Sena needs a planarian’s art of survival
If the Maharashtra political crisis were to be drawn on a canvas as a work of art, it would probably resemble a Jackson Pollock coming to life in front of our eyes: moving dots and lines and squiggles of varied colours, clustering in one location, then dissolving and regrouping elsewhere, ad infinitum. A live abstraction whose meaning may be equally difficult to decipher for the untrained and the expert eye. But in the hurly-burly of the real world, there exist places like Dadar and Thane, and Goa, Gujarat and Guwahati—not to mention Chowpatti, as the voluble Sanjay Raut of the rump Shiv Sena reminds us.
In terms of realpolitik, some baselines are clear enough. Uddhav Thackeray may have exhibited some genuine courage in trying to take the Shiv Sena legacy into uncharted waters, but he was riding on inherited legitimacy. He had neither created for himself the aura of an Übermensch like his father, the redoubtable Bal Thackeray, against whose word not just party faithful but even the ordinary Mumbaikar would not dare to budge nor had he worked anew in the field to set up his own networks of loyalty at the grassroots.
The Shiv Sena, born in 1966 as a disruptive-subversive force, is itself facing a near-unstoppable moment of disruption and subversion. It has performed three substantial roles during its life in Maharashtrian (and Indian) politics. One was when it was advanced as a cat’s paw by Indira Gandhi to break the Left’s labour strongholds in the industrial Bombay of the Seventies. Two, by blending this with the raw, nativist idiom of its invention that is now all over India. This called on the old Maratha pride and took the state away from its cosmopolitan, trade-based history of the last two-three centuries. Third, when it merged the above with the saffron politics of the BJP. As India’s constitutional system resolves its own legal quagmires—about the Fifty-second Amendment aka the Anti-Defection Law, about the role of the Governor and the Speaker et al.—that third part seems in danger of having devoured the whole.