Raj turns Mumbai into a playground for his goons

At the risk of repeating myself, Raj is at it again. This is part three in a series of articles that tracks the antics of Raj Thackeray and his ‘party members’ of the Maharashtra Navnirman Sena (MNS).

The MNS has acquired a reputation for hooliganism. MNS party members went on a rampage and beat up railway entrance examination candidates at 13 exam centers in suburban Mumbai. They justified their actions by stating that the candidates were from North India and that they should have given the exam from their own states. Furthermore, they insisted that only Maharashtrians should be allowed to take the exams held in Mumbai and Maharashtra.


This latest act of violence has drawn fresh criticism from almost every political party of the Maharashtra Government’s inability to rein in Thackeray and his goons.

With the Maharashtra Government finally waking up from its slumber and making known its decision to arrest Raj Thackeray for the second time in eight months, MNS activists unleashed a fresh wave of violence in the wee hours of the morning on October 21. Taxis, buses and rickshaws were damaged and burned across the city. As morning came, MNS activists forced shops and businesses to remain closed in Marathi-dominated areas like Dadar, Parel, Kalyan and Dombivali. As a precautionary measure, most schools and colleges also remained shut.

The police seemed to be fully prepared to handle violence by making almost 2,000 preventive arrest of MNS activists, but in the end they could do little to prevent the city from coming to a standstill. Thackeray was to be presented in the Bandra court before a magistrate who would decide whether to grant him bail for his offences or not. Even before Thackeray was presented in court, a mob of almost 2,000 MNS activists gathered outside the courthouse, damaged public property, pelted stones at passing vehicles and set fire to public vehicles like buses and police vans.

Thackeray has been booked under a variety of sections under the Indian penal code for offenses such as rioting and inciting people to damage public property. While the Bandra court granted him bail, Thackeray still had to get bail for other offenses filed against him in the Kalyan court. This meant that Raj would spend the night of October 21st in jail.

Since then, Raj has been released from jail and is following the gag order issued against him by the Mumbai high court. Though it has been quiet in Mumbai for two weeks, people are still wary of any new trouble that MNS activists might cause. There is a troubled calm across the city as people get back to their daily lives.

This latest act of hooliganism by Thackeray’s goons, masquerading as a political party, provides another sorry example of how India is turning into a mobocracy. A fringe political leader is being allowed to hold the country’s financial capital to ransom and cause millions of dollars of direct and indirect damage to private and public property, and to the economy.

At a time like this, the Government must give priority to the swift execution of the law towards the guilty. Instead, it is wasting precious days and weeks in trying to analyze the event and how it will impact its own chances of getting re-elected in the upcoming elections.

At the end of it all, it is the common man who suffers. It is the man on the street who is beaten up by unruly ‘political workers’ for no fault of his own. It is the man on the street who loses a day’s pay because he is not able to get to work due to a rampaging mob. And it is the man on the street who has to shut down his business because the Congress Government does not have the guts to stand up to a maverick politician with mindless violence on his agenda.

With the state machinery having failed at maintaining law and order, only when this man on the street rises up and ensures that goons like Raj Thackeray do not win elections with such damaging agendas, and that spineless politicians like Vilasrao Deskhmukh (the Chief Minister of Maharashtra) do not get re-elected after such pathetic attempts at protecting common citizens, will the system have worked.

Lastly, what seems to have slipped everyone’s mind is how damaging this violence is for Mumbai and India’s image as a safe investment destination. It won’t be surprising if companies from the rest of the country and the rest of the world think twice before investing in a place where frivolous issues like the size and location of the Marathi font on signboards bring a city of almost 20 million people to a standstill.

If selfish politicians like Deshmukh and Thackeray have their way, Mumbai will go from being a proud, tolerant and cosmopolitan city where people of varied communities live and work, to an intolerant, unsafe and hostile place which will be resigned to basking in its past glory as the has-been apex city of India.

This latest incident was Raj Thackeray’s Diwali gift to the city. This article is mine. I wish everyone a Happy Diwali.