The rot in Maharashtra
Although there is growing opposition to the abominable grandstanding of the Shiv Sena on everything from the rights of migrants to Shah Rukh Khan, we are still not grasping the depth of the crisis we face. The crisis has several dimensions. Machiavelli once said, in his own inimitable way, that we should esteem a man who is liberal, not a man who decides to be so. Part of the difficulty is that the odour of opportunism vitiates the credibility of the opposition to Shiv Sena. The BJP has helped nurture the monster it is now trying to free itself from. The Congress has consistently been pusillanimous in confronting, if not complicit in, so much of the Sena’s rhetoric. And the NCP is, at one level, even more insidious than the Sena. Its style of political equivocation blocks
The writer is president, Centre for Policy Research, Delhi
any effective action against the Sena’s agenda.
These trends also represent a profoundly deep crisis in Maharashtra politics. At one level, Maharashtra should have been a beacon of progressivism. It has dynamism, talent, extraordinary economic advantages. But to put it somewhat gracelessly, Maharashtra politics has become an ominous combination of crony capitalism and nativism. The two may be related. We often think of Maharashtra politicians, from Sharad Pawar to Shinde to the Thackerays as, in a sense, organic products of different social constituencies in the state. This may have been true at some point. But at this juncture they are all grasping at political straws. And this is so for a particular reason. Most political parties and their leaderships in Maharashtra now derive their power not from social forces, but from their ability to create a state-business nexus. Their power to mobilise political funds is immense, and most of them are focused largely on occupying that perch. Maharashtra has consistently had mediocre state governments at best, a fact disguised by the immense advantages of the state.
Pawar, once a politician of considerable promise, has proved to be one of the biggest spoilers in modern Indian politics. The Congress’s stewardship of the state wrecked a lot of the capacity in the state. And you have to wonder if it is any accident that the two most moribund ministries at the Centre are agriculture and power. In short, the political game in Maharashtra is leveraging the state for creating immense networks of power, wealth and influence, not imaginative governance.
In such circumstances, politicians are floundering for electoral platforms. The Sena at least had an ideology. The rest are in a precarious position. They do not have the confidence of performance or a social base. So in the face of the Sena upping the ideological ante, they stand paralysed. Their refusal to consistently take on the Sena is a tacit acknowledgement of their own complicity and weakness. Some appeal to nativism to disguise their sheer opportunism. Others are unable to resist it because their own track records don’t give them a leg to stand on. So there is nothing to break the default equilibrium of politics in the state.
The second dimension of this crisis is the blot it represents on our freedoms. We tend to see each episode of Sena mania in isolation: sometimes it is taxi drivers, sometimes Shah Rukh Khan. The Sena may be a weakening electoral force. But the price it extracts on our freedoms is immense. Its power to curtail discourse is extraordinary. What kind of a democracy will we be, if historians cannot freely write books on Shivaji? What does the tearing down of Shah Rukh Khan posters, the attempt to muzzle his voice, the intimidation of movie hall owners, not to mention the beating up of taxi drivers, represent? It is an attempt to subvert democracy in the most insidious way: intimidate public discourse. To be fair, the Sena is not alone in doing this; we have excused in several state governments similar attempts to muzzle public discourse.
The third dimension of the crisis is social. Elites set standards in any society. And the extraordinary social respectability, if not downright obsequiousness, with which the Sena leadership has been treated over the years has sent out the wrong message twice over. It has legitimised the illegitimate, and it has probably led people to overestimate the Sena’s power. Power is always odd, in that you have it if other people think you have it. The minute others stop believing it dissipates. We have let the Sena get away with this illusion by not standing up to it. No single political group or powerful social force in Maharashtra wanted to call the Sena’s bluff. It makes you wonder how many of us are liberals by conviction or how many are deciding to be so.
The final aspect of this crisis is the breakdown of state institutions. Banning books and publications is almost never a good idea, but in the context of Maharashtra one question needs to be asked. This is a state that bans books with dangerous alacrity, even books of genuine scholarship. Why the double standards when it comes to publications promoting enmity? The issue is not bans, the issue is the impartiality of the state. Second, the state cannot be trusted to provide even standard protections that ordinary citizens deserve, like being protected from intimidation. In such circumstances, small groups can have disproportionate effects in creating a climate of fear.
The Sena’s hold on the popular imagination is exaggerated. It is a consequence, not a cause, of our inability to stand up to it. Liberal values are seldom subverted because of the strength of popular opinion against them. They are subverted because well-meaning people in positions of power equivocate. And elements of discourse elsewhere legitimise what the Sena is doing: targeting artists and writers has been staple sport in states ranging from West Bengal to Gujarat. The drive towards creating a nativist identity is a temptation in many states that have nothing else to go on. Expressing local and vernacular identity is one thing. Converting it into small-mindedness quite another. The very innocent move towards renaming cities and states has not been a harbinger of cultural expression; it has rather been a signifier of shrinking horizons.
The good news is that sociological trends suggest that most citizens are rejecting nativism; they want access to a wider world, whether it is through language or mobility. But it has not stopped politicians from playing that card. Maharashtra
is important not because the Thackerays can break India. They cannot. But it is important because its politics can be one possible future for India, an India where liberal values are in jeopardy.
The writer is president, Centre for Policy Research, Delhi
