Phase 5: The 2 PM Report: Focus on Maharashtra

Pandu Shivaji, an ordinary mill worker stood up from the audience and requested that he be allowed to come on to the stage and speak. As soon as he was allowed to do so, he went on a tirade against the three leaders sitting on the stage. “Borkar is a stooge of the Congress and his two associates here, Kubal and Mayekar have never been with us mill workers, reject them all and support the hammer and sickle” he had shouted to a rising roar among the audience.

The year was 1937, this scene had unfolded during a campaign rally in Mumbai’s Lalbagh area which was then an out and out communist stronghold. Keshav Dada Borkar who was the uncrowned king of Ghodapdeo (which is now a non-descript neighbourhood of Byculla but was once home to hundreds of textile mills and thousands of chawls were workers lived) had been entrusted by the Congress party to make inroads into Communist strongholds of the city. On that day, after his diatribe, Borkar’s goons caught hold of Pandu Shivaji and thrashed him black and blue. Not to be left behind, the Communists then started pelting stones at Borkar and his gang. Soon a massive riot ensued and both rival factions fought it out, reportedly, for more than 5 hours.

This was the 1930’s when there was an undeclared war between Congress and Communists in the city of Mumbai. Keshav Dada Borkar was the right hand man of S.K. Patil and had a unique way of organising mill workers through a network of gymnasiums where he trained his goons to fight pitched battles against the Communists. These gymnasium networks were the precursor to today’s Shakha system in Mumbai. The city always needed such organising skills, then it was the fight between Congress and Communists, in the 80’s it got transformed into a fight between Marathas and outsiders and from the 90’s onwards it became a fight for Hindutva.

Bala Saheb’s Shiv Sena was therefore not a new invention, it was merely an adaptation of the Borkar-Communist organisation to newer needs of Mumbai. If he hadn’t bequeathed the Shakha system, Mumbai would have invented another Bala Saheb to do the same simply because the teeming millions couldn’t survive without such a socio-economic infrastructure.