The motivations for the Shiv Sena's return to hooliganism in Mumbai lie in simple power politics. But they have erred really badly in choosing to target my dear friend Sudheendra Kulkarni and blackening his face for daring to host the reading and release of
Neither A Hawk Nor A Dove, the political and diplomatic memoir of former Pakistan Foreign Minister Khurshid Kasuri. Kulkarni is an activist, scholar and writer of repute. He is also a Marathi Manoos, and even went to IIT in Powai. He is used to being targeted by the left and right. He has a thick skin and a genuine spine. Remember the time he spent in Tihar when the UPA targeted him for his role in what came to be known as the "cash for votes" scandal.
This was when he got a news channel (CNN-IBN) to partner him in a sort of manipulated sting to trap the Congress and its backers trying to buy up opposition MPs on the eve of the 2008 vote on the nuclear deal. The channel got away, but Kulkarni was arrested and held in jail as an undertrial. In my writing and talks on the state of the media, I have often enough marked it out as a rare case of the "source" of a story going to jail, disowned by the journalists he was helping. I also must acknowledge that Rajdeep Sardesai, editor of the channel then, has had the professional courage to accept this in public, including in his book on the 2014 elections. Even as an activist in the BJP, and as a close and trusted aide of Vajpayee and Advani, Kulkarni has held independent views at variance with the conservative stream of the BJP. I also must make the disclosure that he wrote a column for the Sunday opinion page of
The Indian Express when I edited it. I felt honoured too when he chose me to be among speakers at the launch of his book Music of the
Spinning Wheel: Mahatma Gandhi's Manifesto for the Internet Age at New Delhi's Gandhi Smriti in September 2012.
He is a diehard Gandhian, even if I, and many other contemporaries, would find his views outdated and disagree. If the Shiv Sena's idea was to intimidate, they chose absolutely the wrong person. In fact, Kulkarni turned the tables on them by appearing at Kasuri's press conference still smeared in the black paint, and reminded the entire country that Sena boys had thrown black ink on him while he was dressed in clothes representing the Tricolour. This was indeed a very sophisticated putdown, but it also brought back to me a college-time memory of when Chaudhary Bansi Lal, then chief minister of Haryana, was greeted by his electricity board union protestors waving black flags. "You people think black flags will scare me?" he asked. "When I was born, my mother was wearing a 12-yard black ghaghra. If that didn't scare me then, how will a few strips of black (
kaali jhandi) scare me now?" But that was earthy Haryana, this is genteel Maharashtra.
What isn't genteel, on the other hand, is the politics of Maharashtra and the way the Shiv Sena sees its place in it. The party has declined consistently in the past 15 years. It isn't due to one reason, like Balasaheb's health and age, Uddhav's inability to fill his shoes, rise of his cousin Raj as a better headline-hunter or the arrival of the BJP. It is obviously a combination of all of these, but the biggest political factor is a strategic blunder made by Balasaheb Thackeray, which no Sena leader or ideologue can publicly admit.
The Sena was always set up as a local force with a local and later ethnic/linguistic agenda. The Congress helped along its rise early on (there is a little bit of this in Anurag Kashyap's
Bombay Velvet set in that era). Local Congress stalwarts, in cahoots with mill-owners and builders, used the Sena to destroy both left-socialist and then mafia (Datta Samant) run unions. Balasaheb then latched on to Marathi language and "Manoos", as the sons of the soil were called. It was only around the Babri destruction months in 1992 that the Sena emerged as a truly Hindu communal force not only to rival the RSS, but to sideline it. It hasn't grown out of it.
It worked for some time, particularly as it made common cause with the BJP and gained power in Maharashtra and, more importantly, in the city's super-rich Municipal Corporation which became the party's ATM for patronage and resources. But it continued on with "Hindutva-vad" rather than return to its own "Maharashtra-vad". This was a fatal error. Because as Narendra Modi rose, no Hindutva supporter needed any other force to back. The Hindu agenda was lost to Modi's BJP which became the much larger partner in the coalition, thereby completely reversing the state political equation.
The Sena is now a junior partner, and had to grovel its way back in the coalition after having left it. It detests the BJP and its chief minister, particularly as they have stopped the old revenue stream for political mafias and parties (sometimes synonymous) in Mumbai. But it can't break away for fear of losing control over the Brihanmumbai Municipal Corporation (BMC) as well. It wants its lost power and glory back. It also wants to get back its headlines and its
dadagiri over the city which it once owned. It believes it can only do so by undermining its own senior ally, the BJP, and its chief minister, who it sees as an outsider and a usurper. Kulkarni, Ghulam Ali, Kasuri are just collateral victims of this desperation.
(Shekhar Gupta hosts 'Walk the Talk' and 'Chalte Chalte' on NDTV. His weekly column, 'National Interest', appears in Business Standard on Saturdays.)Disclaimer: The opinions expressed within this article are the personal opinions of the author. The facts and opinions appearing in the article do not reflect the views of NDTV and NDTV does not assume any responsibility or liability for the same.