Thackeray, Bal

▪ 2006

 Published in May 2005, Bal Keshav Thackeray: A Photobiography commemorated the career of one of modern-day India's most controversial political leaders. Although Thackeray had never held an official post or run for elective office, the 78-year-old founder of the radical Hindu Shiv Sena (“Army of Shiva”) Party was generally regarded as the most powerful man in the western Indian state of Maharashtra. He was often referred to as the “godfather of Maharashtra” or, as his legion of devout followers called him, Hindu Hridaysamrat (“emperor of the Hindu heart”). His party advocated the end of India's constitutional status as a secular state and the adoption of Hinduism as the nation's official religion. Such was Thackeray's power that when the Shiv Sena gained political control of Maharashtra in the 1990s, he had Bombay renamed Mumbai after the goddess Mumbadevi—the name by which the city is known in the regional language of Marathi—and when Thackeray was satirized by novelist Salman Rushdie in The Moor's Last Sigh (1995), the book was immediately banned in Maharashtra. Over the years, Thackeray had been accused of inciting violent conflicts between Hindus and Muslims. The most notorious incident came in 1992–93, when nearly 1,000 people were killed during several weeks of anti-Muslim rioting in Mumbai. Despite having been known to speak admiringly of Adolf Hitler and even refer to himself as the “Hitler of India,” Thackeray insisted that he was “not against each and every” Muslim. “But those Muslims who reside in this country but do not go by the laws of the land,” he once declared in an interview, “I consider such people traitors.”

      Thackeray was born on Jan. 23, 1927, in Pune, Maharashtra state, British India. He began his career in the early 1950s as a cartoonist for the Free Press Journal in Mumbai. His cartoons also appeared in the Tokyo daily newspaper Asahi Shimbun and in the Sunday edition of the New York Times. In the 1960s he became increasingly involved in politics. He developed a strong regional following through his work for a weekly Marathi-language journal called Marmik, which he published with his brother and which polemicized against the influence of “outsiders” in Maharashtra. In 1966 he founded the Shiv Sena.

      Amid allegations that it employed illegal and sometimes violent tactics, Thackeray's party grew into a major political force in the state. In alliance with the Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP), the Shiv Sena won 138 out of 288 seats in the Maharashtra provincial assembly in 1995—enough to form a coalition government. In power, Thackeray continued to be a lightning rod for controversy. His supporters destroyed the 16th-century Babri mosque in Ayodhya, Uttar Pradesh, in 1992, and in 2000 he was arrested on charges of having incited the deadly 1992–93 Mumbai riots. Though Thackeray never denied the charges, they were dismissed after a magistrate ruled that the statute of limitations on the case had run out.

      The BJP–Shiv Sena alliance suffered a stunning setback in October 2004 when it lost six seats in the Maharashtra elections that many observers had expected the alliance to dominate, and speculation began to turn on who might eventually succeed the aging Shiv Sena leader. His nephew Raj Thackeray—who was responsible for compiling Bal Keshav Thackeray: A Photobiography—had been mentioned as a possibility, as had Thackeray's son Uddhav, who had already assumed the post of executive president of the Shiv Sena.

Sherman Hollar

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