The rise and influence of Balasaheb K. Thackeray, the founder of Shiv Sena who died Saturday, was closely chronicled in The New York Times.
Below is his obituary, as well as selected excerpts from our archives from the 1990s, when anti-Muslim riots wracked Mumbai:
“Bal Keshav Thackeray was born on Jan. 23, 1926, in the city of Pune, about 100 miles east of Mumbai, and came of age during India’s struggle for freedom from Britain,” Vikas Bajaj wrote in Mr. Thackeray’s obituary, which was published on Saturday. “His father, Keshav Sitaram Thackeray, a journalist and activist, was said to have taken the surname because he admired the English novelist William Makepeace Thackeray.”
The elder Mr. Thackeray became a leader of a movement to establish the State of Maharashtra for speakers of the Marathi language, a group that would become a core constituency. Mumbai, then known as Bombay and to this day the financial hub of India, became the capital of the new state.
The younger Mr. Thackeray gained fame as a cartoonist first at the daily Free Press Journal and later at his own weekly publication, Marmik. He used his cartoons to inveigh against Communists and champion the cause of the Marathi manoos, or the average Marathi citizen, who, he argued, was losing out to South Indians, Muslims and other outsiders. In 1966, he established the Shiv Sena, or the Army of Shiva; its mascot is a snarling tiger.
Read the full obituary.
In November 1993, Edward A. Gargan wrote: “In the last year, Bombay has been racked twice by sectarian violence that claimed hundreds of lives and left tens of thousands homeless.”
“While the city’s elite — its stock brokers and bankers and lawyers, its writers and filmmakers — largely managed to insulate themselves from the destruction, Bombay’s poor paid a heavy price,” he wrote. The slums of Jogeshwari, Beherampada and Dharavi were particularly hard hit.
At the core of the discussions of the sectarian strife, Mr. Gargan wrote, was Bal Thackeray.
A Human Rights Commission investigation into the riots found that: “Bal Thackeray openly claimed that the mobs were under his control. It was he who finally said that, ‘A lesson had been taught’ and that the Shiv Sainiks should now desist from indulging in violence.”
Throughout the violence, Mr. Thackeray’s newspaper, Samna, railed against Muslims, urging Hindu thugs to attack Muslims. “This is a religious crusade,” his paper wrote.
In the 10 months since the pogrom, Mr. Thackeray has defied calls for his arrest and insisted on the transfer of police officials hostile to Shiv Sena.
Read the full article from November of 1993.
Two years later, John F. Burns reported that “not far from a clearing beside the Arabian Sea that older residents remember as the site of some of Mohandas K. Gandhi’s largest rallies, angry youths gathered recently for the kind of political activity that Gandhi condemned.”
“They belonged to the Hindu nationalist group Shiv Sena, which rejects Gandhi’s vision of harmony and equality among India’s religious groups: They have a concept of India in which non-Hindus, especially the 110 million Muslims, must accept the primacy of the 700 million Hindus in virtually every sphere of life,” he wrote.
Under orders from Balasaheb K. Thackeray, 68, the Shiv Sena leader, who calls himself the “Hitler of Bombay,” the youths marched on the offices of Outlook, a news magazine. There, enraged by an Outlook poll that showed 75 percent of Muslims in Jammu and Kashmir, India’s only Muslim-majority state, favored secession, the youths poured kerosene on bundles of the magazine and set them alight. The action halted sales of Outlook in Bombay.
A month earlier, similar threats prompted the publisher of Salman Rushdie’s latest novel, “The Moor’s Last Sigh,” to withdraw it from the city’s bookstores. Mr. Thackeray, a former newspaper cartoonist, was angered because Mr. Rushdie, born a Muslim in Bombay, included a biting caricature: a former newspaper cartoonist who admires Hitler and hates Muslims becomes boss of the city.
In Mr. Thackeray’s 30-year political career, Mr. Burns wrote, “he has built an organization that provides jobs and a sense of pride for legions of young slum-dwellers, even as he has set his followers against Communists, Christians, Sikhs — and Hindus who belong to ethnic groups from outside Bombay.”
“Still, for the 14 million residents, Bombay under Mr. Thackeray is unmistakably a place of growing violence against those who offend Shiv Sena’s sense of conformity.” Read the full article.
India Ink: Balasaheb K. Thackeray, a Look Back
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