Last week, Mumbai, purportedly India’s most cosmopolitan city, displayed xenophobic passions yet again when a section of the local people launched sporadic attacks against migrants from north India.

 Taxi drivers and pushcart vendors from the Hindi heartland, especially from Bihar and Uttar Pradesh (UP), bore the brunt of the unprovoked violence. 

 At random, taxi drivers were pulled out from their vehicles and thrashed by angry Marathi youths. Vegetable and fruit pushcart vendors from outside Maharashtra had their wares looted as they fled to avoid marauding mobs.

 The ambivalent attitude of the police and most political parties allowed the ugly situation to fester for several days before an uneasy calm was restored in the financial capital of the country.

 The Raj Thackeray-led Maharashtra Navnirman Sena orchestrated the replay of scary events of some four decades ago in the modern metropolis with a population of over 12 million this time round. 

 It was Raj’s uncle, Bal Thackeray, who in the late 60s first mounted an operation against non-Maharashtrians, ostensibly in the cause of "sons of the soil". At that time, the target was the south Indians.

Tens of thousands of south Indians, mostly white-collar workers in government and the private sector, were too frightened to retaliate. They lay low for weeks till the then-state government, which was not unsympathetic to the "jobs-for-the-local-boys" cry of the Sena, restored order. 

 Thackeray Senior was a newspaper cartoonist in the 60s when he first launched the Shiv Sena (SP), that is, a party of warriors swearing allegiance to the memory of the 17th century Maratha king, Shivaji Maharaj, who fought against the Mughal emperor Aurangzeb. 

 Though its original objective was to propagate Marathi culture, the Sena soon acquired a political agenda when it tapped the growing resentment against the economic alienation of the local people. Maharashtrians felt left out in the job market while generally better-educated south Indians monopolised most white-collar jobs. 

 It was a sore point with the locals that Mumbai (formerly Bombay) had relegated them to its fringes while the best residential and working spaces in the metropolis were owned by non-Maharashtrians. 

 Thackeray exploited the feeling of economic, social and cultural exclusion among Marathas to grow his fledgling outfit. However, after striking deep roots among the Marathas, most shrewdly the Sena sought to put its anti-migrant past behind it, seeking to widen its appeal by embracing an aggressive pro-Hindu platform. 

 Its next target was the "anti-India" Muslims. Through provocative slogans and writings in a Sena-owned newspaper, Thackeray now spewed venom against Indian Muslims. The militancy in Kashmir and the alleged Pakistan-inspired anti-India terrorist attacks in other parts of the country provided him a handle to pander to the ultra nationalist elements among Hindus. 

 But the Sena acquired notoriety for its leading role in the anti-Muslim violence in the wake of the demolition of the Babri Masjid in December 1992. 

 Despite their well-documented roles in the killings and numerous other acts of lawlessness, including arson and vandalism, successive state governments have failed to act against Thackeray. 

 The Maratha demagogue has enjoyed immunity from legal action, making much of his threat that his arrest would result in Mumbai being put to torch by his angry followers.

 The result is neither he nor his close lieutenants have had to pay for the flagrant breaches of the law since the founding of the Sena back in 1966.

 However, in an ironic twist in the original script, last week’s events forced Thackeray Senior on the defensive. The reason is simple. His estranged nephew, Raj, formed his own rival Sena two years ago after the patriarch anointed his own son, Uddhav, as his political successor.

 Raj had believed that the mantle ought to have come to him since he had shown more organisational and political talent than the founder’s somewhat gawky son. 

 But in the end, the old man preferred his own son, causing the nephew to float his own rival party.

 Raj was banking on doing well in last year’s Mumbai municipal corporation election, but surprisingly came a cropper while the original Sena along with its electoral ally, BJP, swept the polls. 

 With a fresh election to the Maharashtra state legislature due next year, Raj’s Maharashtra Navnirman Sena (MNS) most unabashedly tapped the same sentiment which four decades ago helped nurture the nascent Sena floated by his uncle into a formidable force.

 Surprisingly, the spur was the launch of a women’s college in a backward part of Uttar Pradesh by Bollywood superstar Amitabh Bachchan. The college, named after Aishwarya Rai, Bachchan’s actress daughter-in-law, attracted wide publicity, with several non-Congress leaders attending the inaugural in the sleepy eastern UP town. 

 The next day, two motorcycle-borne men threw bottles at the Mumbai bungalow of Bachchan, There were sporadic incidents of attacks on north Indian taxi-drivers and pushcart vendors, too.

 However, the spurt of violence died down when the original Sena showed no interest in taking up the anti-north Indian protest. 

 The mother outfit had come to terms with the presence of some 70% non-Marathas in Mumbai, given that their hostility earlier had led to its defeat in the 2004 parliamentary election. 

 Of Mumbai’s 12 million population, more than four million are north Indians while Gujaratis number nearly 2.5 million. There are about 1.5 million people from south India, Rajasthan, Punjab, etc. Overnight any political party that antagonises such a large number of "migrants", as Raj’s MNS calls them, forfeits their trust, even though it may firm up its grip on the local Marathi vote bank. 

 But, then, at the end of the day democracy is a numbers game. Earning the hostility of migrants cannot but prove counter-productive, as the original Sena had learnt to its own cost.

 Raj probably knows this too but he wants to wean away the Marathis from his uncle’s outfit at any cost. Hence, the orchestrated attacks on the migrants.