When Bal Thackeray batted for Dawood. Why did you not cry then?

It's hypocrisy at its sublime best. When litterateurs and writers line up to return their awards, it smacks of nothing but double-standards. After all, where were these notables when the country saw the dark days of Emergency in 1975, when Muslims were massacred in Nellie in 1983, when a "giant tree" fell in Delhi in 1984 leading to the pogrom-like killings of 3,000 Sikhs, when the Centre banned The Satanic Verses even before the Islamic state of Iran could wake up to issue fatwa against Salman Rushdie, when Kashmiri Pandits were forced to flee the Valley in 1990, and as recent as the last few years when the University of Delhi junked AK Ramanujan's Three Hundred Ramayanas and Penguin decided to pulp Wendy Doniger's book on Hinduism? Why did the authors merely protest against the loony elements but gave the government of the day the benefit of doubt?

Before the dominant sections in the media and the intelligentsia jump up in their seats to brand this writer as "just another apologist of the fascist forces", I must say this hypocrisy isn't just confined to some woolly-headed Left-liberals, but is as much part of the Right-wing domain. As I ponder over this, I see the Shiv Sainiks barge into the BCCI office in Mumbai, shouting slogans against new BCCI chief Shashank Manohar for his endeavour to restart the India-Pakistan series. And as they claim that terror and cricket can't go together, the larger-than-life image of Bal Thackeray comes flashing into my mind. Holy Christ, I see him hosting Javed Miandad, the legendary Pakistani cricketer, at his home.

This, however, isn't just day-dreaming. The Thackeray Sr had actually hosted Miandad just a few years after the 1993 serial blasts simmered the city he loved so immensely. And as fate would have it, Miandad ended up marrying his son to the daughter of Dawood Ibrahim, the mastermind of the 1993 mayhem in Mumbai.

But this was not all. GR Khairnar, the then municipal commissioner of Mumbai, who set about demolishing Dawood's benami properties in the late 1990s, went on record to say that the late Shiv Sena leader had actually telephoned him to call off his demolition drive in the city. According to him, Thackeray told him that "anyone who donates to the Shiv Sena is a Shiv Sainik. Dawood, too, is a Shiv Sainik. I will not allow his property to be destroyed".

Interestingly, in the 1980s and '90s, it was Thackeray who had classified criminals in the name of religion. So much so that he would publicly declare his support for Arun Gawli, a home-grown Mumbai don, on the ground that he was "our" don, as against Dawood being "their" don!

Sujata Anandan brings out eloquently Thackeray's complete lack of ideological moorings in her book, Hindu Hriday Samrat: How the Shiv Sena Changed Mumbai Forever, as she mentions how much the late Shiv Sena leader loved having beer, and then conveniently turning it into the issue of nationalism.

"Every evening," she quotes Thackeray as saying, "[Sharad] Pawar sits down with his big industrialist friends and guzzles down several bottles of imported whiskey. I am a nationalist, I have only Indian beer." Amusingly, Thackeray, towards the end of his life, switched to wine. One wonders if he could maintain his nationalism while having wine.So, as the Shiv Sainiks threaten to have any truck with Pakistan today, do they know how their founder had opportunistically used the issue as per his convenience? And if they know and yet are doing all this, it's nothing but sheer hypocrisy, as deplorable as the act of those who didn't mind accepting a government recognition just two years after the ghastly 1984 pogrom, or keeping a deathly silence when Rushdie or Taslima Nasreen were hounded by Islamic fundamentalists, or even when the Supreme Court occasionally called for the Uniform Civil Code to be implemented in the country.

This is a unique scenario in India. Here the Left doesn't behave like the traditional Left of the West, which would have gleefully accepted the Uniform Civil Code, while the Right would have given it all sorts of names. Similarly, the Right is hardly the Right it should be. It just doesn't have any intellectual depth, provides no real academic alternative and, moreover, has been hijacked by loonies bereft of any ideological moorings. Now that's a tragedy.