There’s justice in Thackerays losing their grip over Shiv Sena
PremiumIts influence over Mumbai was partly why the city can’t be counted today among the world’s greatest
In the Madras of my adolescence, or the way I remember it, we read The Hindu in the mornings, put it aside and shuddered at how the world was a dangerous place beyond its subscriber base. Like most of Bombay. It was called Bombay then, and my city was still Madras. Bombay, in our imagination, was teeming with gang lords. But after the Babri Masjid riots from December 1992 to early 1993, there is one clear boss—Bal Thackeray.
An odd thing about public perceptions in Madras of the time was that even though we blamed L.K. Advani for the mosque’s demolition, he was not seen as a menacing figure. Nor was the Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP), which was misunderstood as a fringe outfit that stood for quaint ideas like Hindu nationalism. It was Bal Thackeray who emerged as the Hindutva firebrand of the period, even though we knew he was a cartoonist once and we were never scared of cartoonists before. And it was his syndicate, named the Shiv Sena, and not the BJP, that showed what hate could do. Power, for example, could be achieved on a campaign of hate and grouses alone.
The Shiv Sena first came to prominence for organized violence against South Indian migrants whom Bal Thackeray cast as people who took away the jobs of Marathi-speaking locals, but he could not flog that issue for long. Then the destruction of the mosque in Ayodhya sparked riots in Mumbai, and Thackeray spoke publicly of Muslims in a way that politicians never did before. His insight was that most orators were boring because they gave sermons, but what was interesting was gossip. As he said in an interview, a lesson he learnt from his father was that an orator must “gossip with the people".
At the beginning, Thackeray probably did not mean to become the figure he did. One of the finest analysis of his power came from Pritish Nandy, who told me, “At the start of his political career, he used to say things half in jest, and he used to be surprised at how seriously his words were taken. Slowly, he began to believe those things that he used to say in jest." By the mid-90s, Thackeray held sway in Mumbai and other urban parts of Maharashtra. As a result, in 1995, the Shiv Sena formed a government for the first time.
That year, as a 21-year-old, I set out to work as a journalist in what was still called Bombay. I imagined I was going to a dangerous place and that inevitably I would be in some risky situations with the Shiv Sena. My first encounters, though, were absurd.
Days after landing in Bombay, I discovered that the Sena ran street gyms that cost just ₹20 or so per month. When I walked into one, half a dozen men on high-carb diets trying to look menacing found it amusing that a South Indian with a Christian name, who spoken no Marathi at all, would enter their den. They asked me to do 50 push-ups “for Hanuman". And they gave me two pieces of cloth—one blue and one red—and said I could only visit the gym wearing these. It took me several days to figure out they were langots.
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I lived in a chawl, in an area that was then a Sena stronghold, and I saw the life of an average Shiv Sainik. He was young and unemployed most days, tried to look menacing even to other Maharashtrians, and the only form of entertainment he could afford were the free street festivals his party organized that began with devotional songs and ended with the national anthem. From 1997 or so, the typical Shiv Sena carnival, at least in the Prabhadevi area, ended not with the national anthem, but with another song—Aqua’s Barbie Girl.
But my most absurd experience of the Sena was the first time I saw Bal Thackeray. It was a press conference in his home, Matoshree. I waited with many journalists, almost all of them from Marathi papers. There was an empty throne in front of us. Finally, he appeared.
After he sat, he stared at two journalists, both women, who were chatting among themselves. He kept looking at them, first in amusement, then in anger. I could understand. Even I thought it was odd. Here was a man of enormous power, and the two were just chatting. He scolded them for being disrespectful. He said, “Do you want to get home?" I do not know if he meant they would be escorted out. One of the women surely thought it was a threat. She yelled at him. This was my first acquaintance with the famed Bal Thackeray—a woman shouting at him and his looking helpless.
Despite its fame, the Sena was in reality a small party. It was Mumbai that was big, not the party. Actually, it remains a regional party even in Maharashtra. Though it has headed the state government thrice, all its terms have added up to less than eight years in power. It has attempted to contest elections in other states, where it has fared poorly. But anything that happens in Delhi, or in Mumbai, gets amplified by the media, and that is how the Sena has an outsized image.
Thackeray’s Shiv Sena, like other political parties, was useless to Mumbai. Neither the party nor Bal Thackeray had a vision for the city. Its people, including me, lived lives and commuted in a manner that were worse than what people had to endure in the rest of India. Intellectually austere journalists from Delhi used to hail Bombay for “its spirit", by which they meant that no flood or terror attack could stop people from going to work. The fact is that people in the city go to work every day because their homes are worse than their offices. The Sena was among the forces that contributed to Mumbai’s decay, denying it its rightful place as one of the great megacities of the world. The Thackeray family’s loss of control over the Shiv Sena is not going to change anything about the party, but perhaps it is some kind of justice.
Manu Joseph is a journalist, novelist, and the creator of the Netflix series, ‘Decoupled’