The Indian Express, Oct 22, 2008
Excluding Raj
For the best part of this year, Raj Thackeray has held Mumbai hostage with intimidation and a discourse of exclusion. This weekend footsoldiers of his Maharashtra Navnirman Sena were at it again, terrorising and beating up north Indian aspirants at a Railway Recruitment Board examination in Mumbai. The incident was of a piece with Thackeray’s politics, which began this year with dog-whistle threats against north Indians in Mumbai with an attack on Amitabh Bachchan for his good works outside Maharashtra — and sustained thereafter with bully tactics to have Marathi signage in the city, the usual chatter about Chhat Puja, absurd announcements of programmes to train the “natives” for services rendered by “migrants”, etc. He has, these intervening months, also flexed his muscles by taunting police officers for saying nothing more provocative than that they would want to enforce the rule of law in the city. For the violence of this week, he was finally arrested on Tuesday morning.
The law, with this delayed action against Thackeray, must take its course. But the law alone is not enough to address the many crimes of Raj Thackeray. The ideas and intimidation unleashed by his politics require a political response. For all of this year, that political response has been felt by its silence. Thackeray has been quite skilful in trying to carve away for himself chunks of his uncle’s constituency. As he has tried to fragment the old Shiv Sena constituency and populism, other political parties in Maharashtra have stood by rather too meekly. The political response that he’s drawn has come from outside, from the national spokespersons of political parties and from north Indian politicians. Politicians in Maharashtra have been guarded. This has led some to draw the obvious conclusion that they would not like to take on Raj Thackeray, in the hope that as the competition between the Shiv Sena and MNS intensifies they could be gainers of parts of the old Sena votebank.
This is a dangerous silence. Thackeray’s MNS is still of uncertain ballast in the state’s or even the city’s electoral politics. But his hate speech and his success rate in getting the media to linger long on his comments, to play them over and over again for amplified assertion, have kept him in business. So, even with his arrest and its aftermath he is certain to keep the spotlight and to set the discourse. Unless the...
internal politics of Maharashtra asserts itself meaningfully, Thackeray will nourish an Us versus Them discourse....
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