An Insight Into the Way Shiv Sena Functions

An insight into the way the Shiv Sena functions

On January 18, three years back, the Shiv Sena was involved in a shameful act of vandalism that sought to disrupt the Indo-Pak cricket series, but shocked a nation.

This is a report of that act, and a look into the behind the scenes maneuverings, the Sena’s legacy and the way it functions.

On Monday, January 18, 1999 when 70 Shiv Sainiks ransacked the office of the Board of Control for Cricket in India at the Brabourne Stadium’s North Stand,

they froze more than its clock at 2:25. They froze an entire nation whose only pan-Indian religion was cricket. The news of the desecration of India’s biggest

cricketing triumph, the replica of the Prudential Cup 1983 World Cup Kapil Dev’s team won at the Lord’s, was sacrilege.

So much so that even the Shiv Sena, the usual suspects who were always gung ho about owning to any notoriety, slunk away from owning up to the handiwork of its

loyal cadre of street fighters. And this is the same party whose lord and master, the frail but fire spitting, rudraksha heaped chief had proclaimed that if Shiv Sainiks had indeed demolished the Babri Masjid, then he was proud of them.

And therein lies a tale. Why did the Sena baulk from owning up to the act?

On the weekend before, the top leaders of the Sena had met at Sena chief Bal Thackeray’s famous house Matoshri, taking stock of the national opprobrium heaped on the Sena and its septuagenarian chief for calling for a ban on the Indo-Pak cricket series that had breached even the heat of the subcontinent’s nuclear arms race.

The Pakistan team was to touch Indian shores for the first time in 12 years. The party’s call for the ban had isolated the Sena from everything and everyone, a

position Thackerey himself relishes. In its isolation the Sena, through its lumpen cadre, always got to snatch the initiative and the headlines. It also made the political careers of several Shiv Sainiks.

The story, reveals a senior Sena functionary, was different this time. After BCCI was vandalized, the Sainiks involved scooted from the scene. Most took cabs to the nearby Churchgate railway station and scampered into local trains that took them to their respective destinations. A small bunch headed instead, too drunk with their triumph to know its impact, to the nearby Jehangir Art Gallery, where Bal Thackeray’s shy son Uddhav was holding his much publicised exhibition of wildlife photographs. They proudly informed Uddhav about what they had just accomplished, with the milk still sticking to their whiskers.

Uddhav, who many top Sena leaders say has not inherited his father’s fiery cavalier attitude and penchant for posturing, lost his nerve. He panicked at the colossal fallout of the act. He immediately sent out denials of the Sena’s involvement in the act to some select reporters. In his panic, and to contain the fallout of the act, the younger Thackerey did not consult his father. The state’s culture minister , Pramod Navalkar, who was at hand, too got into the act and sent out the denials to the press.

As the media hordes bulged from a trickle to a deluge, the denials were also aired. The Sena had for the first time in its history committed to a denial issued by no less than a Thackerey. All evening the phones never stopped ringing at the editorial office of Saamna, the Sena’s mouthpiece. Reporters of other newspapers were constantly checking for the Sena supremo’s statement. It never came. Thackeray senior did on that Monday night something he had never done in recent memory.

He did not react to a big story where his party was involved. Thackeray pausing to think, in itself was big news.

Throughout the two weeks of controversy over Indo-Pak cricket matches that the Sena chief ignited and fanned, and Shiv Sainiks kept feeding through their acts at Kotla and the inane threats of a Sena satrap in remote Delhi, things were spiraling out of control. The prime minister, head of the national government of which the Sena was an important constituent, publicly castigated the Sena chief, taunting him to send his Sainiks to fight at the borders, and reminding him that digging up pitches under the cover of darkness was no act of bravery.

The Sena’s relationship with the Bharatiya Janata Party, its ally at the Centre as well as in Maharashtra, was already strained. But when the prime minister himself took on the Sena chief and his party, Thackeray was quick to singe.

Says Prakash Akolkar, an authority on the Shiv Sena with a book on the history of the party to his credit, “The entire idea (of the rampage at BCCI) was to get

back at the BJP. The timing was crucial. The Union Home Minister (L K Advani) and the country’s top BJP leader was in the city as the guest of the state

inaugurating a flyover outside Mumbai. The state’s top functionaries (Chief minister Manohar Joshi of the Sena and Gopinath Munde, the BJP’s deputy chief minister with the Home portfolio) were on the dais with him. The only way to let BJP know who was the boss was to accomplish it now and here.”

If Thackeray expected the prime minister to have got the message and call him, Vajpayee did not oblige. Instead the Prime Minister’s Office called the constitutional head of the state, the Sena’s chief minister and the current Union Minister for Industries Manohar Joshi. And the call made the chief minister get all hot under the collar.

Said a close aide of Joshi, “ The prime minister clearly said that he was willing to even chuck the state government. And in no unclear terms the PM told Joshi that he did not want to talk to Thackeray. The prime minister would talk to the chief minister, and he wanted the culprits arrested.”

Manohar Joshi could not have missed the menace in the prime minister’s voice. The Sena, stuck with a knee jerk denial and a prime minister willing to sacrifice the state’s government, had little choice. The top leaders of the Sena like Sudhir Joshi, Pramod Navalkar, Subhash Desai, besides the chief minister, converged at Matoshri to brainstorm on how to handle the situation.

Already three days had passed without an arrest by the police, and the pressure from the government at the center was getting more and more unbearable. And

BJP’s Munde, the deputy chief minister of the state and the second most powerful man in the state government with the Home portfolio, was only too willing a

conduit. He let the pressure pass on straight to the police.

A case to the point was when, on the day after the BCCI ransacking, several journalists and others protested outside the Eros Cinema at Churchgate, hardly a

stone’s throwaway from the BCCI office, a nervy police caned them. The news spread across the city and an eager opposition, the Congress, seized the situation.

Leader of the opposition in the Lower House, Madhukar Pichad, reached the Cuffe Parade police station where the arrested protestors were being held, to highlight the case.

When the deputy chief minister Munde of the BJP got to know he called up the police station and almost shouted obscenities at the senior police inspector. Says a source close to Munde, “ He used the choicest gaalies, and asked them where had their bravery gone when the Sainiks had attacked the BCCI. And now, they were showing their bravery by caning journalists.” Munde also told crime reporters of the city papers “the identities of those who ransacked the BCCI is an open secret,” alluding to the Sena’s obvious involvement.

The Sena top brass met at Matoshri on January 20 for four hours. The firefighting was on. One of the ideas tossed, said a source that attended the meeting, was to present 40-50 youngsters to the police. They would own up to the responsibility, but would be tutored to parrot that they were not Shiv Sainiks, nor were they connected to the Sena in any way. The Sena attempted, since they were the bigger party of the ruling combine, to co-opt the city police chief into the scheme.

The police commissioner of Mumbai, Ronnie Mendon, a policeman of the highest integrity, and already under pressure from his own boss Home Minister of the state Munde, the central government, and a nosy media unsympathetic to the state of his nerves, flatly refused to play along. All evidence pointed to the Shiv Sainiks, and there was no question of arresting dummies, he reportedly said.

The drama was hurtling towards the climax. The D-Day arrived. The Pakistani cricket team was readying to board their flight to New Delhi, when Thackeray and

Advani were closeted in a closed door discussion in a last ditch attempt to settle the matter. From a bilateral sporting matter the issue of the 1999 Indo-Pak cricket series had become a prestige issue between two political allies. For Advani it was a matter of prestige of the union of India. For Thackeray and the Sena it was a question of publicly stated ideology that had at stake their power in the state of Maharashtra. But the decibel and TRP level had already heightened the stakes so much, that Thackeray was already in search of a face saving formula.

Advani flew into Mumbai on the morning of --- carrying the seal of the Prime Minister Vajpayee with him, and promptly delivered to Thackeray the threat that Chief Minister Joshi had got to hear directly earlier on the day of the BCCI ransacking. Take it or leave it.

Thackeray immediately made his choice. He said he’d leave it. The protest, that is. He then added a pathetic face-saver “ But only for this year.”

Meanwhile, the police arrested 14 Shiv Sainiks for their involvement in the BCCI ransacking case the very same morning. Among those arrested one man was

missing, who everybody believed to be the man behind the vandalism of the BCCI. Shiv Sena Member of Legislative Assembly, Shrikant Sarmalkar. Proximity to

Thackeray saved Sarmalkar. In the meantime, Chief Minister Joshi’s crony Vinod Khopkar was in the slammer. At least for the week of judicial custody he had

been remanded to. Incidentally, Sarmalkar was the man who led the infamous protest in underwear outside thespian Dilip Kumar’s house.

Part – II

Seven years ago Vinod Khopkar was your average Shiv Sena shaakha pramukh in central Mumbai's Marathi heartland Dadar, home to the party headquarters, the

Sena Bhawan. It also is, incidentally the constituency of the former chief minister, Manohar Joshi. When he, Khopkar, wanted a promotion along the monolithic Sena’s hierarchy, he approached a man the Sena chief hates, a 57-year-old architect and planner called Madhav Deshpande.

Deshpande was a founder member of the Shiv Sena. In many ways he had contributed to the projection of Bal Thackerey as the one-man leader of the Shiv Sena.

But he had been the first to leave the Sena because of differences with his leader in 1978. “Khopkar wanted me to recommend him to Manohar Joshi and his

brother in law, Sudhir Joshi for a promotion in the ranks. I told him it was useless. Balasaheb only recognizes worth in terms of how much money you are willing to pay”, says Deshpande.

Vinod Khopkar is now a vibhag pramukh. When Deshpande met him next and enquired about how he had managed to move up, he said “I took your advice and

started collecting money from hoteliers and shopkeepers in my area and reached it to Matoshri”.

Airbag Pramukh Khopkar, now considered close to the then chief minister Manohar Joshi, would not be able to wish his supreme commander on the latter’s

seventy-second birthday on January 23rd that year. He missed the annual opportunity to be noted and blessed by Thackeray because he was cooling his heels in the lockup after being remanded to judicial custody till January 28th. He had been arrested for being part of the Sena’s goon squad that ransacked the BCCI office. He was among the fourteen Sainiks under arrest and had also been there to disrupt the Ghulam Ali show at the Centaur hotel in Juhu in early 98.

The way the Sena reacts and sends the message down the line to the activists is never direct, says Akolkar. “In the early days, the Sena leadership, besides the

Supremo, met at Matoshri. Among those who were in the inner circle, were the two Joshis, Manohar and Sudhir (who was the state education minister then),

Pramod Navalkar, Subhash Desai and others. A decision was taken and conveyed to the cadre through the Saamna the next day. It was never direct, it was always

rhetorical and the Sainiks were used to reading the message. The exact way in which it was accomplished was left to the Sainiks. “

By Thackerey’s own admission, as a cartoonist he was trained to read between the lines and through the decades that the Sena grew, its cadres were also taught to

read between the lines of the rhetorical Saamna editorials. Thackerey has also scored amazing success with Marmik, the cartoon weekly he had started, which

became hugely popular in the 60’s and 70’s I the Marathi households of Mumbai. Though started with the professed idea of ‘being a Sunday of relief’, it soon

mirrored the founder cartoonist’s own pre occupation. And Thackerey, the cartoonist who had left the Free Press Journal in a huff, used sarcasm and irony to telling effect.

A regular reader of the Marmik, Prakash Paranjpe remembers how Thackerey got his readers all excited, and started to galvanize the germ of his weekly’s

popularity through his first cause – ‘jobs for Maharashtrians’, and he targeted south Indians who robbed the locals of their jobs.

“Unable to raise huge amounts of money, he used to pore over the telephone directories and publish the list of the Boards of Directors of blue chip companies and public sector enterprises, which were full of non Maharashtrian names. This list would always have nothing but a searing headline that said ‘ Read and keep your cool’.” Recollects Paranjpe. The tricked worked. Readers themselves came up with names on the Boards of their own companies and supplied them to Marmik.

Incidentally, Thackerey had always said that he wanted his Sainiks like “live burning coals’. And the Sena was structured, since its inception, to be responsive to only one leader, Thackerey. Deshpande himself is the first to admit that when the Sena was formed in the late 60’s, it was the need of the hour to have a party with only one leader, and Thackerey was chosen for his oratorical skills, his seniority and the fact that he owned a hugely popular weekly.

Later Thackeray ‘s cadre was always excited through his emotional outbursts. One of the Shiv Sena’s early sensational attacks was in 1970 when a communist

MLA, Krishna Desai, was killed. Desai had started to threaten the Sena, and had started his own bunch of volatile bodyguards called the Red Guards. Thackerey

countered by forming his own band called the saffron guards. He then exhorted them to attack Desai, but had allegedly kept it secret from the Sena leadership,

remembers Deshpande, ‘He exhorted them by playing on their emotions. He told them that this man was leading their party. Their leader would be no more. He

would have been comfortable being a cartoonist, but he was doing this for them.”

Though Thackerey has never admitted publicly that he was involved in this incident, an old Shiv Sainik remembers that at the private meeting at the Robert Money school in Girgaum, south central Mumbai, he had owned up to exhorting the saffron guards.

What Thackerey does, is use the love of the Shiv Sainiks for him and by playing on their emotions, turns that love into a heinous crime. But, in the current situation, Thackerey’s Shiv Sainiks have become motivated by their own gain. Each seeks to outdo Shishir Shinde in acts of vandalism, because that is the only way they can reach close to their leader, ‘ says Deshpande. Shinde’s most notorious act was digging up the Wankhede pitch in 1991 on the eve of a cricket match with Pakistan.

Soon enough he was given a ticket to the Corporation election. And this weak voiced portly man rose of to be a mobile wielding Sena MLC.

“We have never allowed the cadre to think independently’, says another Shiv Sainik,’otherwise we will never be effective. Balasaheb’s sentiment is made public on any issue and then it is for the Sainiks to act according to their own resources and daring. The only guarantee they have is that Saheb will never abandon them. He will always own up to Shiv Sainiks, whatever they do and that is the prime motivation for the Sainiks’.

However, that all Sainiks are selflessly seeking to further their supremo’s cause is a myth was publicly stated by Manohar Joshi himself at a meeting with the Sainiks in the second week of December in 1998. Joshi observed, ‘all karyakartaas want to be shaakha pramukhs, all shaakha pramukhs want to be vibhaag pramukhs, and all vibhaag pramukhs want to be Chief minister. But there can only be one Chief Minister’.

Joshi’s own record illustrates what he castigated the Sainiks for. When the Sena’s turn came to nominate the mayor for Mumbai in the seventies, he was superceded by his brother in law, Sudhir Joshi. ‘That whole year Manohar Joshi did not go even once into the mayor’s office. And in fact he did not go to visit his sister even on Bhaubeej. ‘ Bhaubeej is a festival when traditionally all Maharashtrian brothers visit or meet their sisters.

While the Sainiks themselves may fight with each other, as the second rung leadership does over the spoils, Thackerey has maintained an almost mythical cult around him. If ever he is displeased with his own leaders, all he has to do is let it be known. Like in March 1998 when he hit out against Joshi and his ministers publicly through Saamna, and announced that he was embracing three months of forced sanyaas. Sainiks converged on his bungalow and when the leaders rushed to Matoshri to placate an obviously disillusioned Sena chief, even the most elder Sena ministers and ideologues were heckled and abused by the Sainiks. Thackerey had once again communicated to his flock, as well as the pretenders to his authority, who was the boss.

Thackerey dramas are something of folklore. Deshpande publicly accused him of promoting dynastic rule in the Sena, when in 1992 he had inducted his son

Uddhav, and nephew Raj, into the party high command. The next day Saamna carried a blazing headline; Aakhercha Jai Maharashtra’. Once again announcing his

resignation. He gloated over the spectacle of Sainiks rushing to pacify him. This emotional bond is something he evokes whenever he feels weakened within the

party.

Thackerey’s hold over the imagination of Maharashtrian youth has helped him cultivate and manipulate the kind of actions that Sainiks have become notorious for. In fact, with this kind of political sex appeal, criminals easily get swayed to join the Sena. Says Deshpande, ‘All they see is that the Sena chief owns them up whenever they create a dramatic public nuisance. They think of the Sena as an opportunity to go legit by being seen as doing things for a public cause.’

This political sex appeal of Thackerey is the reason that Shiv Sena shakhaas have sprung up in Haryana and Punjab and other such remote corners where the party has no following. This has nothing to do with the Sena or its ideology or any level other than the rank opportunism of encashing the name and seal of Bal Thackerey.

Says Akolkar, “I went to a meeting of Shiv Sainiks in Haryana and found them raising slogans like Jai Bhole and Bum Bhum Bole. When I asked around they said

they figured that Shiv Sena meant lord Shiva’s army. They did not even know that it meant Shivaji’s army.”

(An abridged version of this report was published in the Sunday Magazine section of The Telegraph, Calcutta, on January 24, 1999.)