Silence engulfs maximum city
It had taken no more than an hour for Mumbai to regain normalcy after the last terrorist attack witnessed in 2011. Trains and stations were as crowded as ever; traffic snarls belied the fact that a “terrorist attack” had just taken place. The clichéd “spirit of Mumbai” was perhaps back at work then.
But on the evening of Saturday, November 17, a deafening silence engulfed the city; one, which has been unprecedented in recent memory.
That’s what the demise of Mumbai’s legend and patriarch Bal Keshav Thackeray brought upon.
In stark contradiction to the collective belief that there would be widespread violence by the Sainiks in case Thackeray dies, the Sainiks quietly gathered in thousands outside Matoshree. They stood in absolute silence, only sloganeering intermittently, extolling their demigod, who much to their shock had just passed away.
Senior Sena leaders like Manohar Joshi, Sanjay Raut and others also constantly appealed to the gathered crowd to cooperate with the police and maintain calm.
The eerily empty roads of Dadar and its otherwise jam-packed station at 7 pm were a sight of sheer disbelief. One of the chemist shop owners in the area said, “The news broke at 5 pm and by 5.05 pm every shop was shut.” When asked if Sainiks asked them to shut down, the man responded, “They did, but medical shops were allowed to remain open.”
There was something notable about the surrounding Sena Bhavan, Shiv Sena’s headquarters. Just across the Sena Bhavan hung a life-sized hoarding, which had been put up by none other than the MNS, the party of Thackeray’s estranged nephew Raj. Intriguingly, the hoarding does not bear a photograph of the late Thackeray, just a raised hand with the characteristic (of Thackeray) rudraksh hanging, pointing towards the life-sized photo of Thackeray on Sena Bhavan.
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