Authors: Suketu Mehta
Kamath was a diplomatic sort, hospitably showing me around his terrain. He had the reputation of being honest. “There are very few people like Bhikhu in the Sena,” said Sunil. “He still has a black-and-white TV at home.” But he could be a street thug when the occasion warranted. And through his connections in the state government, he provided political cover for Sunil. “The ministers are ours. The police are in our hands. If anything happens to me, the minister calls,” boasted Sunil. He nodded. “We have powertoni.”
He repeated the word a few times. Sunil had hired a Muslim boy in the Muslim locality for his cable business. “He has twelve brothers and six sisters. I give him money and his brother liquor. He will even beat up his brother for me. I hire him for powertoni.” Likewise, the holy man who exorcised his daughter had powertoni. Then I realized what the word was: a contraction of
power of attorney
, the awesome ability to act on someone else’s behalf or to have others do your bidding, to sign documents, release wanted criminals, cure illnesses, get people killed.
Powertoni:
a power that does not originate in yourself; a power that you are holding on somebody else’s behalf. It is the only kind of power that a politician has; a power of attorney ceded to him by the voter. Democracy is about the exercise, legitimate or otherwise, of this powertoni. All over Mumbai, the Shiv Sena is the one organization that has powertoni. And the man with the greatest powertoni in Mumbai is the leader of the Shiv Sena himself, Bal Keshav Thackeray.
His monstrous ego was nurtured from infancy. Thackeray’s father considered himself a social reformer and anglicized his surname after William Makepeace Thackeray, the Victorian author of
Vanity Fair.
Thackeray’s mother had given birth to five girls and no sons. She prayed ardently to the family deity for a son and was blessed with Bal. He was therefore considered a navasputra, a boon directly from God. Thackeray, now in his seventies, is a cross between Pat Buchanan and Saddam Hussein. He has a cartoonist’s sense of the outrageous. He loves to bait foreign journalists with his professed admiration for Adolf Hitler. Thus, in an interview for
Time
magazine at the height of the riots, when he was asked if Indian Muslims were beginning to feel like Jews in Nazi Germany, his response was, “Have they behaved like the Jews in Nazi Germany? If so, there is nothing wrong if they are treated as Jews were in Nazi Germany.” A woman in the Jogeshwari slums observed, “Thackeray is more Muslim than I am.” He is
a man obsessed by Muslims. “He watches us, how we eat, how we pray. If his paper doesn’t have the word ‘Muslims’ in its headline, it won’t sell a single copy.” The organ of his party is the newspaper
Saamna
(Confrontation), which, in Marathi and Hindi editions, distributes Thackeray’s venom all over Maharashtra.
Thackeray, like anybody else in the underworld, is called by many names: the Saheb, the Supremo, the Remote Control, and, most of all, the Tiger—after the symbol of the Shiv Sena. The newspapers are full of pictures of him next to pictures of tigers. Public billboards around the city likewise display his face next to that of a real tiger. He has taken pains to be present at the inauguration of a Tiger Safari Park. He is a self-constructed mythic figure: He drinks warm beer, he smokes a pipe, he has an unusually close relationship with his daughter-in-law.
Sunil and the Sena boys described the Saheb for me. It was impossible to talk to him directly, they said; even an eloquent and fearless man like their shakha pramukh became tongue-tied in front of him, and then the Saheb would berate him. “Stand up! What’s the matter, why are you dumb?” It was impossible to meet his eyes. On the other hand: “He likes it if you are direct with him. You should have the daring to ask direct questions. He doesn’t like a man who says, Er . . . er. . . .”
Sunil’s colleague talked with great pride about the time every year on the Saheb’s birthday when they went to his bungalow and watched a long line of the city’s richest and most eminent line up to pay homage. “We watched all the big people—ministers, businessmen—bow and touch his feet. All the Tata-Birlas touch his feet and then talk to him.”
“Michael Jackson only meets presidents of countries. He came to meet Saheb,” his friend added. The president of the giant American corporation Enron had to go to Thackeray to get a power deal cleared. When Sanjay Dutt, son of the principled MP Sunil Dutt who resigned in disgust after the riots, was newly released from jail, his first stop, even before he went home, was to go to the Saheb and touch his feet. Every time one of the corporate gods or a member of the city’s film community or a politician from Delhi kowtowed before him, his boys got a thrill of pride, and their image of the Saheb as a powerful man, a man with powertoni, was reinforced.
They told me what to say if I met the Saheb. “Tell him, ‘Even today, in Jogeshwari, we are ready to die for you.’ Ask Saheb, ‘Those people who fought for you in the riots, for Hindutva, what can your Shiv Sena do for
them? Those who laid their lives down on a word from you? What can the old parents of the Pednekar brothers, who have no other children, do?’”
I felt like a go-between carrying messages from the lover to the loved one: “Tell her I am ready to die for her.” But there was a hint of reproach in their questions, as if they felt their Saheb had been neglecting them, these people who had died for his love. As if the blood sacrifice their comrades had made had gone unacknowledged.
I
N
M
ARCH
1995, the Shiv Sena, the majority partner in a coalition with the BJP, came into power in Maharashtra state (the city government had already belonged to them for a decade). The government took a look at the awesome urban problems plaguing the city, the infestation of corruption at all levels of the bureaucracy and the government, the abysmal state of Hindu—Muslim relations, and took decisive action. They changed the name of the capital city to Mumbai.
Once in power, the Sena decided to go after artists, especially Muslim artists. They led the charge against M. F. Husain, India’s best-known painter, for painting a nude portrait of the goddess Saraswati twenty years ago. While their government moved the courts, the Shiv Sena mouthpiece
Saamna
was busy mobilizing public opinion.
Saamna
declared that by painting the Hindu goddess nude, Husain had “displayed his innate Muslim fanaticism.” Then it offered a suggestion: “If he had any guts at all he should have painted the Prophet of Islam copulating with a pig.” The editor of
Saamna
, Sanjay Nirupam, an MP, asked for his pound of flesh: “Hindus, do not forget Husain’s crime! He is not to be forgiven at any cost. When he returns to Mumbai he must be taken to Hutatma Chowk and be publicly flogged until he himself becomes a piece of modern art. The same fingers that have painted our Mother naked will have to be cut off.” What was striking about the writer’s notions of punishment was that they seem to be derived straight from Shari’a—Islamic law.
The Shiv Sena’s notions of what is culturally acceptable in India show a distinct bias toward kitsch: Michael Jackson, for example. In November 1996, Thackeray announced that the first performance of the pop star in India would proceed with his blessings. This may or may not have had to do with the fact that the singer had promised to donate the profits from his concert—which eventually ran to more than a million dollars—to a Shiv
Sena—run youth employment project. The planned concert offended a number of people in the city, including Thackeray’s own brother, who saw something alien in the values the singer represented. “Who is Michael Jackson and how on earth is he linked to Hindu culture, which the Shiv Sena and its boss Thackeray talk about so proudly?”
The Shiv Sena Supremo responded, “Jackson is a great artist, and we must accept him as an artist. His movements are terrific. Not many people can move that way. You will end up breaking your bones.” Then the Saheb got to the heart of the matter. “And, well, what is culture? He represents certain values in America which India should not have any qualms in accepting. We would like to accept that part of America that is represented by Jackson.” The pop star acknowledged Thackeray’s praise by stopping off at the leader’s residence on his way from the airport to his hotel and pissing in his toilet. Thackeray led photographers with pride to the sanctified bowl.
The other kind of values Thackeray likes are those of the country’s industrial dynasties. Thackeray loves big business, and big business loves him. The Sena cut its teeth fighting Communists in the chawls and the factories. The Sena-controlled unions are much more dependable than the left-controlled ones. The party’s money comes not from the rank and file but from the city’s leading businessmen: a car dealer, an airline owner, a diamond merchant. Opposition to Thackeray comes not from the elite but from rural areas, from many middle-class Maharashtrians, and from Marathi writers. As for the courts, Thackeray is unfazed by their power. In June of 1993, the Saheb declared, “I piss on the court’s judgments. Most judges are like plague-ridden rats. There must be direct action against them.”
J
USTICE
S
RIKRISHNA WAS UNWELL
. He sat in his chambers in the neo-Gothic courts complex, massaged his side, and winced. His doctor had warned him not to get too involved in his work. For almost four years now, he had been a one-man truth squad investigating the causes and responsibilities in the riots. The government had charged him with this onerous duty soon after the riots. “After hearing those poor widows and orphans . . . and then the police saying all these people spontaneously went berserk and there was no planning, no coordination? I find it difficult to swallow. After
all, I am also a sensitive human being, not just a judge.” But he had none of the powers of a judge, since in this matter it was only a commission of inquiry meant to come up with a report and recommendations, not a court. If he were acting as a judge, he said, he would have slapped contempt charges on the police for lying through their teeth in front of him.
I asked him when he was likely to finish. He glanced at the calendar on the wall. “Six months at the most. I’m sick of it.” The Shiv Sena government suspended his work in January 1996. After a countrywide outcry, it reinstated the inquiry but hobbled Srikrishna by expanding its scope to include the bomb blasts as well. He had no power to call witnesses in the blasts, since the criminal part of that inquiry was being dealt with by a special antiterrorist court. The judge was of the sensible opinion that there should be two separate commissions of inquiry, one for the riots and one for the blasts. The whole system of commissions of inquiry was flawed, he said. The Jain Commission inquiry on the causes of the assassination of Rajiv Gandhi in 1991, for example, only began calling witnesses in 1995.
I asked Justice Srikrishna if anything good would come out of his labors. He thought a moment and then said, “If nothing else, it’s an act of catharsis.”
I
NDIA HAS NO NEED
to look outside for its models of tolerance. Bombay has hundreds of very different ethnic communities, most of whom heartily dislike one another. They have been tolerating one another for centuries, until now. Each community has an intimate knowledge of the codes of the others. My grandfather did not like Muslims in general, but he knew their customs, he wore well-cut sherwanis, and he told me exemplary stories about the Mughals. When, as a little boy, I asked him why Muslims ate meat, he explained, “That is their dharma.” The strictest Jains were the ministers of the Muslim Nawabs of Palanpur. They would administer their sovereign’s affairs, but they would not eat in his house. Maybe this ability to live together is possible precisely because of these carefully demarcated boundaries, these notions of ritual pollution. There is no possibility of a dangerous miscegenation.
All the people at the meeting in Radhabai Chawl had told me that this kind of communal rioting was unknown in the villages of India. In the villages, people were secure in their faith; they had no need to convince them
selves of their devotion by massacring infidels. As one of the hotheaded young men in Radhabai Chawl had explained, “In the village, if there are two Muslim families and there is a patel”—village headman—“the patel will take care of the Muslims. In the city, the politicians and the police harass Muslims.” In the villages, they said, you live very close to your neighbors and everybody knows everybody’s business and their families and predilections. There is very little mobility; you will have to live together all your lives and can’t afford blood feuds with your neighbors.
Around 5 percent of Bombay’s Muslims voted for the Sena in Maharashtra, in the 1995 elections, reasoning, as one Muslim put it to me, “when you give the thief the keys to the treasury he’ll never steal.” Very few issues affect the urban voter as much as crime. In the anonymous city, in the close quarters of the slum, the overriding interest is law and order, stability. More than water, more than housing, more than jobs, the Bombayite wants personal safety. It was in the Sena’s interest to prevent riots, and Asghar Ali Engineer, who runs an institute that studies communal conflict, said that since the Sena—BJP government came to power, the incidence of communal rioting had gone down sharply. It was not that Muslims felt safe under the Sena government; as Jalat Khan put it, “They have their finger in our ass.” The violence had been driven under the surface, controlled as deliberately as it was deliberately organized during the riots. Periodically, the Sena would show just what it was capable of if displeased—beating up a newspaper editor here, killing a recalcitrant tenant there. But it didn’t order young men like Sunil and Raghav to go out and lay waste to whole communities. It didn’t need this as long as it had the keys to the state’s treasury. It was quiet in the city; but it was a quiet waiting for the storm.
It is the greatest transfer of power in world history: the real devolution of power to the real majority of 1 billion people. A huge transfer had taken place when the British left India and Pakistan, but an even greater shift was to come. In fifty years, independent India has done what five thousand years of history could not do: It gave the people who are in the majority a voice in the running of the country. The Dalits (also known as untouchables), the “scheduled castes and tribes” (those specifically listed in the
constitution as historically having been discriminated against), and the “other backward classes” (those not listed in the schedule but considered deserving of affirmative action) form, as a bloc, the numerical majority in the country. For thousands of years the upper castes—Hindu, Muslim, and Christian—had kept them out of power. But toward the end of the twentieth century, their time had come. For the first time in history the lower castes came into the political process and had a say in who gets to rule them. In 1997, an untouchable, K. R. Narayanan, became president. Brahmin ministers scrambled to touch his feet and ask for his blessings. A bill has come up in parliament, whose passage is inevitable, sooner or later: It will reserve one-third of the seats in the highest legislative body in the land for women, an experiment unprecedented anywhere in the world.