Many years ago, a distinguished western ambassador had described India as a working anarchy. How prophetic those words were!

For not a day passes without there being ample fresh evidence of the anarchy in action in some or other part of the vast country of over one billion people.

In fact, glancing at the newspaper headlines a foreign visitor might get the impression that the country was about to break up into several mutually hostile parts.

Unfamiliar with the ordinariness of the chaotic conditions in the world’s largest democracy, he might wonder how the nation has survived for over 60 years after the departure of its British masters.

And approvingly recall Winston Churchill’s warning that "power will go to the hands of rascals, rogues and freebooters...and they will fight among themselves and India will be lost in political squabbles."

Increasingly, right-thinking Indians everywhere are getting weary of the ugly doings of the politicians. A number of them find some merit in the late British statesman’s caustic remarks prior to the grant of independence to this country.

For proof, witness the orgy of violence in Mumbai and elsewhere in the state of Maharashtra and the counter-violence in the eastern state of Bihar these past few days.

A highly ambitious and wholly unprincipled politician, Raj Thackeray, seeking to carve a political constituency of his own after finding himself ejected from his uncle, Balasaheb Thackeary’s Shiv Sena, has kicked up a right royal mess on the sons-of-the-soil plank.

For over a year now, the 40-year-old Thackeray has carried out a shrill campaign against ‘north Indians’ in Mumbai, the country’s commercial capital, arguing that ‘outsiders’ or ‘migrants’ have monopolised jobs and other economic opportunities which by right ought to have gone to the local Marathi people.

Raj’s uncle, Balasaheb Thackeray, had quit his job as a newspaper cartoonist in the early 60s to kick up a shindy against ‘south Indians’ in Mumbai occupying government and private sector jobs.

At that time too there were charges that he was propped up by the then ruling Congress Party to neutralise the Communists who had dominated the blue-collar trade unions in most commercial and industrial establishments.

The Shiv Sena, founded in 1966, since then had turned its attention against Muslims, targeting them for being ‘anti-national’. It had spearheaded the violence against the community in the wake of the demolition of the Babri Masjid in December 1992.

Four decades later, the Sena founder’s nephew, Raj, angry with his uncle’s decision to annoint his own son, Uddhav, as his political heir, floated his own outfit.

The Maharashtra Navnirman Sena with the not-so-covert encouragement of the ruling Congress-Nationalist Congress Party alliance in the State has virtually held Mumbai to ransom for over a year now.

It has targeted north Indians in the most cosmopolitan city in the country, burning taxis and three-wheeled auto-rickshaws and assaulting their Bihari and UP drivers.

It has torn down shop signs written in Hindi or English, demanding these be replaced by Marathi language signboards, and has railed against the celebration of the ‘Chhat festival’ by Biharis in Mumbai.

Sometime ago, it caused the Bollywood icon Amitabh Bachchan to tender an apology for the reaction of his actor wife, Jaya, who had pointedly mocked at Raj’s insistence on "everyone living in Mumbai speaking in Marathi", arguing that since she came from UP she would speak in Hindi.

After soft-pedalling the threat to peace and law and order from Raj and his handful of ‘hoodlums’, as the media called the MNS activists, the Congress-led coalition in Maharashtra came under intense pressure from various sections of the society.

Raj was arrested last Tuesday. The arrest followed violent attacks on north Indians appearing for a railway recruitment exam for Class III jobs in Mumbai two days earlier.

Young examinees from Bihar and UP were attacked by MNS goons, with a number of them sustaining serious injuries. At least one youth from Bihar later succumbed to his injuries.

Led by the opposition Bharatiya Janta Party (BJP), several allies of the ruling Congress Party, notably the Bihar-centric Rashtriya Janata Dal of railway minister Laloo Yadav and UP-centric Samajwadi Party of Mulayam Singh Yadav sought stern action against the MNS leader.

A non-bailable warrant issued against him by a court in Jharkhand on a petition by a lawyer who alleged that he was inciting hatred and enmity between communities was yet to be served on Raj. Instead, he was held on bailable charges relating to cases of incitement of violence and arson in Mumbai and other towns in Maharashtra.

Following his arrest, there were sporadic incidents of violence in Mumbai. A number of public buses and privately-owned taxis were set ablaze. Commercial establishments and public and private transport remained shut due to fear of the MNS hoodlums.

The local police, staffed by Marathis and sympathetic to the jobs-for-the locals plank, gave the MNS activists a long rope before the central Rapid Action Force brought the situation under control. Raj was freed on bail a day later.

Meanwhile, in retaliation agitators in Bihar burnt a couple of rail coaches and ransacked at least two railway stations. Last Thursday the situation in parts of Bihar was tense with anti-MNS mobs taking to the streets and forcing the railways to suspend operations in the more troubled parts of the state.

The counter-violence in Bihar was reportedly encouraged by local politicians with an eye on exploiting the situation in the coming parliamentary poll.

The root cause of the problem actually was not the denial of jobs to the local Marathi youths but their reluctance to work as taxi and auto drivers, as peons and hawkers of cheap foodstuffs or as ‘dhobhi’ (washermen) and coolies, jobs willingly taken up by ill-educated youths from Bihar and UP villages.

It is notable that the Constitution guarantees freedom of movement across the country. All citizens are free to live and work wherever they want, a point countered by Thackeray Jr, who argues that the creation of linguistic states presupposed that preference in jobs would be given to locals speaking the local language.

As it happens in most such manifestations of a ‘working anarchy’, the situation in both Maharashtra and Bihar would come under control after the ‘locals’ of each respective state had wreaked their angry spleens against innocent people and public property.

But, then, the eruption in Tamil Nadu, where the DMK government is fanning anger against the alleged ‘genocide’ of Tamils in Sri Lanka, is waiting to erupt.