Sonia rally: Parking on Sena turf

For in recent years, Shivaji Park has come to be associated more with the Sena tiger than with the Congress. The last rally held here by the Congress was addressed by then Prime Minister Rajiv Gandhi during the Congress centenary celebrations.

Even in Rajiv’s lifetime, Shivaji Park fell into disuse by the Congress –the former prime minister chose to campaign across the metropolis through corner meetings for both the 1990 Assembly elections and the Lok Sabha polls in 1991 just before his death. Thackeray, therefore, was not far off the mark, when he gloated, following Madhavrao Scindia’s meetingsin Maharashtra, that "they are afraid to hold meetings in maidans. They can only pack halls with party workers and will never get a jansaagar like I do."

The tide might now have turned, as evidenced by Sonia’s meetings across Maharashtra that appear to have broken even Indira Gandhi’s records. Her Nagpur rally last Sunday was said to have surpassed even her mother-in-law’s comeback crowds, while clearly overtaking Atal Behari Vajpayee’s 80,000-strong meeting on the same maidan a couple of days previously.

Not surprisingly, it led L K Advani to cancel his public meeting in Nagpur on Thursday rather than be faced with the inevitable comparisons.

The thought appears to have occurred to the Sena as well, considering that Sonia’s subsequent meeting in Aurangabad was said to have bust even Thackeray’s in a city which he regards as the heart of his Sena-for-the-Marathas movement launched in the wake of Maratha anger against the renaming of the Marathwada University after Dr BabasahebAmbedkar.

According to reliable sources, the Sena was considering shifting the venue of its final electoral rally on February 25, to be jointly addressed by Vajpayee and Thackeray to the Chowpatty sands. Though that plan has now been dropped, the party has allotted "quotas" to all shakha pramukhs who will have to mobilise a certain number of trucks and pack it with people to outdo Sonia’s Sunday rally. There is another dimension to the numbers game. Thackeray’s "sea of humanity" has rarely been that for all the hype though there have been few challengers to his claims. On at least two occasions he has had to eat humble pie, forced into an embarrassing situation by Buddhist Dalits. The first occasion was in 1986 when during the course of the Sena’s agitation against the Maharashtra government’s publication of Dr Ambedkar’s Riddles of Hinduism, Thackeray led a morcha, claimed to be one lakh-strong. Three days later, the Ambedkarites also led a lakh-strong morcha. Only the numbers that turned upseemed almost three times those garnered by the Sena.

More recently, in January 1996 after a sparsely attended rally of Hindu Dalits organised by the Sena-BJP the previous evening, the unity rally of the Republican Party of India had Shivaji Park bursting at the seams. The crowds outnumbered even Thackeray’s famed annual Dassera rallies. Sonia’s rally tomorrow is expected to be packed by these very Dalits who now have an electoral pact with the Congress. It is not surprising, then, that after Mahatma Gandhi’s Mani Bhavan, Sonia will make just one stop before her rally: Chaityabhoomi — Dr B R Ambedkar’s samadhi which Dalits equate with Rajghat.