Rule Of The Mob?

Like tropical storms, crises can blow up out of nowhere. That is what happened in India last week. Let not its suddenness and the fact that it centres on the doings of one man as against a state government, an insurgent group or an unfriendly nation lead us to minimise its seriousness. Frightening as their potential for violence may be, the challenges to the Indian state in Kashmir, Assam and the Northeast are not new. The one that threatens the Indian state today raises another issue altogether. What shall India be ruled by - the law or the mob? It has mushroomed out of nowhere because of the imminent prosecution of Bal Thackeray for his inflammatory writings in the Shiv Sena organ Saamna in January 1993. After six years of procrastination, the Maharashtra government finally approved his prosecution for "inflammatory articulation that sought to break communal harmony in the metropolis and elsewhere". Thackeray and the Shiv Sena have decided to challenge the prosecution not in a court of law but on the streets of Mumbai. For good measure, the Shiv Sena has asked the Centre to direct the Maharashtra government not to arrest Thackeray under the virtually unused Article 355 of the Constitution which lays down that "it is the duty of the Union government to protect states against 'internal disturbance'". If the state government refuses to heed the directive, Atal Behari Vajpayee will have the grounds to dismiss it. To administer an extra dose of sniffing salts to the aging Vajpayee, the three Shiv Sena ministers at the Centre have resigned.

In ordinary circumstances, I would have urged the Vajpayee government to soft-pedal the issue. But there is an especially sinister quality to the challenge Thackeray has posed to the Centre and the rule of law which rules out any compromise. There was no need for him to egg the Sena into resorting to threats and blackmail. The Maharashtra government's decision to prosecute Thackeray under Section 153 (a) of the Indian Penal Code may well not stand in court. This is because Section 468 of the Criminal Procedure Code (CrPC) imposes a limit on the time that can elapse before the police registers a case that merits imprisonment (in this case, of up to three years). Thus, to prosecute Thackeray the Maharashtra government has to ask the high court to condone the delay under yet another clause of the CrPC. It is by no means certain that it will do so, for the only excuse for inaction the present government can furnish - that there was a Shiv Sena government in power between 1995 and 1999 - is invalidated by the fact that there was a Congress government in power between 1993 and 1995. Thus, a determined defence of Thackeray's rights in court would have virtually ensured that the maximum he received would have been a fine.

But Thackeray isn't prepared to submit himself to the rule of law. So he's ready to sacrifice a city, a nation and a political system to satisfy his ego. Had his been a lone case of a deranged ego in a fundamentally healthy polity, it still may have been worth sparing Mumbai the spectre of violence that threatens it now. But the polity isn't healthy. Decades of ever-strengthening links between criminals and politicians has criminalised Indian democracy to the point where there is already a class that is by and large above the law.

The Shiv Sena is itself a quintessential example of the criminalisation of Indian politics. It began in the '60s as a Maharashtrian chauvinist party determined to clean the state's cities of south Indians who had grabbed all the prize service sector jobs. Following a very violent but largely ineffective campaign, it switched its attention abruptly to baiting Maharashtra's Muslims in 1969 and formed its alliance with the Jana Sangh (now BJP). This evil alliance gave birth to the Bhiwandi riots of May 1970 that left more than 300 dead, mostly Muslim weavers and their families. There followed a long incubation during which the Sena paid its way by running a protection racket in the Mumbai slums. In the process, it built up a fearsome criminal cadre. By Thackeray's own admission, nearly every important criminal don of the '90s in Mumbai was or is a graduate of the Shiv Sena school of crime.

Thackeray stands at the very peak of this criminal syndicate. But what's worse, he revels in staying there and disdaining the responsibilities that go with power. When the Sena and BJP won the 1995 elections, he spurned office and allowed Manohar Joshi to run the government. From his ideological pinnacle he then proceeded to terrorise his own government and make Joshi's life miserable. When Enron tried to mend its fences with the state government, it discovered that the magic key lay not in the Sacchivalaya but Shivaji Park. Once it had eaten sufficient crow before Thackeray, all obstacles to its project vanished.

This is the man who has needlessly challenged the entire Indian legal and democratic system. If Vajpayee backs down and puts pressure on Maharashtra to abandon the case the police has constructed against Thackeray, he may as well hold up a sign to advertise that India is no longer under the rule of law. Before he does this, let him pause and consider the consequences: if the Congress presses ahead and the Sena torches Mumbai, the BJP, as its partner, will be finished in the city and possibly in all of Maharashtra. Worse, it will lose the confidence and support of not only Muslims but also Christians and other minorities. The Congress will bless it for the bonanza. Worst, every rabble-rouser who has 'crowd-pulling power' will follow Thackeray's example.

The right course would be to adopt a hands-off policy towards the Maharashtra government, give it whatever paramilitary and other help it needs to maintain calm and let the law take its own course in the Thackeray case.