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COPYRIGHT 2003 All rights reserved. Reproduced by permission of The Condé Nast Publications Inc.
On the morning of his son Uddhav's forty-second birthday, Bal Thackeray retreated upstairs to his private living room, in order to avoid the crowds. From his window, he could see hundreds of his supporters outside in the street, standing in long lines waiting to get in--they had come from all over Bombay to his house, in a suburb near the airport, to pay their respects. His street was always guarded, but that day there were more policemen than usual. Earlier that morning, the servants had strewn petals over the floors of the downstairs rooms and hung floral garlands on the walls. Now dozens of people were crowded into the front hallway, gossiping and sweating and carrying unwieldy plastic-wrapped flower arrangements as gifts, as though there weren't already enough flowers in the house. In the reception room, Uddhav was standing, a little hunched over in his mild way, as well-wishers filed past him, touching their foreheads to his hands or kneeling to kiss his feet.
For more than thirty years now, Thackeray has been the godfather of Bombay--or Mumbai, as he had the city renamed several years ago--and for anyone wishing to secure his favor the birthday of one of his family members is an extremely big event. As the head of Shiv Sena, the party he founded in 1966, he has a legion of thugs at his disposal, and he uses them to exert control over virtually every institution in the city. He never runs for office--he leaves that risky, soiling task to underlings. Instead, he holds court at home, in his sunglasses and necklaces and saffron pajamas, his hair dyed black and slicked into a modified Elvis pompadour. Bollywood movie stars come to pay him homage. Thackeray, who is seventy-six, is part tyrant and part buffoon, and he calibrates the combination with great skill. When a well-known film star praised a film about lesbian housewives that he found distasteful, a group of his men wearing nothing but underpants surrounded the actor's house. His reputation for vengeance is such that, when he was lampooned, as a character called Raman (Mainduck) Fielding, by Salman Rushdie in "The Moor's Last Sigh,"he didn't need to say a word: Mumbai bookstores didn't stock the book for fear of reprisals, and even the central government banned it shortly afterward.
Thackeray is popular because he is funny and legendarily frank. He says that democracy has ruined India; he admires Hitler, and has spoken of him as "an artist who wanted Germany to be free from corruption."When, in late April, the Indian Prime Minister, A. B. Vajpayee, proposed normalizing relations with Pakistan, Thackeray was horrified. "Pakistan is not worthy of friendship,"he declared while entertaining the press at his house, and he observed that going soft on Pakistan was bound to hurt the government in elections. After all, pandering to Pakistanis might look good to foreign leaders and diplomats, but it had been his experience that nothing was quite so effective as an old-fashioned anti-Muslim rampage for getting out the vote at home. In 1993, Thackeray was widely blamed for inciting anti-Muslim riots in which a thousand people died in less than a week; in the next elections, his party's support almost doubled.
As a fomenter of violence for political gain, Thackeray was a pioneer. Now other politicians are catching up with him. Just over a year ago, the chief minister of the state of Gujarat, Narendra Modi, was reported to have actively encouraged several days of spectacularly gruesome Hindu-Muslim riots in the hope that the ethnic hostility would boost his popularity. It did. Modi belongs to the Bharatiya Janata Party, or B.J.P.--the radical Hindu nationalist party that now rules India--and anti-Muslim sentiment nearly always redounds to the B.J.P.'s benefit. Last December, Modi's party was reelected in Gujarat with a majority of nearly seventy per cent. Thackeray, a B.J.P....
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