Visa for Nitish: India, Mumbai and politics of ethnic rivalry

Bihar Chief Minister Nitish Kumar’s declaration that he needs no visa to come to Mumbai and Raj Thackeray’s challenge thrown at him, to try and hold a Bihar diwas in Mumbai, are all the fall-out of the sub-nationalistic politics that is the mainstay of both factions of the Shiv Sena. The very fact that a chief minister has to make a visa statement about a visit to Mumbai is in itself a matter of concern. This so-called ethnic rivalry is a manufactured one. Raj Thackeray is trying to use the anti-Bihar card to gain a political constituency as different from the original Shiv Sena. “We never go anywhere to celebrate our 50th year, why do they need to come here,” is MNS leader Raj Thackeray’s question. [caption id=“attachment_275407” align=“alignleft” width=“380” caption=“Reuters”] [/caption] Thackeray is only trying to redo the sub-nationalist plank of his uncle Balashaheb Thackeray . The question is how much will it help him? Also should Nitish Kumar be worried about Biharis working in Mumbai when other states are trying to get more labour from Bihar to work in their fields? The anti-Bihari subnationalistic plank is utterly flawed and will on the long run boomerang on Raj and his party. The world is no longer what it was when the anti-madrasi anger was whipped up by the Shiv Sena. That too was manufactured and even today south Indian establishments and people from the south do well in Mumbai. There is no enmity, only cooperation. The unifying factor is prosperity, Maharashtra being a top state in terms of foreign investment not to count the fact that the richest people live there and it is the finance capital of the country. For the common man and for everyone in Mumbai what matters is money and its growth: typical of what happens in a place where the stock market dominates people’s lives. It is here that Raj Thackeray is trying to create a divide, just like his uncle also did with limited success. Before this in Mumbai during the states reorganisation , the problem was with Gujaratis who then formed 18 percent of the population. Though there were huge agitations, for Samyukta Maharashtra led by communists and also Bal Thackeray’s father Keshav Sitaram Thackeray, the states reorganisation finally worked out . It is after this that Bal Thackeray took upon the Marathi manoos as the defining politics of his party, something which his nephew has been trying to appropriate. In sub-nationalistic politics, to create hate objects is of primary importance. In the post independence days of struggle for a Samayukta Maharashtra, the hate object was the Gujarati. S A Dange who led the agitation for Samyuktha Maharashtra gave the agitation a class spin saying Marathis were reduced to working for the rich Gujarati. It is predominantly still the case, but the Gujarati is no longer a hate object in Mumbai. Bal Thackeray left the Gujaratis alone and made the South Indian the new hate object. He caricatured them, there were attacks on South Indians but things did not change drastically. South Indians survived and so did Mumbai. So he found the new hate object, the Muslim, during the eighties and nineties. Though for reasons other that Shiv Sena there were anti-Muslim riots in Mumbai, the Shiv Sena too played its part. It is then that the Shiv Sena split and Raj in the last five years has been focusing on creating a new hate object in the Bihari, in order to carve out a distinct political space. On the street this can also include the poor UPite so basically the entire country ( the rest of India so to say) has been off and on held up as hate objects to be thrown out of Mumbai: the Gujarati, the South Indian, the Muslim and now the Bihari and by extension the UPite also. How much of this whipped up anti-Bihari sentiment will catch on? Will this also peter out like the earlier hate campaigns? The ethnic or sub nationalistic strife that the Shiv Sena has sought to create has no basis in reality. The migrant Bihari by all accounts occupy the low-level jobs vacated by the Marathis who have gone a rung higher. A position similar to that of the migrant Bangladeshis who took up menial jobs. For the Bangladeshi , jumping across to India is no longer a great option for things are looking up in his own country thanks to micro-credit system taking off very well there. So now the itinerant migrant looking for mostly unskilled and semi-skilled is mostly the Bihari . Look at the irony. The anti-Gujarati agitation was because the Gujarati was rich and made the Marathi work for them, while now the Bihari is attacked even though the Bihari works dutifully for his Marathi boss. So the anti-migrant politics swings both ways. During the anti-South Indian agitation a book called Shiv Sena speaks: The Official Statement spewed this venom against South Indians: “ The dense cloud of intruders from outside has deprived the blossoming generation of Maharastra of its ancestral zeal and enthusiasm to fight out the battles of life with determination and chivalry.” Now the same vocabulary is being used against the Bihari. In all this the Marathi is presented as a pure class unpolluted by the outsider! The situation of the Bihari going to Mumbai or other states for jobs can be compared to Indians of all ethnicity going to the Gulf countries or the West for lower level jobs and this includes the Marathis as well. So it is a pattern of social and economic life that people migrate towards states or countries with higher economic growth. This in fact helps brings down wages in that country and is mostly spurs growth, as has happened in Mumbai. In Dubai for instance, 80 percent of the population are migrants, (with similar pattern in other gulf states) and the government there has no issues. The Dubai government has made no mention of sending back Marathi labour for instance! So Raj Thackeray’s war cry apart from being anti-national, is self defeating. The jobs which the Bihari occupies in Mumbai to a large extent are not the jobs the unemployed Marathi is looking for. He is aspirational and mostly educated. Given the chance he would prefer not to drive the taxi. To capitalise on the frustration of the unemployed is a Shiv Sena ploy but that may not work any more because opportunities are growing. All the more in Mumbai. Raj must also realise that other states are looking for cheap labour including Punjab where there are not enough hands for agriculture labour. Agriculture minister Sharad Pawar has asked for the national rural employment scheme to be suspended for the duration of the harvest season so that the Bihari labour will migrate. If the Bihari and the Oriya and UP migrant labour stays put in their home states (as is happening now thanks to the rural employment scheme), there will be a crisis in the agricultural sector. So the Bihari migrant worker is being welcomed elsewhere . They are loved for their hard work, uncomplaining nature, and for accepting wages much below the prescribed minimum wages. Only Raj Thackeray hates them. In any case societies which have welcomes people of all ethnicities (look at the West) have always thrived. Mumbai too is an example. So Nitish Kumar holds all the cards. Irrespective of whether he will hold the Bihar diwas celebration in Mumbai, (an absolute and constitutional right) Bihari migrant labour is what will spur growth in Mumbai and many other states in the near future as it has in the past. Who else will work in the huge constructions planned for Mumbai? Hopefully Mumbai will see through this narrow divisive politics of Raj Thackeray, like it did in all earlier occasions when hate politics and militant populism was sought to be forced upon them. The cosmopolitanism of Mumbai has always won.