Pasted below is the article that got printed in the Sunday TOI. Its about how a hooligan has shamelessly addressed leaders, dignified citizens, rivals, etc. I am amazed by the 'cheapest standard of language' and the thought process this man uses to cite examples. Sadly, Mr. Thackeray, who has no job but to stand and deliver the rioting orders in Mumbai (no i m not joking...he targeted South Indians in 1966, Muslims in 1992, and now North Indians in 2008), has once again raised the question of Impotent Law n Order situation in the state. Guys, please please please read and comment over this issue.
BAD LANGUAGE
A Brief History of Thackeray’s Rants
Once again, Bal Thackeray has used Shiv Sena mouthpiece, Saamna, to abuse. This time the Biharis. Jyoti Punwani remembers other instances
You need a mouthwash after reading Bal Thackeray’s writings. Look at how Bihari MPs are frothing at the mouth after just one salvo. (Thackeray had said in Saamna that Biharis are a burden to the country). In the past, Muslims, Communists (invariably referred to as ‘red monkeys’), his female political detractors, Marathi editors, and political rivals, have been at the receiving end of his polemics that is affectionately called by gushing reporters, ‘Thackeri bhasha’.
Once Thackeray wrote in his editorial, “If anyone were to sneeze against Thackeray (the reference is to himself), what else would these flies do except sit on the snot? When that ram (the animal and not the god) and that bundle of rags meet, the hybrid that is produced is....”
The “bundle of rags” was a reference to Professor Pushpa Bhave, “ram” was former deputy chief minister of Maharashtra Chhagan Bhujbal, and “flies”, of course, referred to both. Bhave and Bhujbal were the most visible supporters of Shiela Kini, the Dadar housewife who had implicated Raj Thackeray in the death of her husband, Ramesh Kini, a tenant who refused to vacate his flat in 1996.
When a CBI inquiry was ordered into the affair, Thackeray said in a front page interview to Saamna, “The matter has become cold now. It’s like when you pee, bubbles rise up to the surface in the pot; those bubbles have died down now. Whether they pee again or not is a question to be looked at later.”
Bhave has also been described by him as “that stale naankatai (biscuit)”. Thackeray usually reserves his most vulgar abuses for women. In one edit, he described Mrinal Gore and Ahilya Rangnekar, Mumbai's oldest Leftist leaders, as women whose menstrual rags had long dried in the sun. Reportedly, his crude imitation of Sonia Gandhi at election rallies in 1999, and his repeated references to her honeymooning with Rajiv Gandhi when the country was being attacked by Pakistan in 1971, put off voters and was seen as one of the factors that prevented his return as the self-proclaimed “remote control” of Maharashtra.
Vying with women as targets are of course Muslims, whom he routinely describes as fanatics, traitors, and Pakistani agents who set up mini-Pakistans wherever they go. In their lanes, he has said, streams of poison and treason flow, and that their masjids are storehouses for illegal arms. Sometimes he qualifies that he is not opposed to all Muslims, only the antinational ones. But when he constantly prefaces, or even replaces, the word ‘Muslim’ with traitor, one can be forgiven for equating the two.
Way back in 1989, this reporter was a witness to Thackeray addressing the well-heeled members of the Rotary Club at the Taj Mahal Hotel. Devoting most of his 45-minute speech to “those people” (Muslims), he described them as “green serpents”. Amid titters from the audience, he described Muslim hardliner Syed Shahabuddin a “green rat” and a “bandicoot who should be put into the dustbin.” And also, a “poker” (Shahabuddin had called him a “joker”) because he poked his nose into other people’s affairs. Thackeray has also abused Congress politicians as dogs. He said that they attended iftaar parties wearing fez caps, stood in Mumbai’s Muslim dominated Bhendi Bazaar or in the Parliament wearing green burqas or waving green handkerchiefs, and would even gladly get themselves circumcised to please Muslims.
Marathi editors are also Thackeray’s bugbear. He once wrote that one of them would visit his mistress in Mumbai’s red light area every night, get drunk and be taken home in the morning by his relative.
The question now is: how seriously should one take these rantings? Given the fact that Saamna’s readership runs into thousands, and that Mumbai’s cops are its diehard readers, what Thackeray writes needs to be taken seriously indeed—by the government. Saamna was at least one major reason for the widespread support Shiv Sainiks enjoyed in the ’92-’93 riots.
But if any one agency has chosen to show benevolent apathy towards Saamna, it has been the Congress. When forced to take note, there’s always the elusive “expert legal opinion” that must be consulted. Vijay Tendulkar, Nikhil Wagle, Pushpa Bhave, Mrinal Gore, G R Khairnar, Manimala—the list of intellectuals attacked by Shiv Sainiks is long and illustrious. The government did nothing to protect them, nor to punish their assailant.
