Downing shutters on the fear factory - Dismantling Bal Thackeray’s legacy | Ruchir Joshi

Mail Today, 25 November 2012

Downing shutters on the fear factory

by Ruchir Joshi

Dismantling Bal Thackeray’s legacy of fear will require concerted effort

A LOT OF TV and print reportage and commentary were generated last week. Despite the risk of repeating some of what others have said it might be useful to make a precis of, say, the five chief things we learned last week.

1. It’s possible to make a life- long career out of creating fear. Fear is a kind of wealth you gather to yourself, the more you have, the more you make, both for yourself and for others.

As with making money, you start small and show a profit. Then you find investors. Then you dump most of your initial investors and find new ones with more money to invest in your business ( some of the earlier investors can maintain secret shares, however, and will never help anyone foreclose on your business). As you grow you, naturally, need to diversify and expand your operations, reinvent your brand while mantaining the initial ‘ logo recognition’.

Double- edged

You start by shouting to create fear and the anger that comes from fear.

If you shout loud enough, you can scare a lot of people and make them angry that they’re scared. They will then join you in scaring other people, in the hope the fear will leave your group and pass on to the others, a bit like the domino of loss in capitalism; as the Gujjus say, ‘ anhi topi anhey maathey, chello rahyo ughade maathey’ or ‘ his hat on that guy’s head, that guy’s hat on some other head, the last one end up bareheaded’. If you add a bit of muscle to the shouting, the odd killing and beating up, then you can really scare a lot of people. This will then give you more muscle to increase your power and more support from all sorts of quarters who think they can use you. You may be able to turn the tables and use these people instead, or get into a cat’s cradle of mutual usage and blackmail that lasts throughout your life.

The difference is, money can sometimes be used to make life better for yourself and others, through say education, health systems, infrastructures of various kinds etc. You can amass huge wealth for yourself and some of it may still fall off your table into the hands of others, even if you don’t intend that to happen.

But with the amassing, stocking and investment of fear the only power that will increase is the power to scare more people and to keep them scared longer. You will not cure any disease or eradicate illiteracy with fear. When you die, your only legacy will be fear. The only lesson your followers will have learnt from you is how to create, spread and maintain fear. And, once that fear dissipates, as it will, or once it moves on lock, stock and barrel to other locations, as it does, the only trace left of you will be the memory of the misery you brought to people’s lives.

2. It’s not always a bad thing when evil, powerful people die natural deaths. I remember writing a column when George W. Bush was in power where I said I hoped to god no one managed to assassinate him, because that would turn him into a martyr instead of the cruel and bigoted idiot he was. Thank god Bal Thackeray’s exit was natural and didn’t lead to the deaths of innocent others. Did Bal T get away with it, with setting up this huge industry of fear? Did he escape punishment for all his deeds? In some ways, yes, undeniably he did. But the dreadful beauty of the double- edged sword he forged is this: one can be pretty sure that at the end of his life, in his own megalomaniac view, he had failed to get what he wanted, and he was too intelligent not to realise that after him would probably begin the diminishing and dismantling of his Shiv Sena. The game was up for him a few years ago and his remaining time was spent in bluster, trying to shore up a failing concern.

3. We should not trust our media and certainly not our celebrities or top tycoons. As the praise poured in for this magnate of fear, you had to choke back the disgust. All sorts of high and mighty people had to be ‘ balanced’ about this man. ‘ Whatever, but he developed pride’. ( He didn’t, he spent four decades creating shame for Bombay and India).

‘ Neverthless, he was a worthy adversary’. ( Well, not for the people he maimed.) ‘ I don’t know about others, but he was personally kind to me’ ( while unkindly crippling a great cosmopolis and turning it into a dread- driven small town). ‘ He was witty.’ ( Not very funny, by the examples given).

A lot of this praise and sorrow were clearly driven by two or three kinds of fear. One: ‘ if I don’t praise him, his people can still create trouble’. Two: ‘ if I join in the chorus of sorrow maybe people won’t single me out from all of us who used him to destroy the city’s unions and the workers’ lives’. Three: ‘ his party still comands enough people that we can’t afford to lose on our TRPs’. As a result, too few people actually said what so many felt.

Boundaries

4. India is not a country where democracy and free speech flourish.

There are small pockets of democracy and some scrubs where free speech manage to survive in a vast desert of terrified silence. The more urban you are, the more connected to English and to the world outside, the better your chances of accessing and disseminating free speech. If you live in one of India’s constricted mini- worlds so heavily circumscribed by class and social geography, your chances of being able to speak out and survive unscathed are close to zero. Even if you’re Englishspeaking and live in an urban area, you are at risk unless you are wellconnected.

Thackeritis is as alive and well in south Calcutta as it is in the suburbs of Bombay: say something critical of the powers that be and they’ll get you; right after the police arrest you, the mobs will smash up your house.

Dare

5. To ensure free speech and other freedoms, we have to start prosecuting the low- level policemen who carry out the illegal instructions of low or high level politicians and business forces. We have to challenge them with civil suits, PILs and whatever other legal means at our disposal. There is no magic wand, it’s going to be a hard grind, but what this will eventually lead to is a ‘ push- up effect’ where the top cops, faced with the deep and widespread discomfort of their subordinates will be obliged to protect their own.

It’s only the self- interest of the police that will make them learn to resect the oath they take to the constitution and law and order when they pass out of the police academies.

‘ Sorry sir, you can transfer me, but it’s more than my job’s worth for me to ask the thana officer to carry out this illegal arrest. No can do, sorry.’ Yes, it’s a fantasy, but a good one. In the face of the thugdriven nightmare that’s still alive, let’s give bhay- samrat Bal Thackeray a proper send- off by daring to dream of and make true a reality that would have terrified him.

The writer authored The Last Jet- Engine Laugh