What impact will attacks on Hindi speakers in Maharashtra have on the Bihar polls?

It is not clear whether Uddhav Thackeray’s decision to share the stage with his estranged cousin Raj in Mumbai on Saturday will prove to be a landmark moment in Maharashtra politics. But its effects are already being felt 1,700 kms away in Bihar’s capital of Patna.

Maharashtra has seen a spate of attacks against Hindi speakers of late, carried out by Raj Thackeray’s Maharashtra Navnirman Sena. The fact that the MNS is expected to partner with the Shiv Sena faction led by Uddhav Thackeray, which is, in turn, an ally of the Congress, could end up having an impact on the upcoming Bihar Assembly election.

The new political formation in Maharashtra could potentially allow the Bharatiya Janata Party to present itself as a protector of Bihari migrants even as the Hindutva party accuses the Congress and its allies in Bihar of colluding with the MNS’s anti-Hindi drive.

MNS leader Raj Thackeray’s speech on Saturday made matters worse. He asked his workers to continue with their language campaign even as Uddhav Thackeray applauded.

Scroll asked representatives of three major Opposition parties in Bihar if the reunion of the Thackerays could hurt them in the state’s assembly elections expected later this year. While they sought to downplay its impact, they did admit that the attacks on migrant workers in Maharashtra were gaining traction among Bihar’s voters and putting the Opposition on the backfoot.

Politics over migrant vote

The principal opposition in Bihar is the Mahagathbandhan, an alliance comprising several state and national parties. Scroll spoke to leaders from the three largest constituents of the coalition – the Rashtriya Janata Dal, the Congress party and the Communist Party of India (Marxist-Leninist) Liberation.

All of them said that the issue of migrant welfare would be important in the election, given that migrants and their families make up a sizeable chunk of the electorate in Bihar.

This is perhaps why politicians from several parties have come out with all guns blazing at the Thackerays.

“Patak-patak ke maarenge,” Bharatiya Janata Party leader Nishikant Dubey told Asian News International, threatening the cousins to visit Bihar. We will beat you black and blue.

Pappu Yadav, an Opposition MP from Bihar, went further and promised to rough up Raj Thackeray in Mumbai itself. Election strategist-turned-politician Prashant Kishor faulted Opposition figures, such as Rahul Gandhi and Tejashwi Yadav, for not speaking out against Uddhav Thackeray, their ally.

“It is a major issue here [in Bihar],” admitted Kaukab Quadri, a member of the All India Congress Committee and a former president of the party’s Bihar unit. “We talk a lot about India being one country. But it is very unfortunate that people of one state are being humiliated and slapped in another one. Congress cannot and will not stay quiet just because of our alliance with Uddhav Thackeray.”

In 2019, when the Maharashtra elections produced a hung assembly, Quadri had supported the alliance with Shiv Sena to keep the BJP out of power. He sent a long letter to Sonia Gandhi explaining that Muslims would support Uddhav Thackeray as chief minister, he recollected. But, in his view, it was now time to reassess the merits of that alliance.

“Seeing his [Uddhav’s] actions, we will have to change our policy too,” Quadri added. “If he can join forces with his brother and treat our people this way, we can also change our attitude and go with someone else. They [Shiv Sena] are a state party, while we are an all-India one.”

Leaders from state parties in Bihar, on the other hand, accorded less importance to the political developments in Maharashtra. Kanchana Yadav, national spokesperson of the Rashtriya Janata Dal, the Mahagathbandhan’s largest party, alleged that the BJP and its Bihar allies were bringing up the issue to divert attention from its failures.

“If they really cared about migrant workers, they would have set up factories in Bihar to stop migration,” she said. “They have been in power for 20 years in the state and 11 years at the Centre. How many companies and industries came to Bihar in this time? What did they do to stop the attacks on Bihari migrant workers in other states?”

An uphill battle for Mahagathbandhan

Yadav blamed the mainstream media for amplifying the BJP’s “narrative” instead of questioning the BJP-led government of Maharashtra for a purported collapse of law and order in the state.

“When a crime is committed in West Bengal, Mamata Banerjee is grilled because she is the chief minister,” she said. “But the problem is that when a similar crime takes place in Bihar or Maharashtra, the Opposition is held responsible for it. All the questions are directed towards us.”

Manoj Manzil, a central committee member of the Communist Party of India (Marxist-Leninist) Liberation, echoed her complaints about the way the mainstream media treats the Opposition.

He had recently returned from a visit to Sangareddy district in Telangana, where more than three dozen workers had died as a result of a blast inside a chemical factory. Ten of the deceased workers were from Bihar, Manzil said.

Though he held a press conference in Patna after coming back from Telangana, barely any journalists turned up for it, he said. “Bihar’s workers had died in that accident,” said Manzil. “…Still, very few people in the media paid any attention to us.”

Manzil contended that the government of Bihar should take up the responsibility of migrant welfare and establish a commission to look into it. The Mahagathbandhan would put migration at the centre of its politics in this election, he said.

But Quadri of the Congress party was less hopeful about what they could do. He rued the decline of his party’s ground-level presence through outfits such as the volunteer-based Seva Dal, Indian Youth Congress and the National Students’ Union of India.

“When I was younger, we used to hit the streets for such issues and start agitations on our own,” he said. “But now our organisation has weakened which is why we are on the back-foot. The other problem is that we have very few workers left who work for the party out of a sense of loyalty. That is our weakness.”