Authors: Suketu Mehta
He hates the term “India,” which he attributes to “Pandit Jawaharlal Nehru, him and sheer love for Muslims after the partition. They were calling it India, hence we are Indians. I hate that.” Hindustan, he insists, is the original and proper name for the country. “Begins with Sindhu River. Sindh. Sindh and Sindhu Sindh.” Sindh, now a province in Pakistan.
He says that an article of the constitution defines us all as Hindustanis: “Nineteen-a. The funniest thing: They only take advantage of first line, what about other lines, a b c d e f g h? There again it is very clearly stated that even though people migrate from one state to another state they should see one thing: that they should not disturb peace of the locals there. Why don’t you also take that? Why show me only first lines and not other lines?”
It might be because there is no such line in the constitution. Actually, it is articles 19d and e that he might be referring to, the ones that give all Indians the right to move freely and reside anywhere in the territory of India; 19a grants citizens freedom of speech and expression, which Thackeray might be less well acquainted with. He has invented his own constitution. Which one of his boys is going to take the trouble to look up the written document to verify his confident pronouncements? It is the world’s longest constitution, and probably the least read. People make of it what they will.
Outsiders would desist from crowding into Mumbai if they were taken care of in their home states, he says. “What is their chief minister doing there, with a red light on his car and big bungalow and expenditure? He should make provision for them.” Again, Mumbai’s mess is the fault of politicians. “Cosmopolitan city is not only Mumbai but every city. Bangalore is cosmopolitan, Calcutta is cosmopolitan. It has its own limitations because of amenities. The rains we don’t know what is going to happen. The rains they come and they go. It is something like that fairy song, you know, that children sing: ‘Rain rain go away, come again another day’ and all that it happens like this.”
I begin to entertain the suspicion that he is not all there.
I ask him what accounts for his charisma.
“If you have a flower in your hand and it has a typical fragrance, how can you say that where is the fragrance, where does it come from? A fragrance cannot be seen; a charisma cannot be explained. I don’t know whether I have it or not. Whoever it may be, if anyone has that charisma. I don’t know whether it is charisma or Karishma. If it is Karishma it goes to
Kapoor—” referring to the sexy actress. He laughs at his little pun. “So, charisma is better.”
I ask him how he thinks he will be remembered, about his place in history.
He doesn’t mind if he doesn’t get remembered, he says. “I play with my grandchildren, that’s all.” He won’t write his autobiography; he won’t contest any election. “That’s my decision.” His not entering politics directly is essential to establishing his image among the Sena boys. The Tiger is above politics but controls politicians at his will; he has publicly boasted that he controls his chief ministers by remote control. “I hate politics. I am not a politician, I am a political cartoonist.”
He reminisces about his life as a cartoonist and the Mumbai of old. “When I was in
Free Press Journal
. . . population was there of course. But some glamour was there, some thrill was there. But slowly slowly slowly slowly, when more and more people started pouring it become very difficult. I remember during that time—it was somewhere in ‘forty-two, ’forty-four—the municipal people used to come whenever we used to complain there are rats, big rats. So they used to come with those hose pipes and there were hydrants on the roads. They’ll fit that hose pipe to the hydrant and you put that huge hose into the hole, that rathole, and the others will keep watch with those big rods in their hands—lakdi—and naturally the water goes according to their things you know, the holes inside, under center their thing. Then they will come out from some other hole. When water is coming from this side, they will take shelter from other side. The moment they used to come out, they will beat. At least six to ten—twelve rats were killed. Now water scarcity is so much you can’t afford to have that. But actually, in my backyard, when I was staying there in Dadar, the connection was given to hydrant, hydrant, from hydrant, immediately terrific force with the gust. It was somewhere in ’forty-four, ’forty-five, ’forty-six. But now you don’t see hydrants because it is being misused. The hutment people. They will keep it open and if they fail to put it back, water will go on coming out, actually, with a big flow.”
I am unprepared for this aperçu. “Is there a serious rat problem?” I inquire.
“Rats are bound to be there,” the Saheb responds, now looking at things from a more charitable perspective. “If not the BMC, the rats clean
some of the portion of the debris. Yes. Some eatables are there.” He stops here, having delivered his soliloquy, and leaves me to make what I will of it.
A visitor is announced, the film producer Vijay Anand. He whispers confidentially, “His sons are actually behind bars.” Actually, it is Anand’s nephews. “When this man comes he becomes my devotee.” The Saheb laughs.
The nephews have been accused of murdering their father’s longtime mistress. But when Anand comes in, he does not immediately talk about the sons. He starts with a different kind of problem. Anand owns a theater. His assistant went to record some music using the sound equipment at the studio of another producer, Vinayak Raut, and the equipment broke down. Raut kidnapped the assistant, has held him since the afternoon of the previous day, and has now sent a letter demanding 35,000 rupees in damages. Anand shows the Saheb the letter. Raut has further informed Anand that he has worked on the Saheb’s security detail, that he has collected “vasuli” for the Saheb, and he is now collecting the same extortion payments for the Saheb’s own thuggish nephew, Raj Thackeray.
The Saheb gets on the phone. He remembers every detail of Anand’s convoluted story and relates it to his aide. “I want to see this Raut at twelve tomorrow. I am going to appoint him head of extortion.” Here is the all-powerful leader, righting wrongs with an order and a witticism. The problem will be fixed. He will get the things done.
Thackeray takes special pride in the fact that movie stars, directors, producers—“they all come here. They are all my good friends. They admire me. They have respect for me. I help them also. I solve their problems. That’s true.” The editor had told me that Thackeray didn’t give a damn about politicians from Delhi; if Vajpayee came to see him, he would not be overwhelmed. But if Amitabh Bacchan came to see him, he would make time and would be filled with pride. It is a typical Bombayite’s sense of priorities: entertainment first, politics second. When the film star Sanjay Dutt was jailed for eighteen months for his involvement in the bomb blasts, only the Saheb had the power to get him released on bail. Thackeray tells me that his great rival Sunil Dutt came to his house when his son was in jail. “He wept, he did an aarti around my wife.” Eight or nine producers were sitting in the anteroom, waiting for an audience, while
Dutt circled Thackeray’s wife with a lamp. All their projects with Sanjay were on the line, and they stood to lose crores. Thackeray’s government let him out on bail.
I ask him if he thought Sanjay was guilty.
“They find one spring of a dismantled AK-420, and you are going to run a case against him?” He thinks that Sharad Pawar, then the chief minister, had fixed Sanjay because he was competing against his father for the Congress presidency. But if the court eventually finds him guilty, “hang him.” It is a phrase the Saheb often uses, an all-purpose solution for Bangladeshi Muslims and Sanjay Dutt alike. This leader doesn’t waste time on theory or process; he advocates direct immediate action: Hang them. A leader whom a young man, with little education but a lot of anger, can understand, can worship.
Thackeray’s strongest support has at all times in his career come from sixteen-to thirty-year-olds. “Young blood, young men, youngsters without jobs are like dry gunpowder. It will explode any day.” As they get into their thirties, they start getting respectable or lose the zeal for strife. Curiously, for a man whose support is supposed to come from the young, he goes on, “That generation. They don’t have any culture or sanskar. Sanskar has no English alternative or word.” The closest is “values.” The Saheb is particular about his cultural tastes; Hindi movies and Michael Jackson are okay, but the city’s celebration of Valentine’s Day makes him furious. “Valentine’s Day. I am going to ban it next year. See. They dare not. I’ll tear their cards. What is Valentine’s? Ridiculous! These college boys living on their pocket money given them by their fathers. I don’t know it is white money or black. Enjoying life with girls and the girls are also like that. This what you call Coke generation Pepsi generation. Yes. With”—he gestures with disgust at his leg—“jeans on.”
Sure enough, the next year on February 14, as he promised me, the Saheb bans Valentine’s Day. The call goes out to his Sainiks, who ransack shops selling Valentine’s Day cards and disrupt restaurants advertising Valentine’s Day dinners. Newspapers as far as Turkey, South Africa, and Australia prominently cover his fulminations.
But he has mellowed; he is a tired, aging fascist. Now, after an outrageous statement, there is a gentle laugh, which robs the pronouncement of its “menaas.” At times, joking about the movie people, smoking his cigar, he seems almost avuncular. It is difficult to connect the man sitting before
me with the homicidal fury he unleashed in people like Sunil only a few years ago. But then, he is seventy-three. “I can remote control on government,” he tells me, “but not on my age.”
His fire reappears when he reverts back to his favorite targets. “The Bangladesh Muslims, they have come here. I don’t know who is their godfather mother in Hindustan.” He tells me about a recent bomb blast in Delhi, in which fifteen or twenty people were injured and the police arrested a Muslim man for the bombing. When the news of the arrest spread in the Muslim neighborhood, the call came from the mosque loudspeaker to attack, and a Muslim mob fifteen hundred men strong, according to Thackeray, invaded the police station and released the bomber. “We should tolerate this nonsense?” the Saheb thunders. “Who are you? What right do you have? You go back to your Bangladesh. This is very sad and bad.”
Could this kind of incident happen in Mumbai?
“That way they have a check as far as Shiv Sena is concerned,” he says with pride. No communal riot has happened since the Sena came to power, he points out.
“What is your explanation for why the Bombay riots happened in ’ninety-two and ’ninety-three?” I ask.
“Babri Masjid,” he answers. “No Muslim here knows where is Luck-now, where is Babri Masjid.” Neither, evidently, does Thackeray; the Babri Masjid is located in Ayodhya, hundreds of miles from Lucknow. The mosque was not a working mosque, he says; but there is a Ram Mandir underneath, where Hindu prayers have been offered. Then the mosque was demolished, and the Muslims in Mumbai took to the streets. “Then to save your secular face, dirty face, you say they were not local Muslims, they were outside Muslims, they came from Bihar and Uttar Pradesh, but how dare they come here? And inspire, instigated the locals. That is shot dead then, must be. There was a retaliation from Shiv Sena. If my boys would have not come on the streets I’m sure Hindus would have been slaughtered.”
They retaliated, he says, with “whatever means we had at that time. The stone—it can be stones or tube lights or iron bars. They had some ammunition, the pistols. But even then . . . they would have massacred Hindus. You ask any community, Gujaratis, these these these, they said yes, because of Balasaheb our life was saved.” As, indeed, my uncle had said.
“And then they elected you?”
“No. Once you are saved, you are saved. Then hell with you. We don’t bargain, don’t expect them to do. It is our bounded duty to save everybody’s life then.” The Sena would do the unpleasant work that my Gujaratis are too cowardly to do; they would fight the battle of Panipat against the Afghans all over again. After taking Bombay from us during the Samyukta Maharashtra movement—when they walked the streets looking for Gujaratis to beat up, shouting, “Kem chhe? Saru chhe! Danda leke maru chhe!”—they would now magnanimously protect us against the Muslim hordes.
He warns the Muslims. “Don’t make us suspicious. You be free and frank. Every time you can’t say, ‘Islam is in danger.’ Why we should worry about Islam because ours is not a Islamic country.” He will oppose the Muslims if “their body is here and their heart is for Pakistan; I will be the first man to tell them get out.” Their status in India is questionable to begin with. “What is this Muslim community? After the partition, they should have gone back!”
“Do you feel there will be another riot in Bombay? Is there social pressure bubbling?” I ask him.
“I am not an astrologer, neither a palmist nor a foreteller, but I can tell you this thing—my prophecy you call it or intuition you call it. If the Vajpayee government falls, there is going to be chaos and we’ll be heading toward civil war. A civil war, mind you this.” He is speaking very calmly, not raising his voice, not making a threat; just telling me what will happen, sure in his knowledge. “And then you will know what I have preached, what I have said. I touch wood I don’t want that come true, but it will come true. The Muslims will come out. It is not just restricted to Mumbai. All over the country. It will be a civil war in the country itself.”
What would the Sena do in a civil war?
“By any means we’ll fight. By any means we’ll fight. We’ll have to fight. Retaliation is our birthright. Retaliation is our birthright.”
I remind him about what he has told me: This time the Muslims are armed.
“Let us see, let us see. Let the time come. Let the time come.”
T
HE
M
ARATHI EDITOR
later tells me he was one of a group of journalists speaking to the Saheb when the leader declared that he could see the
future. He had “hallucinations,” he remembers. “Of bloodshed. Blood across his eyes,” and the editor draws a palm across his eyes, wiping away a sea of blood.