Ketkar's article

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The Loksatta editor was attacked by the usual ShivSena weenies for the following article following the announcement of a Shivaji statue taller than Statu of Liberty yesterday

It appears that all the problems of Maharashtra have been solved. People are not only happy and contented but are looking forward to a magnificent future. There are no indebted farmers in the state now, no suicides, no deaths caused by malnutrition. All children go to school, there is no unemployment among the educated as there is tremendous growth of industry as well as the knowledge sector and everyone has been employed. There is no question of the unskilled or the uneducated being unemployed because there is no such person. All the rivers and small and big dams on them have irrigated most of the land, including the drought-prone rainshadow belts. Obviously, there is no food shortage and, in fact, Maharashtra is surplus in food. There is no load shedding and not only is Nariman Point-Colaba shining but the whole state is illuminated. Dr Abhay Bang had espoused the cause of Arogya-Swarajya. That cause has already been achieved and the average lifespan in the state is 100 years.
This great success could not have been achieved without the farsighted leadership, commitment, conviction and vision of the state government. The credit for this goes to Chief Minister Vilasrao Deshmukh and Deputy Chief Minister R.R. Patil. That is why the whole state is applauding and saluting their leadership. Indeed, that is why the people of the state are immensely delighted that the duo that rules the state has taken up the grand project of erecting a magnificent statue of Chhatrapati Shivaji Maharaj, right in the Arabian Sea, across Nariman Point, about one kilometre away. The government has decided that the statue will be taller and more grand than the Statue of Liberty in New York Harbour.
The very idea of such a statue, mooted by the Congress-NCP four years ago, was welcomed by the whole Marathi people. Such a monument was the necessity of the hour, to announce to the world that Maharashtra is a state of warriors and patriots and the symbol of that spirit is Shivaji Maharaj. That is why Victoria Terminus was renamed as Chhatrapati Shivaji Terminus (CST). Instantly after the renaming, trains began to run on time, crowds could be managed, corruption disappeared, the local train journey became comfortable, like in the European suburban railway, and there were no accidents. Could this have happened without the glory of the name of Shivaji Maharaj that adorns the station now? Then the state and the people took the initiative to rename the domestic as well as international airport of Mumbai. Both are now renamed as Chhatrapati Shivaji Maharaj airport terminal. Like a magic wand, the airports became efficient, employees began to behave courteously, flights were punctual, take-offs and landings perfect, no more hovering in the sky looking for landing spots. Who would have believed this if it had not actually been experienced by the people? Was it possible without the miracle called Shivaji Maharaj?
Naturally, the government felt that having solved all the problems of the people, what remains to be done is to tell the whole world of the greatness of Shivaji. The government has decided to have more than one acre of land inside the sea acquired and filled so as to build the monument, which will attract all global tourists. All facilities will be given to the tourists. There will be a museum near the statue, artifacts of the 17th century, Shivaji’s personal effects, swords and shields and attire. There will also be directives issued by the Maharaj to his administrators on how to govern and make the people happy. Along with the museum, there will be shopping malls, selling T-shirts with Shivaji’s painting. There will be Shivaji key chains, Shivaji gift items, including cutlery.
Of course, there will be no beer bars. So obviously, there will be no dance bars, which the Deputy Chief Minister R.R. Patil detests so much. There will be perhaps wine, which according to the leader of NCP, Sharad Pawar, is not alcohol. So wine will be sold and served along with Coke and Pepsi and other soft drinks. There will be swadeshi McDonald’s as well as vintage Marathi vada-pau, which has been renamed by Uddhav Thackeray as ‘Shiv Vada-Pau’. There will also be ‘pani puri’ sold by the MNS activists of Raj Thackeray. No ‘bhaiyyas’ will be allowed to do business, only locals will be engaged.
The monument will inspire not only the people of the state but all those who visit Mumbai. The globe-trotters will go back to their respective countries with the message of Shivaji Maharaj, and the glory of the state called Maharashtra, where every person is happy and contented. It is the most ideal place on earth and anybody looking for a role model should look at the creation of Vilasrao Deshmukh-R.R. Patil. Did anyone else think of and visualise such a fantastic idea?
The monument would be ready soon. In the year 2010, on May 1, the state will be celebrating its golden jubilee. Could there have been a greater tribute to the image, symbol and glory of Shivaji Maharaj than such a statue, standing in the middle of the sea, warning all the terrorists to keep off Mumbai, and to keep away from India because the people of Maharashtra protect and promote the idea of a Great India?
The piece originally appeared in Marathi. It has been translated into English by the writer

Very good article on understanding Thackrey-Bachchan conflict in a socilological context

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A city has always been a site for competing metaphors. Novelists and journalists in their writings have captured this drama. Gunter Grass and Dominic Lapierre did it for Calcutta, one pronouncing it a crematorium of death and the other labelling it a ‘City of Joy.’ In a similar manner, Mumbai too has become a pretext for competing claims and narratives. Only this time, the text is not a novel by Suketu Mehta or Salman Rushdie, it is a populist drama enacted in the open, with the media as storytellers. The impetus is Raj Thackeray’s attack on Amitabh Bachchan. In this essay, one is not interested in them as individuals. One is encountering them as persona, ritual enactments of competing visions of the city.
The first model embodies an idea of the homogenous city, where like reproduces like, as in a dull utopia. To the homogeneity, one adds a territoriality where the city surrounds itself with a cordon sanitaire. It seeks a ghettoisation of the populace, ensuring that nothing new, nothing different can enter. It is a populist ritual of pollution control where the stranger as the migrant, the refugee, or the poor is banned. It is a sanitisation of the rhetoric of nativism, security and populism. It is dystopian vision presented as a guarantee of safety as dullness.
Raj Thackeray is an embodiment of this domain. The only difference between his uncle and him is that Bal Thackeray appears to believe in it while Raj sees it as a legacy, a political real estate he must expand and exploit. This is more instrumental, more desperate, more cynical, more fascist. In Bollywood terms, it is a script for a B-grade movie with C-grade stars. The political trailer would be more worthwhile than the movie itself, moving between the redundancy of boredom and violence.
Counterposing this at the popular, populist, folk and mass media levels is the vision of Amitabh Bachchan. I am not interested in Bachchan and his personal forays into politics. I am interested in the Bachchan of folklore, the man and his sense of the city. The image of Bachchan evokes the alternative politics of the city as plural, diverse, violent, mobile, hardheaded, hardhearted, sentimental and creative.
Mumbai inspires and invites the migrant and the stranger but no one will deny it is a hard city. But as Bachchan and others show repeatedly, it is not the hardness of granite or of the heart, it is a demand for toughness, for survival, an initiation rite that demands that you survive the city. It is not the hardness of closure, denial, and refusal. It is a generous city which thinks dogs in the manger are not genuinely city-bred.
Raj Thackeray presents the vision of the nukkad strongman in a designer kurta offering safety in return for a policing contract. It is a Hobbesian world which offers city life as ‘solitary, poor, nasty, short and brutish’ if one does not accept their vision. It is a ghettoised imagination. The sadness is that the Shiv Sena has the same traumatic emptiness of McCarthyism. Put it on television, expose it on media as a documentary, and it seems hollow. No bit actor is less convincing that Raj Thackeray. In fact, some of his followers carry on as if they could enact his part better.
Bollywood shows that this is a notion of the city in corsets. Bollywood needs the genetics of difference. In fact, in many ways its original, the Bombay Talkies, embodied Hindu-Muslim unity before and after Partition. Bollywood is a salute to every outsider, migrant, stranger who seeks to come home to the city. It is a parallel vision that the Shiv Sena finds threatening and which it tries to control.
Happily myths don’t succumb as easily to the petty politician. Shiv Sena is in Mumbai but is hardly representative of it. Bollywood is in Mumbai but celebrates both the city and India. It is local, national, global and cosmopolitan. The battle at the level of myth is uneven even if the Sena digs hard into local legend and folklore.
Thackeray and Bachchan have become inadvertently competing models of the city. The first is ghettoised, farcical, threatening, and the second is generous, thoughtful, realistic and yet celebratory about the possibilities of the city. Thackeray threatens democracy through populism; the other expands democracy as script and drama even if it is a bumbling one.
One must be grateful it is an open drama being consumed by millions across the country. This binary model of the city raises a futuristic either/or. It raises the question of how a society responds to scarcity or relative deprivation. It is not the poor who create this idiot politics but a middle class seeing its part of the cake shrink. Thackeray’s is a politics of jealousy, envy playing to the politics of scarcity. It plays the idea of the sons of the soil to show it has no sense of the soil called the city. It is the idiom of security battling the metaphors of sustainability.
Democracy is a world of hard choices, even cruel ones. It also allows bit players a chance at the big time. The beauty is democracy does not eliminate either set of players. It puts them in a public arena asking the spectator to make choices. Democracy realises a city of spectators is also a city of critics and actors. Mumbai has set the melodrama and is asking India to decide. Raj Thackeray or Amitabh Bachchan as ‘Bombay meri jaan’?