Sanjay Raut Has All Reasons To Do A Bal Thackeray
By Jahanzeb Mashhadi
16 April, 2015
Countercurrents.org
Sanjay Raut
There is a huge uproar and rightly so about the Shiv Sena's statement of no voting rights for Muslims! I get it, South Indians to Biharis with Muslims being a constant, baying for the blood of communities is what Shiv Sena has done throughout its existence. What I don’t get is the fact that people are actually expecting the government to do something about it.
Isn’t it the country that gave a state funeral to Bal Thackeray after all? The event was covered live! Chief Ministers galore attended the function. Nobody dared refer to him as anything other than Bala Saheb Thackeray that day, regardless of whether he or she was an RSS/SS man or not. There was virtually nobody of any significance right from artists of the wonderfully secular film industry to politicians to socialites who did not come on television to pay glowing tributes.
Bal Thackeray was draped in the national flag and given a gun salute by the state keepers before getting consigned to flames.
The man who did not tolerate Non Marathis in Bombay, (let alone Muslims or Christians) and declared it his fiefdom reserved only for the Marathi manus WAS DRAPED IN THE NATIONAL FLAG. The man who could not share Bombay let alone India was hailed as a great leader of the "masses" and a true "nationalist".
He was not a cabinet minister.He was not a state minister. He was not an ex chief minister. He was in fact an ex-nothing! He was not an army martyr. He had no pedigree which qualified him for a state funeral. Yet, he got one!
He was in fact a man who openly and publicly admitted to fuelling the Bombay riots and having a part to play in it. When Rajdeep Sardesai asked him "Some people say you had a hand in the Bombay riots" Bal Thackeray had notoriously replied - "I had a hand as well as a foot in it. I say it openly before you. Let anybody do anything to me if they can" - "mera haanth kya pair bhI tha riot mein main to open bolta hoon, kisi me dum hai to mera kuch Bigad ke dikha do". Can you imagine a certain Owaisi saying this and getting away with it? Yet Bal Thackeray did. He was a man who openly defied the courts, said he didn't care for the constitution on more than one occasion and gave hate speeches and spewed filth as frequently as urinating.
A man who single handedly held a city to siege for 50 years, a man who openly challenged the authorities, the law and order and constitution of India for 5 decades and led perhaps the most vitriolic political institution in India to new heights of infamy and arson, was given a state funeral!
If you go back further to find out the man’s roots you would find that he was actually a local goon allegedly running a medium sized extortion racquet. He got, allegedly again, hired by the Congress to break the strong hold of the leftist party CPM and its candidate on a particular municipality of Bombay. Bal Thackeray grabbed the opportunity and soon started assuming prominence with his parochial call of jobs for ‘sons of the soil’ and with open threats to South Indians, Gujaratis and finally Biharis; in that order. His initial role was that of breaking the left controlled trade unions, at the behest of the industrialists and section of the ruling party, Congress. This action of his had led to lot of violence between the leftist trade unions and Thackeray followers. The peak of this was murder of the CPI trade Unionist Krishna Desai, a blow from which the left trade unions could never recover.
He was charged as a conspirator and is widely believed to be directly responsible for the death, with some linking him with the act itself. It was, at the end, a long standing a crime he got accused of but never convicted (I wonder why) and subsequently won the election as a corporator from the municipality in question! The legend was born and the CPM stronghold of 20 odd years was broken. He then quickly latched on to the idea of launching a firebrand Marathi identity based political outfir (despite being a migrant himself) with a vicious hatred for Muslims at its core – in sum an allegiance to the RSS ideology and the indigenous identity gave birth to what became the Shiv Sena.
This man after a lifetime of profanities and abuses against citizens of this country, with a history of charge sheets for murders (I believe a total of 4) and numerous extortion cases, heading a party which routinely beat up girls, all non Marathas as a generic rule, Muslims and Christians, vandalized places of worship and public property routinely, committed arson, intimidated and actively participated in precipitating communal tensions and killings in riots WAS GIVEN A STATE FUNERAL.
India united as one in paying the highest glorious tributes to this man - a hypocritical hate monger with a vicious past and every conceivable crime possible in a political career.
This was a man who said if he could be allowed he would like to dump each and every one of them (Muslims) into the Arabian Sea and got a state funeral, draped in the national flag. This was a man who got disenfranchised by the Supreme Court of India for hate speeches, only man in nation’s history, and got a state funeral.
Today a man from the same party has said that voting rights should be taken away from the Muslims, and I actually get his logic. Yet we hear demands for and actually expect action from a man, who himself is a RSS cadre, a man who actively seeks advice from and enjoys the public patronage and political backing of the RSS. I mean are you out of your mind? They are probably deciding on conferring Padma Vibhsuahan on Sanjay Raut to begin with. Raut, in turn, can be assured of that he has just reserved a grand state funeral for himself whenever he goes, may he live a long life, longer than his mentor who went peacefully in his 80s, surrounded with his family members. Poor farmers, Muslims or otherwise, can keep dying by hanging them to trees till then.
Jahanzeb Mashhadi a marketing professional based in Dubai
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