The game of competitive chauvinism goes on in Mumbai. After Maharashtra Navnirman Sena’s hooliganism inside the Maharashtra assembly, it’s Shiv Sena’s turn to rabble-rouse — in the name of protecting the Marathi pride. By taking an intemperate swipe at Indian superstar Sachin Tendulkar for putting the nation above Maharashtra and national honour above that of the Marathi ‘manoos’, the ageing Shiv Sena patriarch Bal Thackeray has swooped despicably too low in his desperate struggle to survive and hold on to the core constituency.

Ever since his nephew Raj Thackeray ditched him to form the rival outfit MNS, the Sena has been fast losing ground. In both the recent Lok Sabha and state assembly polls, the MNS has seriously dented the support base of its parent organisation. It has done so by stridently championing Marathi chauvinism while the Sena in collusion with the BJP has been of late pursuing the Hindutva lines.

The recent assembly poll verdict was a shocker for Sena chief, and he grabbed Sachin’s remarks as the earliest opportunity for offence and one-upmanship over his nephew. Thus the nephew’s crudity of action inside the august House has been matched by the uncle’s crassness of expression. But it also was a sad reminder that nothing has changed with the villain behind the destruction of Mumbai’s much cherished cosmopolitan character. And this time he might live to regret his diatribe in the Sena mouthpiece. 

What offended Bal Thackeray was Sachin’s innocuous statement of reality that he is proud to be a Maharashtrian but he is an Indian first, and Mumbai belongs to India. For Thackeray to take umbrage at this statement shows his utter frustration and the poverty of his politics and ideology. For a person who keeps drawing vicious cartoons that recall a world of suffocating darkness and is accustomed to living in such sepulchral gloom, Sachin’s voice of sanity must have been like a dazzling ray of light. For others, it could be refreshing waft of fresh air that keeps alive the hope of cleaning up the city’s atmosphere that was so polluted by the stench of parochialism and casteism. It is great to see a Maharashtrian standing tall as a world-class Colossus, proud of his roots and even more proud of his being an Indian at a time when Thackeray and his misguided people talk in narrow regional terms and thrive on the crude nativist agenda to divide society for partisan ends. Sachin’s forthright support for the “Indian first” creed amounted to a rebuff to the “Marathi manoos” plank of the Sena and the MNS.

Virtually throughout his ignoble career of divisive politics, the Shiv Sena chief had seldom faced a major challenge to his outlandish theories from anyone of note in Maharashtra. The number of times his foot-soldiers ran riots and intimidated people, including celebrities, for a perceived slight to Marathi pride is anybody’s guess. His mere exhortation at a Shivaji Park rally, jotting of an editorial in the party organ Saamna or a diktat issued from his residence could shut down Mumbai and send his opponents cowering for cover. The city kowtowed to Thackeray who placed himself on a pedestal higher than the highest court in the land and showed a sovereign disregard for the rule of law and constitutional niceties. None, not even Maharashtra’s intelligentsia, dared to question him because he had the means, and, the gall, to “teach a lesson” to anyone who crossed his path. Friday’s attacks on the offices of Hindi and Marathi TV news channels of IBN7 and IBN-Lokmat in Mumbai and Pune by a mob of Sena hoodlums and subsequent words of venom in Saamna could be a signal that the outfit is returning to its traditional brand of violent politics.

Playing this game of rabble rousing effectively to his great advantage, Thackeray has warned that Mumbai will burn if he is touched. The government has sadly treated such open incitement and defiance with extraordinary pusillanimity. His declared political adversaries and the ruling allies, the Congress and especially the NCP, have been playing footsie with him, for their own partisan ends. The Faustian deal has been Thackeray’s insurance against arrest and prosecution. Thackeray’s targets too have kept quiet and toed the Sena line out of fear, knowing not that tolerance of wrong is complicity. It was a damning indictment of the supposedly tolerant majority that he and his goons got away scot-free in spite of all such attacks, verbal and physical, and such exercises in vilification.

Now that a Maharashtrian, who sees himself first as an Indian, has challenged the bully squad of the Sena and the MNS, the Thackeray cookie has crumbled. It required a maestro to say something which should have been said by other, less distinguished people long ago. Had they done so, the poisonous weed of the Sena and its offshoot MNS, menacing anyone dissenting from their parochial pronouncements, would not have taken root. Most Maharashtrians may be relieved that a much-loved and admired son of the soil has stepped forward now to fill the breach. The tongue-lashing that the Sena supremo has got from intellectuals, civil society leaders and politicians cutting across party lines bears out that the unabashed Marathi card that he played in criticising the legendary cricketer has backfired. The bright side of this affair is the manner in which public opinion has come out batting for India. The reactions count in building the edifice of a multi-ethnic, multilingual society and state.

Now that Bal Thackeray has mud on his face, the Maharashtra government and mainstream political parties should seize the opportunity to come together to isolate Thackerays and defeat their brand of regional chauvinism. That would be the befitting homage to felicitate Sachin on his triumphal completion of 20 years in the arena of international cricket. The people of Maharashtra and of India in general love Sachin far too much and they would never forgive a person who seeks to belittle this jewel in the nation’s crown.