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Thursday, Jul 07, 2005

Opinion

Opinion - News Analysis

Bal Thackeray plays a familiar tune

Ranjit Hoskote

Narayan Rane's expulsion can affect the Sena's fortunes in the Konkan region and in Mumbai's apex civic body.

BROOKING NO OPPOSITION: Shiv Sena chief Bal Thackeray. - PHOTO: VIVEK BENDRE

THE SIMMERING tension within the Shiv Sena in Maharashtra, with the interests of long-serving cadre members ranged against the dynastic hopes of party chief Bal Thackeray, exploded into open conflict this week, when Mr. Thackeray publicly announced the expulsion of Narayan Rane on Sunday morning.

Mr. Thackeray has always timed his theatrical gestures well. He chose to embarrass Mr. Rane, his one-time confidante, former Chief Minister and currently Leader of the Opposition in the State Assembly, barely a week before the House convenes for its monsoon session. Mr. Rane, for his part, has chosen the path of nonchalant defiance, refusing to vanish as directed, affirming his status as a "loyal Sainik," and summoning a meeting of the Sena's legislature party. (Ramdas Kadam, an MLA from Khed in the Konkan region, was elected the new leader of the Shiv Sena in the Maharashtra Assembly on Wednesday.)

Internal dissensions

The face-off has dramatised the internal dissensions that afflict Maharashtra's vanguard right-wing party, known for its aggressive self-image and agitational approach to political and cultural issues. The Sena was founded in June 1966 as the first move in a violent nativist campaign aimed at disenfranchising such supposed `outsiders' in Mumbai as the city's South Indian and Gujarati population segments. At first, it served the Congress as a tool to break the hold of the Left over Mumbai's working-class districts. For four decades, its policies have been laid down by Mr. Thackeray, whose brand of charismatic leadership has attracted generations of unemployed and disenchanted Maharashtrians belonging to the middle and the working classes.

By the early 1990s, however, it had become clear that other leaders within the party would stake claim to individual satrapies within the larger context of the Sena's influence. These ambitions began to collide, by the end of the decade, with the dynastic logic of leadership that the ageing Mr. Thackeray clearly wished his followers to accept, as he promoted his son Uddhav and his nephew Raj as the eventual inheritors of his mantle. And when the Thackeray cousins clashed over the sensitive succession issue, the party chief made it clear that it was his son who held his mandate.

Mr. Rane has paid the price for refusing to subscribe without murmur to this inner-party autocracy. Enjoying considerable prestige as a local leader in the coastal Konkan region as he does, Mr. Rane has not been at ease with Uddhav Thackeray's style of functioning or the directions in which he appears to be taking the party. In this, he represents the misgivings of the older cadres of the Sena, whose psychology was shaped by the party's street-fighting years, its involvement in criminal activities such as extortion and para-legal turf settlements in inner-city areas, its unbridled use of strong-arm tactics, and its contempt for the rule of law.

Mr. Uddhav Thackeray appears to have other plans. Since 2003, he has attempted to take the Sena beyond the limits of its traditional perceptions and antagonisms; he has, for instance, attempted to befriend the Dalits, with whose political formations the Sena has consistently done battle since the late 1960s. He is also in favour of a pan-Maharashtra approach aimed at expanding the Sena's reach beyond its bastions in Mumbai and coastal Maharashtra. Although the Sena suffered heavy losses in the 2004 Lok Sabha and State Assembly elections, the younger Thackeray seems committed to projecting a more suavely neo-conservative, centre-right image of the party in the long run.

Mr. Uddhav Thackeray's efforts may well reflect a generational shift away from the incendiary populism and robustly plebeian stance of the party's traditional cadres, with their roots in Mumbai's textile-mill areas, and towards a bourgeois self-perception more in consonance with the new, upwardly mobile classes of a Mumbai and Maharashtra in the throes of change prompted by globalisation. In other words, the Rane episode can be seen, not only as a case of rival egos, but also as an opposition between the street-fighters and bully-boys, on the one hand, and the bourgeois neo-conservative element, on the other.

Mr. Rane's downfall within the Sena follows a familiar script laid down for party leaders who become too powerful or popular, so trespassing upon Mr. Thackeray's prerogatives or interfering with his succession plans. In the early 1990s, for instance, Mr. Thackeray's favoured storm-trooper, the OBC (Other Backward Caste) leader Chagan Bhujbal, fell out with his chief when he began to carve out a support base of OBC and Maratha constituents for himself within the Sena. In December 1991, Mr. Bhujbal and his followers defected to the Congress; he has been the butt of irate satire for his former mentor ever since. Mr. Bhujbal was replaced, in Mr. Thackeray's esteem, by Manohar Joshi, a Brahmin teacher and party activist who eventually came to preside over a chain of restaurants and a tuition-class empire.

Mr. Joshi, who was appointed Chief Minister when the Sena-Bharatiya Janata Party combine came to power in Maharashtra during the mid-1990s, fell out of favour in turn. Mr. Thackeray brusquely ordered him to resign in January 1999, holding him responsible for souring relations between the two right-wing parties; he was also alleged to have condoned corruption on the part of individuals close to him. Mr. Joshi, whose allegiance to the Sena has not wavered despite this rough treatment, was replaced by Mr. Rane, then seen as a rising star who had helped extend the Sena's sway in the Konkan.

Fall from grace

Mr. Rane's fall from grace, and his future moves, will very probably impact the Sena's fortunes in the Konkan region, over which he retains a powerful hold. The Nationalist Congress Party has already made inroads into the Sena's base there in recent times, and it is even being speculated that Mr. Rane is going with the flow rather than guiding it. The Thackeray-Rane face-off is also expected to affect the Sena in Mumbai's apex civic body, the Brihanmumbai Municipal Corporation (BMC), which the party has dominated for two decades. More than half of the 101 Sena members of the BMC's council belong originally to Sindhudurg, Mr. Rane's home base.

While political observers and ordinary citizens in Maharashtra alike wonder whether the rift in the Sena will widen into a full-scale split, violence has already broken out in Mumbai between rival units within the party. The Sena appears, finally, to have turned its dreaded capacity for destruction upon itself.

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