COMMENTARY
Bal Thackeray and Maharashtra’s Dalits Anand Teltumbde
Though Thackeray has been faulted on many counts, an impression has been created that he was anti-caste and, by implication, pro-dalit. The truth is that Thackeray was as unscrupulous in making use of caste as he did in any other matter. His hatred for Babasaheb Ambedkar and his followers was deep-seated.
This commentary is an abridged version of the author’s article “On the Death of Bal Thackeray and the Grief of Athavale”, kraktivist. wordpress.com and available online at http://bit.ly/VPoe0j Anand Teltumbde (
[email protected]) is a writer and civil rights activist with the Committee for the Protection of Democratic Rights, Mumbai.
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T
he events following Bal Thackeray’s death have in a way exposed our cowardly character as a people. The manner in which most people in media showered praise on his character and delivered eulogies to his legacy was nauseating. It is not enough to take shelter behind the Latin phrase de mortuis nil nisi bonum (speak well of the dead or not at all). It is our spinelessness that drives us to such shameful behaviour. No one from the crowds in Mumbai on 18 November or the liberals who paraded their intellect in TV studios asked, what exactly was Thackeray’s contribution to anyone except his cronies and goons. Rather, he was responsible for the deaths and devastation of thousands of innocent lives over five long decades. Indeed, Thackeray did not benefit even the Marathi manoos in any which way. Instead, he lowered their stature as a petty and mean-minded species. Few mustered the courage to remind people how Thackeray played identity politics against south Indians, Gujaratis, north Indians from Uttar Pradesh and Bihar, Bangladeshis and, of course, Muslims for power and pelf; how he was just a petty narcissist autocrat unmindful of how his whims could wreak havoc. One important aspect, however, escaped even this feeble discourse: Thackeray’s visceral disdain for dalits, especially Ambedkarite dalits (read Mahars). Though Thackeray has been faulted on many counts, an impression has been created that he was anti-caste and, by implication, pro-dalit. The truth is that Thackeray was as unscrupulous in making use of caste as he did in any other matter. His hatred for Babasaheb Ambedkar and his dalit followers was deep-seated.
Perhaps this trait came naturally to a good cartoonist. Piggybacking on Marathi sentiments built up during the Samyukta Maharashtra movement, he and his brother Shrikant launched Marmik, a cartoon weekly in Marathi, in August 1960. Although Marmik did not propound any specific political ideology, it consistently criticised Jawaharlal Nehru and S A Dange for toeing the Soviet line, besides deriding Muslims. The border feud between Maharashtra and Karnataka – how it was ignored by the government at the centre and the injustice suffered by the people of Maharashtra as a result – became a cause célèbre for Marmik, which within five years became extremely popular among the Marathispeaking people. Riding on this popularity, and with the visible support of the ruling Congress Party, Thackeray launched the Shiv Sena as a political party on 21 June 1966, with Marmik as its mouthpiece. He highlighted how south Indians were grabbing jobs in Bombay to effectively deflect the attention of the working class from class struggle, endearing himself to the industrialists and political class. After the Sena’s first Dussehra rally on 30 October 1966, which was addressed by the then important Congress leader Ramrao Adik, the returning Shiv Sena mob attacked and burnt south Indian shops and restaurants with impunity. The next year they burnt the office of the CPI-led Girni Kamgar Union with the active support of the Congress. At that time, the Sena acted as the private militia of Maharashtra Congress chieftains like Vasantrao Naik and Vasantdada Patil who wanted to crush the working class movement in Bombay to please their industrialist patrons. The next major action was the cowardly murder of the popular and militant communist trade union activist and sitting MLA, Krishna Desai in June 1970 by the Sena, which by then had firmly established itself as the outfit to be feared. Thackeray skilfully capitalised on this fear and grew into a Frankenstein that cast its evil shadow on Maharashtra for the next five decades.
Parasitic Birth Thackeray’s political prowess lay in the fact that he knew what appealed to the majority of people at different times. decemBER 22, 2012
Wicked Strategy Hardly had the socialist challenge been dealt with, a potentially bigger threat vol xlviI no 51
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emerged in the form of the Dalit Panthers. Founded in 1972 both as a challenge to the unjust social system and as a rebellion against the then moribund and directionless Republican Party of India (RPI), the Panthers threatened the Congress’ cosy relations with the entrenched RPI leadership. The Panthers asked dalits not to support the RPI leaders backing the Congress candidate Ramrao Adik (who was also supported by the Shiv Sena) in a by-election for the Bombay SouthCentral Lok Sabha seat in 1974. To teach the dalits a lesson, the Shiv Sena attacked Bombay’s BDD Chawls in Worli, a dalit stronghold, in January 1974 on the pretext that Panther leaders had denigrated Hindu deities in their speeches. The rioting spread to other areas of the city and continued for a week. A Dalit Panther activist, Bhagwat Jadhav, was brutally killed by the Sainiks, marking the beginning of the feud between the Shiv Sena and Ambedkarite dalits. Interestingly, Adik was defeated by the CPI’s Roza Deshpande, daughter of the communist leader S A Dange. The Worli riot was engineered by the Shiv Sena to neutralise the threat of the Panthers at the behest of its benefactor, the Congress, who could not have done it on its own for the fear of alienating large sections of dalits. For the Shiv Sena, that was no consideration. On the contrary, it would serve its incipient strategy to isolate the Ambedkarite dalits, as Thackeray knew they would never support the Sena. By tarring them as Hindu haters, Thackeray hoped to consolidate all others castes, including nonMahar dalits, under the Sena’s standard. Until then nobody had gone to the extent of identifying people along subcaste lines as Thackeray did. In that sense, he was a bigger casteist than other politicians. This strategy paid him rich dividends in terms of consolidating all other castes and creating a sense of psychological elevation among other dalit subcastes as belonging to a party of high caste Hindus. Ambedkar Hater Thackeray never let an opportunity pass to insult Ambedkar and batter Ambedkarite dalits. When the government decided Economic & Political Weekly
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to rename the Marathwada University at Aurangabad after Babasaheb Ambedkar in 1978, the Shiv Sena had the dubious distinction of being the only political party that consistently opposed the move. Indeed, Thackeray mockingly ridiculed the dalit demand saying, “[P]eople do not have flour at home and they demand a university”. The decision to rename the university caused a furore across Marathwada and led to largescale protests. This was accompanied by mass retaliation against dalits in the region that left about 5,000 people homeless. The mobs were instigated mainly by feudal elements in the Congress and upper-caste zealots in the then Janata Party, and vociferously supported by the Shiv Sena. When Gautam Waghmare, a dalit Panther youth from Nanded committed self-immolation triggering off a massive wave of demonstrations of dalits and left organisations, Thackeray ridiculed him as a bevada (drunkard). The state government finally resolved the issue on 14 January 1994 by truncating the university and appending Ambedkar’s name to half the institution, the other half being renamed as a “Swamy Ramanand Teerth University” to be set up at Nanded thanks to the compromise formula devised by Ramdas Athavale, giving the dalits their pyrrhic victory. However, Thackeray could not stomach Ambedkar’s name polluting the university. The Sena denounced the decision with call for a statewide bandh, but it did not work. As the Shiv Sena spread out of its Mumbai-Thane stronghold, its main plank was battering the Ambedkarite dalits, which gave expression to the latent hatred a majority of caste-Hindus in rural Maharashtra had for them because of their defiance of the caste code, cultural assertion and educational progress. By appealing to such baser instincts of the backward rural folk, the Sena was able to create a constituency in Maharashtra, especially since it did not face competition from other political parties as none could openly abandon its dalit base. The Sena’s strategy was to isolate Ambedkarite dalits on the other hand and consolidated other dalits as well vol xlviI no 51
as OBCs. So from the mid-1980s, the Sena began to instigate a series of assaults and atrocities on Ambedkarite dalits, particularly in the rural areas of Marathwada and Vidarbha. The struggle for fallow land had been one of the main economic agendas of Ambedkarite dalits since 1953 when they staged their first satyagraha under B S Waghmare in Marathwada at the instance of B R Ambedkar. They had a massive nationwide struggle for land under Dadasaheb Gaikwad again in the 1960s. The Sena opposed these encroachments on fallow land by the Ambedkarite dalits, going to the extent of destroying their crops and attacking their villages. A few dalits, mostly agricultural labourers or marginal peasants, were killed in these attacks. On 11 August 1991, two Mahar brothers were beaten to death in a mob attack in Gothala village in Latur district. The most harrowing example was the murder of Ambadas Savane, who was stoned to death allegedly by Shiv Sainiks. When the Sena formed the state government in alliance with the BJP, one of its first decisions was to summarily withdraw over 1,100 cases of atrocities on dalits in Marathwada, interestingly with the consent of Ramdas Athavale. Thackeray’s insidious role in the publication of Ambedkar’s Riddles in Hinduism in 1987-88 and the Ramabai Nagar massacre in 1997 is too well-known to be recounted. Degenerate Dalit Leaders Thackeray’s allegorical statements ridiculing Ambedkar, his abusive references to Ambedkarite dalits, his consistent opposition to the poor slum-dwellers and patronising support to moneybags can certainly be construed as being antidalit. But dalit politics has degenerated to such an extent that it does not have much to do with such things. Justifying any and every kind of acrobatics in the name of seeking “political power for dalits”, with shallow references to Ambedkar, dalit politicians are competing with each other to promote their own interests. Anyone can call the tune by paying a penny to these pipers! It is not surprising therefore that Namdeo Dhasal, one-time fiery Panther wrote 21
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Indira Priyadarshini and eventually found shelter in Thackeray’s den. Another selfappointed sarsenapati of a non-existent Sena, Jogendra Kawade, sang paeans to Narendra Modi and tried to be seen in Thackeray’s funeral. And lastly, Ramdas Athavale, who has outsmarted all others in political brokering, is now an ally of the Shiv Sena. On 29 November Athavale exhorted dalits congregating at Shivaji Park on 6 December to pay homage to Ambedkar
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to also pay their respects to Bal Thackeray at his cremation site. Athavale shamelessly ignored the fact that Thackeray had never left an opportunity to insult Ambedkar and batter his followers. Thackeray had called Ambedkar a stooge of the Nizam; in his street language, euphemistically termed as thakri bhasha, he likened Ambedkar to a pumpkin with spectacles; he sheltered the foulmouthed Sena leader Anand Dighe who mockingly cast doubts on the character
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of Bhimabai, Ambedkar’s mother, while explaining how he became Ambedkar from his original name “Sapkal”; and he tried to institute a custom of celebrating the demolition of the Babri Masjid as manav mukti din on 6 December, the day considered by millions of dalits as a day of mourning and remembrance. Interestingly, he had insulted Athavale himself famously, calling him a parasite. But what is shame before the prospects of power and pelf!
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