They gave colourful headlines to stories of how Rahul Gandhi had boarded a commuter train after joining a meandering queue to buy a first class ticket – instead of asking his security guards to get it – from somewhere to somewhere in the city while fascist hordes of the Shiv Sena failed to derail him.
Thus, Rahul Gandhi’s spin doctors would have us believe, he successfully thumbed his nose at the Sena supremo Bal Thackeray.
The Sena had opposed his visit to the city for holding the view that Mumbai belonged to all Indians, including migrants from Bihar and Uttar Pradesh. Gandhi’s Congress is struggling to find its feet in both the electorally crucial states, which explains part of the discussion.
Film actor Shahrukh Khan said more or less the same thing about Mumbai belonging to all Indians. He too became a hero of everyone, or almost. Amitabh Bachchan continued to sing paeans to Thackeray as he does of everyone who gives his movies a tax break.
Surprisingly, Sahmat, a vocal leftist group that acts as a cultural filter for politically correct art, put out a gushing press release in support of Shahrukh Khan. But now Shahrukh Khan, in a political somersault dictated by commercial exigencies, is going to meet Bal Thackeray to seek his blessings. He needs them so that his just released movie can have a smooth screening.
There would be many red faces among his leftist fans. Meanwhile, the BJP, an ally of the Shiv Sena, chimed in to also slam its partner. It supports pan-India fascism in the footsteps of the BJP’s parent body, the RSS, not the provincial kind practised by Bal Thackeray.
Targeting non-Marathi speaking migrants and older residents in Mumbai is small beer for the BJP, and potentially counter-productive.
The first stone against the Shiv Sena was, however, cast by Mukesh Ambani, the tycoon credited with shoring up most of the main parties, including the Sena.
It was only after his televised remarks during a trip to London, saying that Mumbai was for all Indians that others felt confident enough to growl back at Thackeray, whose mascot is a snarling tiger. The Sena as we all know has lorded over the country’s financial hub since Gandhi’s Congress party, on behalf of the city’s business elite, set it up in 1966 to physically assault and break up communist trade unions.
Therefore, an adverse comment from the leading industrialist berating the Shiv Sena’s platform could be the most significant pointer to changing political architecture in Maharashtra. The change will find an echo in the rest of the country.
As we can see there are many shades of grey in the standoff with Shiv Sena, in the sense that no one is prepared to see it as a rightwing fascist organisation, which in theory and practice it is.
The reason for Mukesh Ambani’s aloofness from Thackeray probably signals the end of the corporate patronage the Sena enjoyed in Maharashtra. One of the reasons for this change of heart can be located in an unflattering reality. Thackeray is not perceived as a team player in the comity of fascists.
He has a running rivalry with Gujarat Chief Minister Narendra Modi, for example. And Modi is the cynosure of the corporate world, and he has proved his worth by both advocating neo-liberal economic policies and in also eradicating Gujarat’s notorious labour troubles by dividing the working class into Hindus and Muslims.
The BJP and the business lobbies of Mumbai are seeing him as a potential prime ministerial candidate. Amitabh Bachchan and Shahrukh Khan too have given Modi a clean chit on his supervision of the 2002 pogroms of Muslim.
That leaves Rahul Gandhi standing alone as someone who appears to oppose Thackeray as well as the BJP. The left is too small a player in the field and is in any case engaged with its own priorities – that of taking on the Maoist threat. But Gandhi doesn’t see the two groups as one should fear groups that promote religious fascism in India.
In any case, before blaming others he would first have to take stock of his own party, the Congress, for the weeds of bigotry to be rooted out. Is it a coincidence that it was during his father’s early rule that the worst kind of religious massacres were unleashed on the Sikhs?
Was it not a fact that the worst anti-Muslim pogroms in Mumbai were staged under the supervision of not the Shiv Sena or the BJP, but during his Congress party’s tenure in power in Maharashtra in 1992-93?
There’s no great lesson or even symbolism in Rahul Gandhi’s using a commuter train to flaunt his credentials as the young man who finally took on Bal Thackeray.
All that he has shown is that if the state so desires, it can tame the most intractable fascist. He has not taken on Bal Thackeray, for to do that he would need to address the murky reality of religious and ethnic bigotry visiting the Congress party in Maharashtra and elsewhere. Could it be this kind of politics he said he doesn’t think much of?
In which case, it’s all the more reason for him to leave superficial gestures aside and get down to the nitty-gritty of rolling back the agenda, both of the Shiv Sena and the RSS-BJP combine, and of the corporate czars who support communally divisive politics to keep ordinary Indians from forming a secular coalition against them.
To begin with, Rahul Gandhi may want to pick up the Justice B.N. Srikrishna Commission report which was initiated by his own party to probe the 1992-93 communal frenzy in Mumbai and then discarded by it. In fact, he might want to compare its fate to several other similar reports that preceded the Srikrishna Commission.
“Even after it became apparent that the leaders of the Shiv Sena were active in stoking the fire of the communal riots, the police dragged their feet on the facile and exaggerated assumption that if such leaders were arrested the communal situation would further flare up, or to put it in the words of then (Congress) Chief Minister, Sudhakarrao Naik, ‘Bombay would burn’; not that Bombay did not otherwise.” That report.
That’s what he needs to read and implement. Not wave out to his fawning fans club from a Mumbai local. Due diligence with burning issues will go a long way in making an agreeable leader out of a tentative, obviously confused and probably poorly-advised Congress icon. The commuter train will take him nowhere.
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Mohammed Abbasi 