Opinion No end to delusions

Now this is all familiar and no doubt Balasaheb is quite aware of it. The only reason for him to have done so must be a sense of frustration at the sad state the Shiv Sena has been reduced to. It is nearly fifty years since Maharashtra was formed. After some glorious early hits,the Shiv Sena is now reduced to fighting with the MNS,its own junior branch. Its electoral performance was such that even the BJP is distancing itself from it. It cannot have escaped Bal Thackeray’s attention that at the end of an active career of five decades,he may not have much to show for it.

In this,Shiv Sena is not that different from its older brother,the BJP. Their politics is based on envy,on the idea that the condition of those they champion—Marathi speakers for Thackeray and Hindus for BJP—is bad because of the presence of some others—non-Marathi speakers for the Shiv Sena and Muslims for the BJP. Thus,the uplift of ‘their’ people requires the persecution of the ‘other’ people.

This thought is not original either to the Shiv Sena or to the BJP. It is the standard ideology of all people who think that whatever their condition,someone else is responsible for it. Get rid of the other and you will be fine.

Alas,this is a fallacy. Prosperity does not come merely from majority rule,even if you can exclude the minority. It comes from the usual route of saving,acquisition of knowledge,enterprise and hard work. Many Marathi speakers know this and have prospered. They don’t vote Shiv Sena or MNS. Many Hindus have prospered and they find the BJP’s logic bizarre. This leaves these parties with a tough choice. You either admit you are wrong in your thinking and adapt to the evidence or you go even more extreme.

The Shiv Sena’s clientele are disaffected Marathi speakers who have had a rotten deal from the rapid economic growth of the last twenty years. All they can do is blame their fellow poor—the Biharis as they compete for the same low paid jobs. But this is a shrinking group since many have found that by learning IT or English they can get better jobs. The shrinking support is also being weaned away by the MNS. The future is bleak for the Shiv Sena as the BJP can testify from its own sorry state.

This is not the case with only right wing parties. The CPM too is shrinking along with the rest of the parliamentary Left. It has competition from the Naxalites. If you have believed and taught that prosperity for the masses can come only by subverting the system,then you have to go on feeding false notions. The CPM has become too respectable to sustain the nonsense it used to preach. The Naxals show that the logic of that belief can only end in bloodshed.

The poor—the Marathi manoos,the Hindu,the proletariat—do not gain anything from such delusions. The leaders do and hence they find it hard to abandon them.