'Us' Vs 'Them'

Calcutta erupted, Bengal fumed, Bengalis everywhere retired hurt when Dada was excluded from Team India. We called it names, mostly regional chauvinism. Sourav Ganguly is not theonly one that inspires chauvinism. Teammate Sachin does too, obviously in home state Maharashtra. The display is less disruptive, only because Tendulkar was not dropped from a successful team. But the bad news is that chauvinism in Maharashtra – mianly Mumbai – is not limited to Sachin Tendulkar; it leaves an imprint in other less sporty slices of life too, some innocuous and others not so.

If you had read a best-selling Marathi newspaper when Tendulkar hit the landmark 35th century, chauvinism was on full display. Tendulkar’s 35th Test century was a fitting cause to goberserk in newsrooms. National front-page headlines, prime time saturation coverage. Tendulkar does not need an introduction, nor does he beg a qualification. He is India’s national icon in a far more substantive sense than say a film actor. His records – and failures – are on the fingertips of most cricket aficionados. He evokes passion miles away from his Mumbai home and Shivaji Park hunting ground. He takes pride in being Indian, no particular smugness in being a Maharashtrian though he has never negated his cultural-linguistic roots. It rankled, therefore, when Marathi newspapers screamed in their headlines "Aapla Sachin" (Our Sachin).

It would be prudent to dismiss this either as the over-zealousness of a Maharashtrian at the news desk or as misplaced sense of propriety over someone or something successful. A bit like us taking faux pride in someone of Indian origin making it to the inner political circles in the United States or Great Britain, completely unmindful of the fact that that individual’s "Indianness" is perhaps an accident, nothing more. But the "Our Sachin" tendency cannot be easily dismissed, not in the current mood and framework that prevails in a city that used to be India’s most cosmopolitan urban example many years ago. Mumbai turned into a ghetto-like settlement after the 92-93 post-Babri communal riots but the gentrification now deserves serious attention, its xenophobia smacks of everything un-cosmopolitan. 

Call me over-sensitive or over-critical, but given the landscape of anti-South Indian, anti-Sikh, anti-Bihari, anti-Uttar Bharatiya, anti-whoevernext, "Our Sachin" in Mumbai is not an aberration. No, it wasn’t the Shiv Sena’s rabidly pro-Hindutva and pro-Marathi daily Saamna that was the culprit. This was the state’s top-billed and perfectly respectable daily from a multi-crore, multi-media publishing group. There’s a sub-text about how the group panders to different audiences or readers in its different avatars, but that is another issue. The chauvinism isn’t limited to this daily, nor to Sachin Tendulkar. And, ever so subtly, chauvinism turns into xenophobia.

A reality show on national television is similarly gob smacked by Marathi media for its "unfairness to Maharashtrian participants". You wonder what the Maharashtrian quotient in Star One’s seasonal favourite "Nach Baliye" is. Most couples who danced – rather, earned neat lakhs to be trained to dance – are well-known faces on Hindi entertainment soaps, well-settled in Mumbai and have professed their love for the city on various appropriate occasions. But, of course, the veteran pair of yesteryear film actor Sachin and television actor Supriya are Maharashtrians by birth. Accidentally. They are Marathi stars merely because both have a considerable oeuvre of work in Marathi cinema and theatre. You guessed it. In a national contest, xenophobic Mumbaikars singled them out for their geographical identities. 

It did not matter that the pair was the top favourite even when the show first rolled three months back, or that they practiced hard to compete with other couples much younger than themselves, or even that Sachin-Supriya never wore their Maharashtrian-ness on their sleeves at any time on the show. Yes, they danced to a raunchy and popular Marathi number in an episode but then other couples too chose an ethnic number they were comfortable with. In fact, neither of them even use their give-away second name Pilgaonkar in their day-to-day work. 

Trust us to make heavy work of their Maharashtrian-ness. How? Under the wrong assumption that theSMS votes in their favour were blocked by the channel! Xenophobia is surely nightmarish. One newspaper raged on that many Maharashtrians were peeved about theirSMS votes were not registering and were being met with a return SMS saying that the voting lines had been closed. Just how many Maharashtrians this newsperson spoke to and how many of them were peeved were conveniently not mentioned. But there was righteous indignation about the possible short-changing of a Maharashtrian couple at the national level. Of course, the last line mentioned a channel spokesperson saying that the voting period as announced was limited to a few hours, and that it will open again for the finalsnext Thursday. The daily exhorted all Maharashtrians to keep that in mind. Sachin-Supriya won but they might win anyways because they were the better dancers or because viewers – non-Maharashtrians too – applauded their courage and effort.

The last time an Indian Idol was to be picked between Mumbai-boy Abhijit Sawant and Ranchi-based Amit Sana, posters and banners went up all over Mumbai’s Maharashtrian strongholds urging people to vote for "Our Abhijit". He won. The jury is still out on what fetched him the title – his singing prowess or the spate ofSMS votes. The current edition of "Indian Idol" too has generated similar sentiments. There’s already talk of the second"Indian Idol" being a Maharashtrian too, following in the footsteps of great singers like Lata Mangeshkar and so on. There are stories in the Marathi media and discussion shows that seven of nine finalists are Maharashtrians, or somesuch proportionate feel-good figure. Does it mean that Maharashtrians make good singers? If an accident of birth was enough to be endowed with talent, there would be nearly ten crore Maharashtrians singing their way to stardom by now. Does it suggest a complex or a sense of misplaced pride? Yes, it does because these are not isolated examples; there’s more.

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If the complex remained confined to such realms as television shows andSMS votes, it might have been easily glossed over until the next manifestation of chauvinistic or xenophobic assertion. It doesn’t. The Maharashtrian versus non-Maharashtrian battle in Mumbai manifests itself in a myriad ways, many of them unbecoming of an urban centre aspiring to become the financial hub of this part of the world, many of them assuming dangerous and violent overtones. And, the neighbourhood politician is waiting in the wings to get on to the appropriate side, turn it to his advantage and get cheap mileage.

Earlier this month, two students came to blows in the Grant Medical College hostel in Mumbai. Nothing new in a hostel setting where everything from food and water to peaceful study space are in perennial short supply. The fight turned physical. It would have remained a hostel-level fight but for the geographical identities, or assumed identities, of the two young men. It was termed a battle between a Bihari and Maharashtrian. The Shiv Sena, of course, jumped into the game relishing the prospect of a good press to tide over its fratricidal wars. Raj Thackeray, ever eager to prove the party’s 40-year-old sons-of-soil theory, declared war on the Biharis and all Uttar Bharatiyas on the campus, assuaging the Maharashtrian students that their "interests would be protected" and threatening the non-Maharashtrians that they had better behave with care, or else. In Sena parlance, "or else" means crowbars, iron rods and soda bottles. 

From there, the issue simply galloped into a political tu tu main main between political allies, it turned into yet another hate-Bihari campaign on the streets of Mumbai, it threatened to degenerate into a nationally significant issue that two chief ministers had to talk about. BJP’s Pramod Mahajan declared that "outsiders whether Biharis or Afriki must behave with dignity and not resort to dadagiri" which enraged his pal and Bihar chief minister Nitish Kumar enough to retort: "Biharis are productive wherever they go, they contribute, that’s why they are there". Caught on the wrong foot, Mahajan blamed the media for misquoting him. But the debate, rather the argument, had touched raw nerves by then, mahila brigades of the saffron variety held placard demonstrations at the college gates, students went on signature drives, the Saamna gave the unfolding drama top billing, rest of the media followed suit. 

Made-to-order incident, non-confusing and well demarcated sides, feeding on xenophobic tendencies. As for the Sena, when there’s no issue to rally cadres around, turn to the good old sons-of-soil philosophy; it fits into any issue in Mumbai these days. It forgot its own position on the issue. Less than 18 months back, the state government wanted to formulate an all-party response to the Supreme Court order on reservation of professional college seats, so that more Maharashtrians got into Mumbai colleges and so on. It invited the Sena and BJP; the Sena refused to play along. The Congress too must plead guilty to the same charge of drawing non-existent boundaries, except that their exhibitionism is relatively low-key. 

This college fight could still be dismissed as a passing cloud. The furore over the recent delimitation of electoral constituencies cannot be similarly overlooked. The delimitation made sense only because constituencies with larger populations would get a better representation in the state assembly and Parliament. On the flipside it meant that older areas, many of them heavily populated by Maharashtrians, would be combined to have one representative instead of the two they can now elect. The sheer demographics of Mumbai demanded delimitation, it was hardly a sentimental decision to favour one or the other ethnic group. 

To be sure, Mumbai’s suburbs are home to a mixed population with many far suburbs housing entire colonies of Uttar Bharatiyas, Biharis, Telugu and Kannada-speaking people who have migrated for jobs. A back-of-the-envelope calculation shows that, in the October 2004 assembly election, Uttar Bharatiya and Bihari voters held the key in as many as 17 of the 34 assembly constituencies in the city. They were put off by the Sena’s continued xenophobic statements, and preferred to throw their lot with the Congress-Nationalist Congress Party. Uddhav Thackeray had sensed which way the wind was blowing and had embarked on his all-inclusive "Mee Mumbaikar" campaign two years ago but had to relent to his cousin Raj. Raj’s supporters beat up Bihari candidates at a railway exam to show that the Sena can never be inclusive in its ideology. 

Mumbai is now home to more non-Maharashtrians; the Maharashtrian population is just about 37 per cent. Yet, Mumbai for Maharashtrians is a favourite theme in drawing rooms and front page discussions. This isn’t all about numbers either. There are no citadels of Maharashtrian careers any longer, if we exempt state government and civic corporation jobs. Even in these bastions, most work which is out-sourced goes to non-Maharashtrian contractors simply they are the guys in business, who in turn employ non-Maharashtrians simply because they are willing to do back-breaking work for longer hours. Jobs don’t discriminate between religions and communities, people do. And, people give jobs to those who are willing to work. If a profession assumes community identity, it must do so with good reason. The essential services sector in Mumbai is testimony to this. 

Almost all essential services – milk production and supply, dairy products, vegetable retail, fruit retail, taxis and auto rickshaw service to list a few – are now dominated by Bihari-Uttar Bharatiyas. If they, as a community or geographical identity, decide to hold ‘Maharashtrian’ Mumbai to ransom, they could do so with great ease. This is the unorganised trade sector that we are talking about where entry is not restricted in the strictest sense. It’s not all that different in the organized sector. The telephonewallas in the MTNL are mostly non-Maharashtrians. The top cadre of the Mumbai police has been served for over a decade now by non-Maharashtrians. Senior most IAS officers, including the state chief secretary, have been non-Maharashtrians. The suburban railway trains, the lifeline of the city, are mostly run by north Indians but this recruitment does not necessarily happen in Mumbai. Even when it does, the number of Bihari applicants far out-numbers that of Maharashtrian applicants. What possibly can the Railway authorities do about that? On what basis then does Raj Thackeray exhort his supporters to beat up the ‘others’? 

Who, indeed, is the ‘other’? What is this schism between us and them? By that token, Mumbai belongs only to the native Koli community who fished and lived along its seven islands. Everyone else is a migrant. It’s no accident that Marathi-medium schools run by the civic corporation are shutting down fast while English medium schools are being opened. It’s also no accident that cinema theatres that showed Marathi films exclusively, even those in the Maharashtrian-dominated areas, have all shut shop with the last of them becoming history this year. It’s not surely an accident that Marathi literature, poetry and theatre have only seen a slump in the last few decades. 

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It is perhaps this drought, this decline, which sparks off and continues to fan tendencies that manifest as "Our Sachin" and "Our Mumbai". To claim those successful as one’s own, to bask in reflected glory is an understandable human weakness. To reduce every issue, every achievement, every sport, every television show to a xenophobic deconstruct is a sign of fear and inferiority complex. Maharashtrians, whether they live in Mumbai or elsewhere, need never suffer from such a complex. There’s enough wealth of words, ideas and philosophies in their collective treasure chests, personalities they can be justifiably proud of, traditions that they can wear as badges of honour, contributions to the national conscience they can rightly claim. None of this is Maharashtrian alone, it’s Indian. 

When Maharashtrians scream "Our Sachin", it’s no different from Calcuttansthreatening to boycott or disrupt Eden Gardens matches if Sourav Ganguly is not part of Team India. We condemned it then, we must recognize and address this too. Whichever way you look at it, it’s abominable behaviour, unflattering attitude. 

Wags say the fault lies in the very nomenclature. ‘Maha’rashtra literally means larger than or superior to therashtra, the nation. How can that ever come to be? Wake up, it’s time to look beyond our limited and self-imposed boundaries.