It all began in February 1956 when the States Reorganisation Commission led by Justice Fazal Ali, with K M Panikkar and H N Kunzru as members, recommended a bilingual Bombay State, including Maharashtra and Gujarat, with Bombay its capital, thereby denying Maharashtra’s exclusive claim over the city. Prime Minister Jawaharlal Nehru and Home Minister Vallabhbhai Patel had been against the restructuring of states on a linguistic basis, but the death of Potti Sreeramulu, the Telugu activist who went on a fast to press for the demand to create Andhra Pradesh, in 1952 compelled Nehru (Patel had died in 1950) to alter his stand. But he was unwilling to concede Maharashtra’s right over the city of Mumbai. The apparently adamant stand of Nehru triggered independent India’s first all-party coalition against the mighty Congress party, which was accused, rightly so, of being anti-federal.
It necessitated the formation of the Samyukta Maharashtra Samiti, which came into being in February 1956, the first all-party anti-Congress front of independent India that had the likes of communist Sripad Amrut Dange, aka Bhai Dange, socialist S M Joshi and activists such as Keshav Sitaram “Prabodhankar” Thackeray and other well-known Maharashtrians. With the 70th anniversary of the formation of the Samiti, which successfully led the agitation demanding an independent state for Marathi-speaking people with Mumbai as its capital, a few months away, Maharashtra is witnessing another all-party mobilisation against the allegedly anti-federal Centre. The difference between now and then, however, is that the once-strong omnipresent Congress at the Centre has been replaced by the BJP.
There are two striking similarities between the situations then and now. Madhav Sadashiv Golwalkar, or Guruji, the Rashtriya Swayamsevak Sangh (RSS) chief then, had extended open support to Nehru and Patel in their initial stand that was against states’ reorganisation on the basis of language. The RSS and Nehru-Patel, strange as it may sound, were on the same page — both believed that linguistic divisions could lead to fragmentation and instability and become a threat to the integration of the newly independent nation. This explains the BJP’s insistence on Hindi.
Spoken predominantly in the north Indian states, Hindi remains central to the saffron camp’s grand design of “nation building”, which envisages Oneness — one nation, one religion and one language (and one political party, one leader, BJP critics might add). It also explains Maharashtra Chief Minister Devendra Fadnavis’s recent political experiment to bring in Hindi as the third language in school education from the primary level. The move backfired but, on the way, it galvanised the Opposition, which wasted no time in forming an all-party front, à la 1956, to oppose the BJP.
Maharashtra is crucial as the only state south of the Vindhyas for the RSS’s long-envisaged plan of Hindi-isation of India. Had Fadnavis, a true swayamsevak, succeeded in making Hindi mandatory from school level, Maharashtra would have been the first big state outside the cow belt to embrace the north Indian language. United in thwarting his efforts were the Thackeray brothers, Uddhav and Raj, who buried their hatchet, if only for the time being, to challenge the ever-so-strong Centre, taking a cue perhaps from their grandfather Prabodhankar, who had played a significant role in spoiling the Nehru-Patel design 70 years ago. So, like in 1956, there is a Thackeray involved in the current politics of language as well.
The 70-year gap between then and now illustrates how Maharashtra politics has let down the Marathi-speaking people. Following the formation of the state of Maharashtra, with Nehru later conceding the state’s demand for Mumbai as its capital, the Samiti that spearheaded the agitation against Nehru’s stand was dissolved, and then the Shiv Sena rose. Led by maverick Bal Thackeray, the son of Prabodhankar, it espoused the cause of the Marathi manoos, but it didn’t go much further than ensuring lowly jobs for locals in state-run PSUs. Unlike the DMK in Tamil Nadu, the Trinamool Congress in West Bengal or even the Assam Gana Parishad in the Northeast, the Shiv Sena was far from being a pan-Maharashtra party. It was, till a few years ago, confined to Mumbai and the Konkan. It lost its mojo after aggressive Hindutva became the mainstay of politics.
The Thackerays, having strayed from the Marathi cause, jumped onto the Hindutva bandwagon. It didn’t take much effort for the BJP to first overshadow the Sena and then split it into two. Meanwhile, Raj Thackeray, the Shiv Sena founder’s successor in charisma, tried his hand at exploiting Marathi sentiments. Like Thackeray Sr, he, too, lost steam on the way and settled for playing second fiddle to the BJP. Led now by Narendra Modi and Amit Shah, it was much easier for the BJP to neutralise the younger Thackeray and make his political outfit, the Maharashtra Navnirman Sena, redundant. In its zeal to run the state on its own, the BJP’s aggressive leadership tried to politically weaken the two Thackerays.
The Fadnavis government’s ill-timed decision — now rolled back — to introduce (read: Impose) Hindi at school level came in this fraught context. It was nothing short of bowling a full-toss in the death overs for a team battling to stay afloat. The BJP government’s move not only rejuvenated the two Thackerays and their two Senas, in the bargain it also sullied the saffron party’s anti-federal image further. The BJP now is being compared with the old Delhi-centric, all-powerful Congress. It is certainly not a comparison the BJP would be happy about. Now, like in the Sixties, the issue of Hindi has crossed political boundaries and has taken a Maharashtra vs Might of Delhi turn. In the Sixties, the fall-out of the Samyukta Maharashtra movement was the Congress’s defeat in subsequent elections. Will history repeat itself with the BJP, which has replaced Congress now?
Only time will answer this question. But meanwhile, like the play Six Characters in Search of an Author by Italian dramatist Luigi Pirandello, Maharashtrians’ search for a genuine and honest regional political party that can go beyond hooliganism and thuggery in the name of Marathi manoos continues.
The writer is editor, Loksatta
Time and again, we have seen that cultures that take pride in their past forget to invest in the present. They lapse into a sorry state of victimhood 
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