The Times of India, October 22, 2008
Editorial
The Outsiders
If he was arrested, Raj Thackeray had warned, the Maharashtra government would have to suffer some consequences. Come Tuesday, Maharashtra Navnirman Sena (MNS) activists did their utmost to deliver on his threat. His arrest in Ratnagiri by the Mumbai police was an important step in the right direction. It was, however, just the beginning of a process of accountability. Muddying the waters is the fact that he has not been brought in on the non-bailable warrant issued by a Jamshedpur court on September 30. Instead, he has been arrested in connection with the MNS’s attack on north Indian candidates appearing for a railway recruitment examination in Mumbai; it happens to be a bailable warrant. But in any legal manoeuvring that follows, a larger picture must not be overlooked.
Raj and the MNS have no compunctions about operating outside the country’s constitutional framework. The methods adopted by them go beyond being merely extralegal; they are anti-national in nature. Their rhetoric is divisive, aimed at promoting regional bias and parochial vote banks. Their actions deny citizens of the northern part of the country their basic rights. Worryingly, their tactics are a symptom of the malaise affecting several parts of the Indian polity. Dissent is a fundamental right in a democracy but its expression here has been subverted by a spectrum of political leaders. MNS activity in Mumbai, attacks on Christians in various parts of India, Mamata Banerjee’s disruptive agitation in Singur or the CPM’s violence in Nandigram are all of a piece.
When a minister reasons in Parliament — as Shiv Sena’s Anant Geete did — that the Railway Recruitment Board’s faulty policies are to blame for the violence against the exam candidates, it points to a disconnect between politicians and the system they are meant to uphold. People are bound to differ over competing interests. These disputes must be channelled through the safety valves provided by the democratic model, that is, through public discourse, a free press, the judiciary, and, ultimately, elections. If the MNS wishes to represent Maharashtrians, it must do so from within the democratic system as their elected representative.
Politicians operating outside the system are, sadly, not the only ones working against it. When Parliament meets for just 32 days in a year as fraught as this, it is as disheartening a symptom of the malaise. If elected representatives can make a mockery of Parliament by not caring to be there, they merely encourage the likes of Raj, who said, ominously, on Sunday that the state’s rulers did not understand the language of non-violence, leaving him no option but to be violent.
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