Amitabh swept up in anti-immigrant backlash

By Krittivas Mukherjee

NEW DELHI (Reuters Life!) - India's biggest film star Amitabh Bachchan is at the centre of violent regional rivalries in the commercial hub of Mumbai, where a local political party is leading a campaign against millions of migrants who control the city's economy.

Bachchan, who hails from Uttar Pradesh and found fame and fortune in Mumbai, has become a lightening rod of criticism that immigrants have sidelined Maharashtrians, the city's original inhabitants.

Leading the charge is Raj Thackeray, head of Maharashtra Navnirman Sena (MNS), a party campaigning against "outsiders" which has targeted migrants from northern India that it accuses of robbing Maharashtrians of jobs.

Party workers have intimidated migrants, damaged vehicles and beaten up taxi drivers, most of whom are from Uttar Pradesh and Bihar, police say.

For generations, willing-to-do-anything migrants from these two states and elsewhere have flooded Mumbai, displacing Maharashtrians in jobs and taking control of the economy.

Thackeray last week called Bachchan ungrateful, saying proof of this lay in the fact that he was building a girls' school in Uttar Pradesh and not Maharashtra, whose capital is Mumbai.

Bachchan's wife, an actress-politician, stoked the controversy by saying she did not know who Raj Thackeray was.

On Sunday, MNS workers attacked theatres screening films in the northern Indian language of Bhojpuri, beat up dozens of migrants and damaged their vehicles.