirman Sena (MNS). The family has used muscle power to deal with its rivals. Their quarries have included leftist trade unions, South Indians, Muslims and now “north Indians”, euphemism for migrant workers from Bihar and Uttar Pradesh. The anti-Bihari campaign in an election year should spell disaster for both the BJP and the Congress who overtly or covertly support the Thackeray family's antics. This is so because of the enormous number of votes they would lose in the populous states of Uttar Pradesh and Bihar.
This potential loss could however be offset for the BJP because of a parallel campaign being run by Bal Thackeray to target Muslims. Last week he extended support to a woman preacher, a sadhvi, with links to the BJP, who has been picked up for questioning in the bizarre but palpably real terror links of Hindu extremists replete with successful bombings and blasts that misfired and killed their own. Bal Thackeray's blessing of the sadhvi is of a piece with the kind of communalisation being carried out across India ahead of the make or break elections for the BJP.
The son-of-the-soil movement, upholding the virtues of Marathi manoos visa a vis the alleged intruders with their alien culture, has spared the Gujaratis, as often happens across India. Gujarati is the lingua franca of Indian bourses, including the main one in Mumbai. The selective targeting of communities on ethnic and religious grounds clearly shows that the Shiv Sena, and now the MNS, mostly attack the weak and the poor. In the absence of a political strategy to combat religious bigotry of the BJP and regional chauvinism of the Thackeray family, India is in a dangerous flux. As some would say the very idea of India as a bouquet of diverse cultures and nationalities is facing a severe test.
As so often happens in this kind of flux, given the political vacuum, people have themselves resorted to humour as the best medicine for symptomatic relief if not the cure. Just as the Ziaul Haq jokes circulated with impunity in his lifetime and they do their rounds against the current dispensation in Pakistan, there have been quite a few on the internet on the Raj Thackeray episode. One such is the lampooning of the future of India with him in charge of Maharashtra. It goes thus
We all should support Raj Thackeray and take his initiative ahead by doing more...
1. We should teach our kids that if he is second in class, don't study harder. Just beat up the student coming first and throw him out of the school.
2. Parliament should have only Delhiites as it is located in Delhi
3. Prime-minister, president and all other leaders should only be from Delhi
4. No Hindi movie should be made in Bombay. Only Marathi.
5. At every state border, buses, trains, flights should be stopped and staff changed to local staff.
6. All Maharashtrians working abroad or in other states should be sent back as they are SNATCHING employment from Locals
7. Visits to Taj Mahal should be restricted to people from Uttar Pradesh only
8. Relief for farmers in Maharashtra should not come from centre because that is the money collected as tax from whole of India, so why should it be given to someone in Maharashtra?
9. Let's support Kashmiri militants because they are right in killing and injuring innocent people for the benefit of their state and community.
10. Let's throw all MNCs out of Maharashtra, why should they earn from us? We will open our own Maharashtra Microsoft, MH Pepsi and MH Marutis of the world .
11. Let's stop using cellphones, emails, TV, foreign movies and dramas. James Bond should speak Marathi
12. We should be ready to die hungry or buy food at 10 times higher price but should not accept imports from other states
13. We should not allow any industry to be set up in Maharashtra because all machinery comes from outside
14. We should STOP using local trains...Trains are not manufactured by Marathi manoos and Railway Minister is a Bihari
15. Ensure that all our children are born, grow, live and die without ever stepping out of Maharashtra, then they will become true Marathis.
Following a nationwide condemnation and an uproar in parliament, the Maharashtra state government finally arrested Raj Thackeray on Oct 21. He subsequently secured an interim bail. Said the editorial in an outraged leftist journal “Such a chauvinistic campaign mounted by the MNS and the accompanied vandalism is simply not acceptable.
The Indian Constitution clearly gives the right to any of its citizens irrespective of their caste, creed or gender to reside and pursue occupations anywhere in the country. It is this fundamental feature of the Constitution that is being attacked with impunity. It is the duty of both the centre and the state governments, who are in office under the oath of this very Constitution, to take all measures, stringent if necessary, to protect, uphold and implement the provisions of our Constitution. Both the governments led by the Congress party have, so far, failed in this task.” Having said that, the Left Front itself has not been able to come up with an effective response to the rightwing upsurge. Shivaji led his people out of Maharashtra to dream of an India under their watch. The Thackeray family is using his name to take the people back to the narrow confines of a matching mindset.
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