Indian politician: Stop calling Mumbai 'Bombay' -- or else
MUMBAI, India -- What's in a name? Everything, according to a powerful party boss in Mumbai and his hordes of violent followers.
Bal Thackeray, a regional politician who 13 years ago led the charge to change the name of India's financial capital from Bombay to Mumbai, has demanded that city fathers drop 'Bombay' from prominent institutions where the name still lingers -- or else.
"We are warning people intoxicated by the name of Bombay," Thackeray wrote in an editorial Wednesday in the newspaper published by his Shiv Sena party. "This warning should be sufficient. Those that don't understand the warning may find they don't have a path to escape tomorrow."
Thackeray has been linked to waves of mob violence in the past, so police are taking his threats seriously.
He has high-profile targets in his sights: the Bombay Stock Exchange, the Bombay High Court, the elite Bombay Scottish School and countless restaurants, shops and offices.
More than two dozen Shiv Sena supporters were arrested Tuesday while demonstrating outside the stock exchange. Earlier, activists broke the signs of textile manufacturer Bombay Dyeing while another group scrawled "Mumbai Scottish" across the walls of the Bombay Scottish School.
Using the Shiv Sena newspaper as a mouthpiece, Thackeray led a nationalist campaign to drop what he calls the colonially tainted name Bombay -- a Portuguese derivation of "beautiful bay" -- and replace it with Mumbai, after the local Marathi language name for a Hindu goddess. The city is the capital of Maharashtra state.
Civic leaders dismissed Thackeray's call as an inflammatory stunt. Bombay Stock Exchange officials said they were not considering a name change.
"This is purely an attempt to pressurize institutions," said V.M. Sukhthankar of the local civic group Agni. "They are trying to raise useless, sentimental issues ... that will temporarily excite and inflame people. Why don't they speak about poverty, drought, instead of raking up baseless issues?"
India went through a wave of name-changing in the 1990s for cities large and small, including Chennai, formerly Madras, and Kolkata, formerly Calcutta.
The name "Mumbai" has been widely adopted here, though it's still common to hear "Bombay," especially in cosmopolitan corners of the city.
In the editorial, headlined "Slaves of Bombay," Thackeray said those who use the old name "are against Maharashtra and Mumbai."
"I don't know why they don't like the name Mumbai ... the whole world has accepted Mumbai," wrote Thackeray, a former newspaper cartoonist.
Thackeray, 82, is an eccentric leader who poses with tiger skins and oversized sunglasses in his campaign posters. At the height of his power a decade ago, he had a virtual army at his fingertips and could shut down this city of more than 18 million with a phone call.
The Shiv Sena -- which means Shiva's Army -- has lost some of its influence in recent years. But they remain a force in Mumbai, where they combine Hindu fundamentalism with regional chauvinism and occasional violence.
Their primary objective is to keep people who are not from Maharashtra out of the state. They often attack north Indian migrants working as taxi drivers and laborers in Mumbai.
(Copyright 2008 by The Associated Press. All Rights Reserved.)
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