Raj is at it again

So Raj’s at it again. After attacking North Indian taxi drivers and shop owners a few months ago in Mumbai, he has revived his agitations. Raj Thackeray and his party supporters (read: goons) have launched a campaign against shop sign boards that don’t feature Marathi, threatened to boycott movies starring members of the Bachchan family, and challenged the joint police commissioner of Mumbai to a street fight. But it seems that Mr. Thackeray has played his cards wrong this time around.

The Maharashtra Navnirman Sena (MNS) went on a threatening spree to shops around the city of Mumbai demanding shop owners to display their signs in Marathi as well. They claimed that the Marathi font had tobe larger than the English or Hindi fonts and displayed more prominently. The Bombay Shop & Establishment Act only states that Marathi has to be displayed along with Hindi or English on the signboard 1. Now, I do not have an issue with Raj Thackeray wanting this law to be enforced. What I find worrisome is the way he has gone about it. He chose to threaten people when he could have simply appealed to the concerned government department to enforce the law. Last time his men beat up helpless taxi drivers who couldn’t do much to retaliate. This time around, he has picked a fight with shop owners from various backgrounds; rich and poor, Marathi and non-Marathi. Small businesses traditionally fund a sizeable percentage of the election budgets of political parties. His campaign might have a negative effect on how much money and support he will be able to garner from this section. He only backed off from his self-enforced deadline later, when the high court came down heavily on the Maharashtra government for sitting idle and letting the MNS take the law into its own hands, and issued a strong statement saying that “nobody could hold the people to ransom” 2
I also think that issues like signs in Marathi must be left to economic needs. If a shop’s customer base includes enough Marathis, the owner will automatically find it necessary to have his shop name displayed in Marathi as well. For example, sign boards in Marathi-dominated areas like Parel and Dadar have always been primarily in Marathi, sometimes English is not even featured on the sign.

This done with, Raj Thackeray picked a fight with the Bachchan family. Over-reacting to a joke in a public function by Jaya Bachchan wherein she said that she would speak only in Hindi as she was from Uttar Pradesh. Thackeray threatened to ensure that all of the Bachchan family’s upcoming releases, including The Last Lear and Drona, would be boycotted. Glass panes were smashed at the theatr where the premiere of the Last Lear was supposed to take place, forcing the cancellation of the event. 3 After Amitabh Bachchan apologized publicly for his wife’s comments, Thackeray withdrew his agitation. What stands out from this incident is that Amitabh Bachchan proved to be the bigger man by apologizing when he didn’t need to, and Thackeray comes out as the politician with frivolous items on his political agenda.
With this out of the way, Raj Thackeray found something else to raise a storm about. His party challenged KL Prasad, the Joint Police Commissioner (Law & Order), Mumbai, to what can pretty much be termed as a street fight. He took offense to a statement made by the Commissioner “Mumbai konacha baapachi nahi” (Mumbai is not anyone’s father’s property), while reacting to Thackeray’s anti-Bachchan agitations. As a response, Thackeray publicly announced that KL Prasad should “come out without his badge and uniform and he will know who Maharashtra and Mumbai belong to,” 4

This list of recent incidents involving the MNS has clearly thrown into the limelight that Raj Thackeray’s agenda is to ignite the anti-outsider hatred in the minds of the average lower-middle class Marathi people of Mumbai. I feel that none of his activities, even if successful, will improve the life of the common Marathi man in any way. Just because a sign is in Marathi or a movie isn’t released doesn’t mean that the standard of living is better for anyone. He may be doing these activities with the vote bank in mind, but it is important to note that some of the very activities he has undertaken, like the Marathi signboard agitations, can actually be counterproductive when it comes to increasing his electoral popularity.

What is left to be seen is how the common voter will react in the upcoming elections to these antics. Hopefully, the resilience of the Indian voter in giving justice to politicians (as seen in the removal of Indira Gandhi after the Emergency) will come out on top, and Raj Thackeray will be resigned to the role of the insignificant angry young man of Maharashtra politics.

Footnotes:
1 http://www.maharashtra.gov.in
2 http://www.deccanherald.com/CONTENT/Aug292008/national2008082887197.asp
3 http://www.mumbaimirror.com/net/mmpaper.aspx?page=article&sectid=35&contentid=2008091220080912032239430f3093acb&pageno=1
4 http://www.ndtv.com/convergence/ndtv/story.aspx?id=NEWEN20080064984