Book Review: Hindu Hriday Samrat- How the Shiv Sena Changed Mumbai Forever

Book: Hindu Hriday Samrat: How the Shiv Sena Changed Mumbai Forever

Author: Sujata Anandan

Publisher: Harper Collins

Pages: 278

Price: Rs 499  

Journalism, or at least news reporting, is concerned more with events than the processes that shape them. The 'whys' and 'hows', which form part of the 'five Ws and one H' of journalism, are overshadowed by the 'what'. So, when hard-bitten journalists write on socio-political phenomena, it is a welcome change. Apart from going behind the scenes to dissect processes that shape events, these writings are important social documents.

Sujata Anandan's Hindu Hriday Samrat: How the Shiv Sena Changed Mumbai Forever is the latest book on the party and its controversial chief. The writer is a senior journalist who has covered the Sena since its salad days. With a subject as colourful as the late Bal Thackeray, the book does have its gems.

Anandan dissects Thackeray by seeing through his personality cult and bares the contrasting styles of Sena president Uddhav Thackeray and his more rooted father. She reproduces behind-the-scenes anecdotes on the rift between the Sena's chief's nephew Raj, who formed the MNS after his estrangement, and senior Sena leaders.
The narrative of a Marathi manoos achieving upward mobility through education in English while his Sainik friends stagnated, vindicates criticism that the Sena did little to take Maharashtrian youth beyond lumpenisation and into institution building and entrepreneurship, barring the ubiquitous vada pav stalls that dot Mumbai.

The Sena did little to project Maharashtra's rich culture and history, instead giving the state and its people a xenophobic image at odds with reality. Its Mumbai fixation inhibited its spread in rural Maharashtra, and Anandan notes that lack of intellectual critical mass ensured that it took 30 years for the Sena to come to power in Maharashtra, unlike other regional forces. That the numbers of Maharashtrians in urbs prima in Indis (India's premier city) declined under its watch is indicative of the Sena not staying true to its stated commitment.

Anandan notes how she received an email from a north Indian who claimed she was beginning to hate all Maharashtrians due to the shenanigans of Raj and his MNS. This shows how the antics of these parties have been allowed to overshadow Maharashtra's contribution to the Indian renaissance like Mahatma Jotiba and Savitribai Phule (started first school for girls) and, above all, the man after whom the Sena is named – secular warrior-king Chatrapati Shivaji Maharaj.

However, there are some jarring points. The book has little on Bal Thackeray's firebrand social reformer and author father 'Prabodhankar' Keshav Sitaram Thackeray, who played a pivotal role in Sena's formation. The book claims that Bal Thackeray was urged by his father to "stand firm" against the Emergency, but "capitulated far too quickly". This is surprising as Prabodhankar passed away in 1973 and the Emergency was declared two years later, in 1975!

The Sena's seeds may have been sown in 1922 (before Bal Thackeray's birth) when Prabodhankar (later a leading light of the Samyukta Maharashtra movement), began a campaign seeking preference for Maharashtrians in jobs because a Maharashtrian engineer who sought employment in the then Madras province was rejected on grounds that locals were preferred! Turning things on their head, south Indians were to become targets of the Sena's ire in Mumbai decades later!

Contrary to the book's claims, Thackeray's former bodyguard Mohan Rawle, elected in 1991, was not the Sena's first MP. Its first candidates to win Lok Sabha seats were Moreshwar Save (Aurangabad), Ashok Deshmukh (Parbhani), Wamanrao Mahadik and journalist Vidyadhar Gokhale (Mumbai) in 1989. Also, the Congress Lok Sabha nominee against VK Krishna Menon was not KD Barve but former ICS officer SG Barve.

The Sena built on anger in smaller Dalit communities at the Dalit-Ambedkarite movement being appropriated by Buddhist Dalits and made inroads into them. It also co-opted smaller, politically neglected communities, which resented the dominance of the Maratha- Kunbi caste cluster in the Congress. Today, the Shiv Sena has one of the widest social bases in Maharashtra.

Some readers may not agree with the author's poor assessment of Thackeray's cartooning abilities. Some of Thackeray's cartoons may belie the claim. For instance, the one on the Watergate scam where Nixon is shown to be cutting his nose off with scissors. With the legendary David Low as his influence, Thackeray's works in his cartoon weekly Marmik were the critical force for the Sena's birth in 1966.

Above all, the book does not answer a crucial question: why do locals feel left out in the development process leading to the emergence of nativist parties like Shiv Sena, AGP, MNS and Kannada Raksha Vedike? Going beyond usual postulation of demographic changes leading to a counter-reaction, are these outfits born at the collision of the old order with the new, as inevitable by-products of the lopsided development process, unequal access to resources and skewed power structures?

In several ways, the Sena was a child of the times. Similar demographic assertions and demands for preferential treatment were seen in states like West Bengal, Assam and Andhra Pradesh; a sub-national movement also shaped up in Tamil Nadu in the troubled decades around the Shiv Sena's formation.

In her seminal work, Ethnicity and Equality: The Shiv Sena Party and Preferential Politics in Bombay, Mary Fainsod Katzenstein, writing with the keen eye yet detached attitude of an outsider, notes that "At the root of nativism is a perceived inequality of situations."

Unlike Katzenstein – who empirically lists out factors like economic competition from "outsiders", creation of Maharashtra in 1960 enhancing the political status of Maharashtrians in Mumbai, rising literacy, an emerging middle-class and its competition with south Indians for office jobs as among reasons for the Sena's emergence – this book fails to put forth compelling reasons for the birth of the party. Moreover, are youth becoming a natural catchment for such forces because of the lack of social movements in an end-of-ideology era in Maharashtra?
Despite some plus points, the book suffers from the lack of bibliography and omits mentioning how Thackeray ruthlessly stifled any challenge to his authority in the party. To sum it up, lives of demagogues like Thackeray are constant reminders of Primo Levi's warnings about charismatic leaders.