Mood: chillin'
Now Playing: Why Marathi Manus sounds like parochialism
Topic: LANGUAGE PATROTISM
So we have both Thackarey cousins wooing the sons of the soul. Few call them Maharashtrians as that would fail the cause. After all, such a racist cause has to be legitimised. I always wondered why it is so difficult to call a spade a spade. But recently it dawned on me that it is difficult for even the media at least in Mumbai to do so because there are so many Maharashtrians amongst their own that it is difficult not to legitimise the cause.
Unlike the Hindutva cause where the majority of the English reading people would forsake militant Hinduism, the fight for 'Mumbai for Maharashtrians' has many takers amongst the Maharashtrian community.
When Raj Thackarey's boys beat up Bihari boys who came to Mumbai to take railway board tests for job I had thought it was the fringe community which supported the cause. I was stunned to read the next day's headlines where the Congress chief minister Sushil Kumar Shinde, a dalit by caste, unwaveringly supported the cause. His only rider was that he was against the violence!
The hypocrisy in this son-of-the-soil policy is that when Jade Goody called Shilpa Shetty a dog staying in slums we all got outraged. What about non-Maharashtrians being abused, beaten up and ostracised?
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