Takeover Balasaheb Thackeray Legacy
Devendra Fadnavis
showed prescience, despite being heckled by Shiv Sena workers, when he visited
Shivaji Park on November 18th to pay his respects on Balasaheb
Thackeray’s 7th death anniversary.
This was particularly
poignant because it is just seven years since Bal Thackeray passed away. And
already, his son Uddhav, showing little political vision, was making ready to
dump his Hindutva legacy. This in the thick of Shiv Sena-NCP-Congress’attempts
at cobbling together a government.
And Balasaheb’s once
charismatic nephew Raj Thackeray has no influence beyond his bailiwick of Thane
either. It is an irony that he made no attempt to split the party when he had
the chance in Balasaheb’s declining years.
The orphaned MLAs born and bred in the
Balasaheb vision can now head for the BJP along with large numbers of party
workers. As the remains of the Uddhav-led Shiv Sena reaps the whirlwind for its
past financial misdeeds, it won’t have much money to look after its flock
either.
Bal Thackeray however
is certainly a Hindutva icon worth the honouring. He stood firm when there were
very few flag-bearers of the saffron ideology.
Despite his legacy being unceremoniously betrayed by the party he
founded under the leadership of his son, it remains valuable. Uddhav saw fit to
quickly dump the demand for a Bharat Ratna award for Veer Savarkar too.
Balasaheb Thackeray however, supported Hindutva and the
Marathi Manoos all along. His party belonged to the NDA from the days of the
Atal Bihari Vajpayee government and through the decade of thick and thin after
NDA1.
Today, the Shiv Sena,
circa 2019, still invokes Bal Thackeray’s name, but apparently denies his explicit
and implicit legacy. It is therefore there for the taking by Devendra Fadnavis
in the state, and the BJP/RSS national leadership.
The situation is reminiscent
of the legacy of Sardar Patel, adopted by the BJP, even as the Nehru-Gandhi led
Congress tried to all but forget about him.
Balasaheb’s story is described
in a new film starring Nawazuddin Siddiqui and probably does not need repeating.
It all started decades ago, as did the story of Maharashtra as a state, with
Bombay as its capital.
I too lived in the Bombay
of the seventies - 1969 to 1979. Most of it was under the stable and low-key
governance of Chief Minister VP Naik of the Indira Gandhi led Congress. His son
went to St.Xavier’s College, as I did, and remember visiting him at Varsha on
Malabar Hill. It was unfussy. Just like going to any other friend’s house.
It was a very
pleasant Bombay in those days. There was enough room to sit down at the front
of the double-decker B.E.S.T buses, upstairs, with the windows propped open to
take in the sea breeze.
The Shiv Sena was
then just a fringe pressure group. It had demanded the ouster of South Indians
working in Bombay, then concentrated in the suburb of Chembur. The anti-Pakistan-anti-Muslim
stance came much later, provoked, no doubt by terrorism and the bomb blasts in
the wake of the Babri Masjid demolition of 1992.
But in South Bombay,
Shiv Sena, under the early Bal Thackeray, with his occasional threats, trade
unionist cum extortionist ways, his goons, did not matter very much. You heard
names like Datta Samant, and later, George Fernandes, the former provoking
factory lockouts. And the latter - railway shut-downs and road blockages at
Fountain in Fort.
The infrastructure of
Bombay those days was largely adequate, the trains ran on time, the electricity
never went on the blink. However, water, gas, milk and other things that were
obtainable against a ration card, Padmini cars, bakelite telephones and
connections, were, along with many other things like foreign exchange, in
typically socialist short-supply.
It must be remembered
the Indira Gandhi years were hardly known for development or GDP growth. But
the broad civic and policy neglect, carried on for decades, with little redress
by a largely Congress government, either on its own or in coalition.
Meanwhile, Shiv Sena
had grown into a considerable political influence throughout Maharashtra, if
not much of a stable electoral presence, right through the Balasaheb years.
Since his demise, truth be told, Uddhav Thackeray has led it to a terminal
decline.
If the Balasaheb
legacy is taken over by the BJP now, the Shiv Sena may be presented with the uphill task of
reinventing itself in its new found “’secular” role in the Opposition, both in Maharashtra
and nationally.
Today, in the 21st
century, even as India boasts of its economic progress, people routinely die in
pot holes in Mumbai, even as the richest municipality in the country run by the
Shiv Sena, looks on unmoved. That the BJP, which has almost as many seats in
the BMC, has kept quiet about this disgrace can perhaps now be remedied at last.
Even apart from the
shortcomings of the BMC, the massive demands of a megapolis, often called the
Maximum City, are badly unmet to this day.
The first notable development,
besides a carriageway towards the airport built long ago, and sundry flyovers,
was the Bandra-Worli Sea Link, opened as recently as 2009, and of course, the
94.5 km Bombay-Pune Expressway, build in record time by Nitin Gadkari during
NDA 1, in 2002.
The Fadnavis first
term however, has been marked by movement in long-stalled infrastructure development,
including the Mumbai Metro and the shortly expected first bullet train between
Mumbai and Ahmedabad.
And now, with a
second term in hand, pending the floor test and the misinformation swirling
thick and fast, more confident and rapid progress can be expected.
Of course, the timely
alliance with the NCP or a sizeable number of its MLAs in another configuration,
should it choose this moment to split between the Supriya Sule (Sharad Pawar)
and Ajit Pawar factions, has a glue to it.
The NCP has a number
of corruption cases against some of its most prominent leaders including Sharad
Pawar, Ajit Pawar, Praful Patel and could even rope in Supriya Sule and her
husband. This will tend to keep the junior partner in this new configuration
well-behaved during the five year term going forward.
(1,020 words)
For: Sirfnews
November 23rd 2019
Gautam Mukherjee
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