The assault oN a sweetshop owner in Mumbai’s Mira Road, allegedly by hooligans affiliated with the Maharashtra Navnirman Sena (MNS), for not speaking in Marathi, is not an isolated incident. It is a deeply troubling brand of politics rearing its head again. Coming in the wake of an agitation against the state government’s ill-conceived resolutions on the three-language policy — first making Hindi mandatory at the primary school level, then making it optional — it is a warning that must be heeded. Both Raj Thackeray’s MNS and Uddhav Thackeray’s Shiv Sena (UBT) accused the BJP-led Mahayuti government of seeking to impose Hindi on the state, the estranged Thackeray cousins coming together after two decades on the plank of “Marathi pride”. Maharashtra’s Devendra Fadnavis government did well to withdraw its Hindi language mandate to schools. But that the incident of assault in Mumbai came as MNS workers celebrated the revocation and days before the protest-turned-victory rally called by the Thackerays on July 5, should ring alarm bells — a parochial politics cannot be allowed to change the subject and tip over into violence in India’s most industrialised state.
Ever since it was founded in 2006, the MNS has periodically stoked the “Marathi pride” issue, employing divisive, even violent, tactics. At a Gudi Padwa rally earlier this year, Raj Thackeray said that his party would not hesitate to slap residents in the state should they refuse to speak Marathi — following this, MNS workers attacked officials at banks for not offering services in the language. However, it is also apparent that such belligerence resonates less and less among the people in a state where non-Marathi speakers make up a significant chunk of the population, and whose capital, Mumbai, attracts workers from across the country. The MNS’s stark and growing disconnect from the ground is evident in its electoral record: From 13 seats in the 2009 Assembly elections to one each in 2014 and 2019 to none at all in 2024. The Shiv Sena (UBT) is also currently engaged in a fight for relevance following the drubbing of the Maha Vikas Aghadi in the 2024 Assembly election — that may explain its regression to the lumpenism that long characterised the undivided Shiv Sena. In doing so, however, it risks stripping away the sheen that Uddhav Thackeray’s chief ministership, seen to be steadying and sober during the pandemic, had earned for the party.
