I am back from my slumber after a month ! There were a whirlwind of thoughts in my mind but not enough zeal perhaps to capture them and weave them into a presentable article for my blog.Today after a self-inflicted drubbing,i told my laptop and my brain,"Chal dhanno aj tere izzat ka sawal hain" ( that was an example of my bad humor ! Sorry ! ). Jokes apart,getting back to serious issues,newspapers and magazines in the past few weeks have been innundated with "Raj-Thackeray Mania". Those articles made an interesting read,i must say.After all, sensationalizing an issue calls for immense talent. Even interesting is the fact that people really fall prey to such tactics.Let me share with you all a personal experience. I have a very good marathi friend and some of my other friends know it.One of my school friends cautioned me the other day of being careful of dealing with the marathis ! I mean that was an outrageous comment for me to digest.Thanks for your advice my friend,but i am a grown up lady and i have a head on my shoulder and that head knows (thanks to God's grace !)how to differentiate. Concern for someone is a different thing and having a blinkered mentality is something different.That comment (for him it was an advice though) did not go well with me. What i fail to fathom is how can we, all of a sudden equate all marathis as being supporters of Raj Thackeray ? This for me is a blatant example of stupidity.Why does Raj Thackeray come to people's mind first and not Hemant Karkare ? I just pity these people who have done and are doing so. Why do we take extreme positions ? Its just like equating all Muslims as terrorists,all Tamilians as supporters of the now extinct LTTE.
Most of us donot know that in the post election coverage of Maharashtra elections aired on various news channels,most of the Marathi journalists present in the TV studios did not support MNS's divisionary tactics. They were of the opinion that Maharashtra has far more substantive issues facing its polity than the issue of 'Marathi-manoos' only.But who cares to understand them.How many of us know about the farmer suicides in Vidharba,sugar problems in western Maharashtra ? May be only 10 % are aware about it.The rest know Maharashtra's politics only through Raj Thackeray, i guess. Thats appalling !
The recent attack on the SP MLA Abu Hashmi during the swearing-in ceremony of the newly formed Maharashtra Assembly,attracted huge media and common people's attention.The issue was again one of the omnipresent issues that has marred our polity - LANGUAGE POLITICS.Abu Hashmi wasnot allowed to take his oath in Hindi by MNS supporters. So many people whom i spoke to were spitting venom saying how can they do so when Hindi is the national language ? Well, for such ignorant Indians let me state it very clearly that our Constitution doesnot mention about a national language in any of its articles.It says Hindi is our OFFICIAL language and not the national language (Go and check Article 343(1) of the Indian Constitution,if doubt still persists). Even i strongly condemn what the MNS supporters did to disrupt the oath taking ceremony but i would like to point out that lets not whip up national sentiments taking recourse to wrong legal knowledge.At the same time i am intrigued to ask myself and to all the enlightened individuals who might read this post-what would the situation be like had some MLA say in any South Indian legislature taken oath in say Urdu ? Or had any MLA in J& K taken oath in Bengali ?
Few weeks later after the Abu Hashmi incident,we had Sachin Tendulkar taking a stand in saying that he is proud to be a Maharashtrian but he is an Indian first.I was glad that Sachin did come forward to save the Marathis being typecast as MNs afficionados. And when Sachin comes to bat,you cannot have a new lad bowling.So exit junior Thackeray and enter the senior Thackeray to topple his wicket ! Now again people started thinking that even Sachin is batting for the marathis,so is it right to brand all the marathis as bad ? I think we have this perennial problem of generalization. This has happened time and again.When in school,i saw how mothers cautioned their children from speaking to Kashmiri shawl vendors in my neighborhood.Reason- Kashmir was bleeding red due to terrorism,so who knows,it might be that the ordinary Kashmiri shawl vendor was masquerading as a terrorist ! When i was in college, Godhra and Gujarat riots happened and again the same thing followed- every Gujarati was labelled a Modi sympathizer ! Now its all so common to equate every Muslim as being a supporter of either the Al Quaida or the LeT. Not only that, even now, every Pakistani is seen as being hellbent in destroying India ! How many of us know that the bodies of the Pakistani terrorists involved in 26/11 are still lying in the morgues of the various Mumbai hospitals, as the Indian muslims have not agreed to give them an Islamic burial.Nobody knows about it,because that story doesnot smell sensational.
Raj Thackeray cannot be said to be the spokesperson of all Marathis,just like Mirwaiz Omar Farooq (Chairman of the Moderate Hurriyat faction) cannot claim to represent ordinary Kashmiri voices from J&K.MNS has won only 13 seats in the newly constituted Maharashtra Assembly.And they have won from some paricular pockets of Maharashtra,i.e., Mumbai-Thane region.That happens in every state.We have specific bastions for a political party, wherein its electoral strength is the highest.That has been a characteristic feature of the voting pattern in Indian elections over the years.
What surprised me the most was the fact that when Bal Thackeray was criticizing Sachin for not being a true Maharashtrian,there was no protest.Even when the Shiv sainiks in Pune attacked IBN-Lokmat's (IBN Lokmat is the Marathi wing of CNN-IBN) office in protest against Nikhil Waghle's remarks on Bal Thackeray,there was no protest from the commoners.My question is why this apathy now ? Is it because in this two battles it was the Marathis on both sides of the fence ? So the rest of the people who were making noises on the question of 'Marathi-North Indian divide' had no stake in this battle royale ? Isnt it hipocrisy then ? I mean if the issue of linguistic chauvinism is an important issue that is connected to the health of the polity,then the question of freedom of speech and expression and also the freedom of the press in free India is as vital an issue as the former.But here surprisingly we found a stoic silence.Here is my problem with the masses. We become judgemental very fast.Forming an opinion on any issue is good,but jumping into a conclusion without sufficiently weighing in the pros and cons is dangerous.That will give us a skewed perception about the issue and that doesnot augur well for the health of our polity.