The banner of revolt raised by Mr Raj Thackerary against his cousin and
Mr Bal Thackeray’s heir-apparent Uddhav signifies the gravest-ever
crisis in the Shiv Sena’s 39 year-long history. Raj decided to resign
from all Sena posts within a few days of a crushing defeat inflicted on
the Sena candidate by former Chief Minister Narayan Rane in the Malvan
Assembly by-election. This isn’t a mere coincidence. Until he joined the
Congress in July, Mr Rane was the Sena’s most-rooted leader, with a
solid base in the Konkan coast. Nor is it trivial that the Sena’s
candidate lost his deposit. Like Mr Raj Thackeray, Mr Rane too saw his
battle inside the Sena as one primarily directed against Uddhav.

Although Mr Raj Thackeray has not directly criticised his uncle-and says
he remains his “God”-the logic of his position pits him against Sena
leaders, including the Senapati himself. After all, it’s Mr Bal
Thackeray who anointed his son as the Sena’s “executive president” four
years ago-a never-before-heard-of post. He did this despite the fact
that Raj is senior to Uddhav as a Sainik and was always considered a
more able, hands-on organisation man. It’s the Sena’s founder-Fuehrer
who allowed Uddhav to marginalise Mr Rane, and later, Raj. Given this,
it’s hard to see how there can be a patch-up with Raj.

In all probability, Mr Raj Thackeray will quit and set up some kind of
“parallel Sena” amidst the raucous celebrations typical of such outfits.
He will be the fifth major leader to quit the Sena-after former Bombay
mayor Hemchandra Gupte and senior leader Datta Pradhan (1977), Chhagan
Bhujbal (1991) and Rane (2005). The pattern is well-established. You
might be talented and fiercely loyal to the Sena. But if you don’t get
on with the Fuehrer (or his son), you don’t count.

However, there’s a big difference between the quiet individual-centric
departures of Gupte and Pradhan from the Sena and the last three
leaders’ public-political alienation. These three fomented revolts and
splits-of rising magnitude. The fact that Raj comes from the Thackeray
family can only magnify the most recent blow to the Sena. Soon, the two
groups will tend to clash and undermine each other. And it’s probably
only a matter of time before the Shiv Sena ceases to exist as a
significant political force. This is likely to happen in Mr Bal
Thackeray’s own life-time.

We must all rejoice in the Sena’s political demise-unabashedly and
without feeling in any way embarrassed. The Sena was the nearest thing
to the European fascism of the first half of the 20^th century which
India produced in the second half. For four decades, its goons played
havoc with politics, the law, culture, sports, and the courts. They
ruled India’s largest-and wealthiest-city through manipulation,
blackmailing, coercion, fear and violence.

The Sena consciously fomented religious hatred and communalised
Maharashtra politics. It manufactured chauvinist prejudice against
non-Maharashtrians and instigated or committed hate-crimes. The Sena,
with its disgusting demagoguery, represents pure, unadulterated evil, a
political force that concentrates much that’s negative and deplorable in
Indian society, including hierarchical authoritarianism, repression and
addiction to the use of force and bullying. The Sena’s disintegration
will deprive the BJP of its sole ideological (Hindutva) ally. That
warrants a minor celebration, as does the BJP’s own crisis, aggravated
by Ms Uma Bharati. Parties that reject India’s multicultural,
multi-religious, multi-ethnic heritage and the bedrock Constitutional
value of secularism can only cause social retrogression and disarray.
The Shiv Sena was created in 1966 as an explicitly Marathi-chauvinist
party by some of Bombay’s topmost industrialists. They used it as a
counterweight to the Communists, who were gaining political weight
especially through growing trade unionism in “sunrise” industries like
engineering, electricals, chemicals and pharmaceuticals. Sena goons
would regularly break strikes, disrupt union meetings and beat up
worker-activists.

They especially targeted educated, skilled militant workers who had
newly migrated from the Southern states and had Left-wing sympathies.
These contemptuously termed “lungiwallahs” were the Sena’s earliest
targets. Next came the Gujaratis and Muslims. Again, it was the South
Indians’ turn. It’s only with the anti-Babri campaign in the mid-1980s
that the Sena became rabidly anti-Muslim in a focussed way.
Early on, the Sena was a tool in the hands of the political Right. The
Bombay Congress boss, S.K. Patil, deployed its goons to disrupt the 1967
election campaign of the Left-leaning V.K. Krishna Menon. Menon was
forced to contest as an independent because Patil denied him the
Congress ticket. He lost the election. The greatest resistance to the
Sena’s thuggery came from the Communists. Krishna Desai, CPI MLA from
Parel, organised Left-leaning youths and gave them self-defence
training. The police, he believed, couldn’t be trusted to defend the
Left against the Sena.

In 1970, the Sena’s thugs hacked Desai to death-Independent India’s
first political murder. They got away lightly thanks to the deeply
compromised ruling Congress. The Sena’s politics of blackmail, violence
and murder came to prevail. Unfortunately, the Communists’ resistance
got subdued. The Sena had a field day.

In its anti-union activities, the Sena was supported by the police, the
state government and the Right-wing media. The government regarded
ensuring “industrial peace” a higher priority than defending fundamental
rights, even law-and-order. Without the support of petty short-sighted
leaders like V.P. Naik, the Sena couldn’t have grown. The Congress
nurtured the monster. And later, the BJP shamelessly allied with it.
Equally reprehensible was the role of industrialists who financed and
mentored the Sena and formulated its political strategy. Mr Thackeray
had none. He was always a low-level demagogue who knew how to appeal to
the crassest, basest instincts of his audience. They manipulated him to
impose his own pro-employer Bharatiya Kamgar Sena on workers. They used
him to demand jobs exclusively for “sons-of-the-soil” and exploit the
sense of inferiority and identity-loss that the Maharashtrian middle
class in Bombay had long nursed. Unlike other Indian metropolises,
Bombay has never been strongly dominated by one ethnic-linguistic group.
Its Marathi-speaking population has been about 40 percent. So the slogan
of “neglect” of the “Marathi Manoos” evokes a strong response especially
when jobs become scarce and the middle class feels threatened.
The Shiv Sena’s historic role has been fourfold: undermine and destroy
working class radicalism in India’s most advanced industries, in Bombay;
infuse chauvinism and extreme intolerance into Maharashtra’s society and
reverse the entire tradition of liberal social reform which began with
Jyotiba Phule; communalise politics and institutionalise lawlessness and
coercion; and, finally, push the terrain of mainstream politics to the
Right.

This is a deeply deplorable agenda. The Sena succeeded in implementing
its first half with the help of the Congress in the 1960s and 1970s. Its
cult of Shivaji helped consolidate Maratha power and rabid Maharashtrian
chauvinism, as well as deeply Islamophobic, illiberal, macho ideas. It
succeeded on the second half of the agenda through the able assistance
of the BJP after the 1980s.

The Sena’s greatest political gains, ironically, came not through its
“sons-of-the-soil” appeal, which it pushed in Bombay and Konkan, but
through OBC support. In the mid-1980s, it extended its influence to
Marathwada and Vidarbha. The key here was not Mr Thackeray, but OBC
leader Chhagan Bhujbal. In 1995, the Sena came to power in Maharashtra
in alliance with the BJP. Crucial to this was the terrible post-Babri
demolition anti-Muslim violence of 1993, which it organised/instigated,
followed by the March bomb blasts. The Sena leveraged power to award
“crony capitalist” contracts, including tripling the size of the Enron
power project after winning elections on the promise of "drowning it in
the sea".

Soon, politics took the back seat in the Sena. By 1999, it was out of
power, but its leaders had accumulated enormous wealth. For instance, a
few months ago, Mr Raj Thackeray, in collaboration with former Lok Sabha
Speaker Manohar Joshi, bought the huge properties of Kohinoor Mills in
Central Bombay, worth over Rs 350 crores. Barring the Raj Thackeray-led
Akhil Bharatiya Vidyarthi Sena, which claims five lakh members in
Maharashtra, the Sena’s mobilisation stagnated. It had every opportunity
to outmanœuvre the shaky Congress-Nationalist Congress government which
replaced it in 1999-2004, but failed to seize it. Its political appeal
shrank, as did the Senapati’s always semi-manufactured charisma.
Eventually, Mr Thackeray went the way of all tinpot dictators and
third-rate demagogues. He became a prisoner of a small coterie, based
upon family loyalties, and a cult of himself and his wife. That
dependence undermined the Sena and led to one revolt after another. The
Sena is probably now at the end of the road. But the “Marathi Manoos”
sentiment it promoted, the sense of injury it cultivated, and the
chauvinist political space it occupied for four decades hasn’t gone
away. It could well be exploited by other currents, including sections
of the NCP and the Congress. That would be a tragedy of historic
proportions. One can only hope that Ms Sonia Gandhi does not repeat the
blunders her mother-in-law made in the 1960s and 1970s, and that Mr
Sharad Pawar doesn’t emulate V.P. Naik.