The situation in Maharashtra, indeed the entire country, is getting from bad to worse, signaling clear danger ahead. Leaders of the mainstream Nationalist Congress Party have begun to sing the same tune as Maharashtra Navnirman Sena leader Raj Thackeray and the mood in Bihar and UP is becoming tense in the process, even as parliamentarians from those states undertake resignations en masse in order to put pressure on the Prime Minister. Of all people Praful Patel, the union civil aviation minister who has made a difference to the country's aviation map, has endorsed party colleague and state minister Chhagan Bhujbal’s advocacy of primacy to the “sons of the soil” and added that the balance between Maharashtrians and others needs to be redrawn. As long as this kind of negative regional politics was confined to a person with the antecedents of Mr Thackeray and his militant regional outfit, it was one thing. For the refrain to be taken up by entities as mainstream as the NCP is quite another. Mr Patel is not a loner. R R Patil, fellow NCP leader, has troubled the waters further by an intemperate choice of phrase, “bullet for bullet”, while commenting on the death of a youth from Bihar in an encounter with the police in Mumbai. This is most unfortunate as Mr Patil’s job as home minister is to cool passions, not stoke them. It does not help that doubts have been cast about how exactly the Bihar youngster was shot by the Mumbai police.
There is nothing new about demands for offering lower-level jobs first to local people, and this has been the practice, informally if not formally, all over the country. But the current demands in Mumbai go further, covering jobs in a central government undertaking, and include an amorphous demand that people show respect to Maharashtrian culture, as well as speaking Marathi. Nobody disrespects the local ethos where he is working and those employed at the street level are the first to pick up the local language for their own good. The fact is that these demands embody a campaign to scare poor non-local workers so that they run away in panic after a point. Mr Raj Thackeray and earlier his uncle, Bal Thackeray, who founded the Shiv Sena, have chosen this as their political platform and the NCP leaders see a political compulsion in making soothing noises to appease such sentiments. The NCP, which is a part of the current Maharashtra government, has been widely seen as the force behind the rise of Mr Raj Thackeray who will supposedly cut down the Shiv Sena to size. The latest statements lend credence to such logic.
There is no end to politics which lowers the common denominator further and further. The process does none any good and harms not just the country as a whole but also the state or city in question. It is most unfortunate that such an agitation should find a base in Mumbai which is the country’s business capital and considered its most professional city. At the end of the day it will only harm Mumbai and reduce the jobs it can offer. This will harm poor Maharashtrians the most. At a time when businessmen can take their businesses almost anywhere in the country (look what happened to Singur), the future of any region lies in its ability to play host to investment and the workers who are the foot soldiers of the supporting eco-system. A group of eminent Maharashtrians like Suresh Tendulkar and Vijay Kelkar have come out boldly against such crude regional politics and it will be in the interest of Maharashtrians to heed them.
