Breaking Point

ON SEPTEMBER 1, six days after a statue of Shivaji collapsed in Sindhudurg district, a vast crowd of protest­ers gathered in South Mumbai. Mostly belonging to the various parties of the Maha Vikas Aghadi (MVA), they had gathered to listen to the who’s who of Maharash­tra’s opposition leaders, from Sharad Pawar and Uddhav Thackeray to state Congress chief Nana Patole, and several others. Many of them, heeding the call dubbing the protest ‘Jode Maro Andolan’ (strike them with shoes), carried large slippers and shoes on their arms, which was odd because there was really no one to strike at the site, not even the police who, despite not granting per­mission for the protest, did not come in their way. The MVA leaders placed wreaths at Hutatma Chowk, the memorial for those killed in the Samyukta Maharashtra agitation for a separate state of Maharashtra; delivered speeches calling the collapse of the statue an insult to Maharashtra; and then followed by a vast crowd, proceeded to the Gateway of India.

Elsewhere too across the state, protests were observed in a num­ber of places, and were countered by government-backed protests against the opposition. Devendra Fadnavis, Maharashtra’s deputy chief minister, dubbed MVA’s protests a political move. But that was not necessary. The figure of Shivaji remains vital in Maharashtra’s political and cultural landscape, with political parties and leaders across the decades seeking to tap into his legacy—whether it is erect­ing statues and memorials, renaming roads and institutions after him or avenging perceived slights against him—to consolidate their own power. A statute of Shivaji collapsing, that too just eight months after it was inaugurated with fanfare, was always going to have political ramifications.

“There is a lot going on here. How does a statue collapse in just eight months? How was a sculptor, with such little experience, awarded such a big project? And mind you, he remained abscond­ing for 10 days, and had he not surrendered, he probably would not have been caught. These are questions everybody is asking today,” says Sachin Sawant, general secretary and spokesperson for the Maharashtra Pradesh Congress Committee. “The people of Maharashtra are very upset. We [the MVA] only gave them an outlet to express their anguish.”

What did not help the government was its own response im­mediately after the statue’s collapse. Chief Minister Eknath Shinde and Fadnavis blamed strong winds at the fort and, according to some observers, appeared to be shifting the responsibility to the Navy, which had been tasked with overseeing the statue’s construction. “Shivaji is like a deity in the state. People have a deep rooted acceptance of him. When the statute fell, people were very distraught. But the immediate responses were very flimsy. Shinde and Fadnavis didn’t show the political pragmatism that[Deputy Chief Minister] AjitPawar did. He realised what was at stake and immediately apologised,” says Surendra Jondhale, a political commentator and professor of political science at the University of Mumbai. “It looked like they [Fadnavis and Shinde] were taking the whole matter very lightly, which just added to people’s anger.” The two, along with Prime Minister Narendra Modi, did apologise later, but by then the opposition had forcefully pushed the narrative of an insult being hurled. Krishna Hegde, a former MLA and currently a spokesperson of the Shinde faction of the Shiv Sena, denies many of these charges. According to him, the statue fell because of particularly strong winds and rusted nuts and bolts. He points out past incidents, in Opposi­tion-ruled states like Karnataka where statues of revered figures like Shivaji have been moved to suggest that most individuals can see through their attempts to politicise the matter. “The controversy ended with the apologies by the prime minister, and the chief minis­ter and deputy chief minister. The statue did not collapse intention­ally. And now a much bigger and grander statue will be erected at the spot. All these attempts to sow discontent will fail,” Hegde says.

What the government did show alacrity at was in charging the sculptor, Jaydeep Apte, with severe sections of the Bharatiya Nyaya Sanhita like attempt to murder and attempt to commit culpable homicide. Apte, who won the contract for the sculpture, was ar­rested by the police last week. The sections he has been charged under are so extreme that the probability of their standing up in court becomes a question. His lawyer Ganesh Sovani calls it a hast­ily drawn First Information Report (FIR). His defence is that it was an act of nature. The statue was a hollow bronze one and there were unusually strong winds on that day, leading to the collapse. He says there have been precedents of statues of iconic figures col­lapsing as well. Some years ago in Boston, one of the US freedom movement figures, Benjamin Franklin, fell down and broke. Last year, six statues of religious figures collapsed in Ujjain but, Sovani says, then-Madhya Pradesh Chief Minister Shivraj Singh Chouhan instituted an inquiry to find out the cause instead of crimi­nally prosecuting the sculptor. That is what he argues the Maha­rashtra government should also have done. “There is no precedent for a case being charged like this,” says Sovani.

According to him, Apte went through considerable personal stress over the project. He had to take a loan to finish it and even after that had to face a delay in getting his payment. “No one was injured. No one died. Attempt to murder requires intention. Will any sculptor intend his statue to collapse and hurt anyone?” he asks. Meanwhile, Apte is now in police custody.

Another aspect that has since emerged is a scar depicted in the statue’s forehead, jutting out underneath Shivaji’s headgear, which had not been noticed earlier. While most historians believe that Shivaji did carry a scar, sustained most probably during the Battle of Pratapgarh in 1659, when he killed Afzal Khan, there has however been some debate about who actually caused the strike, with most historians pointing to the figure of Krishnaji Bhaskar Kulkarni, a Brahmin envoy of Khan’s. After the statue’s collapse, when many began to look up Apte’s Facebook profile, they found an image he had shared, of the clay model of Shivaji sporting the scar, along with a comment where he claimed the injury was caused by Khan. Many opposition leaders and individuals have since shared this image and comment, and framed it as depicting Apte’s skewed ideological view of history. This provides a peek into Maharashtra’s old caste fault lines. There are two views to history here. One which paints Shivaji as a secular ruler, whose rise was, among other things, a chal­lenge to Brahmin control over social and political power. The other view portrays Shivaji as a Hindu ruler who fought against a Muslim empire. For this latter view, being struck by—and later killing, as historians claim—a Brahmin (Kulkarni), would be anathema.

“There is a lot of historical evidence that points to Shivaji being attacked by Kulkarni. And then Shivaji later killing him. But this does not suit the ideological view that the sculptor seems to share. Hence, this claim that Shivaji was struck by Afzal Khan, which is historically wrong,” says Indrajit Sawant, a Kolhapur-based historian who has got into arguments with the current govern­ment for misrepresenting historical events. According to Sawant, there have never been any known depictions of Shivaji’s scar on any statue or other representation before this, and Apte’s sculpture is a sly attempt at pushing such a narrative.

Shivaji as a driver of politics in Maharashtra has a history stretch­ing back to over 150 years, and the phenomenon cut across castes and classes. During British rule, both Jyotirao Phule, who led a move­ment for Dalit education and rights in Maharashtra, and Lokmanya Tilak, a Chitpavan Brahmin, turned to Shivaji as a model for mobil­ising the public. Part of it had to do with the fact that the Maratha Empire and Peshwa rule had been ended conclusively in 1818 by the East India Company and foreign rule became inevitable. Soon, the British began a thrust on education that led to a new category of literate Indians seeking social and political reform. Maharashtra was one of the key centres of this phenomenon in the latter half of the 19th century. Shivaji and the memory of his resistance to Mughal rule became something for them to tap into as a role model.

In the just published biography Tilak: The Empire’s Biggest Enemy, author Vaibhav Purandare mentions how Tilak initiated a festival to celebrate Shivaji following news that the emperor’s capi­tal fort of Raigad was in ruins. Much before that, Phule had written a ballad on Shivaji that went: “[T]he ryots were happy because Shivaji provided them with new laws, took care of the ordinary people, and none was neglected.” The books adds: “Phule, who declared he was writing the ballad for ‘those on the lowest ladder of a caste-ridden Maharashtrian society’ and had deliberately eschewed heavy Sanskrit words for that reason, was looking at Shivaji from the people’s point of view and depicting him as the hero of the masses. In that sense, Phule presaged what Tilak did later. Soon Marathi newspapers and periodicals in the 1870s were writing about Chhatrapati Shivaji regularly…”

Shivaji as a political force has remained ever-present in Maha­rashtra since then. Soon after Independence, when the Samyukta Maharashtra agitation for a separate state for Marathi speakers took off, it drew on the memory of Shivaji’s reign to rally follow­ers. It would eventually lead to the formation of the Shiv Sena by Bal Thackeray. In his book Mumbai Fables, Gyan Prakash writes about that rally in which the launch was announced, coincidentally in the ground called Shivaji Park: “He [Thackeray] likened rajkaran [politics] with gajkaran [ringworm], playing on the phonetic similari­ty of the two words to rail against politics and politicians. He declared that the Shiv Sena was not a political party but, as the name suggest­ed, an army inspired by Shivaji. The goal of this army, according to Thackeray, was to advance the cause of the Marathi manoos by smashing its way past the intrigue-ridden realm of politics.”

The subject of Shivaji being extremely sensitive in the state’s politics, perceived slights lead to immediate agitation. As in 1974, when there were protests following a lecturer, Pandharinath Vishnu Ranade, writing an article in a journal critical of Shivaji’s revenue system. The journalist Vidyadhar Date wrote about it in 2007 in the Economic & Political Weekly: “He lost his job as a lecturer in Marathwada University and faced humiliation and prosecution even though he was quite respectful to Shivaji.” Date’s article was in the wake of another huge protest that had rocked Maharashtra when a group called the Sambhaji Brigade ransacked and vandal­ised the Bhandarkar Oriental Institute following the publication of a book by James Laine that the agitators thought had insulted Shivaji. Laine, an American academic, had done his research at Bhandarkar but, given that he was not around, the protesters decided to target the institute instead.

The response to the collapse of the statue in Sindhudurg is in keeping with this political sensitivity. It was immediately ex­ploited into an opportunity by opposition politicians against the government which, in turn, had to be seen taking proportionate measures to counter it. It explains why the prime minster and chief minister apologised, and also the severe sections applied in the cases filed against the sculptor.

The Maratha vote, according to many observers, was one of the major reasons why the Mahayuti alliance of the government fell so short of its expectations in the Lok Sabha elections earlier this year. With the government, and in particular Fadnavis, being cast by Manoj Jarange-Patil, the face of the Maratha reservation stir, as being opposed to the demand of Maratha reservation under the Other Backward Classes (OBC) category, in just the Marathwada region, the epicentre of the Maratha quota protests, Mahayuti candidates lost as many as seven of the eight seats. “Later in the stir, Jarange-Patil was openly calling Fadnavis and the government anti-Marathi and anti-reservation. And this has had a big impact on the government’s image among Marathas,” Jondhale says.

This is probably why, apart from announcing populist schemes like the Ladki Bahin Yojana, the government has also tried to dodge the accusations of being unresponsive to Maratha sentiments by undertaking efforts like bringing back Shivaji’s weapon wagh nakh, which it is claimed he used to kill Afzal Khan, from London’s Victoria and Albert Museum on loan. Whether this item, cur­rently on exhibition in Satara, truly belonged to Shivaji or is a replica is a matter of debate.

The demand for Maratha reservation however, many believe, is going to play an even more important role in the coming state elections. And a statue of the revered king falling just months before the election is not going to help the government win any sympathy from the community.

Another more local, but equally interesting aspect around this episode, is the region where the statue was located. Ratnagiri-Sindhudurg, the Lok Sabha constituency where Rajkot fort is located, is part of Konkan, a picturesque sliver of land that straddles the Western Ghats to the east and the Arabian Sea to the west, whose unique weather and soil, its con­noisseurs will tell, provide the ideal conditions for the best al­phonso mangoes—or hapus in the Konkani dialect—to grow. It has also traditionally been the stronghold of the undivided Shiv Sena. Many youths from this region tend to migrate to Mum­bai, and this has helped the Sena consolidate its power both in Mumbai and this region. Sena has thus, for decades now, won a majority of the Lok Sabha and Assembly seats in this region.

This changed when Shinde and his faction broke away from the undivided Sena. Along with him went many other leaders from Konkan. This political churn, cou­pled with the growing popularity of the Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) in Maharashtra over the years, meant that while Uddhav Thackeray’s faction of the Sena performed reasonably well in the Lok Sabha polls, winning a total of nine of the 21 seats it contested, for the first time in decades, it drew a blank in this region. In fact, as though to rub salt into Thackeray’s Konkan wound, the constituency of Ratnagiri-Sindhudurg voted for Narayan Rane, a Sainik-turned-BJP leader and an old political foe of Thackeray.

The statute’s collapse has come as a shot in the arm for Thackeray’s Sena. And its local leaders, sensing an opportuni­ty, have since been hard at work to use the fallout to regain its old clout.

“This [Konkan] area has traditionally been an important region for the [undivided] Sena. And this aspect [of regaining political clout] is definitely there in this protest. Uddhav’s Sena senses a political opportunity to turn things around here, and that is what we are seeing,” says Jondhale.

The impact of the statue’s collapse on the forthcoming elections will be known only later but, for the moment, it has definitely stirred the pot.

CollapseDevendra FadnavisEknath ShindeJaydeep ApteMaharashtraMVA protesterNarendra ModipoliticsShivaji statueSindhudurg