Sainik with style quotient

Suave and Shiv Sainik, Aaditya Thackeray is a paradox of sorts.

In March, he received a style icon award from a leading newspaper group in Maharashtra. As mother Rashmi beamed in the audience, the young man answered with élan as an interviewer queried him on his likes, dislikes, mannerisms, philosophies, friends, even girlfriends and possible marriage. He made a perfect Page Three picture.

Earlier, in 2014, Rashmi had reason to be even more pleased. A bitter election campaign was on — the Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) had snapped its 25-year-old alliance with the Shiv Sena, throwing Aaditya’s father, Uddhav, to the wolves. Jumping to the rescue was Aaditya, the head of the party’s Yuva Sena (youth wing), which his father had created just for him even in the face of resistance from the party grand patriarch Bal Thackeray. Fresh from a heart surgery for 12 stent implants, Uddhav set himself a punishing Statewide campaign schedule, even as his son took charge of the party’s media interactions. On his innumerable rounds of TV studios and FM radio channels, Aaditya did not falter once as all sorts of questions were thrown at him. The icing for Rashmi was the fact that, unlike her husband or his estranged cousin Raj who restricted themselves to appearance on Marathi channels, Aaditya held his own in English too. A product of the Bombay Scottish School and St Xavier’s College (making him, in fact, the first among four generations of Thackerays to go to college), Aaditya ably fielded questions from veteran journalists and anchors on national channels.

However, the irony of it all was not lost on anyone. As one BJP leader (who wishes to remain anonymous) put it bitingly, Aaditya belongs to a nativist party that thrives in Maharashtra on the narrow, parochial and xenophobic platforms of ‘Mee Marathi’ and ‘Marathi manoos first’. “What can you say about the future of a party set up for the Marathi manoos whose GenNext cannot speak Marathi and writes poems in English?”

When Aaditya was still 17, his parents had compiled his poems, written during his school years, into a book. Not exactly award-winning stuff, it nevertheless had grandfather Bal Thackeray raging against Maharashtrian families that sent their children to upper-crust schools where Marathi was an optional language and who conversed in English at home. Several middle-class Maharashtrians weren’t amused too, as they fumed that their children were left out of job markets because they had limited themselves to Marathi. Helpless against his own family, Bal Thackeray hit out at his grandchildren who spoke fluent English to their mothers, leaving even their fathers out of the conversation.

He himself had been true to his Mee Marathi policy, sending all his children to Marathi-medium schools. But in a fast-globalising world, the lack of English and Hindi language skills limited their sphere of influence to the Marathi-speaking State and, understandably, his sons and their wives wanted better for their children. Even as the fourth generation of Thackerays gradually caught up with the rest of the world, the Shiv Sena, at its core, remained unchanged from what it was in the 1960s, when it first took root on the promise of securing jobs and housing for local Maharashtrians. Although Bal Thackeray had begun well by attracting to his party many intellectuals who wanted to uphold Marathi asmita (ethos) and culture, over the years the Shiv Sena became notorious for its lumpen and anti-social cadre. It first rioted on the streets in 1968 against the then deputy prime minister Morarji Desai’s perceived disregard for the Marathi manoos , and the violence unleashed — vandalising government property such as milk- and telephone-booths, electric poles and street lights — has since become its signature style of sorts.

Along the way, many members, especially the educated ones, quit the Shiv Sena as they were opposed to the blatant disregard for constitutional norms. Legions of unemployed youth were attracted to the party, ready to rally to Bal Thackeray’s side on a single call to arms, and use their muscle to violate and intimidate; in return, they were accommodated in low-ranking jobs in government and private institutions where the workers’ unions had been captured by the party over the years.

In a party with such a rough-edged reputation, Aaditya’s Page Three sophistication sticks out like a sore thumb. The recent incident wherein Shiv Sena MP Ravindra Gaikwad beat up an Air India employee over a seating disagreement and yet faced no action from the party goes to show the limited influence a suave young leader can wield without upsetting the primary support base. Gaikwad even boasted that he had learnt his combative skills from Bal Thackeray.

Nationalist Congress Party leader Rahul Narvekar has been a mentor to Aaditya in his earlier avatar as a Shiv Sainik. “There is a limit to what he wants to do and what he can do. And no matter what he wants to do, he certainly will not be allowed to destroy the core base of the party,” Narvekar says.

The Shiv Sena as a party has always professed its faith in street justice, which keeps it connected to the masses. People at the lower rungs of society are always looking up to their local Shiv Sena shakha (unit) to solve issues ranging from leaky or dried-up municipal taps in their slums to preventing sexual harassment at workplace or even wife-battering by drunk husbands. In return for all this, as also for their jobs in factories, sweatshops and as domestic help, the people vote the Sainiks to power again and again. As they did at the recent Brihanmumbai Municipal Corporation polls, allowing the party to limp ahead despite the BJP’s concerted effort to defeat it.

It surprised no one that in the upper-crust areas such as Malabar Hill and Napean Sea Road or even Bandra and Juhu in the suburbs, the Sena trailed the Congress and the BJP — the beautiful people are not impressed enough by Aaditya (though they may accept him into their circles) to vote for his party.

Moreover, with Uddhav retaining all authority, Aaditya had little say in the distribution of tickets or the execution of policy decisions — factors that are essential for leaving one’s stamp on the party. For now, Uddhav is unlikely to cede anything more than the youth wing to Aaditya, as he himself has only just emerged into the political limelight after remaining in his late father’s shadow for years. Aaditya could use the time to evolve his core group of supporters, and in this he could take a leaf out of his grandfather’s early book — a time when Bal Thackeray had surrounded himself with professionals, including lawyers, doctors, professors, socialists, et al who helped him accurately read the pulse of society. While Uddhav is only just beginning to find acceptance as a leader in his own right, the descent of the party into dynastic succession has not gone down well with a significant section of Shiv Sainiks. Any premature move to elevate Aaditya could imperil the party’s unity. As one contemporary of Bal Thackeray put it, “Taking nonsense from Raj and Uddhav has been bad enough. Are we now expected to kowtow to a callow youth as well?”

So it will be a while before Aaditya can really hope to stamp the Shiv Sena with his own personality. For now, he will be gradually eased into the family business of nativist politics, and this seems to be the right way forward, says Narvekar, as he has the covering fire of his father if he stumbles and makes mistakes. But alongside this, he also needs a 21st-century agenda to take the party forward. For instance, Shiv Sena members have often been nominated to the Mumbai University senate without contributing much to education except to force university managements to employ their members to various Class 3 and Class 4 positions. When Aaditya was studying at St Xavier’s College, the then vice-chancellor Rajan Velunkar wanted to improve the syllabi and the quality of teachers but faced opposition from the Sena senate members. “They wanted me to build more canteens and toilets instead,” Velunkar recalls. Their rationale was that students — the future voters — would remember toilets and canteens as more tangible evidence of Aaditya’s efforts towards improving their lot, rather than intangibles like improved courses or teachers.

Then again, Aaditya’s most distinguished work at university was to compel the withdrawal of Rohinton Mistry’s Such a Long Journey from the second-year literature graduate course on the grounds that it had a few paragraphs that were critical of a character who suspiciously resembled his grandfather, even though the book was more an indictment of the Congress under Indira Gandhi.

The Yuva Sena had, in its early years, also roughed up a school principal for taking disciplinary action against some students. The trademark Shiv Sena style of blackening faces and locking out staff attracted much flak. The Yuva Sena in later years appears to have toned down a bit, even as Aaditya cultivated his ‘cool guy about town’ image. But it is doubtful if he will ever be able to fully transform the party’s character from its nativist militancy to a more mainstream, law-abiding one.

The Gaikwad case, over which both Aaditya and Uddhav maintained a studied silence while simultaneously striking a deal with the ruling BJP, indicates otherwise. Both father and son know all too well that their party’s strength comes from the likes of Gaikwad who thump their chests about how they use unlawful means to make people fall in line... and get away with it. But the kind of protection that the Congress, which was the ruling party in Maharashtra for years, first offered Bal Thackeray and the BJP now extends to Uddhav, may run out by the time Aaditya comes into his own.

It is a well-documented fact that the Congress and some Mumbai entrepreneurs patronised Bal Thackeray and helped him, both politically and financially, to set up the Sena. Both were essentially tired of the domination of communist parties in the metropolis and the Sena not only broke the back of left trade unions but also helped the Congress to politically defeat the communist parties in the 1960s. The Congress, in return, frequently turned a blind eye to the Shiv Sena’s strong-arm tactics. This continued until the mid-’80s, when Bal Thackeray began to turn from regionalism to religion. In the beginning, his brand of Hindutva was too extreme even for the BJP, but eventually the late Pramod Mahajan, then BJP general secretary, saw electoral benefit in an alliance with the Shiv Sena. This tie-up continued until 2014, when the BJP under Narendra Modi decided to break out on its own.

It is unlikely that the two parties will ally again after the current term of Parliament, and the Shiv Sena is likely to be entirely on its own from 2019. Between now and then and beyond the next general elections, the party needs to evolve a strategy that can help it stand on its own feet without being propped up by either the Congress or BJP. The burden of the party strategy in the future is likely to fall on Aaditya’s shoulders and, though he has enough time to set up his own team, he needs to come up with something more than canteens and toilets to attract today’s youth.

Striking a fine balance between the nativist core of the party and the need for a sophisticated image beyond just style awards and social media posts will be no mean task. Aaditya will have to deal with the aspirations of the Marathi youth that stretch far beyond the class 3 and class 4 jobs that the Sena has held out so far. It is a daunting task that even his father and uncle Raj have not been able to achieve. Aaditya must necessarily tread the middle path — the ideas will not be forthcoming from the beautiful people he mingles with nor the lumpen sections he seeks to avoid. There is a vast Maharashtrian middle class, tired of the Congress and the BJP, waiting to be conquered. Can Aaditya be their knight in shining armour? That is a question to which only Aaditya can find an answer.

Sujata Anandanis the author of Hindu Hriday Samrat—How the Shiv Sena changed Mumbai Forever

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