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The direct enlightenment experiment soon failed. The alliance between Shiv Sena’s “Prabodhankar Shakti” and Prakash Ambedkar’s Vanchit Bahujan Aghadi’s “Bhim Shakti” could not be formed. Instead of riding the wave of Ambedkar-Prabodhankar nostalgia, Uddhav Thackeray chose the pragmatic option of going with the big parties of Congress and NCP (Sharadchandra Pawar). The alliance broke just before the assembly elections. Anyway, the rise of Enlightenment sentiment in Maharashtra was not parallel to the rise of Ambedkarite sentiment.
At this historical juncture, Uddhav Thackeray stands as the most important symbol of the Enlightenment tradition in Maharashtra, even if he is not consciously expressing it. His failure is that he is not moving beyond being a symbol, not moving towards embodying the spirit in a new party. He lost his old party to Shind groupAnd then he retained only the remaining faction. He could have established a new Shiv Sena (enlightener) for the continuation of Marathi knowledge in the twenty-first century.
Marathi society is a relatively enlightened society, although it has been badly repressed for the Bombay riots, and Shiv Sena has also taken its fair share of the blame. But apart from such exceptional circumstances, the Marathi are hardly a fanatic people. It is precisely this character that distinguishes Marathi Hindutva from its pan-Indian version.
Even Bal Thackeray’s fascism was partly imaginary. True, it had some terrible moments, but in terms of scale or intensity, it cannot be compared with any fascist movement anywhere else in the world. It was also too weak to qualify as fascism – it was anti-immigration in speech, whereas many indigenous societies like Kerala and Tamil Nadu were anti-immigration in practice, while being inclusive in speech. Mumbai remained metropolitan even during the reign of Bal Thackeray and has remained so ever since. This relative civilization, which survived despite Bal Thackeray, is the gift of Marathi enlightenment.
