The Death of Tolerance and Bal Thackeray

In his book on Bombay, Suketu Mehta writes of Michael Jackson using Bal Thakeray’s urinal while visiting him, thus elevating it to the status of a little monument. Reading of Thakeray’s antics, it is surprising that he had such an ordinary side to his personality. But so did Osama bin Laden, who was seen playing volleyball with his daughters in a camp in Peshawar, as mentioned in Lawrence Wright’s book. If Thackery considered Jackson’s trickle to be holy, it just reinforces the simple reality that famous men and women, however vile, cannot avoid being ordinary.

Thackeray’s behavior was consistent with a modern Hindu fascination with urine. The Vishwa Hindu Parishad (VHP) has been selling soaps and other cosmetic products (special diwali offers) which it claims are made from cow urine. But one wonders whether Thackeray realized how ordinary his prejudice really was. His repeated references to the Muslims as landya (literally small penis, often referring to circumcised Muslim men) clarified, that even in his hatred, Thackeray was merely regular.

Now that he is dead, the English language media seems oddly benevolent. Important people, including the President of this rather decrepit Republic, have expressed their sorrow. Suddenly, everyone is being politically correct. Those who are clear minded, like Praveen Swami in The Hindu, use words the lay reader will mostly miss out on. The only person who has clearly outlined his disapproval is Markandey Katju, whose sporadic edicts are, by now, well known. 

Katju, in the pages of The Hindu, correctly identifies the Bhils, Gonds, and other pre-historic tribes as original Bhumiputras, the oldest inhabitants of this land. But he then proceeds to substitute Thackeray’s inane and flawed racist dogma with a delusional Nationalist one. A resilient and widespread conception of national unity may solve some of our problems. But it is not something that can be achieved by Katju’s invocations of the Constitution, the way it couldn’t be achieved by Nehru’s literary flourish.

Shiv Sainiks are proud having put Muslims on fire in 1993 or beating up Biharis in recent times. They, and many other disillusioned supporters flocked to Thackeray’s cremation. It became a massive event of mourning and fear. A girl who expressed her disapproval on facebook was arrested and later let out on bail. 

The silence of journalists could be explained as letting mere survival instinct rule. No one wants Sainiks to beat them up and ransack their homes and offices. But it isn’t just the absence of any condemnation. It is a tacit approval of the elevation on death of a man who if alive should have been imprisoned, to say the least. One can merely speculate as to size of the crowds when Narendra Modi dies.

The reality which liberal thinkers refuse to face is Secularism has become unfashionable. The days of Hindu–Muslim bhai bhai are passé. As Western thinkers like Ayan Hirsi Ali parade their pedestrian understanding of Islam and Islamism, thus providing humanitarian wars with shallow justifications, the elite in India too have decided to express their unsentimental materialism. The narrow narrative of progress is being borrowed from the West, sans the realization that it is crumbling there. The exercise becomes easier as contempt for history spreads. Meanwhile, historians, like most other academics, refuse to write simply. It is not uncommon to find affluent, caste Hindu individuals aggressively blame the Muslim population for its squalor. ‘They’ should do something about their condition. India must develop. With or without them. Preferably without.

In such a world it is natural that Bal Thackeray will receive respect. And Modi’s rampage of 2002 will be ignored. Gently, and without complaint, we jettison our liberal selves, to the pages of history, to be later re-written.   

So what does this teach us? Surely, from the death of such a great man, we can take home some lessons, however ransacked our homes may be. It teaches us that liberal values, progressing towards which we consider inevitable with growth, can be forsaken in the blink of an eye. It teaches us that democracy, the real thing, is not paramount in most of our minds. It teaches us that tolerance has been relegated to tiny civil rights groups, hoarse from shouting the obvious. And that the study of history has become, for most people, history.

What must we do, then, as we watch the very fabric of tolerance distort? We don’t need an exalted idea of nationhood or religion. Acknowledging universal values does not require grand identities. All it requires, to begin, is that we call a hooligan a hooligan. Whether he be alive and well, or like Balasaheb, comfortably dead.