Brink Politics In Maximum City

Collapsing infrastructure, complex identity politics and shifting alliances make for a dangerous cocktail that Raj Thackeray may be trying to exploit. AJIT SAHI reports from Mumbai

TAXI DRIVER Prahlad Singh drove out of a second-hand car dealer’s shop on December 27 and headed straight to Mumbai’s most popular place of Hindu worship, the Siddhivinayak Temple, to thank Ganpati, the god of auspicious beginnings. He had waited for this day eight years since leaving his native Bihar for the city of dreams. He prostrated at four other temples that evening. Sadly, the propitiation wasn’t enough. Five weeks later, on Sunday February 3, a dozen louts stopped his shining yellow- black Santro at midday on a crowded suburban Bandra road and smashed both windscreens with iron rods as a terrified young woman commuter sat in the backseat. “Bhaiyya,” spat an attacker at him, using the common pejorative for north Indians living in Mumbai. More bewildered than shaken, Singh, 35, says, “I have never harmed anyone in Mumbai. What the hell happened?”

The answer to that question is fairly simple — it’s the politics, stupid. In its ninth straight year in power in Maharashtra, the ruling combine of the Congress and the Nationalist Congress Party faces an uncertain election year in 2009, with both the Lok Sabha and the state Assembly up for grabs. Out in the wilderness for the same period, the state’s Opposition grouping of the Bharatiya Janata Party and the Shiv Sena, which has only once ruled Maharashtra from 1995 to 1999, has sensed its chance of winning power once again.

In every sense, the violence that spilled out this week on Mumbai’s streets against the lower stratum of its estimated four million north Indian residents — over a quarter of the city’s population — reflects the desperation for votes inherent in the chase for power. Ironically, basking in the political spotlight in this countdown to the next year’s elections is the Shiv Sena renegade, 39-year-old Raj Thackeray, whose own political fortunes have plunged, marked by electoral wipeouts since he angrily parted ways two years ago with his father’s older brother, the Shiv Sena’s iconoclastic founder-leader Bal Thackeray. This week’s very visible attacks on Mumbai’s cabbies, snack vendors, everyday commuters and even Amitabh Bachchan’s residence — invariably carried out by a few and always with the media in tow — have been self-confessedly wrought by the musclemen of Raj Thackeray’s fringe political outfit, the Maharashtra Navnirman Sena (MNS).

Jai Maharashtra Ire on the streets, and against Amitabh Bachchan

“It is a shame that despite living in Mumbai for decades so many north Indians have failed to imbibe the state’s culture and learn the Marathi language,” MNS vice-president Vageesh Saraswat told TEHELKA. “Why live in Maharashtra and behave as if you are still in Uttar Pradesh?”

To be sure, despite the frenzied media coverage, the violence has been sporadic and limited; mercifully, it has failed to halt the daily business of tens of frenetic millions that make Mumbai India’s most cosmopolitan city. Yet, the conflict has roused fears of another round of social divisiveness in Mumbai and in some parts of Maharashtra, bringing calls from national leaders in north India like Railways Minister Laloo Prasad Yadav, UP Chief Minister Mayawati and Bihar Chief Minister Nitish Kumar for the arrest of Raj Thackeray.

THE IMMEDIATE provocation for Raj Thackeray lay in last month’s moves by the Shiv Sena to reach out to north Indian voters in and around Mumbai, orchestrated by Bal Thackeray’s son and successor at the Shiv Sena, Uddhav. Raj had quit the Sena in 2005 after Bal Thackeray ignored him and handed the party’s baton to Uddhav, naming him the executive president. Now 47, Uddhav is older than Raj but he had entered politics a decade after Raj began working the party ropes in 1983. During January-end this year, Uddhav and the Shiv Sena vigorously courted the north Indians by organising several public functions across Mumbai, called ostensibly to celebrate “UP Divas” or foundation day. First, Raj Thackeray issued a warning against holding such celebrations. Then, he publicly accused Amitabh Bachchan of preferring Uttar Pradesh, his birthplace, over Maharashtra, his place of residence and work. The violence followed quickly.

“The Shiv Sena knows the north Indian votes are crucial if it has to return to power, as the Maharashtrians have now become a minority in each of the 36 Assembly constituencies of Mumbai,” says political commentator Kumar Ketkar, editor of the Marathi daily Lokmat.“Uddhav cannot repeat the mistakes of 2004 when the party courted mostly the Maharashtrians and lost badly.”

SHIV SENA leader Prem Shukla, who also edits the party newspaper Dopahar ka Samna, adds, “Raj is desperate that Uddhav doesn’t come to power. He reckons that a conflict between the north Indians and the Maharashtrians will polarise votes and hurt the Shiv Sena.”

In choosing Amitabh Bachchan as a target, Raj has displayed clever timing. It fetched him national media attention and Jaya Bachchan, herself an MP from Uttar Pradesh, walked right into his trap by publicly saying she knew no Thackeray other than Bal and Uddhav. Indeed, the potential of Raj Thackeray to play the spoiler in the state’s politics is not lost on any party. Not one of the four key players — Congress, NCP, BJP and Shiv Sena — has spoken out on the controversy. Loudest is the silence of Bal and Uddhav, who will be damned if they condemn the attacks and damned if they don’t.

Although his father Srikant Thackeray was an apolitical artiste, who as a film music director famously directed Mohammed Rafi in his first Marathi song, Raj Thackeray displayed a love of politics from quite a young age. Old timers recall that Raj would accompany his uncle Bal to political rallies from the age of six and sit on the stage often fiddling with his uncle’s garland. An artist like his uncle and older cousin Uddhav, Raj joined the JJ School of Arts and became a students’ union leader there. Indeed, he is widely credited with the rise of the Bharatiya Vidyarthi Sena, the Shiv Sena’s student outfit that Bal Thackeray gave him to run and nurture in the 1980s and which has long provided its share of the Shiv Sena’s dreaded muscle power. For much of that period and subsequently, Raj was among senior Thackeray’s closest coterie, and became a key leader of the Shiv Sena cadre.

“Raj has had a strong and loyal following even within the Shiv Sena and it is entirely possible that once the Bal Thackeray era is over, many may defect to Raj Thackeray,” says commentator Ketkar. “This vote bank may be scattered and chaotic, but there are enough lumpen elements to keep up the rabblerousing and they could prefer Raj over Uddhav.”

In a way, Raj Thackeray is merely following a script first dramatically enacted by Bal Thackeray when he founded the Shiv Sena in 1966, rising from being a mere current affairs cartoonist to a popular and fearsome leader vocalising the Maharashtrian sentiment against the Gujaratis and south Indians in Mumbai. Mumbai had always seen non-Maharashtrians reap a better harvest than the Maharashtrians: through the last century the Parsis and the Marwaris led the businesses, the south Indians proliferated as clerks and north Indians settled as mill workers and small businessmen and traders of milk, fish and newspapers and even, among the Muslims, scrap dealers, besides running the city’s cabs and three-wheelers.

IT WAS such sectarian sentiment and concomitant violence that brought Bal Thackeray national infamy and firmly established him since the 1960s as a voice on the Maharashtrian right. In a short while, the Shiv Sena and its thuggish cadres became a key figure in pitched battles against militant trade unions, provoking the Communist allegation that Bal Thackeray and his party were doing the dirty job as a proxy for the industrial lobby aligned with the Congress that then ruled the state. Over the next two decades, the Shiv Sena traversed the whole gamut of sectarian politics targeting Gujaratis who had lived in Mumbai for generations, south Indians, north Indians and finally Muslims during the 1989-93 movement for building a Ram temple at the site of the Babri Mosque in Ayodhya. “The common Maharashtrians do not support this divisive politics and that is why in 40 years the Shiv Sena has never seized power on its own in the state,” says Sanjay Nirupam, the 43-year-old former Shiv Sena MP who migrated to Mumbai from Bihar two decades ago and spent over a decade as a senior leader with the Shiv Sena before defecting to the Congress. “Bihar and UP are forever caught in caste-based divisive issues and politics. Not so Mumbai.”

Same direction Raj Thackeray has been urging stronger unity among Marathi speakers

If ever Nirupam’s view had merit, it is now. Migration from north India, especially UP and Bihar, to Mumbai has increased substantially over the last decade. A census study four years ago estimated 40 new families enter Mumbai every day as fresh migrants. As a result, the city’s 5.5 million Maharashtrians have turned a hopeless minority. Ironically, the Shiv Sena could well be blamed for the sharp increase in the migration. Around the 1995 Assembly elections, as an Opposition party it promised free housing for those living in the slums, prompting a mad scurry to find residence in the quintessential shantytowns that dot Mumbai’s landscape. Once in power, the Shiv Sena quickly forgot that promise — among the reasons it lost power in 1999 — but the tide of migration once unleashed continued unabated.

The Shiv Sena got a rude shock in the 2004 Lok Sabha elections when among others the party stalwart Manohar Joshi, the outgoing Lok Sabha Speaker, failed to retain his seat in the Shiv Sena stronghold of North Central Mumbai that includes Dadar, the crowded inner-city tract in Mumbai which houses the Shiv Sena headquarters. Worse, the Shiv Sena-BJP lost the Assembly elections once again and failed to win more than 18 of Mumbai’s then 34 Assembly seats. Within a year of the rout, Uddhav Thackeray had modified the party’s catchphrase from“Mee Marathi” (I’m Marathi) to “Mee Mumbaikar” (I’m from Mumbai) and begun a quiet yet aggressive campaign among the city’s residents of north Indian origin. The strategy paid off as the Shiv Sena retained power with substantial support from the north Indian vote inlast year’s high-profile elections to the Mumbai municipality, the BMC, which is India’s richest municipality with a staggering annual turnover of Rs 12,000 crore. Indeed, the Shiv Sena today runs six key municipalities in Maharashtra, including in Nashik, Nagpur, Aurangabad and Thane. In Pune’s municipality, the Shiv Sena actually junked the BJP and teamed up with rival NCP to seize power.

“It was a different world 40 years ago and Bal Thackeray could succeed at polarising opinion then,” says Nikhil Wagle, veteran activist-journalist and longtime Shiv Sena critic. “Today is the age of globalisation. Today, Maharashtrians like me are dependent on the non-Maharashtrians at every turn in our daily lives. Raj Thackeray’s attempt at polarising won’t work.”

AFTER THE 2004 elections, even Raj Thackeray realised the new reality: that there is no political future without the non-Maharashtrian Mumbai voters on his side. Indeed, a re-jigging of constituencies in Maharashtrawill ensure that in next year’s Assembly elections, 64 of the state’s 288 seats will be found in Mumbai and the neighbouring district of Thane, the Shiv Sena’s strongest bastions.

Ironically, Raj Thackeray launched MNS with a specific secular agenda; his party flag prominently included the colour blue for the Dalits, green for the Muslims and saffron for the Hindus. But last year’s municipal elections across Maharashtra turned his political dreams decidedly sour. His much-touted MNS was washed out everywhere and made it barely to the 221-seat BMC with just six of its representatives winning. Struggling to stay politically afloat, Raj realised that the only target left was the one that the Shiv Sena occupied. He was watching closely when the Shiv Sena broke ranks with its partner BJP and announced support for the Congress’ candidate for President, Pratibha Patil, a Maharashtrian, in the July 2007 election. MNS insiders say Raj was more than certain he had to move quickly when last month Uddhav led a string of well-attended farmers’ rallies in Nagpur, Amravati and Pune, seeking a waiver of bank debts of poor farmers, an issue that was hardly ever the Shiv Sena’s staple.

Indeed, the Sena’s growing clout with the north Indians does not provoke only Raj Thackeray. It has also been noticed with concern by the Congress-NCP that has traditionally received the north Indian migrants’ votes in and around Mumbai. In fact, the failure of the state government to arrest Raj following this week’s violence and the absence of strong criticism from Chief Minister Vilasrao Deshmukh is prompting the allegation that the Congress is behind Raj for a sectarian agenda.“The police stood around and watched as Raj Thackeray’s goons beat up people of north Indian origin,” Abu Azmi, the Samajwadi Party’s working president in the state, told TEHELKA, “Clearly, the Congress-NCP is backing Raj Thackeray.” As proof, he cites the fact that Raj attended the wedding of Mumbai Police Commissioner DN Jadhav’s daughter later in the week, where the beaming top cop welcomed him happily. Says Wagle, who has faced physical assaults from the Shiv Sena, “In the immediate future, Raj could well act as a Congress agent (against the Shiv Sena).”

Complicating the political landscape, Azmi’s fellow leader, former UP Chief Minister Mulayam Singh Yadav and his key lieutenant Amar Singh have been making a strong push to establish their party’s presence in Maharashtra— another reason for worry for the Congress-NCP. Similarly, UP CM Mayawati herself led a big rally of the Bahujan Samaj Party at Mumbai last November. In Mumbai, she has already started ground-level committees with representation of all sections of society.

Though both Mayawati and Mulayam can hardly be expected to win many seats in Maharashtra next year, they could fracture the traditional north Indian and Dalit votes, thus helping the Shiv Sena indirectly. In this scenario, the Congress-NCP would surely not mind if Raj manages to drive some of the traditional Maharashtrian vote away from the Shiv Sena by portraying the latter as no more the party of the people of Maharashtra.

Charged up MNS activists raise their war cry

THE POLITICS may be what it is but there is no denying that the issues raised by the current storm are resonating across the complex and complicated social structure of Mumbai. “I am no Maharashtrian bigot and my brother and sister are married to north Indians, but I don’t understand why the north Indians would not leave our politics to us,” says Nitin Jadhav, a 47-year-old Maharashtrian who currently runs the airport employees’ union in Mumbai as its general secretary.

Popular Bollywood actor Govinda, a Mumbai icon and lately a rogue politician himself, pleads for better relations between the two sides. “Mumbai is the lifeline of India and it carries India along. If Mumbai is hurt with conflict, so will India,” he says.

All agree, however, that Mumbai is as good a melting pot as can be in India. It is no strange irony that Vageesh Saraswat, the MNS vice-president, is a migrant from Aligarh in UP who speaks only broken Marathi. Prem Shukla, the Shiv Sena leader and newspaper editor, is a migrant as well. Says Sanjay Nirupam: “My wife is a Maharashtrian and I have a long list of Maharashtrian friends. That is why I say: let’s not carry on with this Marathi versus non-Marathi debate. Otherwise, all taxis in Mumbai will stop.”

Actually, even that’s not true. Cabbie Prahlad Singh had sold his wife’s jewellery and borrowed from his brother to buy his taxi, and there’s no way he will go back without making good for his wife and brother. “Mumbai has given me everything. I make four times as much here as I did in Bihar. Why on earth will I ever go back?”