Mumbai: Raj Thackeray has taken down his documentary on Prime Minister Narendra Modi and industrialist Gautam Adani from his social media handles, and he made no secret of why.
The Maharashtra Navnirman Sena chief said on Sunday that he had deleted it following a request from the Mumbai Police Commissioner. He did not disclose the grounds the request cited, and there was no immediate word from the city police on what provision was invoked.
That a political documentary can be pulled down after one phone call from a police commissioner is the part worth pausing on. Maharashtra's opposition has spent months arguing that the state's police machinery is being used to manage political messaging. The MNS is not part of that opposition bloc, which makes the sequence harder to slot into the usual template.
For Thackeray, the calculation is local. His party has been out of the Assembly since 2019 and is fighting for the space that the Shiv Sena's two factions now occupy. A documentary naming the Prime Minister and India's largest port-to-power conglomerate was always going to travel further than a rally speech, which is presumably why it was made.
The content of the film, its view counts before deletion and whether copies survive on other platforms are all unclear.
There is a second reading. Announcing the deletion publicly, rather than quietly removing the post, converts a compliance into a statement. It tells his own cadre that he was asked, and it tells the government that he complied without a fight.
Mumbai has a long history of this particular transaction between the police and the political class, and each side has learned to read the other's signals. What is new here is the speed and the public accounting.
There is no information that any case has been registered or any court proceeding begun in the matter. What the request precisely consisted of has also not been made clear.
Whether the documentary returns in another form is not known. Neither is whether the police will say anything at all.