Last October, when Maharashtra politician Bal Thackeray died, television channels which had been keeping a close watch on his health immediately started analysing his life and legacy. The next day his funeral was covered live by all channels, complete with pundits in TV studios discussing every aspect of his political career. Some anchors and analysts got a tad emotional, recalling their association with Thackeray — most of their memories were pleasant.

Was he such a wonderful but misunderstood man?
The thoughts that arise from reading Vaibhav Purandare’s book, Bal Thackeray & The Rise of The Shiv Sena ( published by Roli Books, RS 350), are similarly confusing, even for a long-term watcher of Bal Thackeray. After going through this biography one can’t help asking — did we get him wrong all along? Are his critics guilty of seeing only one side of the man and ignoring the fact that he was a deeply loving father, a loyal friend, a convivial host and someone who also adored his dogs? And that he had a point when he spoke about injustice to his people? There was of course the matter of riots and killings and vicious venom spewed against the minorities, but those things have to be seen in context, this book informs us.
Purandare, who earlier wrote a book on the Shiv Sena and turned this one around within weeks of Thackeray’s death, has tried his damnedest to be balanced, objective, fair and all that his professional training as a journalist has taught him. He doesn’t want to be seen as a hagiographer or a fan, but nor does he want to appear as an unabashed critic; the latter approach could even have consequences, given the Sena’s attitude towards its detractors. But even so-called balanced perspective eventually depends on where you stand and, going by this book, it appears that Purandare stands quite close to the Sena’s point of view.
Evidence of this is apparent early on. Thackeray set up the Sena for Maharashtrians in the 1960s. For Thackeray, “Maharashtrians” did not include those who were born in Maharashtra and spoke the language but happened to be Muslims, Christians or even Dalits. For the Sena, the term Maharashtrian included only those from the Hindu upper castes, with “Marathi” surnames. It was to give them a leg up and remove all perceived prejudice against them in jobs and elsewhere that the Shiv Sena was formed. The Sena’s approach was not to provide more education and skills to those who had been discriminated against, but to ridicule everyone else and, if necessary, resort to violence to bring them in line. The tactics may have been wrong, but the ultimate objective was understandable, the book tells us.
Purandare uses statistics to show how “Marathi speakers” were being discriminated against, stating, “the non-native population of Mumbai remained large, considering both birth-place and mother-tongue figures.” And quoting the Gazeteer of Bombay, which was written in the early part of the 20th century, he writes, “The economic dominance of non-Maharashtrians in Mumbai can be traced back to the mid-nineteenth century, when Marathi-speaking elites like the Pathare Prabhus were displaced by the ‘more enterprising Bhatias and Banias’”. But could this not have happened because the Bhatias and Banias were cannier businessmen? Business cycles change, old elites die, new ones are born — where is the anti-Marathi discrimination in all this? After all, the mills were full of Maharashtrian labour — would that not suggest that others, say, south Indians, were being deliberately left out of that job market?
Any author taking a 360-degree historical view would have delved deeper into this issue, because it forms the very basis of the formation and later success of the Shiv Sena. Have more Maharashtrian businessmen emerged in the last 40 years because of the Sena? The answer to that question will show how sincere the party was in its campaign. This early rationalisation of the Sena’s political philosophy lays the groundwork for the rest of the book.
In the 1960s, as the Sena began to gain popularity, three things became clear — first, it was going to appeal emotionally to aggrieved Maharashtrians, logic be damned; second, while it hit out at south Indians (and, it is often forgotten, Gujaratis) for controlling jobs and businesses, its unrelenting focus was on the Communists and the powerful trade unions they ran. After the emergence of a strong Left movement in that other corporate city, Calcutta, businessmen were seriously worried that Bombay would go the same way. Thackeray’s campaign suited them just fine and many of them even bankrolled his outfit even as the Congress encouraged it politically. Third, and most important, the Sena believed in violent tactics. Thackeray brooked no dissent — he even got his own followers badly beaten up if they went against him in any way. The many cases of random violence — bashing up a recruitment officer, for example — are enumerated but left uncommented upon. We don’t know what the writer’s views are. Criticism of the Sena is usually from well-known rivals of the party, but this is not a newspaper report, it is a book and it demands more layered writing, not a listing of each and every thing that the author’s research throws up. It is not as if the author does not have opinions — discussing the time when Raj Thackeray left his uncle, Purandare writes in detail about his own predictions, even using the first person singular.
Purandare is on more confident ground writing about the later years, which he probably covered as a reporter. His assessment of the poor performance of the Sena-BJP government is nuanced, though the same cannot be said of his retelling of the 1992-93 riots. The Justice Srikrishna report has severely indicted the Sena and some of its leading lights for their involvement in the targeted violence during those bloody times. Purandare again lists each and every bit of information, including the losses suffered by transportation companies, but the big picture is missing. What we get instead is quote upon quote from the editorials of Saamna, the Shiv Sena-run daily, but not a single one from any other paper, either English, Marathi or, indeed, Urdu. This account will give a misleading picture to any lay reader who does not know the details of the whys and wherefores of the riot, its political dimensions and the grand overall plan of the Sena, which immediately rose to become a Hindutva party and then won the state elections a couple of years later.
During his funeral, no news channel saw it fit to interview the victims of any of the riots in which Sena’s men had gone berserk. Purandare too has tended to spend his time in the archives and interviewed Thackeray and many other politicians, but there is little reporting from the ground and no interviews with those whose lives were irretrievably altered because of the Sena’s violence. Which is why, while anyone interested in Indian political history should read this book, we will all have to wait for a really cogent, in-depth and more rounded book on the man and his organisation.

Sidharth Bhatia can be contacted at sidharth01@gmail.com