Dividing The Nation

A statue of the Great Maratha warrior king Chhatrapati Shivaji in a classic battle pose dominates Shivaji Park, a spear’s throw from Raj Thackeray’s residence. The Maharashtra Navnirman Sena (MNS) leader, like his uncle Bal Thackeray, frequently flaunts Shivaji’s name to rally voters at his public meetings in Maharashtra. The distortion of history is conveniently ignored. Shivaji fought and defeated powerful Mughal invaders to create a unified India, albeit a Hindu one. Raj Thackeray is doing the opposite: dividing India by unleashing his goon squads on fellow Indians, with fatal consequences, just because they happen to come from outside the state. The strategy to play to the Maharashtrian gallery and steal the vote bank from under his uncle’s nose is obvious, but the ramifications are evil and dangerous. Having literally scented blood, his increasingly militant and mindless supporters are now indulging in open arson, destruction of property, and murder. The passenger from Bihar who was kicked and beaten on a train till he died is the latest manifestation of the politics of hate that has been unleashed in India’s commercial capital.
It would be tempting to wonder how a petty tyrant and gangster like the young Thackeray could be allowed to hold the country’s most cosmopolitan city to ransom. The answer is to be found in the political career of Raj’s uncle Bal Keshav Thackeray, founder of the Shiv Sena, which is best defined by the ancient credo—saam (communicate), daam (buy), dand (force), bhed (divide). Thackeray built his party by playing the Marathi manoos card over 40 years ago. While his son Uddhav has been busy imparting lessons on the merits of globalisation, for nephew Raj, who split from the Shiv Sena three years ago, the four principles are sacred testaments.
After adopting a universal political philosophy embodied in the MNS flag that has bands of saffron for Hindus, green for Muslims and blue for Dalits, he has quickly leapt to the final—divisive politics.

The results are more than encouraging, if the recent incidents of violence in Mumbai are an indication. While MNS has sowed the seeds of dissent between the Marathis and ‘outsiders’, it’s the unsuspecting man in a local train who got lynched even as a hate-ridden Bihari youth opened fire in a BEST bus. That’s the kind of hatred Raj Thackeray and his MNS is spreading.
The incident of October 28, when Dharamdev Rai, a migrant labourer from Gorakhpur district in Uttar Pradesh, was lynched by Marathi-speaking youths after a clash, has left the nation shocked. Just a day earlier, Rahul Raj, a 23-year-old Bihari youth from Patna, travelled all the way to Mumbai with the sole intention to avenge the attack on fellow Biharis by the MNS over the past one year. But after he opened fire and held 13 passengers hostage at Kurla, he was shot down by the police. If a corporate parallel were to be drawn, what’s happening in Mumbai and the Shiv Sena is akin to a battle for succession. An ailing patriarch, his son who is seen as a rank outsider and a streetsmart nephew who believes he was the successor.
Add to that the weak leadership in a state where the two ruling coalition partners are constantly trying to outdo each other. The situation was tailor-made for the opportunistic Raj to play with fire to carve out his own niche. When he started taunting the ‘outsiders’, Mumbai’s ruling class looked the other way. When aspirants for railway jobs were beaten up and prevented from taking examinations, Chief Minister Vilasrao Deshmukh initially seemed to view it as a problem that would go away on its own. But when the pressure got on him, he finally decided to book Raj under Section 153 of the IPC, which ensured that the MNS chief was out of jail within 24 hours. It was a familiar compromise.
Raj could have easily been booked for more serious offences which would have ensured a longer stay in jail. A Bombay High Court judge, Justice J.N. Patel, had already condemned his actions and likened him to a terrorist. There was also a case pending against him in Jamshedpur, where a non-bailable warrant had been issued against him for denigrating a community (Biharis).
Instead, there was shameful capitulation from all concerned, an indication of the psychological blow that one man and his rabid followers have inflicted on India’s maximun city.
The police cannot be expected to do any better when Joint Commissioner of Police K.L. Prasad, who showed spine by reminding Raj that Mumbai was not anyone’s ancestral property, is told to lie low. And when the nation expected its leaders to act decisively, nothing was forthcoming from those who mattered. The silence from Congress President Sonia Gandhi and Rahul Gandhi was sphinx-like, while Prime Minister Manmohan Singh’s call for sanity seemed under duress, coming as it did after the unlikely combine of Railways Minister Lalu Prasad Yadav, Bihar Chief Minister Nitish Kumar and Steel Minister Ram Vilas Paswan lodged protests.