The Rediff Special / Kumar Ketkar

'We have to fight fascist tendencies within us'

While the Shiv Sena and Bharatiya Janata Party appear to be the two constituents of the alliance that rules Maharashtra, there are two others, apart from 41 Independent legislators due to whose support the alliance can remain in power, that influence its functioning. They are the Thackeray family and the more invisible RSS.

The RSS and the Shiv Sena represent different cultures and ideologies. There is no other party in the country whose every section and element has remained devoted to one leader and that leader alone for 31 years. Even the RSS cannot make that claim.

For one man to remain undisputed leader of an organisation for 31 years, and even after that party comes to power, control its every move without holding the reins of government and assuming responsibility is a unique achievement. In these 31 years, he has commanded the support of not merely the uneducated but undivided loyalty of the educated middle class. Thackeray is such a figure. That aspect of his role must not be underrated.

I have attended Thackeray's first public meeting in 1966, thereafter in 1976, 1986, until today. He has always hurled filthy abuse at the press, barely concealed diatribes against Muslims and also enthused youngsters to violently challenge their family's political leanings.

Where did this strength and support come from? For the youth who saw some hope even in the obviously malevolent politics of the Shiv Sena? How could a force like the Shiv Sena and all that it represents be born on Maharashtra's soil?

This is one aspect of the Shiv Sena and its appeal that has been ignored by the Congress, Left and progressive forces. Which is why they wittingly and unwittingly contributed to the Sena's popularity and today its rule. Apart from that, ruling Congress governments in the past blatantly allowed the Shiv Sena and Thackeray to get away with their often unlawful conduct. So what's to stop them now that it is their government? If they had not been able to get away with their conduct in 1966, 1971, 1982, they would not have been in power today...

Many parties and political formulations reflect alliances of different streams...

Within the BJP, this conflict between the BJP workers and its RSS base is becoming more and more visible. In Rajasthan, and in Gujarat, particularly this conflict is out in the open. In Gujarat despite having an absolute majority, the BJP could not contain this conflict and it burst out in the open.

But in Maharashtra the support the RSS has had traditionally from the educated, thinking, upper middle class. The hold of the BJP has emerged from the fast-urbanising, upper caste and upper class elite and its support of Hindutva. In the last two years in the state, and over the past decade, nationally, it is this section -- the upper caste and upper middle class -- which provided the critical support base for this Hindutva alliance in Maharashtra.

Without this section that is with the BJP and Hindutva, there was little possibility of this alliance coming to power. The most consolidated vote bank for Hindutva in Maharashtra is from this excessively urbanised class. Remember Maharashtra has witnessed the maximum urbanised growth in the country.

The BJP could pull the support of this class and give the Shiv Sena the respectability of the middle class it needed, while it was the Shiv Sena that could provide the numbers from the ordinary Marathi manoos.

Political opportunism and a wedding of numbers that is what the alliance represents. It is an alliance of mutual needs, not an ideological bonding. The RSS and BJP worker still feels utter contempt for the Shiv Sena and its style of functioning while the average, young Shiv Sena worker knows little how to work with the BJP-RSS style. But still they have made the alliance work...

What we have to remind ourselves is that this alliance in Maharashtra represents a linking, or bonding, of two distinct trends, two cultural trends within us, within our own society, within our families.

Only if we are willing to recognise and admit this, will we be able to emerge out of delusions and struggle against what the BJP and Shiv Sena represent. Because that battle, and that struggle is one that we will first have to wage within our own homes, within our own drawing rooms, in our chawls, in our middle class housing colonies.

Let us not fool ourselves that the Shiv Sena does not enjoy wider support from various sections of society. Even after their recent reversals in local elections (municipal corporations all over the state) the sound base of their support will not simply disappear or go. They may also lose in Konkan and may also politically face defeat in Bombay during the next polls.

But that ideological base will stay. Another party may benefit from the same culture, the same thought process, the same tendencies. These may temporarily shift loyalties elsewhere, to the Congress even, but the dangers that these tendencies represent will remain.

That does not mean that it is not of the paramount importance that this alliance be defeated politically. It is vitally important. But for the dangers that these forces represent to disappear, a deeper battle has to be fought. The mere political defeat of the Shiv Sena-BJP alliance is not going to purge our society of the fascist tendencies that they represent. Let us not make any mistake about that.

We have been deluding ourselves these forty years or more. We, who consider ourselves the educated middle class, the readers of Maharashtra Times and Loksatta, have been deluding ourselves and thus been unable to control or detect these tendencies within us. Even in many progressive households it is often said in confidence, "But whatever you say these Muslims saale are like that. They are uncouth, fanatical, they breed like rabbits, their birth rate is higher than the Hindu birth rate."

Despite the fact that we know the contrary. That the birth rate of Muslims is on par, in certain regions even less that of Hindus. This is the normal, off-the-cuff, drawing table, party conversation in many an educated middle class household, that proclaims itself to be anti-communal and supporter of the Congress!

Once such tendencies exist, and are given credence, the poison slowly spreads Then it does not remain restricted to voicing prejudice against only Muslims but also dalits, then other castes and finally exposes itself for what it is -- fascist.

That is the challenge before Maharashtra today. To struggle against the fascist thought-processes within society that this alliance represents and that is slowly eroding, or wiping out genuine Maharashtrian culture that is full of dissent, struggle and debate. Nor merely defeating the Shiv Sena and BJP.

In the central government, too, we have an alliance, maybe of opportunistic rogues. But I believe that at a crucial juncture they did put the country above all else and saved us the consequences of a fascist regime. If the BJP had remained in power today, the text books in all our schools would have been changed, our democratic institutions would have been eroded, and they would have attempted to crush the genuine, secular, democratic trends within society. Because forces like these like to distort reality and even dictate which side the sun rises.

Kumar Ketkar is executive editor, Maharashtra Times. This is excerpted from a lecture he delivered on the seventh anniversary of the Marathi evening newspaper, Aapla Mahanagar.

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