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October 30, 2015

India: 'If the Shiv Sena's politics of coercion goes unchecked, Mumbai cannot remain what it has been' says scholar Gyan Prakash

India Today - 9 November 2015

Parochial trumps plural
If the Shiv Sena's politics of coercion goes unchecked, Mumbai cannot remain what it has been and what all great cities are-open, welcoming, places of diversity and experimentation.
Gyan Prakash | October 28, 2015

If the Shiv Sena's politics of coercion goes unchecked, Mumbai cannot remain what it has been and what all great cities are-open, welcoming, places of diversity and experimentation.

The Shiv Sena attack on the BCCI office on October 19 is condemnable, but it should come as no surprise. Muscle power is, after all, the Sena's characteristic modus vivendi. What should trouble us, however, is what the minimum, mean-spirited politics of Hindu chauvinism portends for Mumbai's existence as a "Maximum City".

The city's cosmopolitan self-image may be a myth, but it matters. At stake is the actual history and the living present of diverse religious, linguistic, and ideological coexistence that stands behind the idea of the city as a tropical Camelot. Any city is a society patched together with natives and immigrants, people of different classes, faiths and cultures. This is all the more so in Mumbai. Its very foundation as an Island City, forged from seven islets on the Arabian Sea, tells a story of human artifice. Well documented is its history as a dazzling mélange of communities and tongues, as a teeming population of merchants, businessmen, salaried employees, shopkeepers, workers, professionals, and artists. It has even concocted a hybrid vernacular-Bambaiyya-to conduct everyday communication across linguistic barriers. The myth is really experienced.

Is it any surprise, then, that the Sena announced its founding in 1966 by attacking the plural ideal? Bal Thackeray celebrated the birth of the Marathi manoos by targeting south Indians. He followed it up by attacking communists in the mill districts. Thundering against the Muslims, he called their neighbourhood Pakistan. The city had to be cleansed of its "alien" elements.

But it was not enough to unleash a vitriolic ideology to kill the real idea of Bombay. Direct action was needed. It would not do to just excoriate south Indians for allegedly taking away jobs from the "sons of the soil". Udipi restaurants had to be attacked. No working through the institutions, no patient building of political support would suffice in securing the rights of the Marathi manoos. The cause demanded vandalising government offices and the physical intimidation of officials. It wasn't adequate to just oppose the communist ideology; they had to be physically destroyed. So, the Sena members allegedly murdered the CPI MLA and trade union leader, Krishna Desai, in 1970. The same year, Thackeray's inflammatory rhetoric preceded the violence directed against Muslims in Bhiwandi. And as the Srikrishna Commission noted, Thackeray's combustive speeches and the Sena's actions played a role in the 1992-93 riots.

Violence is not an unfortunate byproduct of the Sena's politics. It is its essential method. As the original Angry Young Man, Thackeray extolled the virtues of thokshahi, the rule of force, as opposed to lokshahi, democracy. In place of the norms of liberal-democratic politics of discussion and debate, what drives the Sena is a doctrine of direct action fuelled by feelings of masculine, virile energy. It seeks to achieve prompt attention to its goals by short-circuiting the political process.

The main culprit in letting the Sena's assault on institutions go unopposed, if not aiding it, is the Congress. It looked the other way when the Sena's activists went after the communists because it saw political advantages in cutting the reds to size. The Congress-led government appointed the Srikrishna Commission to inquire into the 1992-93 riots only under intense public pressure to restore its image as an institution standing above social divisions. When the Sena-BJP government came to power in 1995, it did everything possible to dilute its responsibility. The Congress-NCP formed the 1999 government, but it ignored the commission's recommendations for prosecuting the guilty political leaders and police officials. If the commission stood out as a courageous assertion of liberal norms, the government's conduct demonstrated its abject failure to uphold the rule of the law. Again, it was under the Congress-NCP government that Mumbai University dropped Rohinton Mistry's Such a Long Journey from its syllabus after a Sena threat.

The Sena's attack against cricket-that quintessential symbol of fair play-is only the latest act in its offensive against liberal institutions. What makes it more ominous is the context. The attempt to silence a Pakistani author from speaking by smearing the face of his Indian interlocutor with ink comes to mind. So does the lynching at Dadri. Even if what sparked these incidents in the recent past is the Hindutva ideology, that is not what makes them worrying. What is menacing is the attempt to impose an ideology in defiance of the law. As an historian my mind immediately turns to Germany in the 1930s. There, too, the Nazis rose to power by destroying democratic institutions with the politics of intimidation.

The Sena's latest antics may be driven by a desire to climb out of its lowered status in the alliance with the BJP that was forced upon it by the last state elections. Built by Bal Thackeray to call the political shots with thokshahi, accepting a junior status in the alliance is not in its DNA. So it resorts to what it knows best-ride back to political dominance by defying democracy and unleashing intimidation. Surely, it is emboldened by the fact that the politics of direct action that it has so persistently deployed and perfected is becoming the normal way of settling ideological differences.

Although the Shiv Sena's intimidation has long stalked the city, Mumbai is not what it wants to make. Any time spent in the city will convince you that, in spite of all the problems, it is still welcoming to strangers. When terrorists attacked in 2008, the city did not erupt into an anti-Pakistan or anti-Muslim hysteria. Bombay may be Mumbai now, but Bambaiyya is still the language of the street. This is not to invoke the clichéd "Mumbai spirit" but to assert that its history and the present of interactions across boundaries in everyday life matter. But so do institutions.

If the Sena's populist style of politics goes unchecked, it will destroy institutions of democratic discussion and debate. If that happens, everyday life in the city will not remain immune from intimidation and violence. Already, Muslims experience great difficulty in renting and buying apartments because property owners defy laws against discrimination.

Mumbai cannot remain what it has been and what all great cities are-open, welcoming, places of diversity and experimentation-if its institutions and the rule of law are put to death by the minimalist politics of coercion. It is heartening to see writers returning their Sahitya Akademi Awards in protest against the state's inaction against the forces of terrorisation. The survival of democracy requires that the Maximum City embrace maximum politics.

Gyan Prakash teaches history at Princeton University and is the author of Mumbai Fables