Me Mumbaikar

On 26^th April 1986, The Times of India carried a cartoon depicting a khadi-and-Gandhi-cap clad politician cautiously touching a sleeping tiger. The tiger roars back, taking the neta by surprise. “He’s alive!”, the neta exclaims, while the common man watches on. It was the story of the 1985 BMC (Bombay Municipal Corporation, then) elections, whose results had just been declared and a seemingly dormant Shiv Sena had scored a surprise victory. A picture is worth a thousand words, and so was this R.K.Laxman cartoon.

Though the Shiv Sena had been formed nearly two decades earlier, it had largely remained on the periphery of the State’s politics until then. With this victory in the BMC, the Sena saw a strong resurgence, and Bal Thackeray quickly capitalized on it, swaying the local Marathi youth, hit hard by the influx of migrants and the devastating textile strike by Datta Samant in 1982. The Sena has almost continuously controlled Mumbai since then, and when in 1995, Manohar Joshi was sworn in as the 15^th Chief Minister of Maharashtra; Thackeray’s power reached its peak. (The term ‘remote control’ first came into political parlance with this very arrangement)

Among his detractors, Bal Thackeray evoked extreme reactions. His contempt for democracy, anti-Muslim rhetoric or use of strong arm tactics made him a soft target of the pseudo-secular intelligentsia. But there is one thing Bal Thackeray could never be accused of – hypocrisy. Thackeray spoke what his heart said, and it was this very forthrightness that endeared him to his masses.

Thackeray’s success came, not because of, but in spite of, an unfriendly media. It has rarely been reported that the Shiv Sena runs one of the largest ambulance networks in the country. Its Sthaniya Lokadhikar Samiti provided jobs to hundreds of jobless youth in the 1980s and early 90s, literally pre-empting them from joining the underworld during the heydays of Mumbai gang wars. At the peak of the Mandal Commission controversy, when even the supposedly upper caste parties like the Congress and the BJP dithered, Bal Thackeray launched a scathing attack on caste based reservations, risking his political career, but staying true to the principles he believed in.  Long before Vajpayee’s Roads Revolution, the Sena – BJP government built a network of more than 50 flyovers in the city, without which city traffic would have come to a standstill today.

In later years, Thackeray tried to expand his base outside Maharashtra, shedding his pro-Marathi stance and embracing the Hindutva agenda. This earned him a large non-Marathi following within Mumbai, but the Sena could not make any meaningful dent outside Maharashtra.

Today, Thackeray leaves the Sena in a precarious state. As corruption dominates the political discourse, the Shiv Sena finds itself on a sticky wicket. Raj Thackeray’s MNS (Maharashtra Navnirman Sena) has split his Marathi manoos voter base down the middle. How Uddhav takes up these challenges remains to be seen.

While most of Maharashtra’s politicians come from regions such as the Konkan, Vidarbha, Central Maharashtra or the sugar belt, Thackeray was the only leading political figure who had his roots in Mumbai. Till the very end, Thackeray remained in Mumbai, trusting his life to doctors who belonged to the very faith he was accused of targeting.

He loved Mumbai and fought for Mumbai. For this and this alone, Balasaheb Thackeray will be badly missed.

Remembering Ashok

I received an SMS from Western Railway yesterday. The message said “Your hurry could lead your family to worry. Save your life for your family. Use subways and foot over bridges to cross railway tracks”. I would have instantly deleted the message as I normally do, but my mind went back – many many years ago, to a person I knew, who had died while crossing the Railway tracks…..

Ordinarily, it would seem surprising that so many deaths occur while crossing railway tracks. After all, a train is predictable – it is easily visible due to its size, it does not start or stop suddenly, runs on well defined tracks and has much less maneuverability than say, traffic on the road. Yet, statistics indicate that more than 2,000 people die every year crossing the railway tracks in Mumbai alone i.e. six per day. A few months before I was born, my grandmother died this way. And nearly twenty years ago, so did Ashok.

Ashok was nobody. Working as a peon in a government company, Ashok was as nondescript a person as one could be. He was barely five feet tall, frail, dark and wore thick framed glasses. He was soft-spoken, innocent and harmless. Qualities that made him the butt of jokes and taunts in his office. And yet, Ashok took all of it in his stride, never getting angry or upset. He seemed to have reconciled to the fact that this was bound to happen. As if the sole purpose of his existence was to give others a superiority complex. Everyday, Ashok came to office on time, and did his work diligently and sincerely, such as wiping off the furniture, dusting off the heavily stuffed files stacked in rustic cabinets, or brining tea for the staff from outside. He never complained about anything. Occasionally, he borrowed money from me. Hundred rupees, two hundred, sometimes five hundred rupees, promising to repay after the salary day. He always kept his promise. Until the last one.

One evening, Ashok left office as usual, and never returned. He was run over by a train while crossing the tracks on his way home at Jogeshwari. 

When the rich and the famous die, obituaries are written about them, praises sung, and their names immortalized. I am sure Ashok had no such luck. Except for his immediate family who must have felt his absence, Ashok was soon forgotten, and nobody spoke of him ever again.

Until this message that came to me yesterday reminded me about him again.

We all know that we are going to die one day. What we don’t know is, when and how the death will come. When Ashok left office that fateful evening, little did he know that his time had come. And for him, like the two thousand others in Mumbai that year (and every year), God chose the Railways as the engine of death.