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SharePoliticians, we know, like to divide people in the hope that at least one group will vote for them. Raj Thackeray, worried that the father-son duo of Bal and Uddhav Thackeray may have walked off with the ethnic
Maharashtrian vote, encouraged an attack on hapless north Indian taxi-drivers this week in the hope that the Marathi manoos will now see him as their savior.
In doing so, he may have done Mumbaikars a disservice. Mumbai is the last place to welcome fundamentalism of any kind -- beyond a point.
I know that we have seen religious riots, caste conflicts and ethnic mayhem in the past. But whenever these problems have surfaced, Mumbai's citizens have closed ranks because anarchy on the streets works against their economic interests.
If there is one thing that unites Mumbaikars, it is their shared goal of getting ahead in life. Disruption impedes their progress. I am confident Raj Thackeray will fail in his efforts to drum up linguistic chauvinism.
That said, it is worth understanding what Raj is really trying to tap into so that we can come to terms with it better. Fears of becoming a minority are as old as civilisation itself.
Depending on which unit you take as the whole, almost every community in India thinks it is being gradually outnumbered by 'others'.
In Maharashtra, it is Maharashtrians; in Bangalore it is Kannadigas; in India as a whole, the non-Hindi speaking states worry about each one of them being swamped by Hindi-speakers.
Look at religious numbers, and Sikhs feel threatened in Punjab; Muslims in the whole of India; Hindus in the sub-continent and the world.
At the other end of the spectrum, the Parsis are so insecure about their minuscule numbers that they are collectively willing themselves into extinction.
There are only two ways to grow the numbers, and these include conversion or inter-marriage. But they are so rigid about not recognising outsiders who marry Parsis as Parsis that the community is shrinking right before our eyes.
The plight of the Parsis demonstrates the connection between community insecurity, racial purity and fundamentalism.
At one level, the Parsis are one of India's most forward-looking communities, and probably the best-educated. But they are so concerned about racial purity that they are about to lose it all.
The obsession with racial purity makes them one of the most "fundamentalist" communities in the world. Apparently, a high level of education and wealth is no guarantee that you will not be completely reactionary in another sphere.
In a lecture delivered at Delhi University in 2005, Salman Akhtar, lecturer in psychiatry at Harvard Medical School, and brother of our own lyricist Javed Akhtar, explains the lure of fundamentalism through the "six burdens of sanity".
Sane and mentally healthy people have to live with uncertainty, complexity, moral ambiguity, personal responsibility, cultural impurity and the certainty of death.
No matter who you are, you will ultimately die. You will also be racially or culturally impure. Even the Parsis are not exempt from this rule. Nor is there something inherently Maharashtrian about Marathi manoos. Everybody is a mix of several influences --racial, linguistic, whatever.
Every sane person knows this, but for many people this lack of simple definition or identity is burdensome. Fundamentalism, by painting things in black and white (us vs them), tackles this sense of not being rooted in anything by getting rid of the "six burdens of sanity."
The Marathi manoos are plagued, like other human beings, by the normal uncertainties of life, domestic tensions, economic angst, et al. Raj Thackeray is offering the lure of a fundamentalist ideology targeted at "the other" as a placebo.
It may work for some time. But for sane people, there is no getting away from the burdens of sanity. The Marathi manoos will gain nothing by driving away the north Indian from Mumbai or other parts of the state.
Email: r_jagannathan@dnaindia.net
