Raj Thackeray’s goons may have made the most noise, but crass regionalism has raised its ugly head of late in many parts of the country. In Bihar, in retaliation to the MNS campaign, mobs have gone on a rampage and a Maharashtra IAS officer was attacked. Nitish Kumar’s five JD(U) MPs resigned from the Lok Sabha. In Tamil Nadu, the DMK’s Karunanidhi wants to project that it outdoes rival Dravidian parties in protecting Sri Lankan Tamils, even if it means twisting the arm of the central government. In Andhra Pradesh, Chandrababu Naidu, who had resolutely opposed the formation of Telangana, has now changed his stance, fearing that otherwise he would have to pay the price at the next assembly polls. In Rajasthan, Chief Minister Vasundhara Scindia has launched her poll campaign playing up regional sentiment and adopting a confrontationist stance towards the Centre, on the lines of Narendra Modi’s campaign asserting Gujarati pride. In Assam the spate of recent terrorist attacks is largely attributable to the schism between the original settlers and migrants.

Already ripple effects of the dangerous game played by Thackeray are being felt elsewhere. In Haryana a gang of lumpens issued an ultimatum to 15,000 Maharashtrian families, their neighbours: leave or else. In Chandigarh some vague north Indian organisation hopes to garner TV attention by threatening to throw out Maharashtrians.

Can a citizen of India really be termed an outsider in his own country? It is in any case debatable how one decides who is an outsider and who a son of the soil. The MNS claims it wants to protect the character of Mumbai which is being destroyed by migrants from north India. The supporters of the MNS and Sena, mostly Marathas, believe that they should reap the benefits that accrue from living in the country’s commercial capital. But the Kolis, the fishing community that was the original dwellers of the island of Mumbai, can in turn dub the Marathas, who hail from the plains of Marathwada and not the coastal belt, outsiders. The Kolis did not benefit financially from the transformation of their once sleeping fishing villages into a major port and a commercial hub. And, of course, neither the Kolis nor the Marathas played much part in setting up the city’s financial institutions, its major landmarks, the film industry, philanthropic bodies, cultural movements, hospitals and educational institutions. It was the British, Parsees, Gujaratis, along with entrepreneurs, artistes and innovators from all over India who made Mumbai what it is today. In fact at the time of the division of Bombay state into Gujarat and Maharashtra in 1960, Gujarat maintained it had equal claim to Bombay since the city had almost similar numbers of Gujaratis and Maharashtrians then.

... contd.