Unchecked, unbalanced

Violence is becoming a given in Maharashtra8217;s public culture

A twenty-five-year-old labourer was lynched by angry hoodlums in Mumbai. A couple of days back, the Maharashtra police shot 13 rounds into a young man from Patna, who had allegedly gone berserk on a BEST bus and threatened to kill Raj Thackeray, who systematically fanned the flames of this vicious politics that ranged Maharashtrians against North-Indian migrants.

Even if we dismiss Thackeray as a poseur who has exploited the dirtiest, most lowdown trick in the book for political gain, the fact remains that he and his predecessors have managed to turn a once large-hearted Mumbai into a seething, dysfunctional town where frontier justice goes unchecked. Though the administration has finally passed a law that holds rioters accountable for destruction of property, these vengeful mobs are a firmly entrenched feature of Maharashtra8217;s public life. It is almost a parallel system of rough justice 8212; contemptuous of law and state, determined to vent their rage.

Unsurprisingly, all the condemnation of the Mumbai killing have come from outside the state 8212; which reveals the extent to which years of intolerance and vigilante violence have debased Maharashtra8217;s public culture. This makes Mumbai8217;s citizens inured to it, if not actually complicit. The resented outsiders are from the north now rather than the south, but the paranoid and suggestible Marathi manoos of Thackeray8217;s worldview is still blindly lashing out in retribution for livelihoods and opportunities snatched away 8212; despite the fact that most of these new migrants, like Dharamdev Rai, the labourer killed this week, are taking on the low-paid, low-low skill jobs that locals want to leave behind. They rally behind the MNS, like they used to behind the Shiv Sena 8212; since the other parties are too mindful of working out ways of acquiring pieces of the Shiv Sena votebank being broken away by Raj Thackeray. Politicians like Thackeray play on the stumble in Marathi self-confidence, and turn it into a permanently embattled, nervous and brutish view of the world. And the tragedy is that no other political force in the state wants to counter this tactic 8212; with the result that Maharashtra politics appears condemned to spin around this damaging myth.