Sense at last

After two months of a vicious and ill-conceived campaign, Shiv Sena supremo Balasaheb Thackeray finally withdrew his threat to disrupt the India-Pakistan cricket series. While there is widespread relief over this development, it would be naive in the extreme to assume that Maharashtra8217;s tiger has been tamed. He has only, in television parlance, taken a short and strategic break. Sometimes even megalomaniacs can read the writing on the wall. The national mood was unequivocally against his project of hate, with even the BJP8217;s partners at the Centre, like the AIADMK, the Trinamool Congress and the TDP, calling for his arrest. By graciously agreeing to tell his boys not to dig up pitches and terrorise cricketers, he was only recognising that his game was up.

The Vajpayee government, even though it may have won a temporary reprieve, doesn8217;t exactly emerge from the pitch victorious. For two months, the Shiv Sena leader and his cohorts continued to thumb their noses at the Prime Minister. In their effort to occupythe moral high ground, they even questioned Vajpayee8217;s patriotism and politics. In response to the Prime Minister8217;s observation that the Shiv Sena attack on the Ferozeshah Kotla pitch in Delhi was a black spot on the nation, Thackeray audaciously suggested that the Prime Minister use detergents to wash the pitch clean. This excess of jest smacks of a rare arrogance. Distrust and dissent have irreparably damaged Shiv Sena-BJP ties, and the only unifying factor now is the common fear of Congress ascendancy in the state. It was this fear that brought the Home Minister L.K. Advani post-haste to the tiger8217;s den with a mollifying bouquet of roses on Thursday. The BJP8217;s political opponents claimed that the move amounted to the party prostrating before Thackeray. This, of course, is an exaggeration, but there8217;s no denying that there was an element of kowtowing to the Shiv Sena that does not behove a party that rules at the Centre. What8217;s more, there was rich irony in Union Iamp;B minister Pramod Mahajan reading outThackeray8217;s message congratulating his boys for their fine work of vandalism. What really is the country to make of that? Does the BJP then approve of the pitch-digging and cup-breaking activities of Thackeray8217;s puppets in Delhi, Muzaffarnagar and Calcutta or not?

Now that the controversy is behind them, Maharashtra8217;s rulers are in an unseemly hurry to bury it. Chief Minister Manohar Joshi has made it patently clear that his government will take no action against those who attacked the BCCI office earlier this week, and damaged some historic trophies that were displayed there. The issue has been resolved so why take action, asks Joshi nonchalantly. It is astonishing that the chief minister of any state can display such partisanship. His stand runs counter to any notion of governmental responsibility or the rule of law. There are no two ways of looking at it: the vandals must be punished, and punished in an exemplary manner. Anything else would be an insult to this country and all that it stands for.Meanwhile, the Union government must not let down its guard and take every precaution to ensure that the current cricket series goes through without incident.