Frontline, November 07-20, 2009
Wounded tiger
PTI
Shiv Sena supremo Bal Thackeray casting his vote at a polling station at Bandra in Mumbai.
SHIV SENA supremo Bal Thackeray is furious, hurt and disillusioned, if one goes by an editorial in the party’s mouthpiece Saamna. Commenting on his party’s debacle, he says: “It is not outsiders but Maharashtrians themselves who have stabbed me in the back.”
The Sena, which ruled the State in alliance with the Bharatiya Janata Party from 1995 to 1999, finished fourth, winning just 44 of the 169 seats it contested.
The 85-year-old leader asks why the “Marathi manus”, whom the Sena consistently supported, failed to vote for the party. According to him, the latest election has made him lose faith in everything, including Maharashtrians and God.
Citing the success of the dominant regional parties in Tamil Nadu, he says: “It seems the Marathi people still have not got wiser, and their minds are dead.”
The senior Thackeray wondered how the people of Maharashtra could bring back to power a government that had failed on every front. “There was corruption, load shedding, Maoist terror which killed policemen, suicides of thousands of farmers and the Mumbai terror attacks. But people could not see anything,” he wrote.
His tirade caused an uproar among Mumbai’s Maharashtrians. Thackeray then came up with the flimsy excuse that he was targeting only those Maharashtrians who had turned against him – a veiled attack on his nephew. The Sena appears to be going through an identity and leadership crisis. It was Bal Thackeray who singularly ensured the party’s victory in 1995. His son Uddhav does not seem to have the father’s capabilities. Political observers feel that the party virtually has no issues to fight on.
When the Sena was launched in 1966, it aimed at job reservation for Maharashtrians. It backed trade unions and played a crucial role during the Mumbai textile mill crisis. However, in the early 1990s, the party became much more right-wing and proclaimed that it would uphold Hindutva. It joined forces with the BJP, and became a powerful entity playing a major part in communal riots.
The party never had any lofty ideology. Mostly made up of lumpen elements, it went from strength to strength by propagating communal hate. At one point, its moral policing became quite extreme: its activists even smashed shops that sold Valentine’s Day cards because it was not an Indian festival.
Now evidently Raj Thackeray and his Maharashtra Navnirman Sena have stolen its “ideology”. The MNS operates in much the same manner. Raj says his party follows the Hindutva philosophy. He also takes up employment-related issues such as the cause of the Jet Airways probationary employees who were dismissed. Of late, Raj and Uddhav have been waging a war of words. Unless the Shiv Sena gets its house in order, it seems obvious which cousin will emerge the winner.
Anupama Katakam
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