Editorial: At odds with Shivaji

The collapse of a 35-foot statue of Shivaji at the Rajkot Fort in Maharashtra, less than nine months after it was inaugurated by the Prime Minister, could not have come at a worse time for the BJP. The state is due soon to have an Assembly election, and the party’s alliance with two breakaway factions of the Shiv Sena and NCP is in disarray after a poor show in the recent Lok Sabha election. The opposition alliance is sure to dub this as an injury to Maratha pride and proof of the state government’s ineptitude. A setback to the BJP in Maharashtra will accelerate the erosion of support for the Narendra Modi regime at the Centre and put a question mark against its survival in office.

The fall of a statue to gusty winds would normally not be a substantive issue in an election, but in Maharashtra the symbolic significance is vast. Shivaji Maharaj is a universally revered icon for Maharashtrians, and every statue of his — sword drawn to the skies — embodies both their defiance of empire and their desire for empire. The legend of Shivaji outwitting the army of Aurangzeb, emperor at the zenith of Mughal power, is known to every schoolboy. The collapse of his statue will go down as a sign of carelessness towards a much-loved icon and feed into other reservoirs of anger.

The state government’s response has been to blame it on the elements, pass the buck to the Navy and scapegoat the designer and contractor of the project. But to people on the ground the hard truths are clear: The statue collapse is only the latest of a sequence of O&M incompetencies displayed by BJP regimes across the country, including leaks sprung by the new Parliament building and the Ram temple in Ayodhya, broken statuary at the Ujjain Mahakaleshwar temple, train derailments, bridge collapses and highway moonscaping. Taken together, they drive home the message that BJP regimes do not care enough to do well the very things they crow about the most.

Sensing peril to the BJP, the PM hastened to the state and offered an abject apology to the Maharashtrian people. Both those acts, the hastening to the site of a mishap as well as the apology to an injured identity, are uncharacteristic of Modi, which tells us how important elections are to him. But the haste and abjectness of the apology also indicate Modi’s sensitivity to other vulnerabilities. Not only can the Shivaji statue episode trigger Maratha ire at the BJP, it could also feed into the popular resentment against Gujaratis in Mumbai.

Other invisible threads run in this theme. The Shivaji dear to all Maharashtrians and the cliques who hold sway in the BJP in Maharashtra have history, as they say. The warrior king’s coronation as Chhatrapati was opposed tooth and nail by the 17th century high castes, which forced the king to bring in a priest from Varanasi to conduct the rituals. Shivaji scholars also hotly dispute the historiographic interpolation that his valour was owed in large part to a Brahmin guru, Samarth Ramdas. Three years ago, the then governor BS Koshyari poked his finger into this cultural hornets’ nest by imputing that Shivaji Maharaj is an ‘old’ and perhaps outdated icon compared to the ‘new’ icon Nitin Gadkari. These are merely three examples of the BJP’s discomfort with the Shivaji legend. The fallen statue of Sindhudurg has brought it all back at the wrong time.