Yesterday once more

Raj Thackeray and his party could be the first victims of the Pandora’s Box they’ve opened

Dilip Chitre

Mr Raj Thackeray’s grandfather, Keshav Sitaram Thackeray, modelled the spelling of
his surname on the British writer, William Makepeace Thackeray’s name to sound English to English ears during the heyday of the British Raj.

Raj’s  uncle Bal, so named after none other than Bal Gangadhar Tilak by the  ‘Prabodhankar’ father of Bal and his violinist brother Shrikant — Raj’s
father  — was a fanatical chauvinist and Muslim-baiter.

During the ‘freedom fight’ for a linguistic state of Maharashtra with Mumbai as its capital, and the Belgaum district now in Karnataka, and the Dang district now in Gujarat , KC Thackeray, along with PK Atre, was one of the two orator-journalists who persuaded thousands of Marathi-speakers to join a jail bharo movement. I was one of them, and spent 18 days in the  Byculla Jail in 1957.

Ten years later, Bal Thackeray (who left the Free Press Journal daily about the same time I joined it as sub-editor  in 1959) launched the Shiv Sena and  its pernicious percentage politics in Bombay/Mumbai.

His first easy target was the mopla fresh coconut seller on the city’s chowpattys — Girgaum, Dadar, and Juhu. Extortion paid; and it  emboldened Bal Thackeray and his lieutenants, including his younger brother Shrikant, to target the wealthy Shetty owners of Udipi fast food restaurants in the city.

Nobody seemed to mind this. The Shiv Sena attracted throngs of jobless youth, lumpen elements, and those whom gangsterism beckoned for other reasons.

The textile tycoons and other entrepreneurs and industrialists needed to break the hold of communist and  socialist unions on the workers of  central Mumbai.

They encouraged the newly-founded Kamgar Sena to crack the labour scene open. The communist Krishna Desai was killed allegedly by Sena workers. Soon, Parel and Lalbaug turned to the right from the left. The then chief minister of Maharashtra, Vasantrao Naik had a secret understanding with Bal Thackeray.

When the deputy prime minister of India, Morarji Desai visited the city in 1967, the Shiv Sena closed the city by felling trees  and lamp posts across roads, looted shops, and held the government to  ransom for five days.

As an eye witness, I wrote an account of the riots and their roots. Sham Lal, the liberal editor of The Times Of India sent back the article saying that he wished he could print it but dreaded the consequences.

AD Gorwalla published two of them in his Opinion. The third, entitled “Rise Of The Third Shivaji” was published by BG Verghese in The Hindustan Times and it was quoted on the floors of both houses of the Parliament.

Is Raj Thackeray doing anything new? His uncle Bal started it all. Is RR Patil’s procrastination novel? VP Naik did the same thing a long time ago. History has been repeating itself in Mumbai.

However, there is a crucial difference every time it seems to repeat itself. In 1960, Marathi speakers were nearly 70 per cent of the population of Mumbai. The numbers have steadily dwindled since. The Marathi manoos has steadily retreated to Thane and Raigad districts.

In the city that now seems to be bursting at its seams with some 20 million inhabitants, Marathi speakers are just about 35 to 40 per cent of the population and neither the Maharashtra Navanirman Sena nor the Shiv Sena can politically survive without the support of Hindi speakers from Uttar Pradesh, Bihar, Rajasthan, Madhya Pradesh, and Uttarakhand.

‘North Indians’ would of course include Panjabis and Haryanavis as well. Raj Thackeray and his party have got themselves besieged by their foolish and
desperate move against a settled polity. They have opened a Pandora’s Box and they could be its first victims.

The average middle-class Marathi mindset is ambivalent about Raj Thackeray’s brief political career. There are industrial townships in Maharashtra where the non-Marathi workers outnumber the Marathi workers.

Even in a public service sector such as urban transport, the Marathi to non-Marathi ratio is asymmetrically poised in favour of the non-Marathi. Billions of rupees of investment in Maharashtra are at stake here. The Nationalist Congress Party is playing this dangerous game and Raj is perhaps only a Trojan horse being used by Maharashtra’s equally brash deputy chief minister.

One can only hope that Raj is shown his place by the long arm of the law, lest we face further mega-urban turbulence in the near future. Mumbai is, after all, not a country bomb. It is an atomic bomb.

Dilip Chitre is a poet.