Decoding the visceral hatred between BJP and Sena

BJP president Amit Shah has visceral hatred for the Shiv Sena. So does Prime Minister Narendra Modi. But the hatred is mutual. Uddhav Thackeray too hates both Modi and Shah. This is not without reason. In fact, it is political and manifests in many ways.

Their resentment towards each other is nearly a decade-old. After Modi became Chief Minister of Gujarat in 2007, the Gujarati trading community in Mumbai had organised a felicitation ceremony by holding a large rally in Shivaji Park. Modi came amid a lot of fanfare and theatrics.

Balasaheb Thackeray, the then Shiv Sena supremo, who always regarded Shivaji Park as his backyard where only his voice would roar, did not like the idea of sharing the jungle. There was another challenge thrown at the ‘Original Tiger’. The Modi Bhakts (the phrase had not yet come in vogue), primarily the Gujaratis, had begun to describe him as “Hindu-Hriday-Samrat”.

But Balasaheb had already taken over the mantle of being the “Hindu-Hriday-Samrat”. Indeed, the Sena Supremo never recognised even Lal Krishna Advani as the leader of the Hindus. The only “Hindu-Hriday-Samrat” (HHS), before him was Swatantryaveer Savarkar! But Balasaheb believed that he had been assigned the divine responsibility of protecting and promoting the Hindu Nation!

Then who was this Gujarati usurper masquerading as “HHS”? Balasaheb had particular hostility towards the Gujaratis in Mumbai. This was because of the legacy of the Samyukta Maharashtra Movement. The businessmen and industrialists’ community in Mumbai was primarily Gujarati and Marwari. The struggle for the state of Maharashtra was opposed by the Gujaratis. They wanted a bilingual Mumbai. Bilingual meant Marathi and Gujarati.

Balasaheb’s father, Keshavrao (more known as Prabodhankar) was one of the prominent leaders of the Maharashtra Movement. The hostility towards Gujarati community was almost in-built into the movement. Actually, a large number of Gujaratis were neither rich, nor in business. But that was how the community was branded. Balasaheb had imbibed that hostility from his childhood.

So when a Chief Minister of Gujarat arrived in Mumbai amid a lot of pomp and celebration, that hostility within surfaced. Though Balasaheb was supposed to be on the dais, as an ally of the BJP, he refused to felicitate him. He just did not turn up. With Balasaheb not arriving, most of the Marathi crowd disappeared from the audience too, making the meeting a sort of a Gujarati meet in Shivaji Park, a sort of blasphemous act for the ‘Marathi Manoos’.

When Narendra Modi’s name began floating as the prime ministerial candidate, Balasaheb publicly declared his support for Sushma Swaraj. That deeply upset a vengeful Modi and he has not forgiven the Sena for this. When Balasaheb passed away, the entire top brass of the BJP, from LK Advani to Sushma Swaraj, attended his funeral and paid their respects. Modi was conspicuous by his absence.

After becoming PM, Modi began to sideline Uddhav rather too obviously. Once he anointed Amit Shah, he too began to marginalise Uddhav and Sena. Neither for official events or for party functions, Uddhav was either not invited or, if he was there, he was ignored. Even when Devendra Phadanvis was sworn in, in a gala function in Shivaji Park, Modi rather humiliatingly ignored the presence of Uddhav on the stage. It has happened on so many occasions since.

Uddhav keeps nursing the same injury and there is a general feeling that the Gujarati within Modi has sustained the hatred for the Marathi’s. To return the ‘compliment’, the Sena leadership, particularly Sanjay Raut, executive editor of Samna, the daily mouthpiece of the organisation, keeps condemning Amit Shah and Modi.

Sometimes Shah is surreptitiously described as ‘Shahistekhan’, the villain who had come to Maharashtra to murder Shivaji Maharaj! Uddhav has gone further by publicly echoing the slogan coined by Rahul Gandhi, “Chowkidar Chor Hai”. Samna keeps praising Rahul Gandhi for his qualities and running down Modi as liar or worse. The Maharashtra unit of the BJP is routinely condemned in the paper. All this is reported to Modi and Shah.

The hostility between the two is not only personal and political, but also linguistic and cultural. The feeling in the Shiv Sena rank and file is that Modi uses the cultural base and mass support (muscle power) of the Sena to get Lok Sabha seats and then he isolates the ally. This is precisely what Modi did in 2014.

That is why the Shiv Sena is insisting on two things: election to the state Assembly and Lok Sabha should be simultaneous and secondly, a 50-50 distribution of seats. The BJP feels that it is a national party with its own majority at the Centre and cannot accept such “equality” with the Sena. Modi and Shah want to show “Sena” its place.

The Sena is essentially a party born on the street, with its activists coming from the working class, the unemployed and the lumpen public. Its base is in the slums, Chawl or lower middle class communities. Most of them are OBCs. The BJP, on the other hand, is primarily led by Brahminical ethos (the RSS base) or the stable, well-off, mainly urban middle class. There is a clear-cut class divide between the BJP and the Sena.

All such dormant or not so dormant factors surface every time the two parties sit for seat sharing negotiations. They are rarely on the same page. The Sena claims to be the original Hindu Party. The BJP feels that it is a sophisticated outfit, run by educated elites (mainly upper caste) and the Sena is a riff-raff, lumpen, rabble rousing party. They do not even share mannerisms.

Yet, they depend on each other. Without the alliance, they feel, coming to power is not possible. Therefore, it is a struggle for arithmetic (number game) as well as chemistry. It is a fight for political power and also for sharing the metropolitan spoils. It is a competition between two parties for getting larger and larger control over the city or the state. Both the parties have no roots in the rural areas and have little understanding of agriculture.

And yet, with the growth of cities and lumpens, with the expansion of the middle class and the service sector, they have become stakeholders in power. The fight has begun, first between themselves and later with the Congress and the NCP.

(The writer is a Rajya Sabha MP from the Congress. Views expressed are his own)