Thackeray Cousins at War

They were supposed to go for the Maharashtra government’s jugular. Instead, they’re at each other’s throats.

Cousins turned foes Uddhav and Raj Thackeray have found a new passion: making a grand public show of their dislike for each other. It started as a series of irritable murmurs against each other at the start of the campaign season for Maharashtra’s Assembly polls due on 13 October. But as the date nears, the two have started using verbal weapons that are vulgar even by the standards of the Shiv Sena, the party to which both once belonged—and now only Bal Thackeray’s son Uddhav does, with Raj having formed his breakaway Maharashtra Navnirman Sena (MNS).

Party cadres on both sides of the divide—who are not known to be squeamish about language by any stretch of the imagination— are said to be getting embarrassed by all the name calling by their leaders. It’s so bad. In the constituencies where Shiv Sena and MNS candidates are pitted as opponents, the party cadres are not even sure if there exist any other campaign issues at all. The earlier assumption, that it would be easy to torpedo the ruling coalition’s re-election bid, is wearing thin. The original election plan was to exploit dissatisfaction with the Democratic Front government, led by the Congress in alliance with the Nationalist Congress Party. But that was to be done with the entire opposition—the Shiv Sena, MNS and Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP)—voicing popular concerns together. As the opposition. Instead, what party cadres are witnessing is a family fight that worsens by the day, even as the ruling coalition sits back and resists the urge to laugh at this sordid show of saffron ‘sala-darity’ (sala here refers to a despised relative).

As direct attacks go, the Sena mouthpiece Saamna drew early blood when it referred to Raj as ‘Jinnah’ in a recent editorial. If Jinnah broke up the country, raged the paper, Raj had broken up a family. Though Sena Chief Bal Thackeray is the publication’s official editor, everyone knows that this one came from its executive editor Sanjay Raut, a Rajya Sabha member, former Raj loyalist and current Uddhav confidant.

In an interview to Saamna, Thackeray senior avoided any harsh references to his estranged nephew Raj. It is Uddhav, everyone in town knows, who is leading the hostilities against Raj. With Sena voters having defected to the MNS in droves, the son has little choice but to curtail the party’s losses, and his chosen tactic is to blame his cousin for all the injury done unto the party’s cause and his ageing father’s feelings, the fragility of which is a story by itself in the bylanes of central Mumbai, the Sena bastion. “The MNS is the creation of two godfathers, the Congress and NCP,” thundered Uddhav at a recent rally, “MNS is a contractor working on a commission for both these parties. It will vanish after the polls. He is not Superman, he is a supari-man.” A term often associated with gangsters, it refers to a hired hitman. But if this was impolite, more was to come.

In retaliation, Raj has likened Uddhav to a serpent guarding a legacy that he has not fought to uphold. “He says I have hijacked the bhoomiputra (sons-of-the-soil) issue, but what has he been doing?” asked Raj at an MNS rally, “The Marathi community still faces the same problems—lack of jobs and affordable homes. If four decades after the Shiv Sena’s inception, the Marathi people are turning towards the MNS… it is time for the Sena to wake up.”

Uddhav’s response has been a revelation of Raj’s alleged business dealings. “If he (Raj) claims that he is the champion of the Marathi manoos (people), why is he not reserving 80 per cent of flats for them in the buildings built by him?” he asked, angrily, “Why is he investing in Dubai, why not here? He bought Kohinoor Mills in Dadar from where many Marathi workers were thrown out. Now he is building a mall there. One of his partners in this project is a North Indian. Why not reserve shops for Marathi people there?”

The most pointed query for Raj, however, came from a former follower who switched sides, Prakash Mahajan, another brother of the late BJP leader Pramod Mahajan. “Why did he give his dogs foreign names?” he asked. The canines are called James and Bond, for the record. “Why did he not have Marathi names like Bandya, Kandya… etcetera?” This is about as crass as wink-wink, nudge-nudge campaigning can get; the unspoken next word in this sequence of rhymes would be a streetside pejorative term for ‘circumsized’.

What might the fight imply in electoral terms? Gopinath Munde, BJP vice-president and Lok Sabha member from Maharashtra, dismisses its relevance to his party’s chances. “This is not a Thackeray versus Thackeray fight, but between two political parties,” as he sees the nature of hostilities, “One of them is our ally and the other is not, so the BJP does not stand to lose from it.”

Other observers see it as a lose-lose deal for the cousins. “They are on a self destruction path,” says political commentator Dr Aroon Tikekar, “There is no favourable atmosphere for raking up the sons-of-the-soil issue.” The so-called manoos vote, he adds, is disappearing. Yet, the cousins are ready to lose all dignity in their struggle to claim Bal Thackeray’s political legacy.

That being the case, the Congress-NCP are expected to make the most of the opposition disunity. The Sena is contesting 159 seats, while the MNS, 144, mainly in Pune, Thane, Nasik and Mumbai. This is considered the ‘golden quadrangle’ that could decide the Assembly, and it is here that the MNS stole enough Sena Lok Sabha votes to give the Congress-NCP combine an edge. This election could be a repeat show, with the Congress left gloating over the remains. Strategies to split the opposition have been employed before in Maharashtra—in the late 1960s, the Congress used the Sena to crush the Left—but the eventual fallout has invariably been ugly.

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