The best way to know the self is feeling oneself at the moments of reckoning. The feeling of being alone, just with your senses, may lead you to think more consciously. More and more of such moments may sensitize ‘you towards you’, towards others. We become regular with introspection and retrospection. We get ‘the’ gradual connect to the higher self we may name Spirituality or God or just a Humane Conscious. We tend to get a rhythm again in life. We need to learn the art of being lonely in crowd while being part of the crowd. A multitude of loneliness in mosaic of relations! One needs to feel it severally, with conscience, before making it a way of life. One needs to live several such lonely moments. One needs to live severallyalone.

Tuesday 4 December 2012

MOB MENTALITY, MILITANT POLITICS AND THACKERAYS (II)

Leaders across the globe, over the ages, have exploited this character of the mob to look for and follow a leader. Crusaders did it. Nazis and Fascists did it. Expansionist regimes did it. Radical elements are doing it.

What Thackeray did has been a practiced political practice. Many other Indian leaders are doing so. Many have been doing so in the past. Leaders, especially of Telugu, Tamil, Kannada, Malayali, Rajasthani, Punjabi Sikh, and Northeast tribal origins have been practicing regional politics of hatred for years but no one took it to the extremes that Bal Thackeray did.


He branded the outsiders in Maharashtra (though very much Indian) as the root-cause behind problems of Maharashtrian people. People in distress (and there were millions of them) and people not in distress but having strong notions of regional identity (a significant lot) who were not finding any other alternative to their problems (or mental blocks), found the escape-route in Thackeray’s words; in his doctrine of sectarian hatred.

How Thackeray exploited this initial mobilization on his call makes the history Bal Thackeray wrote in the Maharashtra politics. Being a good orator and hailing from a creative background, he diverted his strength into fomenting elements of sectarian politics in Maharashtra. He exploited the inherent fear of survival and livelihood. He, under his radical style of politics, promoted hostile elements who acted like mobs even resorting to violent means to extend Shiv Sena’s electoral footprint.

Shiv Sena and its offshoot, MNS, both have followed this line of politics in Maharashtra. Both these parties are synonymous with politics of vandalism if to put it in the perspective of ‘bandh’ and other disruptive activities of these two Thackeray outfits.

The memorial row is nothing but just yet another example of that brand of the militant politics promoted and nurtured by Bal Thackeray and Shiv Sena. And we need to be ready to witness more of it in the coming days.

To continue.. 

©/IPR: Santosh Chaubey - http://severallyalone.blogspot.com/