Earlier this month we witnessed terrible ethnic violence in Mumbai city, where a Marathi supremacist group attacked poor North Indian migrants to the city. Those responsible for the attacks were cadre of the “Marathi Navnirman Sena”, a breakaway group from the infamous “Shiv Sena”.

The Shiv Sena is a political party that all Indian citizens will of course will be familiar with. Hindus in other countries such as here in Britain will have certainly heard of it, but probably have a mistaken view of the organisation.

The name “Shiv Sena” conjures up images of force, and most young Hindus in the west assume it to be some kind of religious vigilante organisation or gangster outfit. One sometimes finds absent minded militant young Hindus in Britain claiming to be part of the Shiv Sena without a clue as to what the Shiv Sena is and what it stands for. Hence it is pertinent to write this article and help dispel ignorance.

In fact the Shiv Sena is a regionalist political party based in the Indian state of Maharashtra, presenting a significant political force only in that state. It was founded in Mumbai in 1966. Its name refers to the seventeenth-century Hindu warrior Shivaji as well as to the deity Shiva. The party was first founded as a local action group representing local concerns of Maharashtrian people. Its founder-leader was Bal Thackeray (right), a former cartoonist, who has since become a house-hold name in India. Shiv Sena is a populist party, deeply rooted in Maharashtrian popular culture, and representing popular creativity, popular sentiment and also popular anger.

In its early days, Shiv Sena’s populist agenda was more anti-immigrant than pro-Hindu. Mumbai in particular had a heavy influx of people from other regions in India looking for work, and Shiv Sena opposed them vigorously with the argument that jobs in Mumbai should be first of all for the “sons of the soil”. The opposition to immigration included occasional violence and regular extortion (particularly targeting wealthy Gujarati and Tamil Hindu businessmen).

Other Hindu revivalist movements vigorously criticised Shiv Sena’s policy in this regards calling it a threat to unity. Over the tears, however, Shiv Sena sorted their lives out and evolved from an anti-immigrant party to a structure which helps the endless stream of newcomers to integrate into the Mumbai metropolis. Many non-Maharashtrian Hindus who were previously threatened by the Shiv Sena began to caste their votes for Shiv Sena quite early (especially Tamils and Keralites), and sizeable groups of them have entered the organisation.

The party’s regionalist agenda of its early days made it the second strongest party in Maharashtra state. By the 1980’s it made Hindu concerns its priority, as by this time Muslim mob activity and aggression were becoming a primary concern to India as a whole and Mumbai (India’s centre of organised crime) in particular. The Muslims in India were beginning to act as they had in pre-partition days some decades earlier, and the parties in power (particularly the Congress) were treating them with kid-gloves. The Shiv Sena’s championing of Hindu causes made it the strongest electoral party in the state of Maharashtra.

Shiv Sena’s policies are simple and rustic, with hardly much thought applied to its policies. By its own motto: “Our actions are our programme” and “Shiv Sena believes more in social activities than politics”. According to V.S Naipaul, the Nobel-Prize winning Trinidadian writer, the Shiv Sena has been a very constructive social force in Mumbai’s slum areas, even before it ever came to power. This alludes to Shiv Sena’s championing the cause of the poor Maharashtrians of all (and especially the low) castes.

The Shiv Sena got a lot of bad press when it reacted in strength against a series of Muslim attacks on Hindus in early January 1993 after three days of Muslim rioting (6 to 8 January), Bal Thackeray’s activists took the law into their own hands. The result was a large-scale conflagration which killed at least 557 people, a majority of them Muslims. Even years later, no Shiv Sena spokesman has either denied their role in these riots or expressed apology for it: they see it as a necessary intervention in a Muslim attempt to take over Mumbai through street terror. On the other hand,. when Muslim underworld figures launched a series of bomb blasts (12 March 1993) in retaliation for these riots, (including a failed one against the Shiv Sena headquarters) which killed some 300 people, mostly Hindus, the Shiv Sena did not react, either to avoid further escalation or because they were not capable of escalation beyond the standard Indian riots. As a corollary to this episode, Shiv Sena (in alliance with the BJP) came to power in the next Maharasthra state elections in 1995, in which many Hindus who had previously placed their vote elsewhere rallied behind the Shiv Sena for their perceived role as “defenders of Hindus”.

Surprisingly enough a significant number of Muslims have found a place in the Shiv Sena. There are several Muslim sub-branch organisers in Mumbai and at least one branch organiser in Pune. Shiv Sena never ceases to state that it considers Muslims who are 100% loyal to Hindustan as equal to Hindus, but “those who sit here dreaming about Pakistan or the break up of India have no right to be here. We do not apologise about our stand against them.” Shiv Sena certainly cannot be classed as a Hindu fundamentalist organisation. A fundamentalist movement is when there is absolute insistence on certain beliefs from a core text, often to the point of violence, as the core of the movement. At most in can be said that Shiv Sena are a radical group, but “fundamentalist” is a misnomer.

The Shiv Sena has developed an electoral alliance with the Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP), but has often been at odds with the BJP on the latters perceived softness and lack of activity, particularly against terrorism . As a result, small Shiv Sena units have been set up in many other parts of India, particularly in Uttar Pradesh, Punjab, Madhya Pradesh and Andhra Pradesh. These groups are independent from the Maharashtrian Shiv Sena, but they profess the same creed, preferring Bal Thakeray’s toughness to the “white shirt, afraid of getting tainted” ways of which they accuse the BJP. These Shiv Sena groups have grown considerably as a grass roots presence, but are not a significant political force outside Maharashtra. It is interesting to note that as time passes, many Hindus also see Shiv Sena as “giving all the talk, but being short on action.”

Shiv Sena has the reputation of being heavily involved in mafia activity in Mumbai. In India, all political parties are involved in such activities to some extent, and it is hard to assess whether this applies any more to Shiv Sena compared with other parties - although the image that has been created around them by the media would have us believe so. Even the Shiv Sena’s very commendable work in preventing anti-Sikh violence in Mumbai after Indira Gandhi was assassinated in 1984 was explained by the media in terms of the Mumbai Sikhs paying the Shiv Sena “protection money”.

It should be noted that the relation between Shiv Sena’s Hindu character and its mafia character tends to be of inverse proportion: on a number of occasions, Bal Thackeray called off Hindu nationalist agitations probably in exchange for money. An example was when Rajiv Gandhi passed the Muslim Women’s bill (which deprived Muslim women divorcees of state maintenance) under pressure of a Mullah lobby. This was a typical Congress policy which appeased Islamic fundamentalist but made average Muslims suffer, brought to light by the famous Shah Bano incident.

Thackeray announced a series of rallies at the Congress Centenary celebrations in 1985. Foreign media would have been present in huge numbers and the Congress’s stupidity would have stood fully exposed. However, at the last minute he was called for a meeting with top politicians and then he cancelled the agitation without explanation!