Bal Thackeray's legacy in India

[Sheilbh]

Bal Thackeray
Bal Thackeray, who has died aged 86, was a former newspaper cartoonist who founded Shiv Sena (Shiva's Army), an extremist Hindu party which has been held responsible for violent attacks on Muslims in India; he was known as "the Tiger of Mumbai".

When Thackeray founded the party in 1966 it was in order to advance the interests of the Marathi-speaking poor living in the Maharashtra state capital of what was then called Bombay. Originally his targets were migrant workers from elsewhere in India whom Thackeray accused of stealing jobs from local "sons of the soil". Young Shiv Sena toughs, recruited from the ranks of the unemployed, beat up Tamil shoeshine boys and trashed Keralan restaurants and Gujarati-owned shops. Shiv Sena "street cadres" were deployed to "persuade" employers to reserve jobs for Marathi-speakers over workers from other parts of the country.

In its early days Shiv Sena also won tacit support from India's ruling Congress Party as a stick to beat communist trade unions, then dominant in the local textile industry. When, in 1970, Krishna Desai, a communist member of Maharashtra's legislative assembly, was assassinated by Shiv Sena activists, Thackeray congratulated his murderers, declaring that "we must not miss a single opportunity to massacre communists wherever we find them".

By this time the Congress Party had come to regret turning a blind eye. The previous year Thackeray had organised riots in support of Maharashtra's claim to Belgaum, a city with a majority Marathi-speaking population which had been transferred to the state of Karnataka following an administrative reorganisation. Fifty-six people were killed when Indira Gandhi's government ordered the Army to fire on the rioters; Thackeray, along with several others, was arrested and jailed.

But the arrests only inflamed the violence as Shiv Sena supporters came out on to the streets in an orgy of looting and arson. Eventually the authorities had to beg Thackeray to issue an appeal for peace from prison. He was released a few days later and from that moment was effectively beyond the reach of the law.

Shiv Sena soon established itself as the major political force in Bombay. By 1973 it controlled the city council in alliance with other parties, maintaining its influence with the ever-present threat of violence. It was said that a single phone call from Thackeray was all it took to bring the city to a halt.

In the mid-1980s Thackeray, who cited as key influences Walt Disney and Adolf Hitler, began to seek a wider role on the political stage by capitalising on growing communal tensions between Hindus and Muslims. This was despite the fact that in the 1970s his party had been happy to form an alliance with the Indian Muslim League on the Bombay city council. "The Mussulman is on a rampage," Thackeray declared. "From 30 million to 130 million! As if he was born only to breed."

In 1989 Thackeray formed an alliance with the Hindu nationalist Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP). In 1992, after Hindu militants destroyed a mosque said to have been built on the site of a Hindu temple in the northern town of Ayodhya, Thackeray's followers were prominent in the communal riots that erupted in Bombay. The violence, which began in early December, lasted for about two months, leaving 900 dead, nearly 600 of them Muslims. As unrest spread throughout India, Thackeray sought to fan the flames, calling on Hindus to "teach [Muslims] a lesson".

The riots, and a series of bomb attacks blamed on Muslim extremists, helped to catapult the Shiv Sena-BJP alliance to power in Maharashtra in 1995. Thackeray could have been chief minister, but he regarded democratic politics as a "ringworm infection" and appointed a trusted ally to the position so that he could "retain remote control". In 1996 he was instrumental in Bombay renaming itself Mumbai — a symbolic rejection of colonial and other "intruders".

An official inquiry held Thackeray and other Shiv Sena leaders responsible for fomenting the unrest of 1992-93, but Thackeray was never prosecuted. Indeed, over the years some two dozen cases against him were either withdrawn or never went ahead due to the government's reluctance to take him on. In 2007, when he urged his followers to form Hindu "suicide squads" to attack Muslims, he was charged with inciting hatred but never convicted. The only "punishment" that was carried out was a six-year ban on his right to vote in 1999, a decade after he had been found guilty of election offences.

Business commentators blamed Shiv Sena's brand of politics for Mumbai losing out in the battle for industrial investment to cities such as Pune and Aurangabad, one business journal recently observing that "the costs it has imposed on Mumbai, and on its countless residents yearning for steady employment, are incalculable".

Bal Keshav Thackeray was born on January 23 1926 in Poona, in what was then British India. His father, Keshav Sitaram Thackeray, a journalist, was said to have changed the family name from Thakre out of admiration for William Makepeace Thackeray. In the 1950s Keshav was a leading figure in the United Maharashtra movement, which advocated the creation of a separate state for speakers of the Marathi language.

Bal Thackeray began his career as a cartoonist with the Bombay-based English language daily The Free Press Journal, but in 1960 he left to found his own political weekly, Marmik, in which he campaigned against the growing influence of outsiders . At the same time he gained a reputation as an orator, drawing huge crowds to rallies at the city's Shivaji Park. These became something of an annual ritual at which Thackeray would often turn up clad in saffron robes and sporting huge sunglasses.

The Shiv Sena lost power at state level in 1999, but has continued to be a dominant presence in Mumbai, both on the city council and on the streets, where it has taken on the role of unofficial culture police. Recent targets have included shops selling Valentine's Day cards ("foreign cultural imports") and Pakistani sportsmen and entertainers.

In 2010 activists forced some Mumbai cinemas to close in protest at "unpatriotic" comments by the Bollywood actor Shah Rukh Khan regretting the absence of Pakistani cricketers from that year's Indian Premier League. The same year activists burnt copies of Rohinton Mistry's Such a Long Journey, which paints a negative picture of the Shiv Sena, forcing Mumbai University to agree to drop the work from its reading list. Thackeray remained actively involved in these campaigns. A few days before his death he wrote an editorial in the party's newspaper, attacking the decision to invite Pakistan to play a cricket series in India in December.

While most foreign visitors gave Thackeray a wide berth, in 1996, somewhat bizarrely, he persuaded Michael Jackson to play a concert in Mumbai and donate the profits to a party youth charity. But he himself never travelled abroad and left Maharashtra only twice.

Thackeray ranted against dynastic politics in other parties, but his strictures did not apply to the Shiv Sena, and he chose as his heir his son Uddhav. The move threatened to cause a split in the movement when his nephew Raj left to form a rival outfit, the Maharashtra Navnirman Sena, in 2006, taking many party members with him. It is thought that Thackeray's death may unleash a power struggle between the two.

Thackeray's wife, Meena, died in 1995 and the following year his eldest son, Bindumadhav, was killed in a road accident. He is survived by two sons.

Bal Thackeray, born January 23 1926, died November 17 2012

Hitler's Strange Afterlife in India
Nov 30, 2012 4:45 AM EST
Hated and mocked in much of the world, the Nazi leader has developed a strange following among schoolchildren and readers of Mein Kampf in India. Dilip D'Souza on how political leader Bal Thackeray influenced Indians to admire Hitler and despise Gandhi.

My wife teaches French to tenth-grade students at a private school here in Mumbai. During one recent class, she asked these mostly upper-middle-class kids to complete the sentence "J'admire ..." with the name of the historical figure they most admired.

To say she was disturbed by the results would be to understate her reaction. Of 25 students in the class, 9 picked Adolf Hitler, making him easily the highest vote-getter in this particular exercise; a certain Mohandas Gandhi was the choice of precisely one student. Discussing the idea of courage with other students once, my wife was startled by the contempt they had for Gandhi. "He was a coward!" they said. And as far back as 2002, the Times of India reported a survey that found that 17 percent of students in elite Indian colleges "favored Adolf Hitler as the kind of leader India ought to have."


In a place where Gandhi becomes a coward, perhaps Hitler becomes a hero.

Still, why Hitler? "He was a fantastic orator," said the 10th-grade kids. "He loved his country; he was a great patriot. He gave back to Germany a sense of pride they had lost after the Treaty of Versailles," they said.

"And what about the millions he murdered?" asked my wife. "Oh, yes, that was bad," said the kids. "But you know what, some of them were traitors."

Admiring Hitler for his oratorical skills? Surreal enough. Add to that the easy condemnation of his millions of victims as traitors. Add to that the characterization of this man as a patriot. I mean, in a short dozen years, Hitler led Germany through a scarcely believable orgy of blood to utter shame and wholesale destruction. Even the mere thought of calling such a man a patriot profoundly corrupts—is violently antithetical to—the idea of patriotism.

But these are kids, you think, and kids say the darndest things. Except this is no easily written-off experience. The evidence is that Hitler has plenty of admirers in India, plenty of whom are by no means kids.

Consider Mein Kampf, Hitler's autobiography. Reviled it might be in the much of the world, but Indians buy thousands of copies of it every month. As a recent paper in the journal EPW tells us (PDF), there are over a dozen Indian publishers who have editions of the book on the market. Jaico, for example, printed its 55th edition in 2010, claiming to have sold 100,000 copies in the previous seven years. (Contrast this to the 3,000 copies my own 2009 book, Roadrunner, has sold). In a country where 10,000 copies sold makes a book a bestseller, these are significant numbers.

And the approval goes beyond just sales. Mein Kampf is available for sale on flipkart.com, India's Amazon. As I write this, 51 customers have rated the book; 35 of those gave it a five-star rating. What's more, there's a steady trickle of reports that say it has become a must-read for business-school students; a management guide much like Spencer Johnson's Who Moved My Cheese or Edward de Bono's Lateral Thinking. If this undistinguished artist could take an entire country with him, I imagine the reasoning goes, surely his book has some lessons for future captains of industry?

Much of Hitler's Indian afterlife is the legacy of Bal Thackeray, chief of the Shiv Sena party who died on Nov. 17.

Thackeray freely, openly, and often admitted his admiration for Hitler, his book, the Nazis, and their methods. In 1993, for example, he gave an interview to Time magazine. "There is nothing wrong," he said then, "if [Indian] Muslims are treated as Jews were in Nazi Germany."

This interview came only months after the December 1992 and January 1993 riots in Mumbai, which left about a thousand Indians slaughtered, the majority of them Muslim. Thackeray was active right through those weeks, writing editorial after editorial in his party mouthpiece, "Saamna" ("Confrontation") about how to "treat" Muslims.

On Dec. 9, 1992, for example, his editorial contained these lines: "Pakistan need not cross the borders and attack India. 250 million Muslims in India will stage an armed insurrection. They form one of Pakistan's seven atomic bombs."

A month later, on Jan. 8, 1993, there was this: "Muslims of Bhendi Bazar, Null Bazar, Dongri and Pydhonie, the areas [of Mumbai] we call Mini Pakistan ... must be shot on the spot."

There was plenty more too: much of it inspired by the failed artist who became Germany's führer. After all, only weeks before the riots erupted, Thackeray said this about the führer's famous autobiography: "If you take Mein Kampf and if you remove the word Jew and put in the word Muslim, that is what I believe in."

With rhetoric like that, it's no wonder the streets of my city saw the slaughter of 1992-93. It's no wonder kids come to admire a mass-murderer, to rationalize away his massacres. It's no wonder they cling to almost comically superficial ideas of courage and patriotism, in which a megalomaniac's every ghastly crime is forgotten so long as we can pretend that he "loved" his country.

In his acclaimed 1997 book Hitler's Willing Executioners, Daniel Goldhagen writes: "Hitler, in possession of great oratorical skills, was the [Nazi] Party's most forceful public speaker. Like Hitler, the party from its earliest days was devoted to the destruction of ... democracy [and to] most especially and relentlessly, anti-Semitism. ... The Nazi Party became Hitler's Party, obsessively anti-Semitic and apocalyptic in its rhetoric about its enemies."

Do some substitutions in those sentences along the lines Thackeray wanted to do with Mein Kampf. Indeed, what you get is a more than adequate description of ... no surprise, Thackeray himself.

Yes, it's no wonder. Thackeray too was revered as an orator. Cremated, on Nov. 18, as a patriot.

There's a great veiled portrait of him in Rushdie's 'The Moor's Last Sigh'.

[jimmy olsen]

In 1992, after Hindu militants destroyed a mosque said to have been built on the site of a Hindu temple

The birthplace of Rama must be liberated!

[Razgovory]

Damn it shelf, you lost me right at the end with the guy quoting Daniel Goldhagen.   

Seriously though, there is a really unpleasant nationalist streak in India.