Ruling Mumbai part I
Shiv Sena's victory of the regional election 2019 - @Baptiste Tholoniat
About once every two months, the city of Mumbai dresses in orange.
The tiger-headed flags, the huge posters of Bal and Uddhav Thackeray, the multitude of slogan tags in Marathis, and the few bleachers at the temple areas for Shivaji where drinks and leaflets are distributed are all saffron touches that speak volumes about the state of municipal democracy today, and this for two reasons.
The first is the political color they give to the city. The saffron orange is the political color of the Hindutva doctrine and the consortium of parties that support it, the Sangh Parivar.
Conceptualized in 1923 by Vinayak Damodar Savarkar (1) and possibly defined as the project of Indian nationalism based on the country's Hindu principles and roots, Hindutva has dominated political life since Narendra Modi's election to power in the central state in 2014.
The Shiv Sena, which has been in power in Mumbai since 1985, is one of the pillars of Hindutva, perpetuating it in the city and state of Maharashtra through a hybrid combination of Hindu nationalism and regional chauvinism.
Indeed, if the orange refers to Hindutva, the ancillary symbols such as the marathi or Shivaji reflect the primary nature of the party, which has made the defence of Marathi identity (2) the nerve centre of the sainik political project. Initiated at India's independence in 1947 and reinforced in 1966 when the party was created, this struggle is characterized by its regionalism, i.e. the systemic tendency to claim and prefer the region, which is based on a singular definition of the said region, namely the inheritance of the land acquired from the Hindus of the area, the sons of the soil.
Moreover, the second relevant indication conferred by the bi-monthly safronisation of Mumbai is the party's hegemony over the city. In fact, covering a city of this size with orange is an inordinate occupation of the public space, which directly refers to the singular practices of Shiv Sena within Mumbai.
Mumbai, a city of more than thirty million inhabitants, is the breeding ground of the party, both in terms of electoral weight, political involvement and ideological justification.
The Shiv Sena has indeed enjoyed a prolific insertion in the heart of the city, since it has integrated itself there first through its intellectual elite, then its working class and finally its middle class over the last fifty years by practicing both an ultra-local form of public service and an almost omniscient form of power over the legal and illegal activities of the city. Both components are part of a rejection of politics in favor of direct social action which combines local populism, the overthrow of the legal order and exceeding the electoral mandate.
This then questions the limits of the conventional definition of the political party as an association organized around a philosophy in order to attract membership and thereby exercise the power conferred by the control of electoral institutions. On this point, we will work here on a way to qualify the nature of this party and identify the underground and unconventional springs of its hegemony.
I would tend to qualify it as a "total" political party, since it came to power by imposing itself as a power parallel to the institutions and then merging its institutional and external activities.
Let's follow the sainiks crowd and see where it goes (
Shiv Sena supporter on the regional elections' victory day on their way to Shivaji Park
@Baptiste Tholoniat
(1) Hindutva : who is a hindu ? Vinayak Damodar Savarkar, 1923
(2) implying the identity of the inhabitants considered as originating from Maharashtra