Praveen Swamy: An authentic Indian fascism
Ever since Thackeray’s passing, many of India’s most influential voices have joined in the kind of lamentation normally reserved for saints and movie stars. Ajay Devgn described him as “a man of vision”; Ram Gopal Varma as “the true epitome of power”. Amitabh Bachchan “admired his grit”; Lata Mangeshkar felt “orphaned”. Even President Pranab Mukherjee felt compelled to describe Thackeray’s death as an “irreparable loss”. The harshest word grovelling television reporters seemed able to summon was “divisive”. It is tempting to attribute this nauseous chorus to fear or obsequiousness. Yet, there is a deeper pathology at work. In 1967, Thackeray told the newspaper Navakal: “It is a Hitler that is needed in India today”. This is the legacy India’s reliably anti-republican elite has joined in mourning. Thackeray will be remembered for many things, including the savage communal violence of 1992-1993. He was not, however, the inventor of such mass killing, nor its most able practitioner. Instead, Thackeray’s genius was giving shape to an authentically Indian Fascism.
His fascism was a utopian enterprise — but not in the commonly-understood sense. The Left, a powerful force in the world where Thackeray’s project was born, held out the prospect of a new, egalitarian world. The Congress held the keys to a more mundane, but perhaps more real, earthly paradise: the small-time municipal racket; even the greater ones that led to apartments on Marine Drive. Thackeray’s Shiv Sena wore many veneers: in its time, it was anti-south Indian, anti-north Indian, anti-Muslim. It offered no kind of paradise, though. It seduced mainly by promising the opportunity to kick someone’s head in.
Nostalgic accounts of Mumbai in the 1960s and 1970s represent it as a cultural melting pot; a place of opportunity. It was also a living hell. Half of Mumbai’s population, S. Geetha and Madhura Swaminathan recorded in 1995, is packed into slums that occupy only 6 per cent of its land-area. Three-quarters of girls, and more than two-thirds of boys, are undernourished. Three-quarters of the city’s formal housing stock, Mike Davies has noted, consisted of one-room tenements where households of six people or more were crammed “in 15 square meters; the latrine is usually shared with six other families”.
From the 1970s, Girangaon — Mumbai’s “village of factories” — entered a state of terminal decline, further aiding the Sena project. In 1982, when trade union leader Datta Samant led the great textile strike, over 240,000 people worked in Girangaon. Inside of a decade, few of them had jobs. The land on which the mills stood had become fabulously expensive, and owners simply allowed their enterprises to turn terminally ill until the government allowed them to sell. Thackeray mined gold in these sewers — building a politics that gave voice to the rage of educated young men without prospects, and offering violence as liberation. It mattered little to the rank and file Shiv Sena cadre precisely who the targets of their rage were: south Indian and Gujarati small-business owners; Left-wing trade union activists; Muslims; north Indian economic migrants.
The intimate relationship between Mr. Bachchan and Thackeray is thus no surprise. In the 1975 Yash Chopra-directed hit Deewar, Mr. Bachchan rejects his trade-union heritage, and rebels by turning to crime. He is killed, in the end, by his good-cop brother. The Shiv Sena was a product of precisely this zeitgeist; its recruits cheered, like so many other young Indians, for the Bad Mr. Bachchan. Like the mafia of Dawood Ibrahim Kaskar — which, it ought to be remembered, flourished in the same Mumbai — the Sena offered patronage, profit and power. Its core business, though, was the provision of masculinity. There are no great Sena-run schools, hospitals or charities; good works were not part of its language. Read more: An authentic Indian fascism
