As so often, the Hitler comparison was an exaggeration. However, given Thackeray's pronouncements, you can see why he reached for it. Fanatics threatened Husain and all associated with him with violence. They destroyed his paintings at every opportunity. When a TV network asked its viewers whether Husain should receive India's highest honour, youths from the Army of the Hindu Empire stormed the studios. In 1998, other militants attacked Husain's Bombay home and wrecked it. Thackeray justified them and identified with them. "If Husain can step into Hindustan, what is wrong if we enter his house?" He was redefining India as "Hindustan" and turning Husain into an enemy alien in his own city. 

At some level, the Thackeray clan may have understood that it was cynically whipping up a mob. Vipul Patel, Husain's friend and adviser, told me that he was in a meeting with Thackeray's son and political heir when Husain walked in, unexpected and unannounced. The sectarian did not start screaming but was slightly in awe of the artist and treated him with the utmost politeness. 

The logic of retaliatory sectarianism could not be gainsaid, however. It dictated that when Islamists offered a reward to anyone who would kill Danish cartoonists who had offended them, Hindutva politicians offered a reward to "patriots" who would chop off Husain's hands.

Not that Islamists could leave Husain alone either. They turned on him for directing a film in which an actor sang a song to an actress whose lyrics included words from the Koran.

They used black propaganda tactics against him. They renamed an untitled line drawing of the goddess Durga with a lion, which even the most sexually deprived or depraved among the gallery-going public could never find stimulating, and pretended Husain had called it Durga in union with a lion. They could then accuse him of producing blasphemous pornography, although it is far from clear from the picture if sexual union of any kind is taking place.