Will Balasaheb’s legacy endure?
Balasaheb Thackeray, who died at 86 on Saturday after a prolonged illness, would be remembered as one of the most charismatic figures in public life in India, if dangerously so. He was certainly an unusual politician.
He was quite open about his love of beer, for instance, when any association with alcohol — in deference to traditional middle-class values — is frowned upon in public life in this country. He wouldn’t mind offering personal help to those who asked, even if they were opponents, for such gestures signified to him that he was granting a favour as potentates of past times did. Face to face the strongman of Mumbai could be blunt but also charming, as many have testified.
Qualities such as these brought the Shiv Sena chieftain admirers from all walks of life in Mumbai. But none of this would have mattered if the cartoonist-turned-political phenomenon of India’s richest city did not also inspire the deepest fear, especially among those who found themselves at the receiving end of his ideological blade. The late Thackeray had gathered a veritable “sena”, or army, of poor and lower middle-class Marathi-speaking people which had been raised for nearly half a century on an unadulterated diet of regional chauvinism and mistrust of the non-Marathi “alien”, besides a host of other social and political categories. In a manner of speaking, the Shiv Sena chief was the ever present dark cloud on the horizon of Mumbai.
He was feared by governments, political opponents, capitalists, movie moguls, Bollywood’s best-known producers and actors, and at various times people of Gujarati origin in Mumbai, or those who had come from South India, or specified parts of Hindi-speaking North India, such as Uttar Pradesh and Bihar. Communists and Muslims, as categories not individuals, were the steady symbols that the Shiv Sena was ranged against. That brought this movement — founded in 1966 by Balasaheb Thackeray — to generate pride in Marathi language, literature and culture in the wake of the creation of Maharashtra as a separate state five years earlier — in close proximity to the thinking of the RSS, only with a strong regional element.
So much revolved round the person of the late Maharashtrian leader that it is hard to say how long his legacy would survive his passing. The Shiv Sena left a strong imprint on Mumbai, and a somewhat less strong one on some other towns of Maharashtra. It has existed as an urban
phenomenon anchored to the powerful personality of its progenitor. Its social and political colours can’t suddenly die out. But as an electoral force it has come up against a sudden challenge in the death of
its founder.
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