The Maharashtra government may have finally gathered the courage to arrest Maharashtra Navnirman Sena (MNS) chief Raj Thackeray today but the belated move could end up being a case of too little, too late.

Hours after his arrest for his inflammatory remarks against “North Indians” and the violence it provoked, Thackeray was out, granted bail by a Vikhroli court on personal surety of Rs 15,000. Magistrate S K Sharma told him “you are an educated person, I need not say anything more.”

Veteran politicians and observers in Mumbai say that although Raj’s latest avtaar could be a creation of 24-hour news television — and the violence could simmer down soon — he has ended up achieving his objective: upstaging, at least, for now, his relatively moderate cousin and rival Uddhav in the battle to prove who is the true heir of Bal Thackeray.

Senior politicians, including many in Chief Minister Vilasrao Deshmukh’s Congress party itself, said the entire episode in a sense reminded them of the late 1960s when the Congress allowed the rise of a cartoonist called Bal Thackeray, whose parochial politics continues to be a hot-button issue.

Mumbai had been agog with the impending arrest of Raj for over a week now ever since his supporters went on the rampage targeting migrants from north India.

The police were ready to move in and take Raj for his inflammatory speeches within days but orders from the top never came until a second round of rioting this week meant Deshmukh could not resist the pressure from Delhi in the face of national outrage.

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