Cousins Thackeray
Cousins Thackeray

Author: Dhaval Kulkarni

Publisher: Ebury Press

Published: 2019-09-20

Total Pages: 304

ISBN-13: 9780143448488

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They are first cousins twice over, but have had widely divergent political trajectories. One, an abrasive, fire-breathing demagogue, was seen as his uncle's political heir whose behavioural traits he cultivated. The other, an introvert, is at his best when plotting strategies on the drawing board rather than the rough-and-tumble of street-corner politics that his party is known for in India's financial capital. Starting out as brothers-in-arms, they had a bitter falling out over inheriting the party mantle. The younger cousin branched out on his own, hijacked the populist, ethno-centric plank of his parent party, putting his cousin-turned-political foe on the defensive. A series of miscalculations later, the boot seems to be on the other foot. The elder cousin has managed to keep his flock together and cemented his position as his late father Bal Thackeray's political heir, while the other, one of the most popular crowd-pullers in Maharashtra, is itching for an electoral comeback. The Cousins Thackeray evaluates the political careers of Shiv Sena president Uddhav Thackeray and Maharashtra Navnirman Sena (MNS) chief Raj Thackeray. It also examines questions about identity politics, and the social, cultural and economic matrix that catalysed the formation of the Shiv Sena and the MNS from it. Above all, it is a look at what makes the Thackeray cousins so integral to the politics of India, Maharashtra and Mumbai.

No Holds Barred
No Holds Barred

Author: Narayan Rane

Publisher: Harper Collins

Published: 2019-05-06

Total Pages: 192

ISBN-13: 9353029465

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Early in 1999, when Shiv Sena chief Balasaheb Thackeray decided to instal a new chief minister in Maharashtra, he was asked who the man of his choice was. 'New CM? Narayan Rane,' he replied, as though the question need not even have arisen. His pick was a mass leader who had first caught his attention as a teenager in a Mumbai suburb when Thackeray had just started his party in the 1960s. The committed Shiv Sainik with close access to the supremo, however, stormed out of the party and joined the Congress in 2005. In the years that followed, he was a powerful fixture in the cabinet of one of India's most politically significant states - always with a fighting chance of making a comeback as chief minister and perennially holding out an existential threat to not only his one-time bosses in the Shiv Sena but also the leaders of his own party. Today, having broken from the Congress too and been elected to the Rajya Sabha on a Bharatiya Janata Party nomination, he remains as unpredictable and aggressive as ever. In No Holds Barred, Narayan Rane looks back on the years he has spent in the dog-eat-dog world of Indian politics. Packed with revealing stories of his encounters with the who's who of the game in Maharashtra and at the Centre - ranging from the Thackerays, Pramod Mahajan, Gopinath Munde, Manohar Joshi, Vilasrao Deshmukh, Ashok Chavan and Devendra Fadnavis to Sharad Pawar, Ahmed Patel and Rahul and Sonia Gandhi - this is a truly candid and fearless tell-all that exposes the true nature of India's corridors of power.

The Tears of the Rajas
The Tears of the Rajas

Author: Ferdinand Mount

Publisher: Simon and Schuster

Published: 2015-03-12

Total Pages: 809

ISBN-13: 1471129454

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The Tears of the Rajasis a sweeping history of the British in India, seen through the experiences of a single Scottish family. For a century the Lows of Clatto survived mutiny, siege, debt and disease, everywhere from the heat of Madras to the Afghan snows. They lived through the most appalling atrocities and retaliated with some of their own. Each of their lives, remarkable in itself, contributes to the story of the whole fragile and imperilled, often shockingly oppressive and devious but now and then heroic and poignant enterprise. On the surface, John and Augusta Low and their relations may seem imperturbable, but in their letters and diaries they often reveal their loneliness and desperation and their doubts about what they are doing in India. The Lows are the family of the author's grandmother, and a recurring theme of the book is his own discovery of them and of those parts of the history of the British in India which posterity has preferred to forget. The book brings to life not only the most dramatic incidents of their careers - the massacre at Vellore, the conquest of Java, the deposition of the boy-king of Oudh, the disasters in Afghanistan, the Reliefs of Lucknow and Chitral - but also their personal ordeals: the bankruptcies in Scotland and Calcutta, the plagues and fevers, the deaths of children and deaths in childbirth. And it brings to life too the unrepeatable strangeness of their lives: the camps and the palaces they lived in, the balls and the flirtations in the hill stations, and the hot slow rides through the dust. An epic saga of love, war, intrigue and treachery, The Tears of the Rajas is surely destined to become a classic of its kind.