Where Hitler meets Thackeray

By V Sudarshan

A cople of years ago stand up comedian Albert Brooks made a film he called ‘Looking for humor in the Muslim world.’ It was almost entirely shot in India. In the film Albert Brooks, playing himself - a Jewish stand up comedian - is sent on a fact-finding mission, based on the premise that even though George Bush has a great sense of humour, his administration had difficulty understanding very many groups of people: Chinese, Africans, but mainly the Muslims. The American president wanted to develop a secret weapon that would work on the sense of humour in the Muslim world. But what made them laugh? It was a mystery to Bush. It is for Brooks to find out what makes Muslims laugh and he has to produce a 500-page report based on the findings. Brooks wonders: Why India, a Hindu country? The man heading the committee that sends him on the mission responds: ‘‘There are 150 million Muslims there. Is that enough for you? Anyway we’ll consider the job half done if you can tell us what makes the Hindus laugh.’’

Funnily enough, the truth manages to elude the comedian. But Albert Brooks would have got much closer to the truth had he stopped over in Mumbai and met the Shiv Sena chieftain Bal Thackeray, who started out life as a cartoonist but has got to that stage in life where others draw cartoons of him and caricature him in novels where Thackeray is transformed into characters with nicknames like Mainduck, which means frog in Hindi. Salman Rushdie did it in Moor’s Last Sigh, and his book got banned, which is not a bad thing for sales. But sometimes it doesn’t even take a book to stir his followers. The weekly magazine Outlook was targeted by Sainiks last Tuesday for featuring the Sena chieftain under the categorisation of ‘villains’ in an issue that took stock of India at sixty. It was the third time that copies of the magazine were being burnt by Shiv Sainiks.

About ten men burst into the weekly’s Mumbai office broke, among other things, a fax machine, a photocopier and burnt copies of the magazine. It is a Shiv Sena ritual and a way of getting their point of view through as well as an accomplishment, like climbing Everest and sticking a flag there. Outlook got a taste of it in its very first issue in October 1995 when the cover story suggested the majority of the people of the Srinagar valley wanted independence.

Shiv Sena found the article, based on a survey, offensive and anti-national. So they burned copies of the magazine. The second time the magazine was burnt by Shiv Sainiks, there was a debate on what triggered it off: the cartoon, a gentle caricature, drawn by a Muslim cartoonist, Irfan Hussain, who later was to die, stabbed over two dozen times, in mysterious circumstances, or the biting article, which recorded the chieftain’s slide from ‘terror to tamasha’.

This time the offending article was not a lengthy one full of anecdotes to illustrate the point or anything like that. It was just a little snippet, barely a hundred words. It was accompanied by a small caricature of the chieftain where Bal Thackeray wielded a paint brush dressed up as Hitler with a painted toothbrush moustache staring out of an empty photo-frame.The xenophobic German who sent Jews to their death in thousands holds a strange fascination for Bal Thackeray. He is on record as having told the Navakal: ‘‘Yes, I am a dictator. It is a Hitler that is needed in India today.’’ He was once asked in a television programme whether he wanted to be Hitler of Bombay? ‘‘Do not underestimate me,’’ he is reported to have retorted. ‘‘I am (the Hitler) of the whole of Maharashtra and want to be of whole of India.’’ The Hitler question was put to him twelve years ago in September 1996 by the Outlook magazine as well during an interview. ‘‘Once you’d expressed admiration for certain facets of Hitler.’’ ‘Comparison was inevitable,’ the interviewer prompted.

Thackaray said: ‘‘I have not sent anybody to the gas chamber. If I’d been like that, you wouldn’t have dared to come and interview me.’’Thackeray may not have sent thousands of people to the gas chamber to die, but here is an observation Justice Sri Krishna makes in his report which goes back to January 8, 1993, when a reporter Yuvraj Mohite was taken to Matoshri, Bal Thackeray’s residence, during the thick of the Mumbai riots and Mohite makes notes as he listens to the Shiv Sena chieftain: ‘‘From the conversation which could be heard by Mohite, which he has reproduced in extenso in his affidavit, it was clear that Thackeray was directing the Shiv Sainiks, shakha pramukhs and other activists of Shiv Sena to attack the Muslims, to ensure that they give tit-for-tat and ensure that ’’not a single landya would survive to give oral evidence‘‘.(Landya is a derogatory expression).

This is in effect what the magazine highlighted as having contributed to his being featured in its altogether too modest list in the rogues’ gallery - his Hitler fascination, his hatred for Muslims, his reducing of democratic politics to a ‘poor caricature.’ Thackeray did not even head the list; he made an appearance way down after Nathuram Ghodse and Sanjay Gandhi, jostling for space between Dawood Ibrahim and Mohammed Azharuddin.Coming back to Brooks, if he had met Thackeray, he would not have missed the humour lurking in the Shiv Sena supremo proudly letting it be known to the Mumbai chatterati that Michael Jackson used the toilet in Matoshri and Shiv Sena organised a chaddi morcha outside Dilip Kumar’s house for his support to Deepa Mehta’s film Fire. Think of it, a bunch of guys in their underwear, followers of a man who admires Hitler and Whacko Jacko (Would you let your kid sleep over in Neverland?) protesting outside the house of an Indian film icon who received the Nishan-e-Pakistan because he supports a film with a lesbian scene in it. He would also have squeezed some improvisational humour out of the fact that Bal Thackeray is on record as declaring he is ‘not against patriotic Muslims like Mohammed Azharuddin’ and both should land up in a weekly magazine’s random list of ‘villains’, side by side, like two peas in a pod.

The funny thing about drawing up villains’ lists is that somebody’s villain is always some one else’s hero. It is a humourless task, but it has its moments.The simple thing for Brooks to have done would have been to get Bush down to Iraq - unescorted - to find out what makes Muslims laugh. That would have been funny. But picture this: Albert Brooks (a Jew) interviewing Bal Thackeray, a self-confessed Hitler admirer on what makes him laugh? If you can picture that, you can picture Albert Brooks in say Iran, or better yet, in Saudi Arabia doing research on the elusive funny bone. In the film, when Brooks finally turns in his report, he falls 494 pages short. How many pages would he have got had he met Bal Thackeray?