Maharashtra’s voters are reduced to choosing between two brands of odious Hindutva

Maharashtra is gearing up for the most complicated state election in its history. Each day in the lead up to the voting day on 20 November has brought surprises – whether it is parties suspending rebel legislators, or large numbers of independent candidates challenging political stalwarts, or even rumours of parties themselves switching alliances. Since the principal contest is between two alliances made up of ideologically incompatible partners, there are innumerable possible outcomes even after the votes are cast and the results are declared on 23 November. The murky politics that has led to several upheavals in the state over the past five years, with  no state government able to complete its term, has carried on into this election. Maharashtra stands on the brink of the political unknown. 

Emblematic of the mess in Maharashtra is the composition of the two major alliances in the fight. On one side is the incumbent Mahayuti alliance comprising the Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP), the faction of the Shiv Sena led by the state’s chief minister, Eknath Shinde, and a faction of the Nationalist Congress Party (NCP) led by Ajith Pawar. On the other side is the Maha Vikas Aghadi (MVA) comprising the Congress party, the Shiv Sena faction led by Uddhav Bal Thackeray – or the Shiv Sena (UBT) – the faction of the Nationalist Congress Party led by its founder, Sharad Pawar (SP-NCP), the Samajwadi Party and the Peasants and Workers Party of India. It is clear that ideologies have been ignored in these alignments as supposedly secular parties have teamed up with hardline right-wing parties on both sides. 

Amid this chaos, there has been a significant development that has been little talked about: progressive voices in Maharashtra’s civil society, who were once staunch critics of the Shiv Sena for its violently right-wing anti-minority parochialism, have now thrown their support behind the MVA – including Uddhav Thackeray, the son of the Shiv Sena’s founder, Bal Thackeray. 

MK Gandhi’s great-grandson Tushar Gandhi, the author Ram Puniyani, the activist Teesta Setalvad, the former high court judge B G Kolse Patil and the filmmaker Anand Patwardhan signed an appeal to “vigilant citizens” before the general election in May, urging them to vote for the MVA since “they clearly represent the only viable political option for the people of Maharashtra and the country.” Along with many other writers, activists and journalists, they have endorsed the MVA for this state election as well. 

This is seen as a strategy to keep the authoritative BJP, which is in national power, in check in Maharashtra. It apparently stems from an argument that has gained traction in recent years that the state’s politics has been de-ideologised. Parties, factions of parties and numerous legislators have jumped across ideological lines because only personal gain and personal strategies are seen as remaining of any importance. But the ruling alliance and the opposition both contain parties that take pride in Hindu supremacist and exclusionary practices. The real reason for the current state of play is that the state’s politics has been completely overwhelmed by Hindutva, not de-ideologised. The progressive figures endorsing the MVA choose to ignore this fact and are asking voters to choose the alliance that they perceive to represent the milder form of Hindutva. 

While voting for the MVA could be a progressive Maharashtra resident’s preferred strategic option, for stalwarts of secularism to portray one variant of Hindutva as liberal and progressive is worrying – and it raises the question of whether the allegiance of liberal voices is also shifting in strange ways as the allegiances of politicians are shifting. All the while, the state has been spiralling downward into an environment of hate, with minorities, especially Muslims, being attacked and even killed without mercy and with impunity. 

ON 29 SEPTEMBER, 27-year-old Sadiq Usman Shaikh was riding home on his motorcycle in the Maharashtra city of Latur. With him were his wife, Iqra, and their six-year-old son and three-year-old daughter, Nadia. Iqra and Nadia were killed before they reached home in what is being described as a hate crime. News reports say that Sadiq had objected to a car being driven recklessly, after which the car’s passengers hurled communal slurs at him and his family. The five men in the car chased Sadiq’s bike for five kilometers before ramming into it, killing Iqra and Nadia. The men reportedly identified the family as Muslim by Iqra’s burqa.  “Imagine the amount of hate in their hearts towards Muslims, they didn’t even care about the two young children,” Ali Shaikh, Sadiq’s brother, said. 

About a month earlier, a video had surfaced of a group of young men beating 72-year-old Haji Ashraf Ali on a train to Mumbai because they suspected he was carrying beef.  The video was recorded by the perpetrators, who believed their act would be valourised by right-wing supporters, as has happened with similar attacks across India many times before. Equally disturbing was the hateful and communal language that the video showed being used by the men, seemingly in their twenties. Afterwards, lying half-conscious in hospital, Ali said, “I never thought this could happen to me.” 

Over the past couple of years, I have documented several incidents of mob lynching across the country, where most of the victims have been Muslims. I have witnessed many families in similar disbelief, asking, “How can our neighbours do this to us?” and “Where did this hate come from?”

Maharashtra has emerged as a hotbed of hate speech and communal violence in the last two years. India Hate Lab, a research group based in Washington DC, has reported that Maharashtra has seen the highest incidence of hate speech of all the Indian states in recent times. The group documented 91 hate-speech events across 27 districts in the state in just the first ten months of 2023. There were also more than 45 incidents of  violence and vandalism – in Malvani, Kolhapur, Aurangabad, Beed, Satara, Navi Mumbai, Mira Road and more. 

I have closely followed the work of progressive figures in Maharashtra – their films, writings, lectures and social activism – who have pushed back against this kind of hate for many decades. It is through their  work that  we learnt how the 1990s – when the Shiv Sena spearheaded communal politics in the state – marked a turning point in the exponential spread of such hate. 

When Sadiq objected to the reckless driving, the occupants of the car referred to him as “laandya”, according to his family. Specifically, they are reported to have shouted, “You laandya are acting too smart. You need to be taught a lesson.” The word “laandya” is an anti-Muslim slur roughly meaning circumcised, and was popularised by the Shiv Sena’s founder, Bal Thackeray, through his speeches and writings during and around the communal riots in Mumbai in December 1992 and January 1993. Thackeray famously celebrated the carnage, using inflammatory rhetoric that still echoes in the public discourse.

The Srikrishna Commission, constituted by the Maharashtra government to investigate the riots, summoned Manohar Joshi to testify before it. This was while Joshi was the state’s chief minister – the first figure from the Shiv Sena to hold the office. He was asked, among other things, about the use of the slur in the party’s newspaper, Saamna. The commission found that the Shiv Sena fomented and organised the riots, which resulted in the deaths of many Muslims.

For many years, the party wore this indictment as a badge of honour. Bal Thackeray, who the commission said acted “like a veteran general” during the riots, often expressed his admiration for Adolf Hitler and his preference for dictatorship as a model of governance. According to the political scientist Suhas Palshikar, Thackeray even ridiculed the Rashtriya Swayamsevak Sangh (RSS) – the ideological parent of the BJP and the country’s largest Hindutva force – for being too sober and passive. He thought their Hindutva was not militant enough.

The argument of many progressive people supporting the MVA is that Uddhav Thackeray’s ideology is different from that of his father, and that this means he is a legitimate part of the “secular” MVA. They say that Uddhav and his Shiv Sena were “deradicalised” while in power in the state between 2019 and 2022. However, his own words and actions belie this claim. Uddhav and his Shiv Sena (UBT) faction still cling to Bal Thackeray’s ideology of Hindutva and strategy of opportunism. 

WHEN THE RSS CHIEF, Mohan Bhagwat, declared in 2014 that India is a Hindu Rashtra, or Hindu nation, Uddhav said, “I support the comments made by Mohan Bhagwat. When he says that India is a Hindu nation, what’s wrong with it? Balasaheb Thackeray used to say the same thing for a long time.” 

When he resigned as chief minister in 2022, he refuted claims that the Shiv Sena had drifted away from Hindutva. “Whatever we do it is for ordinary Shiv Sainiks, for Marathis and we do it for Hindus,” he said. Uddhav has always upheld the party’s core ideology of exclusion. Even as part of the so-called secular MVA alliance, he has repeatedly said how proud he is that the Shiv Sena participated in demolishing the Babri Masjid. He reminded everyone about the central practice of the party, which is vigilantism. 

He now begins his speeches by addressing crowds with the Marathi phrase “Jamlelya majhya tamaam Hindu bhandhawaanno, bhagininno ani maatanno” – “To all my Hindu brothers, sisters and mothers gathered here” – just as his father used to do. But his father never held public office. Uddhav used the same opening for his speeches even as chief minister, excluding Maharashtra’s significant population of Buddhists, Muslims and people of other faiths. Somehow, this became normalised. 

He repeated the act in a speech this October, during the Shiv Sena’s much-awaited annual Dussehra rally. He said that he respects the RSS and Bhagwat, and even praised Lal Krishna Advani and Atal Behari Vajpayee, who were proponents and instigators of the Babri Masjid demolition. He also claimed that the BJP’s Hindutva under its current power duo – Narendra Modi and his right-hand man, Amit Shah – has become diluted. For Uddhav, their Hindutva, which has spurred a spike in hate crimes across India, is not pure enough.

Arguably the second most powerful man in Uddhav’s faction of the Shiv Sena is Sanjay Raut, who was a close aide of Bal Thackeray. In 2015, Raut advocated for the disfranchisement of India’s 200 million Muslims. He has a long list of anti-Muslim writings and speeches to his name, as do many Shiv Sena legislators in both of the party’s present factions.  

Meanwhile, the leadership of the MVA alliance, comprising the Congress and Sharad Pawar’s faction of the NCP,  has displayed a disturbing silence on the hate and atrocities against Muslims.

The Shiv Sena (UBT) is desperately trying to show that it has an identity – and the identity is that it is not the BJP. Statements and actions by its members that are being read as reflecting liberal stances are just echoes of BJP views often opposed by liberal and progressive citizens across the country. The party is trying to present an alternative Hindutva. 

Some scholars argue that the Hindutva of the Shiv Sena of the 1990s was different because it was vernacular, was mixed with nativism, was non-brahmanical and even anti-brahmanical. There were several smaller Hindutva groups around the country that initially stayed away from the brahmanical stronghold of the RSS, but slowly they were all subsumed into it. Only the Shiv Sena remained as a non-BJP political party with Hindutva politics at its core. That made the BJP and the Shiv Sena separate, but natural allies. 

A hardline Hindutva alliance of a unified Shiv Sena and the BJP won the 2019 Maharashtra state elections. However, soon after this, the Shiv Sena broke away from the BJP. It forged a new coalition with a unified NCP and the Congress that became the MVA, and went on to form the government and made Uddhav Thackeray the chief minister. 

In 2022, more than half of the Shiv Sena’s members in the legislative assembly left the party and the alliance to join the BJP, splitting the Shiv Sena into two factions. This rebel faction gave the BJP the numbers to topple the MVA government and form a new government in its place. The drama was repeated in 2023, when a large group of NCP members left the MVA to join the BJP–Shiv Sena alliance. Another round of this bizarre game of power is expected soon after the results of this state election are announced on 23 November.

How long will it take for the Shiv Sena (UBT) to return to its long-term natural alliance with the BJP? Nobody in Maharashtra can refute the possibility of this happening even immediately after the election result. 

NIKHIL WAGLE, a prominent progressive journalist, has said that he supports the MVA because it is a “secular force which wants to protect the constitution”. He believes the Shiv Sena has changed under the “sober” Uddhav Thackeray. 

Perhaps no other journalist has borne the brunt of the Shiv Sena’s anti-constitutional vandalism more than Wagle. One of the many attempts to attack him over his criticism of the party and its founder occurred in 2009. Shiv Sainiks barged into the offices of the news channel IBN Lokmat, then headed by Wagle, and beat up staff members. Raut, who was then a member of parliament, justified the act in an interview to The Hindu. Wagle said one of the attackers was from Raut’s constituency and that the incident was a pre-planned political attack. Today, there are videos on YouTube both of Raut leading seat-sharing negotiations with the other members of the MVA, and of Wagle endorsing the alliance in an interview. 

The ruling Mahayuti alliance has leaders like Shinde and the BJP’s Devendra Fadnavis who, with their hateful rhetoric, are trying to compete against and surpass Ajay Bisht, the chief minister of Uttar Pradesh (who goes by “Adityanath”), and Himanta Biswas Sarma, the chief minister of Assam. Bisht and Sarma, two BJP darlings, are both known for their unabashed anti-minority vitriol. One of the leaders of the opposition MVA alliance, Nana Patole, was with the BJP between 2014 and 2018. 

The makeup of both competing alliances symbolises a victory for the BJP and the RSS. Their hate has been so normalised that voters are left to choose one brand of Hindutva over another as a strategic compulsion.

IN 1974, Jayaprakash Narayan decided to incorporate the RSS into his movement against the prime minister, Indira Gandhi, and her Emergency. In one of his letters from prison during the Emergency, Narayan wrote, “By incorporating them in the Sampoorna Kranti Andolan I have tried to de-communalise them (RSS and Jana Sangh).” Today, this is seen as a historic blunder that empowered India’s right-wing forces. Many might be falling prey to a similar delusion in Maharashtra’s current politics. 

Narayan never supported the politics of the RSS or its first political party, the Jana Sangh – a predecessor to today’s BJP. And I know the progressives endorsing the MVA do not support the exclusionary politics of the Shiv Sena. But the threat of creating a new Frankenstein while opposing an autocratic BJP government persists. History has taught us that this threat can have practical effects beyond compromising our morals.

I have listened through hours of hate speech during rallies of the Sakal Hindu Samaj, a coalition of right-wing nationalist groups, in Maharashtra. The most notorious of hate mongers, such as T Raja Singh, Nitesh Rane, Suresh Chavhanke and Dhananjay Desai, have one role model: Bal Thackeray. They proudly claim this in their speeches and interviews. 

Raj Thackeray, Bal Thackeray’s nephew and the leader of the Maharashtra Navnirman Sena, another right-wing party, occasionally surfaces with hateful rhetoric and acts of vandalism that eerily mirror his uncle’s manner and technique.  Even members of the present BJP, including Modi, seem to have modeled their behaviour and tactics on him. Progressives have not stopped fighting Bal Thackeray’s hate even many years after his death in 2012. They are still going to court against such hate speech and trying to spread messages of love and peace. But how far will this firefighting work? 

Maharashtra has been dubbed a purogami rajya, a progressive state. But on what basis? Is its heritage of reformers such as Rajarshi Shahu,  Jotirao Phule and B R Ambedkar enough? In Pune, which is now called the vidyeche maherghar, or hometown of education, the great social reformers Savitribai and Jotirao Phule were shunned, attacked and ostracised in the 1850s for educating girls from the oppressed castes. Usman Shaikh and his sister Fatima Shaikh famously offered them shelter and a space to run a school for girls. 

But today I can think only think of the family of Sadiq Usman Shaikh. My hometown is not very far from where Iqra and Nadia were killed. I am sure the question “Where does all this hate come from?” will echo in my mind and make my hands tremble when I drive a scooter with my burkha-clad mother riding pillion.

My hands might also tremble when I realise that this hate has now been so normalised that many supporters of the MVA come from the same impoverished Muslim mohallas once disparaged as mini-Pakistans by Bal Thackeray. I remember how my friends from other faiths would loathe these neighbourhoods and be frightened to enter them. 

Nadia was three years old when she died. Had she lived, she might have grown up in the squalor of a mohalla, facing isolation, prejudice and humiliation for being a Muslim woman in this country. She might have been the daughter of a “laandya” but she had a right to live. 

The five men who killed them did not deserve to be filled with so much hate that they turned into murderers. Perhaps the urgent and only strategic choice we need to make is to keep in check every variant of an ideology that can lead us to this consequence.