Maximum City?

While traveling back home last week I filled myself up with three editorial pages worth of support/criticism for the recent activities of Raj Thackeray and his party Maharashtra Navnirman Sena (MNS), and other tidbits reporting happenings in Mumbai, Pune and Nashik - Some taxis were attacked and burnt down, native hooligans wreaking havoc in housing societies of north indian immigrants, shops ransacked and burnt, shopkeepers beaten up etc. On one page was an article that predicted Raj's 'imminent' arrest, on its back was another which scraped history for examples of how the Thackerays have been known to give the police a slip, another speculated that a great cataclysm would be unleashed if Raj Thackeray was arrested and on the same page there was another article which severely chided the incumbent Congress government on its spinelessness and inaction (tell us something new!). Surely when every possibility is so elaborately detailed, who can stop the paper from claiming to have accurately predicted the future?

When I reached home and put my baggage down, I suddenly remembered a time from the past when somebody had once gifted me an E. M. Forster omnibus. I had read it for a couple of days until some ineluctable reason might have forced me to put it down and place it in my collection. I unearthed it and read this one particular essay called What I believe once again. I had routinely read it then but this time I made sure I concentrated on every line. It cannot get myself to judge whether it is a remarkable essay by whatever standards but it was certainly ahead of its time. The very first paragraph goes as follows:

I do not believe in Belief. But this is an Age of Faith, and there are so many militant creeds that, in self-defence, one has to formulate a creed of one's own. Tolerance, good temper and sympathy are no longer enough in a world which is rent by religious and racial persecution, in a world where ignorance rules, and Science, who ought to have ruled, plays the subservient pimp. Tolerance, good temper and sympathy - they are what matter really, and if the human race is not to collapse they must come to the front before long. But for the moment they are not enough, their action is no stronger than a flower, battered be- neath a military jackboot. They want stiffening, even if the process coarsens them. Faith, to my mind, is a stiffening process, a sort of mental starch, which ought to be applied as sparingly as possible. I dislike the stuff. I do not believe in it, for its own sake, at all. Herein I probably differ from most people, who believe in Belief, and are only sorry they cannot swallow even more than they do. My law-givers are Erasmus and Montaigne, not Moses and St Paul. My temple stands not upon Mount Moriah but in that Elysian Field where even the immoral are admitted. My motto is : "Lord, I disbelieve - help thou my unbelief.

How far fetched do these words seem today. One might not even be so kind as to call Forster a romantic anymore. Tolerance, good temper and sympathy would not have enough intensity in order to step outside a moral science class room and only a raving lunatic would care to remember and enunciate them. There is a universal undertone in the language of Thackeray and Thackeray - that of intolerance and of incontinence. Incontinence to such an extent that either Sena is built on a principle that draws its spirit from a perpetual hunger for an enemy. There is nothing novel in Raj Thackeray's politics. As the Loksatta editor Kumar Ketkar put it succinctly:

Raj Thackeray is a product of the same Shiv Sena culture which actually started this 1966 onwards; later on, they were also responsible for the attacks on North Indians just four years ago. The questions of North Indians versus Maharashtrians, South Indians versus Maharashtrians, Hindus versus Muslims, these were not dogging the city for a long time. This was started after the birth of Shiv Sena

On the receiving end there is apathy, discontent, fear and plausible deniability. Apathy from those who don't have to bother about a bhelpuriwallah losing his only means of livelihood; discontent from the millions of middle class and poor Maharashtrians who are desperately in need of a way out; fear from the poor taxi driver and the daily wage laborer who are the victims of a man's selfish electoral motives channeled through an ethnocentric community against their own; and plausible deniability from the a government that never finds its spine in the right place in times of need. An then, there lies scathed a maximum city with minimum tolerance. The overcrowded megapolis of over twenty million people burns while its infrastructure crumbles in a time when the last thing that the city wants is "a rupture in its social fabric caused by visionless political interests". Of all the things that one reads, what inevitably stick to one's memory are the cliches. Cliches that hope and instruct to hope; cliches that throw up questions which are fated to be forgotten the moment they surface. I leave you with some that I happened to read:

Maybe, if Raj Thackeray is genuinely interested in the future of Mumbai, he needs to shift his gaze from ill-advised, high-profile agitations against chat pujas to more concrete proposals for urban renewal. Blaming Mumbai's problems on the economic migrant is to simply escape responsibility for failing to address the core issue: a serious crisis of governance. The train from Gorakhpur and Patna station to Mumbai central isn't going to stop in its tracks because a lumpen mob insists on it. What can be stopped is the political corruption that has destroyed Mumbai's body, and now threatens its soul. Why cant Mumbai's leaders agree, for example, to stop regularizing illegal slum colonies?

PS: My wing treat stands canceled today because of rumours that the bugger has been arrested.
PPS: Anyone for Valentine's day?