Open Forum

New Delhi, 7 February 2008

North Indian” Card

raj helping Bihar & UP

 
By M D Nalapat

(Holds UNESCO Peace Chair, Prof, Geopolitics, Manipal Academy of

Higher Education)

Towards the end of the 60s, when the Communist parties and radicals such as Datta Samant were recruiting tens of thousands of underpaid and overworked blue-collar employees in Bombay into their fold, a roadblock appeared in the person of a brilliant, opinionated cartoonist named Bal Thackeray. Within the space of two years, he succeeded in separating a large proportion of the Maharashtrian workers from the others and in the process launching an incendiary style of politics that saw his followers converting the streets of the city into battle zones.

First D A Desai and after him successive Home Ministers and Chief Ministers of Maharashtra gave immense latitude to Thackeray and the organisation he set up, the Shiv Sena. Along with South Indians, the new political force went after the Muslims, insinuating that they were less loyal to the country than others. Slowly at first, and then more rapidly, the cosmopolitanism that had been the distinguishing mark of Bombay began to wither. Regional and communal passions got freely aired and aroused, until finally there was a reaction.

Ironically, this came from the same entrepreneurial class that had initially seen the Sena as deliverers from the grip of the Communists and the radicals over the city's trade unions. Towards the early 70s, greenfield ventures that would otherwise have been set up in India's mercantile capital moved instead to Hyderabad, Bangalore and Chennai, besides other locations. The commercial rise of the South into its present primacy owes much of its origin to the diluting of the cosmopolitan spirit of Mumbai by the Shiv Sena

Today, the nephew is carrying forward the work begun by the uncle. By his media-savvy tirades against north Indians, Raj Thackeray may ensure a flow of fresh capital from BombayBihar, where clusters of advanced industry have sprung up over the past few years. Both Mayawati as well as Nitish Kumar are investment-friendly, and in neither State has there been the overt appeal to parochial instincts that is being witnessed in Mumbai. and its environs to Uttar Pradesh and

Even though north Indians, especially those unfortunate enough to be taxi drivers, may be getting targeted by followers of Raj Thackeray, Maharashtrians throughout the north are safe with local populations seeing them as what they overwhelmingly are-- a productive and law-abiding human resource for the development of the area in which they have settled. The qualities that made the western region great in times past have ensured a welcome to the Maharashtrian all over India, even though his cousins in Mumbai may not be showing a similar open-mindedness.

From its inception, the Shiv Sena has enjoyed popularity with the Marathi-speaking public, which seems at variance with the moderate and nationalist essence of the people of the State. Hopefully, Raj Thackeray will not succeed the way his uncle did, for by his actions, he is reducing the attractiveness of Mumbai for the entrepreneurs and professionals. The city needs to retain its primacy. Should the younger Thackeray gain traction, within a few years, Mumbai may begin the slide into economic irrelevance that Kolkata witnessed since the 70s, a reversal of fortune that only now is being substantively tackled by Chief Minister Buddhadev Bhattacharya

Ever since 1965, when Prime Minister Shastri acted in a statespersonlike manner to defuse the Tamil Nadu language agitation by ensuring the continuation of English in official India, it has been obvious that the Hindi-speaking people of the country are very unlike the Sinhalese in Sri Lanka, the Sunni Punjabis in Pakistan and the Wahabbis in Bangladesh. In all three neighbours of India, extreme social turmoil has resulted from the effort of a single group to establish hegemony over the rest.

In Sri Lanka, the Tamils were ruthlessly excluded from the educational and career opportunities open to the rest of the population, while in both Pakistan as well as Bangladesh, linguistic and other minorities suffer discrimination at the hands of a single dominant group. This is far from the situation in India, where there has never even been an effort to leverage the population pre-ponderance of the Hindi-speaking people into hegemony. Even in Bihar, UP, Rajasthan, Madhya Pradesh and other Hindi-majority States, those speaking different languages and from other regions have been made welcome, despite discrimination against north Indians in some areas of the country

An important index of culture is the cinema. It is no accident that award-winning Malayalam and Bengali films tend to be gloomy and heavy going, for such a mood is part of the local psyche. Conversely, Hindi films are more cheerful, and tend to have a happy ending. And whether it was Vyjayantimala, Rekha or Hema Malini in the past or Aishwarya Rai now, heroines (and even some heroes) from the South have been welcomed, as have those from minority backgrounds, such as the inimitable Saira Banu and her husband Yusuf Khan (Dilip Kumar).

Today, the very ascendance of a new generation of Khans in Hindi cinema is proof that the secular spirit is alive and well in India's Hindi-speaking universe. Indeed, the language used is far from Sanskrit, and is almost indistinguishable from Urdu, a language that traders and others, in denial of the moderate ethos of India, claim has been all but eliminated from the country after 1947. In both music as well as in cinema, Hindi has scaled heights that have made "Indian cullture" a household word in several parts of the globe. In the field of mass media as well as literature, Hindi is holding its own in competition with such established genres as Tamil and Bengali

Small wonder that even Bal Thackeray has rebuked his nephew for seeking to play up a non-existent "north Indian" card, that too on the issue of the celebration of a festival. India is the land of a hundred thousand gods and goddesses, as well as nearly that many festivals. It is a land that has historically welcomed influences from across the world and melded them into a confluence.

Each Indian embodies Indutva. The reality that every daughter and son of this country embodies within themselves a fusion of the Vedic, the Mughal and the Western. In case Raj Thackeray feels uncomfortable in such an environment, perhaps he ought to visit places more in harmony with a monochrome approach to society, such as Saudi Arabia or China, to return and glory in the diversity of India. ----INFA

 (Copyright, India News and Feature Alliance)