The basic facts: Shiv Shena, a regional nativist party in India whose constituency is the left-behind-in-India's-economic-miracle population of the western state of Maharashta, of which Mumbai is the capital. Mumbai is also the capital of Bollywood. Sena's one-issue platform is Maharashtra for the Maharashatrians (self-rule and preference for Marathis in Maharashtra and exclusion of Muslims) and its program is intimidation, public and physical. It's led by the past-his-prime bully Bal Thackeray. The party took a beating from Congress in recent state elections much to Congress's relief. Other spin-off and complicatedly allied and squabbling chauvinist parties (BJP, RSS, MNS, like everything in India, these groupings are labyrinthine), are engaged in an internecine struggle in anticipation of the upcoming elections.
Sena’s latest target is the huge film star Shah Rukh Khan who publicly regretted in a recent television interview that Pakistani cricket players had been passed over by Indian team owners in the recent player’s auction, presumably because of 26/11. (SRK, himself a cricket team co-owner, also didn't bid for any Pakistanis, worth keeping in mind.)
For that, Shiv Sena threatened to shut down SRK's newest film, a tear-jerker called My Name is Khan, about anti-Muslim prejudice in post-911 America. (In the film SRK is not only the lead character whose name--like Shah Rukh's own--is Khan, but also has Asperger's and goes on a journey across America--sounding more and more like Forrest Gump--see next graph.)
Shah Rukh is the biggest Bollywood star around, a Muslim, and a Mumbaiker. If there was a Bollywood Forrest Gump, he would be the star. SRK has more star power than Tom Hanks and more sex appeal—-I can’t even think of a Hollywood equivalent right now. Besides his films, he’s constantly in small-drama television commercials and gives frequent aw shucks interviews. Overexposure apparently holds few risks for him. Over 40, with a wife and two kids that he frequently mentions as the people whose good opinion matters most to him, he has a large-boned, boyishly mischievous face, a good big open smile, and just a hint of mature cragginess. He’s smooth and smart with a gift for coming across as affably honest and humorously self-deprecating.
For example, though he’s lived in Mumbai for years he doesn’t know Marathi, the regional language. Linguistic purity is an evergreen issue with Sena, which recently tried and failed to get a bill passed requiring Mumbai taxi drivers, mostly immigrants, to know Marathi. SRK smiles fetchingly and says it’s a point of embarrassment to him that he only knows a few Marathi phrases (which he displays), and he’s terrible with languages, but his kids know it! A domesticated, urbane, safe householder kind of sexy.
Not like Sachin Tendulkar, India’s (and the world's) enduring cricket great who stands for a kind of purity and innocence and self-discipline. There’s a guy who stays away from the limelight off the field but lacks Tiger Wood's arrogant aloofness. Tendulkar was Sena's first target in this latest campaign which started several months ago. Most recent Sena target was Rahul Gandhi, heir apparent to the fabled Nehru dynasty, about a week before the SRK brouhaha erupted.
SRK, Rahul and Tendalkur are all too big for Sena to make a dent in, and most of the country has sided with them against Sena. But the controversies keep SS in the headlines and aapparently prevents supporters form noticing the party isn’t doing squat to help the fervent base of folks to whom it markets its tediously predictable but fiery brand of identity politics.
SS threatened to use its shock troops to block the release of My Name is Khan--with violence. The cops took no chances and pre-emptively arrested Sena protesters with, one would not be rash to assume, little regard for their civil rights. On this very blog in August, I mentioned a controversy in which My Name is Khan was embroiled in a dispute over whether SRK had been profiled and detained by U.S. customs on a trip there. It was a badly managed publicity stunt, and he backed down quickly when INS categorically denied the allegations.
As the Times article says, the Shiv Sena name goes back to the army of General Shivaji. Shivaji was the iconic resistance fighter against the Mughal empire as it began to fall apart in the 17th century. He particularly went up against Aurangzeb, the last of the great Mughal emperors, the legendary villain of the Mughal piece for Hindus. Aurangzeb was a strict Muslim who made a career of persecuting Hindus and razing temples, among them Vishwanath, the holiest site in Banaras for the entire last millennium, because, it is said, its citizens had given shelter to Shivaji. Vishvanath had been razed and rebuilt before, but Aurangzeb erected a mosque on the ruins, and the cosmopolitan and artistic glory that was Hindu Banaras never recovered its 17th century grandeur. Today’s Vishvanath, the Golden Temple built by the fabled Marathi Queen Ahalya Bai Holkar of Indore (this time in appreciation for the connection between Shivaji and Banaras), stands near by. It is smaller than the original temple but gorgeous, and the object of fervent devotion by locals and pilgrims.
Today’s cynical, bullying Sena does not practice the religious tolerance that the historical Shivaji was supposedly known for. Their major talent is generating chauvinist controversy, especially against Muslims. They are linguistic thought police who punish the famous for any reference to Bombay, Mumbai's colonial name, or for mild, obviously true statements to the effect that Mumbai belongs to every Indian as every place in India does.
The famous have been remarkably acqueiscent, rarely criticizing them publicly and groveling to their demands for apology for alleged insults to Maharashtrians. One of the more thoughtful views of all this is voiced in this long quote (I'm taking the liberty) from a Feb. 13 column by Dileep Padgaonkar, who writes thusly for the Times of India about what is specific to India, but an old, old story:
[SS has] been able to exploit to their advantage the anger, fear, frustration, resentment and pent-up aggression of middle-class and lower-middle class Maharashtrians who have failed to cope with the swift and sweeping changes in the polity and economy of the state.
Modernity has indeed evaded large sections of Maharashtrians especially as economic reforms opened up more opportunities hwich other communities, endowed with more pluck, drive and energy, were able to seize with greater felicity. They cornered jobs, started businesses, occupied urban spaces that were once the exclusive preserve of the locals and, not least, emerged as force to be reckoned with in politics. It is in this soil of insecurities that the Sena sowed its poisonous seeds.
In the outfit's reckoning, when people canot compete in the open market the only choice left to them iseither to sulk or to seek refuge in the politics of parochial identity. Such politics needs targets. Some 'other' has to be found who can be demonised, intimidated, terrorised and, should the need arise, also massacred. But this alone would not have been enough to succeed the way itdid. Another key element was needed to finess the strategy. The Thackerays systematically cultivated friends with money and muscle power: builders and corporate groups, film stars, the underworld and, not least, rival political parties. When the friends refused to fall in line, they resorted to their tactics of intimidation. The patriarch reckoned, correctly, that those engaged in making big money had the spine of an eel. And those busy playing seedy power games jettisoned their ideological claims if breaking bread with Sena furthered their ambitions.
This tells you why no harm has ever visited the Thackerays though they have flouted the law at will and mocked at the Constitution time and again. You cannot write them off unless the Indian state puts them on a tight leash. The political class ensures their electoral defeat and the government of the day addresses the real or contrived insecurities of Maharashtrians without the trappings of identity politics. This calls for courage. Rahul Gandhi and Shah Rukh Khan have demonstrated it.
Taking on Sachinn Tendulkar, the national pride of India, was a tactical goof (his sin was saying he fights for all India on the cricket field), but perhaps not a strategic one. Same for Rahul Gandhi, who’s positioning himself to run for prime minister one of these days as a populist sort of moderate. He called their bluff (his sin was saying ‘Bombay’ in some speech or other that Sena was apoplectic about, and voicing, as everyone attacked by Sena does, the civic unassailability of multicultural multi-religious India) by going deep into Maharashti voting territory on a local train and pumping the flesh with crowds who received him with obvious and enthusiastic affection.
Tendulkar has an almost innocent virtue going for him, Rahul the rock star legacy of his name. What SRK has is his giant stardom. As an idealized family man, I don't think he's been associated with any sex scandals, but there’s a little streak of something there. Today’s paper has a story that after SRK passed through the imaging security at Heathrow recently, a couple of young women, presumably security workers handling the images, accosted him with prints from the machine showing the details of his anatomy, THAT part, under his clothes. He breezily autographed the prints and was quoted as saying that only somebody “not well endowed” had anything to fear from the machine.
This is interesting not only because of the rooster strut that makes an astounding invasion of privacy a concern for wimps, but because it's nekkid pictures (which we are titillatingly encouraged to imagine) without it's being your fault, just what a domesticated older male sexpot requires. You can't imagine Tom Hanks doing that.
With each of these incidents, the respectable papers crow that Sena is shooting itself in the foot. But in Sena politics, even if you lose you win, because each controversy grabs headlines that feed the sense of aggrievedness its followers feel. After Sena threatened to shut down the film, there were a flurry of television interviews with the director and SRK—-WOULD THEY WITHDRAW THE FILM AND DISAPPOINT SRK FANS???--which was released after all (are you surprised?). The tv reviews of this two hour and 40 minute monster are gushing. Based on the trailer snippets, I’m betting on the one negative review I heard that SRK toggles back and forth between between hyper and cute, and the plot is mawkish. The release day was yesterday, Shivratri, a major religious holiday on which Shiva gets married to his consort Parvati. Schools and shops are closed, followed by a long--Valentine's (big here)-- weekend. A lot of folks will be going to the movies.
The story has been all over local and national Indian television all the time (CNN and BBC have run small stories but are mostly not very interested) in both editorial content and ads. Not only Sena spends too much time on the non-substantive. The English language channels (a large number) have been chewing the whole thing and spitting it out for several days and make no pretense of objectivity. When interviewing Sena leaders, they loudly denounce them to their faces for their political divisiveness. But they interview them. The audience for the English language channels is a comparatively educated one that views Sena as corrupt, opportunistic thugs (as do most Indians who are paying any attention). But Sena has little to lose from the liberal enmity of television commentators.
SRK has tweeted about it (as we know from its constant broadcast on tv) taking an I'm-hurt-but-I’m-only-being-reasonable-and-a-patriot tone and lamenting that Shiv Sena is dividing the country (it isn’t, actually), and asserting in a high minded tone that his stardom is transient, his integrity non-negotiable, and his Indian identity unassailable. Thus he refuses to apologize (and the media is happy to side with one of their own and keep the story going.)
A few Mumbai theaters scheduled to release My Name is Khan closed down for a day to take the public temperature. No surprise, the 21 Mumbai theaters that stayed open to screen it were packed, and there was only token protest and a bit of scuffling here and there.
A resounding win-win for My Name is Khan AND Shiv Sena.
Popular culture is a good place for such issues to be raised and followed through, and Bollywood frolics are an arena of civil society where the public feels it has a stake in the fight and can participate in the discussion. More so, unfortunately, than in the official political arena, since Lok Sabha (Parliament) is widely thought to be corrupt and useless. Several of these incidents in a row probably help consolidate and reinforce the conviction all Indians are equal citizens. Given the considerable anti-Muslim sentiment currently washing around, that's to the good. And why not have the biggest film star, the biggest sports star, and the biggest political star on the side of the angels? A long overdue development that will make it safer for others to travel in their wake.
yes. and yes. labyrinthine to be sure...
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