Verbal communication — speaking and listening — is fundamental to being human. To do so with grace is fundamental to being civilized. And the ability to communicate publicly and collectively is fundamental to a democracy. Slapping, kicking and wrecking public property are a form of communication that is less than human by all three counts. Hence the uncouthness of the four legislators doing precisely that in the Maharashtra assembly. They have offended against humanity, civilization, democracy and the Constitution. The incident affords an opportunity to reflect on the decline in India’s culture of democracy. In their violence against a colleague for taking his oath in Hindi instead of Marathi, the four legislators from the Maharashtra Navnirman Sena have failed the people they represent in two ways. First, they have projected their own and their party’s bigotry upon the will of the people. Second, by getting themselves suspended for four years, they have rendered their constituencies unrepresented in the legislature for this period. They deserve worse punishment than suspension, and no country, and no people, deserves to be led by such leaders. Between the four of them, these men have attacked north Indian industrial workers in Maharashtra, dug up a cricket pitch in Mumbai to disrupt sporting ties with Pakistan, brought the city to a standstill several times, and fought with election security personnel over voting machines. This reduces the entire idea of democracy, of popular representation, to a dangerous and disgraceful travesty.

The MNS, together with its ‘parent’ organization, has been running a parallel regime in Mumbai and Maharashtra that is an obnoxious inversion, or perversion, of democracy. Thus Mumbai’s legendary resilience has had to be directed as much against its internal enemies as against threats from outside the country. An old and complex nexus of power, money, corruption and terror holds this system together and keeps some of Mumbai’s most iconic citizens in its mercy. It is a shame that the spirit of enterprise, openness and cosmopolitanism that informs most Mumbaikars has to resist or ignore continually the brutality of the MNS’s and the Shiv Sena’s regressive politics, which presumes to act on behalf of those people whose will it oppresses and appropriates in the name of regional allegiances.