Daily Times

Pakistanis must have been a tad amazed at the threat of Maharashtra Navnirman Sena (MNS) leader Raj Thackeray to disrupt the shooting of the forthcoming TV programme Sur Kshetra, which pits a team of singers from Pakistan against a team from India. Billed, quite literally, as a war of tunes, the promos of the show are repugnant for the crassness with which they seek to stoke the ever-smouldering hyper-nationalistic feelings. It will not be wrong to fear that the fire of jingoism could singe the ethereal art of music and subject its universal appeal, overriding national boundaries, to the passions of parochialism.

Raj Thackeray’s strident opposition to Sur Kshetra, however, is not based on aesthetics, but emanates from the baser sentiment of retribution. Thackeray believes India should not host Pakistani artists, providing them opportunities to become famous and rich, as their country does not extend similar openings to those from India. He has harped on the recent ban on Ek Tha Tiger in Pakistan to hammer his point. Thackeray has also been directing his ire and fire against the famous Indian singer, Asha Bhosle, who is one of the three judges in Sur Kshetra. Bhosle has refused to rescind her decision, being aware that her popularity insulates her from the possibility of assault by Raj’s followers, who show no compunction in resorting to violence.

Raj’s attempt to engender popular anger against the Pakistani singers typifies a style of politics that draws sustenance from identifying and branding different communities as the ‘outsider’ and initiating movements against them. This is not surprising as his political training has been in the family cradle of the Thackerays, whose patriarch Bal Thackeray acquired a following through his venomous outpourings against the Tamil migrants residing in Mumbai. He subsequently enlarged his base in swathes of Maharashtra through his attacks against the Muslims. The Thackerays, however, witnessed a split as the aging Bal, succumbing to the unconscionable bias grounded in blind parental love, decided to entrust the reins of his party, the Shiv Sena (SS), to his son Uddhav, ignoring the more valid claims of nephew Raj. In pique, Raj launched the MNS and began to imitate his uncle in pursuing hate politics.

Yet Raj’s targeting of the Pakistani singers is in reality an aside, a distraction, from his current obsession with the Biharis, a nomenclature erroneously invoked to describe the Hindi-speaking migrants not just from Bihar but also from Uttar Pradesh. Settled in Mumbai for decades, constituting its menial labour force, plying taxis, running street corner food stalls or working as vendors and hawkers, Biharis have been accused of salting away economic opportunities from the sons-of-the-soil as well as diluting the culture of Maharashtra. Earlier this week, MNS activists barged into a cinema hall, disrupting the screening of a film in Bhojpuri, a distinct Hindi dialect spoken in the state of Bihar. Politicians from Bihar, particularly its chief minister, have been firing salvos against Raj, pointing to the illegitimacy of his politics as the Indian Constitution guarantees to every Indian citizen the right to settle in any part of the country.

Worryingly, the Thackerays’ migrant-is-outsider theme has increasingly acquired a new salience in India. For instance, the clashes between the Bodos and Muslims in Assam provoked physical abuse of people from the northeast working or studying in the city of Pune. It was precisely why text messages threatening retaliatory attacks on the northeasterners in Bangalore acquired an ominous ring and sparked off a temporary exodus, the like of which has not been seen in recent times.

Even the Bodo-Muslim conflict has the theme of migration underpinning it. The tribal Bodos claim they have been outnumbered because of Bangladeshi Muslims illegally migrating through the country’s porous borders in the east and appropriating their land. Muslims counter these allegations, flashing documents, at times obtained illegally, to establish their Indian citizenship and suggesting that all Muslims — whether from West Bengal or those belonging to Assam — are wrongly clubbed under the rubric of Bangladeshis. Their contention has gained credence as quite a few social scientists have pointed to the historical fact of the British settling East Bengalis (now Bangladeshis) in Assam for reclaiming land for tea plantations and agriculture.

Yet to deny outright the influx of Bangladeshis into India is symptomatic of living in denial and extending the culture of political correctness to the extreme. What, though, remains contentious is the precise number of Bangladeshis in India and the method of identifying them. Such distinctions do not bother the Thackerays who, as also other rightwing groups, are likely to exploit the illegal Bangladeshi issue to broaden the migrant-as-outsider theme to include the entire Muslim community. This example also portrays the inherent difficulty of distinguishing the internal and external migrants in a land that segued overnight into a clutch of countries only 65 years ago, under British rule.

Six decades may seem inordinately long to an individual, but it perhaps amounts to just a few blinks in the movement of time and memory and history. No wonder, the hangover from the past persists in the present. This the mohajirs of Pakistan perhaps understand well. At the time of Partition in 1947, Urdu-speaking Muslims from Uttar Pradesh, Bihar, East Punjab and other states migrated to Pakistan, not only to escape the fury of the traumatic times but also because they subscribed to the theory of Hindus and Muslims constituting two separate nations. Theirs was indeed a conscious decision to join voluntarily a political community, a classical definition of who constitutes a nation. Yet migrants they remained, in their own eyes and of those among whom they settled, subsequently charting a new discourse on separateness.

Or take Nepal, where the Madhesis, or the people who inhabit its Tarai region, believe Kathmandu has treated them as outsiders from the time of the Gorkhali conquests more than two centuries ago. They believe they have been discriminated against, and suspected of owing allegiance to India because of close cultural ties between them and the people of Uttar Pradesh and Bihar. Partly, Nepal’s continuing political instability is directly linked to such sentiments among the Madhesis. Conversely, many pahadis, or the hill people, who settled in the Tarai generations ago, feel the new political consciousness following the ouster of the monarchy has rendered them outsiders in their own country. An August 2007 report in Himal magazine quotes a harried pahadi, drinking in a bar, saying, “I feel like a Madhesi, and am at a loss in Kathmandu. Today, I am being told I am an outsider…Madhesis need to do one thing: give up these dual loyalties. Most of them support India over Nepal. Why can’t they only be Nepalis, like us?”

As such, at the best of times, rightwing politics rely on fanning the anxieties and fears of those who suspect the ‘outsider’ could deprive them of their livelihood and swamp their unique culture. Such politics will acquire a sharper edge as the subcontinent experiences the pain of the global economic downturn, a condition conducive for those who are forever in search of the ‘outsider’ to persuade people to join their project of militaristic mobilisation of their societies.

The author is a Delhi-based journalist and can be reached at ashrafajaz3@gmail.com