Being among the few earliest surviving colleagues of Bal Thackeray since 1952, I would have hardly believed that within a span of two decades the meek, self-effacing cartoonist would emerge as the most charismatic and undisputed leader of the masses. Next to Chhatrapati Shivaji, he dominated the Maharashtrian psyche and ethos.
There were a number of other political leaders who could lay claim to the title of the uncrowned king of Mumbai. There was the Bombay Pradesh Congress Committee president S.K. Patil who could raise huge political funds and was a great organiser. There was V.P. Naik, the longest serving chief minister of Maharashtra, who had to be eased out of office during the Emergency. Then there was the fiery socialist trade union leader George Fernandes, who at the peak of his career could bring the entire city to a halt — stalling suburban rail and road traffic and the civic conservancy staff. He did flex his muscle several times to drive home his hold over the city.
Yet, none of them earned the kind of love and adoration that Bal Thackeray did. Over a period of time, he mastered his inherent drawbacks — his inability to speak fluent or even chaste Marathi and English — by developing his own distinct style of oration. His command over English, I noticed, had improved considerably by 1974, when I heard him at a glittering function to honour his senior and one-time colleague R.K. Laxman. Thackeray could carry himself without being self-conscious.
He would form permanent bonds like few others could with people that he liked and with whom he shared ideals or a specific outlook. He had a special affinity for his old colleagues from the Free Press days. Whenever we met, he would ask about each one.
In 1991, when the Mantralaya Vartahahar Sangh celebrated its annual day where it honoured its retiring members, it invited Thackeray as the chief guest. I was also invited in my capacity as the press adviser to the chief minister of Maharashtra. The moment Thackeray entered the Mantralaya press room, he spotted me sitting in the first row. He headed straight for me and sat next to me, joyfully chatting about old times.
When he took the floor, he came down heavily on the declining standards of reporting and journalism in general. “We had an ace crime reporter in M.P. Iyer in the Free Press Journal,” he recounted. “He would come into the office every day around noon to provide the lead story for the eveninger. One day, he walked in without his usual swagger and looked crestfallen as he came to my desk. I asked him why he looked so depressed and his reply stunned me. ‘No rape, no murder, no dacoity, no story!’ For the crime reporter in Iyer, any kind of major crime was his justification for a good story. That is the kind of commitment to journalism we all shared and which I find is being eroded steadily. If you want to hear more of this, talk to Ravi,” he said, pointing at me.
Incidentally, Iyer was born and brought up in the Shivaji Park area in Mumbai, spoke chaste Marathi and would demonstrate his prowess before Thackeray’s halting grip over his own mother tongue in the 1950s. (Iyer died in a fake motor accident near Panchgani, engineered by the underworld in 1973. The car he was driving was hastily brought to a garage in Bandra and the same night, burnt in a mysterious fire in the workshop.)
At the Free Press Journal, I had developed close ties with Thackeray’s father, Prabhodhankar Keshav Thackeray, arising out of a simple misunderstanding over something I had written for the paper. I soon became a frequent visitor to his home in Dadar at the time.
When Prabhodhankar’s statue was unveiled near his old residence at Dadar, I attended the late evening function. As Thackeray, Manohar Joshi, Sudhir Joshi, Pramod Nawalkar and others trooped out, Thackeray held my hand and told Nawalkar, a common friend from the Free Press days, “If he was alive today, he would have said Ravi is a better son to me than you.” I was left speechless, but I realised that his ability to estimate any situation was perhaps another inherent quality that earned him the undisputed loyalty, love and affection of the Marathi manoos.
Finally, more than anyone else, he was the one who gave the Maharashtrian an identity of his own in their own capital city. Left to S.K. Patil and the tycoons, Mumbai would have been a city-state. The financial capital of the country that it has emerged as is thanks to other factors.
The writer is a former journalist & press adviser to NCP chief Sharad Pawar