Bal Thackeray was
not meant to be a demagogue. The
elements were so mixed in him that Nature could stand up and say: Here was a
gentle soul who found his fulfillment in a Sherlock Holmes-style pipe and a
glass of beer. And yet, he proved the
elements wrong. He obliterated Bombay’s history by
changing its name and altering its face and in the process became an apostle of
urban violence leading a lumpenproletariat mafia. Bal was agreeable, decent.
Balasaheb was virulent, pestilential.
It is easy to
condemn Thackeray as a destroyer of peace and a promoter of petty chauvinism.
But it would be wrong to ignore the forces, principally two, that built him up as an agitprop militant.
The Bombay Pradesh Congress Committee had an enemy to destroy while the city’s
prominent industries had trade unions to tame. Both objectives called for
unconventional measures, but neither the
BPCC nor industry associations could resort to actions that would dent their
image as law-abiding entities. For them Thackeray became a convenience.
That was because
the Shiv Sena had by then done some bashing of heads and smashing of shops. It
was an accidental confluence of factors
that brought this about. Free Press Journal (FPJ) where Thackeray made
his mark as an editorial cartoonist had passed into the hands of a new boss and
he had done what was then unthinkable:
Publish a soap company advertisement as
the lead news story of the day. Half a dozen outraged members of the editorial
team resigned in protest, Thackeray among them. They started a new newspaper,
but it failed. Economic hardship faced Thackeray. As a desperate measure, he
revived an old idea of starting a Marathi periodical. It was a shot in the dark. But it made headlines when it published a
chance contribution by a chance contributor detailing how senior positions in
big companies like Glaxo were monopolised by South Indians. The rest was
history.
As it happened, the
most prominent South Indian of the time was the popular MP from North Bombay, V.K. Krishna
Menon. He was a Congressman, but the most prominent Congressman of Bombay, BPCC
President S. K. Patil, detested him and was ready to do anything to banish him
from Bombay. Shiv Sena became Patil’s weapon and Menon was
banished once and for all. Sena storm troopers were even more frenetic as they went after trade union leaders. With patronage
coming from both political and industrial godfathers, Thackeray grew into a
godfather himself, lacking in neither finances nor clout.
Like company
executives and Krishna Menon, several trade union leaders too were South Indians,
with a Mangalorean named George
Fernandes at the helm. This and the fact
that Udupi restaurant boys and
moplah narielpaniwallahs were soft
targets made Shiv Sena focuses on South Indians in its early rounds of
violence.
Spicy coffee house
theories spread that Thackeray had developed a personal grudge against South
Indians. There was talk that he was jealous of R.K. Laxman who started out in
FPJ and went on to glory while he, Thackeray, was denied his due.
In fact, Thackeray
not only had high regard for Laxman, but counted South Indians among his
buddies in FPJ. There was a good deal of banter. Thackeray called the FPJ news
desk the Malayali Club. The celebrated crime reporter M.P.Iyer constantly showered friendly abuse on Thackeray. But
Thackeray would not take offence because Iyer used colloquial Marathi with a
brilliance Thackeray could not command. At least on one occasion, Thackeray
paid public tribute to Iyer and S.Sadanand, FPJ’s founder, holding them up as
models for young journalists to follow.
Thackeray was as
much a victim as an exploiter of circumstance. The movement that gathered
around him was unworthy of him. It deteriorated into a communal platform. Its
fire passed to nephew Raj Thackeray, remarkable for his unsmiling mien, who
further reduced it to a platform for social hatreds. Bal Thackeray deserved
better for, essentially, he was a cartoonist with a capacity for humour. A good guy. Now only the
badness of his movement will remain.