“People in the industry are respectful and cautious of not being on their wrong side,” says Nihalani. “It has always been a good thing to be in the good books of Balasaheb,” says veteran journalist Rauf Ahmed. It all boils down to survival strategies and market compulsions. “They have been exerting coercion and Bollywood hasn’t had the spine to stand up to them. Everyone chooses to be reverential because of their tremendous nuisance value,” says an insider. Last decade the clout has been on a relative decline and has, in fact, got transferred to Raj Thackeray’s Maharashtra Navnirman Sena. So Karan Johar had to apologise to Raj for the use of Bombay instead of Mumbai in Wake Up Sid.
For Mahesh Bhatt he was an aggregate of disparate memories. So, on the one hand there was the Thackeray who “approved” Bhatt’s Saaransh despite their fears that the portrayal of the villain Gajanan Chitre might raise his heckles. It didn’t. On the other hand was the unfortunate incident when the Shiv Sena literally drove Pakistani cricketer Mohsin Khan back to his country when he sought to set base as an actor in Bollywood. Bhatt who was with Mohsin when he went to meet Thackeray remembers it as a "heartbreaking scene", "a painful memory". "His coterie attempted to browbeat, belittle Mohsin," he recollects.