Salil Tripathi: The Demagogue of Bombay - WSJ.com

The Demagogue of Bombay

Ultimately Thackeray failed to change the essentially tolerant nature of the city.

By SALIL TRIPATHI

In death as in life, Bal Thackeray brought Bombay to a standstill. Thousands of policemen were called up to maintain order on Sunday, the day of his funeral. They needn't have bothered, as the streets were deserted out of fear. Most residents chose to stay home rather than risk the wrath of Thackeray's supporters.
On the other hand, a sizeable fraction of the population felt genuine grief at the death of the founder of the Shiv Sena party that governed Maharashtra state from 1995-99. More than one million people lined the streets to bid Thackeray farewell. So why did his nativist rhetoric resonate so widely over the last half century in India's most open, meritocratic and vibrant city?
Thackeray formed Shiv Sena, named after a 17th century Maharashtran warrior-king, in 1966. It was a bleak time in domestic politics. India had just lost a war against China, won an inconclusive war against Pakistan, Prime Ministers Jawaharlal Nehru and Lal Bahadur Shastri had died in office, and drought was causing hardship and hunger. Prime Minister Indira Gandhi was in the process of splitting her party, the Congress, and adopting a radical socialist line, nationalizing banks and devaluing the rupee.
 

European Pressphoto Agency

Balasaheb Keshav Thackeray.

This insecurity was fertile ground for a nationalist cartoonist seeking a way into politics. Thackeray first stoked the injured pride of Marathi-speaking people in Bombay and roused them to take action against outsiders. South Indian job-seekers and the restaurants they and others patronized, many of them called Udupi, were his early targets, followed by Gujarati and Marwari shopkeepers. Later, he helped businesses divide trade unions.
But linguistic chauvinism had limited appeal. By the 1980s, the Shiv Sena realized that if it only talked about Marathi identity, it would remain a Bombay-based party. In the city the majority no longer spoke Marathi, while in the rest of Maharashtra tension over migrants was less of an issue as the population was overwhelmingly Marathi.
And so Thackeray turned to Hindu nationalism, or Hindutva. Muslims became the target, and he laced several of his speeches with obscene invectives. He claimed he was only against pro-Pakistan and anti-national Muslims. But he defined nationalism in a narrow way, humiliating those who favored a more inclusive national identity.
Attacks against Muslims grew. A play retelling a Shakespearean story in the style of Ram-Leela (a folk form) was disrupted because the playwright was Muslim and supposedly was ridiculing Hindu Gods. Bollywood stars who accepted Pakistani honors were condemned; Pakistani artists were not allowed to perform in the city. Party activists dug up the pitch to stop a Pakistani cricket team from playing a test match in the city.
Such cultural, religious and linguistic chauvinism succeeded because it was usually accompanied by the threat of violence. In the late 1980s, angry because of Sikh terrorism in Punjab, Thackeray made the astonishing call to boycott Sikh businesses in Bombay unless the city's Sikh leaders prevailed upon terrorists to give up violence. The city's Sikh leadership asked him to join them to visit the militants, a challenge he avoided.
Buses and cars that defied Thackeray's strike calls were destroyed, and shops that chose to stay open would get attacked. There was violence against people, too. Shiv Sena politicians were implicated in judicial inquiries, but prosecutors shied away from trying them. Opposition politicians accused the Shiv Sena over the murder of a trade unionist in 1970.
In the early 1990s, a newspaper launched by Shiv Sena carried relentlessly inflammatory articles against Muslims after Hindu nationalists tore down Babri Masjid, a 16th century mosque in the northern Indian town of Ayodhya. Thousands died in the riots that followed.
The Justice Srikrishna Commission, appointed to inquire into the 1992-93 riots in Bombay, wrote: "From 8 January 1993, at least there is no doubt that the Shiv Sena … took the lead in organizing attacks on Muslims and their properties under the guidance of several leaders of the Shiv Sena from the level of the shakha pramukh (branch president) to the Shiv Sena pramukh (president) Bal Thackeray who like [a] veteran General, commanded his loyal Shiv Sainiks to retaliate by organized attacks against Muslims." The report was submitted in 1998, when the Shiv Sena governed the state, rendering prosecutions politically impossible.
In "The Moor's Last Sigh," Salman Rushdie loosely modeled the character of Raman Fielding after Thackeray. Noting the danger the Shiv Sena posed, Rushdie presciently wrote: "Those who hated India, those who sought to ruin it, would need to ruin Bombay."
But it isn't easy to tear apart Bombay because, as Mr. Rushdie went on to write: "Bombay, a relatively new city in an immense ancient land, is not interested in yesterdays…. In Bombay all Indias met and merged… Bombay was central; all rivers flowed into its human sea. It was an ocean of stories, we were all its narrators, and everybody talked at once… What harmony emerged from that cacophony!"
Indeed, in Bombay the culture is based on commerce and opportunity, not a person's caste, creed, language, class or appearance. The city's icons are tycoons, cricketers, and movie stars, not politicians. Bombay has grown over centuries because of its commercial, mercantile instincts, and such cities thrive when they remain open.
Ultimately Thackeray's jingoism was doomed to failure. He may have succeeded in changing Bombay's official name to Mumbai, and enforcing the usage by fear. But he found it harder to change the essentially tolerant nature of the city, which did not erupt in retaliatory violence after terrorist attacks such as the ones in November 2008. Bombay continues to lead the way forward for the country. It will take time for the city to heal, but it will.
Mr. Tripathi, a writer in London and native of Bombay, is the author of "Offense: The Hindu Case" (Seagull, 2009).