Mumbai: Five months after Eknath Shinde took over as Maharashtra Chief Minister, Hindutva ideologue Sambhaji Bhide visited his office in the state secretariat.
As Bhide came out of the Mantralaya office, a woman television reporter placed a boom microphone before him and asked him about the visit. Bhide, dressed in a typical white shirt and traditional white ‘topi,’ tartly said, “Wear a bindi first. Then I will speak to you.”
The state women’s commission sent Bhide a notice and there were a lot of angry responses from leaders of Opposition parties. CM Shinde, however, did not utter a word.
For Shinde and many other politicians in Maharashtra, mostly from the Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) and both the factions of the Shiv Sena, Bhide is not just a Hindutva ideologue or founder of the outfit Shri Shivpratishthan Hindustan. He is ‘Bhide Guruji’, a figure they publicly like to put on a pedestal and revere.
This “guruji” is now once again in the eye of a storm, named in multiple police cases for allegedly making derogatory remarks about Mahatma Gandhi, Mahatma Jyotiba Phule, Gautam Buddha and Sai Baba.
Across Maharashtra, there have been protests against him as well as for him.
And this time, while politicians from the ruling coalition are making the right noises about not tolerating insults to national and state heroes, the statements have been coming with a rider. That Sambhaji Bhide is doing the important work of “taking the message of Hindutva to people and connecting Shivaji Maharaj and his forts with the Bahujan samaj”, as Deputy Chief Minister Devendra Fadnavis said in the legislative assembly last week.
“We consider Sambhaji Bhide to be our guruji. What is the problem?” Fadnavis said when Congress and Nationalist Congress Party (NCP) MLAs demanded that the state government take action against Bhide for his alleged objectionable remarks about Gandhi.
Bhide has a large following among the ‘Bahujans’ — the Other Backward Classes, Scheduled Castes and Scheduled Tribes — and it is this reach that makes political parties think twice before directly censuring him.
Speaking to ThePrint, Sanjay Patil, researcher with Mumbai University’s politics and civics department, said, “Sambhaji Bhide has a mass following. His speeches, remarks reach different pockets of the state through short clips on platforms such as WhatsApp.
“He has popularity, and parties counting on the Hindutva vote and the Bahujan vote don’t want to stick their neck out and lose such a large follower group.”
Moreover, Patil added, “nobody wants to be on the wrong side of any issue related to Hindutva”.
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Manohar alias Sambhaji Bhide
Manohar Bhide, who is based in Sangli, is said to have taken the name ‘Sambhaji’ after Maratha warrior king Chhatrapati Shivaji’s son, Chhatrapati Sambhaji.
Bhide has the image of being a simple man, wearing cotton clothes with a vermillion teeka on his forehead, often walking barefoot and travelling around Sangli on a bicycle.
He was earlier with the Rashtriya Swayamsevak Sangh (RSS) and then broke away to start the Shri Shivpratishthan Hindustan. Through this platform, Bhide puts forth his ideology about Hindutva and Chhatrapati Shivaji’s teachings in the form of lectures delivered across Maharashtra.
He liberally uses foul words about Hindus as well their “enemies”, pits an “us-versus-them” narrative, and slams the supposed tolerance of the Hindu religion, interspersing his speeches with episodes highlighting the greatness of Chhatrapati Shivaji and Sambhaji, quoting from the abhangas of 17th-century Saint Tukaram and the Bhagavad Gita.
Bhide’s criticism of Mahatma Gandhi, too, is not new.
In one of his speeches in 2015 at Bhosari in the Pune district, Bhide said, “The great man on our currency notes gave us a mantra — ‘Hindu Muslim bhai bhai’. But that made Hindustan go down the drain. Forgetting the teachings of Chhatrapati Shivaji and Sambhaji Maharaj, he made this a nation of eunuchs… Why do we keep criticising [Hyderabad MP Asaduddin] Owaisi when we ourselves are so shameless?”
This time, according to Fadnavis’ statement in the assembly, in a speech at Amravati, Bhide referred to two books supposedly written by Congress leaders. He made a member of his outfit read out a few controversial paragraphs about Gandhi from one of the two books, ‘The Koran and the Fakir’.
In 2008, Bhide sparked protests in Sangli over the screening of Bollywood film Jodha Akbar, leading to the police resorting to lathi-charge. Bhide’s supporters, in response, indulged in stone-pelting. At that time, the Congress-Nationalist Congress Party (NCP) government in Maharashtra was accused of going soft on him.
NCP’s R.R. Patil, who hailed from Sangli, was the state home minister then and was said to be among the politicians close to Bhide, sources from multiple parties said.
Bhide first made national headlines when Modi visited him while campaigning for the 2014 Maharashtra elections and praised him as an inspiration.
The next time was in 2018, when he was named as an accused in the Bhima Koregaon violence. However, in March that year, Fadnavis, then the CM, made a statement in the Maharashtra legislative assembly that there was no evidence to link Bhide to the Bhima Koregaon violence.
During some of his speeches, Bhide has also reportedly made outlandish statements, such as how eating mangoes from his gardens have helped some couples give birth to sons.
During the Covid-19 pandemic, in 2021, he first said people who died of the virus are “not fit to live”, and then that the world would be free from Covid only if the Maharashtra government allows the annual Ashadhi Pandharpur Wari pilgrimage to be held.
However, despite all these controversies, this is perhaps the first time that the Opposition parties are loudly speaking up against Bhide’s statements, with leaders from the Congress and Sharad Pawar-led NCP also hitting the streets in protest, demanding Bhide’s arrest.
Congress leader Anant Gadgil told ThePrint, “Our reaction is louder because his statements have gotten increasingly provocative. We know this is a part of the BJP’s strategy to let people like him create controversies so that attention is diverted from real sociopolitical issues.”
‘Taking Hindutva to the Bahujan samaj’
Members of the Shri Shivpratishthan Hindustan maintain that their organisation is apolitical and many of its members at the grassroots are affiliated with different political parties, whether it is the BJP, factions of the Shiv Sena, or the Congress and the Nationalist Congress Party (NCP).
Multiple members of the outfit told ThePrint that senior leaders from across parties regularly participate in its campaigns and events such as the Durgamata Daud, a procession that starts from a local temple and concludes at the other end of the town, organised across multiple cities annually during the Navratri festival, or Gadkot Mohim, a mountaineering expedition to Chhatrapati Shivaji’s historic forts.
Sanjay Jadhar, Pune district chief of Shivpratishthan Hindustan, told ThePrint, “There is no problem if someone opposes what Guruji says, but the way he is being opposed, the manner in which all of it is happening, is inappropriate.”
“Our work doesn’t involve politics, so I don’t want to look at all of this politically,” he added.
Last week, Jadhar and other members of the Shivpratishthan Hindustan in Pune submitted a letter to the Pune district collector Jyoti Kadam condemning Bhide’s “defamation” by some people for their “political selfishness”, and urged the administration to take strict action against anyone trying to defame him in the future.
Political analyst Hemant Desai said the RSS, the ideological parent of the BJP, was initially seen as a Brahminical outfit, but over time they tried to consolidate the rest of the society in the mainstream under one Hindutva umbrella.
“However, it was always with the unsaid understanding that the mainstream is the upper caste. Bhide has grown in an RSS background. What Sambhaji Bhide has done is that the entire Bahujan samaj was given the identity of Hindus,” he added. “Explaining Chhatrapati Shivaji’s history in relation to atrocities by Muslims, popularising Hindutva ideologue V.D. Savarkar among the Bahujan samaj.”.
Added Desai, “And as Sambhaji Bhide’s ‘Hindukaran’ kept on increasing, the BJP’s base among Other Backward Classes in Maharashtra also kept swelling.”
(Edited by Sunanda Ranjan)
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