Rahul Gandhi’s question to the Shiv Sena and the Maharashtra Navnirman Sena (MNS) about the ethnicity of the NSG commandos who took on the 26/11 terrorists was crass political rhetoric.
It signals the entry of a new guard in the party which is willing to play hardball. The comment shot an arrow straight into the heart of where it might hurt the Shiv Sena and the MNS. Clearly, the parochial politics of these two local parties has now annoyed just about every other political dispensation in the land.
The Rashtriya Swayamsewak Sangh and the Bharatiya Janata Party, the Samajwadi Party, the Bahujan Samaj Party, the Dravida Munnetra Kazhagam, the Congress and the Left have all taken issue with the “Mumbai for Maharashtrians” argument put forward by the Sena and its breakaway party, the MNS.
Interestingly, Rahul Gandhi’s jumping into the fray has forced the state government and the state Congress to also come out and echo his words. Very often, the state Congress and its partner, the Nationalist Congress Party, tend to be very weak in their responses to Sena bullying.
The NCP’s RR Patil, in his last avatar as home minister, faced some flak for his apparent refusal to take action against Raj Thackeray and the MNS when North Indian taxi drivers and labourers were being attacked.
The Sena, unfortunately for itself, has opened war on too many fronts —it has taken on all “non” Maharashtrians, north Indians in particular, Sachin Tendulkar, Mukesh Ambani, Shah Rukh Khan, Australian cricketers and Pakistani cricketers.
This would have been a formidable combination to take head on even in its heyday. It is doubtful if it can now fight all of them in its much weakened state, struggling not just to reclaim lost ground but also to re-establish an identity for itself.
For now, it seems that the Sena has bitten off far more than it can chew. The issue of who Mumbai belongs to may sound ludicrous but at its most serious it has to do with the future of the Indian state.
That is why just about every large political party in the nation has spoken out against the Sena. This is not a battle that the Sena can hope to win.
It is all the more likely, however, that the Sena did not expect to win this one or even that the issue would snowball. Perhaps all it was hoping for was high-impact visibility in the media to establish its Marathi manoos credentials.
The question is whether it has achieved that purpose even if it loses the larger battle for vote share.
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