Opinion Express View on assault on women in Thane for not speaking Marathi: MNS is out of touch with reality

The news of two women, one of them pregnant, allegedly being heckled and assaulted for not speaking in Marathi, in Maharashtra’s Thane, is deeply troubling. It comes in the wake of Maharashtra Navnirman Sena (MNS) supremo Raj Thackeray’s exhortations to his party workers to not “hesitate and slap those refusing to speak Marathi in the state”. Thackeray had withdrawn his Mi Marathi campaign following a backlash from various quarters, insisting that it is not a “compromise”. But even as his reversal signals the MNS’s waning relevance, incidents such as the one in Thane highlight, yet again, the pernicious fallouts of a narrow identity politics, rooted in regional and linguistic chauvinism.

A glance at the trajectory of the MNS reveals the flaws in its foundation — and more crucially, in Thackeray’s vision. In 2006, when he launched the MNS, Thackeray sought to channel the Maratha pride embodied by his uncle, the late Bal Thackeray, by voicing the concerns of its youth against migrants, especially from north India. Bal Thackeray’s diatribes, too, were chauvinistic. But the Shiv Sena supremo combined them with grassroots initiatives that garnered support from a cross-section of Marathi society. In contrast, the MNS’s rhetoric about the Marathi manoos stokes fear and resentment, while the party has failed to offer solutions to the state’s many problems, including in education, healthcare, housing and employment. Thackeray’s ideological vacillations — repeatedly changing his stance on Hindutva, Prime Minister Narendra Modi and the BJP-led Mahayuti — and the rise of his cousin Uddhav Thackeray’s Shiv Sena (UBT) have further eroded his credibility. The MNS’s disconnect with the grassroots became apparent in the 2024 assembly elections, where the party drew a blank. Even the attempt to launch his son Amit as the heir apparent failed to take off.

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While Maharashtra is no stranger to the politics of parochialism, it also recognises the importance of political pragmatism. The Mahayuti government, which came to power in November with a huge mandate and on promises of addressing economic distress across the state, has repeatedly iterated its vision of making Maharashtra the country’s first trillion-dollar economy by 2030, with Mumbai as the country’s fintech capital.  Such an ambition is conditional on a conducive ecosystem that  nurtures talent, offers ease of doing business and opens up opportunities. For a party that professes to speak for its youth, aligning with this broader vision would appear to be practical. The limitation of Thackeray’s political imagination, however, has rendered MNS a party out of touch with the state’s aspirations, increasingly irrelevant in the face of Maharashtra’s pressing need for progress.