antara
Antara Dev Sen is Editor of The Little Magazine, an independent publication
devoted to essays, literature and criticism on social concerns and issues neglected
by mainstream media (www.littlemag.com). Sen has earlier worked as a senior
editor with The Hindustan Times and The Indian Express, among
other assignments. She can be contacted at sen@littlemag.com
The very day an Indian got a whopping £64,000 from Honda UK as compensation for having been called a “f***ing Indian” in the workplace, Raj Thackeray got massive media attention and public adulation for calling Mumbai’s immigrants “f***ing North Indians” – or Marathi rhetoric to that effect – and encouraging his hoodlums to drive them out of Maharashtra.
It is painful to think of what Thackeray’s theatrical arrest and release says about the health of our polity. And totally depressing to think of what it says about us, the people. Simply by making a regressive, dangerous nuisance of himself, Thackeray has established himself in our minds as a serious factor in the future of Maharashtra politics.
Full coverage: Maharashtra vs North | Special: The ‘Maha’ battle
Raj Thackeray has shown himself to be a true Indian. He gets full marks for diligently copying a concept and zero for innovation. Also, he’s delivering late and is not ashamed of it. The organisation that he has left behind, the Shiv Sena, pioneered the son-of-the-soil or bhumiputra concept in Indian politics about half a century ago and Raj’s current movement to keep ‘outsiders’ out of Bombay is a late, late, boring rerun of the agitation scripted by his uncle Bal Thackeray, who spent his youthful years campaigning to keep honest, hardworking people out of the city. He started with a tirade against Tamils, with slogans like lungi hatao, pungi bajao, crass caricatures of the Tamil language (yendu gundu) and attacks on idli-dosa eateries, which were becoming popular at the time, and graduated to diatribes against Marwaris, Gujaratis, Biharis and UPwallahs. Raj revived it by naming the Big B among the hateful UPwallahs, and his diligent followers promptly went and threw bottles at the house of India’s biggest superstar.
The truth is, the Marathas are sitting ducks for anyone who will stand up and say that they have been denied their place in the sun. In the Mughal era, they were derided as ‘hill rats’ – which was really a grudging, backhanded compliment for their desperate valour in battle. Later, the British were not very eager to applaud their exploits, which made them rather uncomfortable. British Calcutta’s Lower Circular Road is built along a fortification originally called the Mahratta Ditch, which was dug to keep the Peshwa’s cavalry out of Calcutta.
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After the British had consolidated their position and made Bombay the gateway to India, the city was swamped by Europeans, Anglo-Indians, Baghdadi Jews, Gujaratis and Sindhis, who marginalised the Marathis into a largely lower middle class population. In more recent times, the failure of Bihar, far left extremism in Calcutta and language politics in Chennai brought North Indians and Tamils to the city in droves. Mumbai is India’s most variegated salad bowl and it’s no wonder that many Maharshtrians feel a little crowded.
Meanwhile, the bhumiputra concept has caught on elsewhere. Kolkata, which got a head start over the other metros when it was the second city of the British Empire, has always wrinkled its nose at the rest of the country. After Independence, it was especially peeved when Marwaris cornered the city’s capital and industries. Recently, there have been fears that the influx of people from Bihar, UP and Punjab is changing the culture of the city.
Delhi has now caught the bug, with Chief Minister Sheila Dixit complaining last year that the infrastructure of the capital was breaking down under the pressure of migrants from Bihar and UP. So, when the city administration – rather absurdly – tried to introduce citizen identity cards in January as a security measure, Nitish Kumar thundered that it was a cunning plot to weed out Biharis. The problems of resident Bangladeshis, Nepalis and Pakistanis trying to pass themselves off as Indians pales into insignificance compared to the problem of miffed Indians from Bihar. And with good reason.
Down South, thanks to its language politics, Chennai has always been a little suspicious of northerners. And most people in most major States have reservations about Muslims, the great ‘other’ of post-Partition India.
These sentiments come to a head in the cities, where people have to live cheek by jowl and compete for scarce jobs and amenities. And tensions are bound to increase as India urbanises rapidly and farmers alienated from their land move to the cities in search of a livelihood. So it is urgently necessary for city administrations to get to grips with the problem before it assumes violent proportions, like it did in Mumbai recently, or in Assam last year. Immigrants have to be made welcome by inclusive policies and protected from hate-mongers who try to polarise the population in order to secure a vote bank.
The energy of immigrants increases the prosperity of cities, where aboriginal rights have no place because they are continuously evolving societies. If we favoured those rights, we would have to reserve seats in the Brihanmumbai Municipal Corporation and the Vidhan Sabha for Koli fisher-folk and Warlis, who were in Mumbai so long ago that the districts of Colaba and Worli are named for them. For every son of the soil, there will be an older, better, more rooted bhumiputra. And we are not fair to them either. If priority as a citizen was decided by the antiquity of locals, then our tribal population would not have been so neglected. True democratic freedoms need more than vote-bank politics to grow.
The views expressed in the article are the author’s and not of Sify.com
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