An insight into the way the Shiv Sena functions

On January 18, three years back, the Shiv Sena was involved in a
shameful act of vandalism that sought to disrupt the Indo-Pak cricket
series, but shocked a nation.

This is a report of that act, and a look into the behind the scenes
maneuverings, the Sena's legacy and the way it functions.

On Monday, January 18, 1999 when 70 Shiv Sainiks ransacked the office
of the Board of Control for Cricket in India at the Brabourne
Stadium's North Stand,
they froze more than its clock at 2:25. They froze an entire nation
whose only pan-Indian religion was cricket. The news of the
desecration of India's biggest
cricketing triumph, the replica of the Prudential Cup 1983 World Cup
Kapil Dev's team won at the Lord's, was sacrilege.

So much so that even the Shiv Sena, the usual suspects who were
always gung ho about owning to any notoriety, slunk away from owning
up to the handiwork of its
loyal cadre of street fighters. And this is the same party whose lord
and master, the frail but fire spitting, rudraksha heaped chief had
proclaimed that if Shiv Sainiks had indeed demolished the Babri
Masjid, then he was proud of them.

And therein lies a tale. Why did the Sena baulk from owning up to the act?

On the weekend before, the top leaders of the Sena had met at Sena
chief Bal Thackeray's famous house Matoshri, taking stock of the
national opprobrium heaped on the Sena and its septuagenarian chief
for calling for a ban on the Indo-Pak cricket series that had
breached even the heat of the subcontinent's nuclear arms race.

The Pakistan team was to touch Indian shores for the first time in 12
years. The party's call for the ban had isolated the Sena from
everything and everyone, a
position Thackerey himself relishes. In its isolation the Sena,
through its lumpen cadre, always got to snatch the initiative and the
headlines. It also made the political careers of several Shiv Sainiks.

The story, reveals a senior Sena functionary, was different this
time. After BCCI was vandalized, the Sainiks involved scooted from
the scene. Most took cabs to the nearby Churchgate railway station
and scampered into local trains that took them to their respective
destinations. A small bunch headed instead, too drunk with their
triumph to know its impact, to the nearby Jehangir Art Gallery, where
Bal Thackeray's shy son Uddhav was holding his much publicised
exhibition of wildlife photographs. They proudly informed Uddhav
about what they had just accomplished, with the milk still sticking
to their whiskers.

Uddhav, who many top Sena leaders say has not inherited his father's
fiery cavalier attitude and penchant for posturing, lost his nerve.
He panicked at the colossal fallout of the act. He immediately sent
out denials of the Sena's involvement in the act to some select
reporters. In his panic, and to contain the fallout of the act, the
younger Thackerey did not consult his father. The state's culture
minister , Pramod Navalkar, who was at hand, too got into the act and
sent out the denials to the press.

As the media hordes bulged from a trickle to a deluge, the denials
were also aired. The Sena had for the first time in its history
committed to a denial issued by no less than a Thackerey. All evening
the phones never stopped ringing at the editorial office of Saamna,
the Sena's mouthpiece. Reporters of other newspapers were constantly
checking for the Sena supremo's statement. It never came. Thackeray
senior did on that Monday night something he had never done in recent
memory.

He did not react to a big story where his party was involved.
Thackeray pausing to think, in itself was big news.

Throughout the two weeks of controversy over Indo-Pak cricket matches
that the Sena chief ignited and fanned, and Shiv Sainiks kept feeding
through their acts at Kotla and the inane threats of a Sena satrap in
remote Delhi, things were spiraling out of control. The prime
minister, head of the national government of which the Sena was an
important constituent, publicly castigated the Sena chief, taunting
him to send his Sainiks to fight at the borders, and reminding him
that digging up pitches under the cover of darkness was no act of
bravery.

The Sena's relationship with the Bharatiya Janata Party, its ally at
the Centre as well as in Maharashtra, was already strained. But when
the prime minister himself took on the Sena chief and his party,
Thackeray was quick to singe.

Says Prakash Akolkar, an authority on the Shiv Sena with a book on
the history of the party to his credit, "The entire idea (of the
rampage at BCCI) was to get
back at the BJP. The timing was crucial. The Union Home Minister (L K
Advani) and the country's top BJP leader was in the city as the guest
of the state
inaugurating a flyover outside Mumbai. The state's top functionaries
(Chief minister Manohar Joshi of the Sena and Gopinath Munde, the
BJP's deputy chief minister with the Home portfolio) were on the dais
with him. The only way to let BJP know who was the boss was to
accomplish it now and here."

If Thackeray expected the prime minister to have got the message and
call him, Vajpayee did not oblige. Instead the Prime Minister's
Office called the constitutional head of the state, the Sena's chief
minister and the current Union Minister for Industries Manohar Joshi.
And the call made the chief minister get all hot under the collar.

Said a close aide of Joshi, " The prime minister clearly said that he
was willing to even chuck the state government. And in no unclear
terms the PM told Joshi that he did not want to talk to Thackeray.
The prime minister would talk to the chief minister, and he wanted
the culprits arrested."

Manohar Joshi could not have missed the menace in the prime
minister's voice. The Sena, stuck with a knee jerk denial and a prime
minister willing to sacrifice the state's government, had little
choice. The top leaders of the Sena like Sudhir Joshi, Pramod
Navalkar, Subhash Desai, besides the chief minister, converged at
Matoshri to brainstorm on how to handle the situation.

Already three days had passed without an arrest by the police, and
the pressure from the government at the center was getting more and
more unbearable. And
BJP's Munde, the deputy chief minister of the state and the second
most powerful man in the state government with the Home portfolio,
was only too willing a
conduit. He let the pressure pass on straight to the police.

A case to the point was when, on the day after the BCCI ransacking,
several journalists and others protested outside the Eros Cinema at
Churchgate, hardly a
stone's throwaway from the BCCI office, a nervy police caned them.
The news spread across the city and an eager opposition, the
Congress, seized the situation.

Leader of the opposition in the Lower House, Madhukar Pichad, reached
the Cuffe Parade police station where the arrested protestors were
being held, to highlight the case.

When the deputy chief minister Munde of the BJP got to know he called
up the police station and almost shouted obscenities at the senior
police inspector. Says a source close to Munde, " He used the
choicest gaalies, and asked them where had their bravery gone when
the Sainiks had attacked the BCCI. And now, they were showing their
bravery by caning journalists." Munde also told crime reporters of
the city papers "the identities of those who ransacked the BCCI is an
open secret," alluding to the Sena's obvious involvement.

The Sena top brass met at Matoshri on January 20 for four hours. The
firefighting was on. One of the ideas tossed, said a source that
attended the meeting, was to present 40-50 youngsters to the police.
They would own up to the responsibility, but would be tutored to
parrot that they were not Shiv Sainiks, nor were they connected to
the Sena in any way. The Sena attempted, since they were the bigger
party of the ruling combine, to co-opt the city police chief into the
scheme.

The police commissioner of Mumbai, Ronnie Mendon, a policeman of the
highest integrity, and already under pressure from his own boss Home
Minister of the state Munde, the central government, and a nosy media
unsympathetic to the state of his nerves, flatly refused to play
along. All evidence pointed to the Shiv Sainiks, and there was no
question of arresting dummies, he reportedly said.

The drama was hurtling towards the climax. The D-Day arrived. The
Pakistani cricket team was readying to board their flight to New
Delhi, when Thackeray and
Advani were closeted in a closed door discussion in a last ditch
attempt to settle the matter. From a bilateral sporting matter the
issue of the 1999 Indo-Pak cricket series had become a prestige issue
between two political allies. For Advani it was a matter of prestige
of the union of India. For Thackeray and the Sena it was a question
of publicly stated ideology that had at stake their power in the
state of Maharashtra. But the decibel and TRP level had already
heightened the stakes so much, that Thackeray was already in search
of a face saving formula.

Advani flew into Mumbai on the morning of --- carrying the seal of
the Prime Minister Vajpayee with him, and promptly delivered to
Thackeray the threat that Chief Minister Joshi had got to hear
directly earlier on the day of the BCCI ransacking. Take it or leave
it.

Thackeray immediately made his choice. He said he'd leave it. The
protest, that is. He then added a pathetic face-saver " But only for
this year."

Meanwhile, the police arrested 14 Shiv Sainiks for their involvement
in the BCCI ransacking case the very same morning. Among those
arrested one man was
missing, who everybody believed to be the man behind the vandalism of
the BCCI. Shiv Sena Member of Legislative Assembly, Shrikant
Sarmalkar. Proximity to
Thackeray saved Sarmalkar. In the meantime, Chief Minister Joshi's
crony Vinod Khopkar was in the slammer. At least for the week of
judicial custody he had
been remanded to. Incidentally, Sarmalkar was the man who led the
infamous protest in underwear outside thespian Dilip Kumar's house.

Part - II

Seven years ago Vinod Khopkar was your average Shiv Sena shaakha
pramukh in central Mumbai's Marathi heartland Dadar, home to the
party headquarters, the
Sena Bhawan. It also is, incidentally the constituency of the former
chief minister, Manohar Joshi. When he, Khopkar, wanted a promotion
along the monolithic Sena's hierarchy, he approached a man the Sena
chief hates, a 57-year-old architect and planner called Madhav
Deshpande.

Deshpande was a founder member of the Shiv Sena. In many ways he had
contributed to the projection of Bal Thackerey as the one-man leader
of the Shiv Sena.
But he had been the first to leave the Sena because of differences
with his leader in 1978. "Khopkar wanted me to recommend him to
Manohar Joshi and his
brother in law, Sudhir Joshi for a promotion in the ranks. I told him
it was useless. Balasaheb only recognizes worth in terms of how much
money you are willing to pay", says Deshpande.

Vinod Khopkar is now a vibhag pramukh. When Deshpande met him next
and enquired about how he had managed to move up, he said "I took
your advice and
started collecting money from hoteliers and shopkeepers in my area
and reached it to Matoshri".

Airbag Pramukh Khopkar, now considered close to the then chief
minister Manohar Joshi, would not be able to wish his supreme
commander on the latter's
seventy-second birthday on January 23rd that year. He missed the
annual opportunity to be noted and blessed by Thackeray because he
was cooling his heels in the lockup after being remanded to judicial
custody till January 28th. He had been arrested for being part of the
Sena's goon squad that ransacked the BCCI office. He was among the
fourteen Sainiks under arrest and had also been there to disrupt the
Ghulam Ali show at the Centaur hotel in Juhu in early 98.

The way the Sena reacts and sends the message down the line to the
activists is never direct, says Akolkar. "In the early days, the Sena
leadership, besides the
Supremo, met at Matoshri. Among those who were in the inner circle,
were the two Joshis, Manohar and Sudhir (who was the state education
minister then),
Pramod Navalkar, Subhash Desai and others. A decision was taken and
conveyed to the cadre through the Saamna the next day. It was never
direct, it was always
rhetorical and the Sainiks were used to reading the message. The
exact way in which it was accomplished was left to the Sainiks. "

By Thackerey's own admission, as a cartoonist he was trained to read
between the lines and through the decades that the Sena grew, its
cadres were also taught to
read between the lines of the rhetorical Saamna editorials. Thackerey
has also scored amazing success with Marmik, the cartoon weekly he
had started, which
became hugely popular in the 60's and 70's I the Marathi households
of Mumbai. Though started with the professed idea of 'being a Sunday
of relief', it soon
mirrored the founder cartoonist's own pre occupation. And Thackerey,
the cartoonist who had left the Free Press Journal in a huff, used
sarcasm and irony to telling effect.

A regular reader of the Marmik, Prakash Paranjpe remembers how
Thackerey got his readers all excited, and started to galvanize the
germ of his weekly's
popularity through his first cause - 'jobs for Maharashtrians', and
he targeted south Indians who robbed the locals of their jobs.

"Unable to raise huge amounts of money, he used to pore over the
telephone directories and publish the list of the Boards of Directors
of blue chip companies and public sector enterprises, which were full
of non Maharashtrian names. This list would always have nothing but a
searing headline that said ' Read and keep your cool'." Recollects
Paranjpe. The tricked worked. Readers themselves came up with names
on the Boards of their own companies and supplied them to Marmik.

Incidentally, Thackerey had always said that he wanted his Sainiks
like "live burning coals'. And the Sena was structured, since its
inception, to be responsive to only one leader, Thackerey. Deshpande
himself is the first to admit that when the Sena was formed in the
late 60's, it was the need of the hour to have a party with only one
leader, and Thackerey was chosen for his oratorical skills, his
seniority and the fact that he owned a hugely popular weekly.

Later Thackeray 's cadre was always excited through his emotional
outbursts. One of the Shiv Sena's early sensational attacks was in
1970 when a communist
MLA, Krishna Desai, was killed. Desai had started to threaten the
Sena, and had started his own bunch of volatile bodyguards called the
Red Guards. Thackerey
countered by forming his own band called the saffron guards. He then
exhorted them to attack Desai, but had allegedly kept it secret from
the Sena leadership,
remembers Deshpande, 'He exhorted them by playing on their emotions.
He told them that this man was leading their party. Their leader
would be no more. He
would have been comfortable being a cartoonist, but he was doing this
for them."

Though Thackerey has never admitted publicly that he was involved in
this incident, an old Shiv Sainik remembers that at the private
meeting at the Robert Money school in Girgaum, south central Mumbai,
he had owned up to exhorting the saffron guards.

What Thackerey does, is use the love of the Shiv Sainiks for him and
by playing on their emotions, turns that love into a heinous crime.
But, in the current situation, Thackerey's Shiv Sainiks have become
motivated by their own gain. Each seeks to outdo Shishir Shinde in
acts of vandalism, because that is the only way they can reach close
to their leader, ' says Deshpande. Shinde's most notorious act was
digging up the Wankhede pitch in 1991 on the eve of a cricket match
with Pakistan.

Soon enough he was given a ticket to the Corporation election. And
this weak voiced portly man rose of to be a mobile wielding Sena MLC.

"We have never allowed the cadre to think independently', says
another Shiv Sainik,'otherwise we will never be effective.
Balasaheb's sentiment is made public on any issue and then it is for
the Sainiks to act according to their own resources and daring. The
only guarantee they have is that Saheb will never abandon them. He
will always own up to Shiv Sainiks, whatever they do and that is the
prime motivation for the Sainiks'.

However, that all Sainiks are selflessly seeking to further their
supremo's cause is a myth was publicly stated by Manohar Joshi
himself at a meeting with the Sainiks in the second week of December
in 1998. Joshi observed, 'all karyakartaas want to be shaakha
pramukhs, all shaakha pramukhs want to be vibhaag pramukhs, and all
vibhaag pramukhs want to be Chief minister. But there can only be one
Chief Minister'.

Joshi's own record illustrates what he castigated the Sainiks for.
When the Sena's turn came to nominate the mayor for Mumbai in the
seventies, he was superceded by his brother in law, Sudhir Joshi.
'That whole year Manohar Joshi did not go even once into the mayor's
office. And in fact he did not go to visit his sister even on
Bhaubeej. ' Bhaubeej is a festival when traditionally all
Maharashtrian brothers visit or meet their sisters.

While the Sainiks themselves may fight with each other, as the second
rung leadership does over the spoils, Thackerey has maintained an
almost mythical cult around him. If ever he is displeased with his
own leaders, all he has to do is let it be known. Like in March 1998
when he hit out against Joshi and his ministers publicly through
Saamna, and announced that he was embracing three months of forced
sanyaas. Sainiks converged on his bungalow and when the leaders
rushed to Matoshri to placate an obviously disillusioned Sena chief,
even the most elder Sena ministers and ideologues were heckled and
abused by the Sainiks. Thackerey had once again communicated to his
flock, as well as the pretenders to his authority, who was the boss.

Thackerey dramas are something of folklore. Deshpande publicly
accused him of promoting dynastic rule in the Sena, when in 1992 he
had inducted his son
Uddhav, and nephew Raj, into the party high command. The next day
Saamna carried a blazing headline; Aakhercha Jai Maharashtra'. Once
again announcing his
resignation. He gloated over the spectacle of Sainiks rushing to
pacify him. This emotional bond is something he evokes whenever he
feels weakened within the
party.

Thackerey's hold over the imagination of Maharashtrian youth has
helped him cultivate and manipulate the kind of actions that Sainiks
have become notorious for. In fact, with this kind of political sex
appeal, criminals easily get swayed to join the Sena. Says Deshpande,
'All they see is that the Sena chief owns them up whenever they
create a dramatic public nuisance. They think of the Sena as an
opportunity to go legit by being seen as doing things for a public
cause.'

This political sex appeal of Thackerey is the reason that Shiv Sena
shakhaas have sprung up in Haryana and Punjab and other such remote
corners where the party has no following. This has nothing to do with
the Sena or its ideology or any level other than the rank opportunism
of encashing the name and seal of Bal Thackerey.

Says Akolkar, "I went to a meeting of Shiv Sainiks in Haryana and
found them raising slogans like Jai Bhole and Bum Bhum Bole. When I
asked around they said
they figured that Shiv Sena meant lord Shiva's army. They did not
even know that it meant Shivaji's army."

(An abridged version of this report was published in the Sunday
Magazine section of The Telegraph, Calcutta, on January 24, 1999.)