From the Archives (January 19, 1971): Shiv Sena’s new look(From an editorial)

The great cities of India, with their trading and industrial concentrations, are highly cosmopolitan and it may even happen that the majority of the urban population are not local people. This is not surprising, especially in agricultural countries where the higher standard of life in the cities pulls in more people from the villages than the jobs available to them. In this sort of situation, political parties demanding priority for the sons of the soil are likely to nourish and the Shiv Sena in Bombay had grown powerful on this basis. But the Shiv Sena is by no means unique: with the growth of linguistic States, regionalism and parochialism have flourished all over the country especially in a period of food shortage and unemployment. Even the communist parties, despite their ideological claims, have developed in West Bengal and Kerala on the basis of local sub-nationalism and won success at the polls by raising the cry of discrimination by the Central Government which stands for the equal treatment of all regional groups.