The Grouse in the Heart of Mumbai

By MANU JOSEPH

Published: November 21, 2012

NEW DELHI — A misfortune of Mumbai is that its politicians have always had a better understanding of the great city than many of its elite writers, who have long described the city by its most vacuous quality — cosmopolitanism.

According to this obtuse literary outlook, it is the educated, affluent, fashionable and gorgeous outsiders who are the cosmopolitans. The odorous laborers from the northern states are merely “migrants.” And Mumbai, according to these same artists, is and always was a good-natured city that welcomes outsiders of all kinds with open arms. But a man called Bal K. Thackeray knew this was not the true nature of his city.

Every great city has a grouse in its heart, and he knew what Mumbai’s was: the grouse of the native against the outsiders who were taking away his jobs, building great homes he could not afford, diminishing his language, changing the menu of his restaurants and replacing his cinema with another kind of cinema.

In 1966, Mr. Thackeray founded the Shiv Sena, a political organization that swore to return Mumbai, the capital of the western state of Maharashtra, to Maharashtrians. In the decades that followed, the Shiv Sena unleashed a wave of hatred and violence against the most vulnerable targets among the outsiders. In 1995, soon after the party won enough seats in the elections to head the state government, he changed the city’s name from Bombay to Mumbai, the Marathi word for the city.

On Sunday, Mr. Thackeray, the last don of Mumbai, lay in state, wearing dark glasses, his body wrapped in the national flag, which is a sacred object in India. The living can be arrested for wearing it.

He was another old man in the brief history of India’s apparent democracy who should have spent time in prison but instead lived a full, successful life, and died of natural causes when his 86-year-old heart stalled after an illness.

As with other regional dons in this country, he was, in a way, the creation of the Indian National Congress party, which had won the mandate several times to govern Maharashtra but allowed a ringleader of thugs to use violence and fear to build his myth. He was the strongest evidence for his own favorite thesis that India was a farcical democracy and that the man who controlled fear controlled everything.

By the time he died he was a somewhat diminished political figure, but as the news of his death swept through Mumbai on Saturday, the city, fearing violence, shut down.

No self-respecting Indian don departs from the world without his sidekicks smashing some windows. Saturday evening and all of Sunday, there were no taxis on the road, no pharmacies, no cinemas and no supplies of milk and other things that the government classifies as “essentials.”

The people of Mumbai, for excellent reasons, had little faith in the state government, which is currently led by the Congress party, to ensure their safety if they dared to step out for reasons other than attending Mr. Thackeray’s funeral.

Mr. Thackeray often described himself — with a twist of his wrist and a flick of his fingers, as if he were delivering a great one-liner — that he was not a politician but a political cartoonist. For a man who described himself as a cartoonist, he never denied — in fact he proudly accepted — that he favored the use of force against those whom he believed should vacate Maharashtra.

He was, of course, a capable cartoonist. He understood the importance of being interesting in the presence of strangers and used satire and personal insults to great effect even in his fiery speeches. He once said in a television interview that an important lesson he learned from his father was that a public speaker must not lecture people and bore them but must “gossip with the people.”

In a political career that rested on overtly encouraging hate, he first unleashed his goons on South Indian migrants, then found his political goldmine in the early 1990s, when he, through his public speeches and articles, fanned one of Mumbai’s bloodiest communal riots, which killed nearly a thousand people.

A Maharashtra government inquiry into the riots indicted Mr. Thackeray on charges of inciting the violence. He roared that if he were arrested, “the whole country will burn.” In 2000, the Congress-led state government did arrest Mr. Thackeray, but he was granted bail within hours.

The writer and film producer Pritish Nandy, who represented the Shiv Sena in the upper house of Parliament and maintained a long friendship with Mr. Thackeray, told me: “At the start of his political career, he used to say things half in jest, and he used to be surprised at how seriously his words were taken. Slowly, he began to believe those things that he used to say in jest.”

And the cartoonist eventually presided over an organization that has been involved in hundreds of cases of stabbings, riots and acts of vandalism. The way of the nation is that he will soon become a statue with a pointed index finger on whom pigeons will mete out justice.

Manu Joseph is editor of the Indian newsweekly Open and author of the novel “The Illicit Happiness of Other People.”