Authors: Suketu Mehta
Among the candidates Sunil is friendly with is the Congress Party candidate from a nearby constituency, Mama, who is a cable businessman and leading gangster in the Chotta Rajan syndicate. Mama is all of thirty years old; he was born in Bombay. His father came here from the caste-ridden north sixty years ago. He comes from a backward caste, but Bombay liberated his family. “In the village, all the lower castes used to look up to the upper castes, be their servants. Here, they are the bosses.” They have come forward in the city, through politics.
Mama points out the advantages of backing him to his contributors. “Give five lakhs,” he says to a potential donor in the construction business. “And I’ll get your five lakhs back to you within five days of getting elected. I’ll pass one toilet block.” The contract to build it would go to the donor. Sunil chortles that Mama’s main campaign promise to his constituency is: “If you elect me, you’ll be free from goondas.” As the boss of the thugs, he is running a sort of protection racket for the entire constituency. Since the police have failed so miserably at curbing extortion, the public might as well elect the extortionist himself to guarantee protection. It is the same survival tactic that led 5 percent of the city’s Muslims to vote for their blood enemy, the Sena, in the 1995 election.
Meanwhile, from Malabar Hill, a friend in the fashion industry calls me on my mobile with a question. He has decided to vote for the first time in his life today. “I’m in your old neighborhood,” he says. He is entering Walshingham House School, where the voting station is located. “There are two boxes in front of me. One says Lok Sabha, one says Vidhan Sabha. Which is the Center and which is the State?” he asks me, referring in the first instance to the national elections.
Nobody in Jogeshwari would need to ask such a question. I ask Mama whose city he thinks Bombay is: that of the rich on Malabar Hill, or of the backward castes who are emerging now?
He laughs. “Bombay is the vadapav eaters’ city; otherwise it is nobody’s city.”
The country has gone through three general elections in as many years. It is an agonized, continuous reaffirmation of loyalty to the democratic process; again and again, the country has to prove itself a democracy. The patience of the people amazes me. Year after year, with no real choices
ahead of them, the country still trudges dutifully to the polls. In 1991, 57 percent of the electorate voted; in 1996, 58 percent; and in 1998, 62 percent of the 600 million voters of India exercised their right to vote. There is no good reason for the 1999 election, since after enormous expense and months of campaigning in the heat, the government in Delhi remains pretty much what it was before the election. People had been expecting a mass boycott this time; although the turnout diminishes slightly, people still stand in long lines in the heat in front of the polling stations. It is perhaps a national version of dharma. People do not ask why they are voting; they just know it is their duty to do so.
In Maharashtra, the Sena—BJP alliance, which has been in power in the state since 1995, loses the state elections in 1999. They had promised to build 4 million houses for people in the slums and ended up building fewer than four thousand.
“When are you going to meet Bal Thackeray?” people keep wanting to know.
“On my way to the airport,” I reply. I don’t want to stick around in Bombay if I somehow annoy the Saheb during an interview. So it is not until a month before I am to move back to New York, after my bags are packed, my ticket bought, that I finally meet Thackeray. A Marathi newspaper editor, who knows him well, takes me to meet the Supremo on a June evening in 2000.
There is a mass of security guards outside the bungalow. He has a small army guarding him: a total of 179 police officers, including a battalion of 154 constables, 19 subinspectors, 3 police inspectors, and 3 assistant commissioners of police. The state government, Sena or Congress, gives him police vehicles and a bulletproof automobile to travel in; his mansion in Bandra is fortified and guarded round the clock at state expense. The Tiger roars only from behind the safety of his guards.
The bungalow is one of many in a government project for artists—Kalanagar—toward the rear of a quiet lane in Bandra. It is painted in white and built in the standard Bombay glossy style, calculated to give an impression of opulence grander than the physical space it occupies. The Thackerays are from a lower-middle-class background; they have no idea how to
spend all the money they’ve made. They buy big cars, like Pajeros, unsuitable for Bombay roads. The mansion, the editor tells me, is filled with stacks of rupees.
A metal detector is run over my person, my bag is examined, and we are shown to a hall filled with huge pictures of Shivaji. There are many chairs facing a door. All the people seated on the chairs are staring at the door, willing it to open. Barely have we taken our seat than the door opens just for us, and we are shown into a small receiving room ahead of all the others. This room is filled with many large pictures of Thackeray’s deceased wife. Her death left him adrift. Then his daughter-in-law became close to him; she had recently been asked to leave the bungalow, at the insistence of Uddhav, one of his sons. There are also a couple of plaques, a small white one on the coffee table—
I LIKE PEOPLE WHO CAN GET THE THINGS DONE!
—and a bigger one, in gold and red lettering, NO ADMISSION FOR “NO.”
A couple of minutes after we enter the receiving room, the Saheb comes in. “Jai Maharashtra,” he says, and the editor returns his salutation. Then I shake the hand of the one man most directly responsible for ruining the city I grew up in.
He sits in an armchair next to an end table, on which is a statue of a Masai warrior carrying a spear and shield.
I start. “I am writing a book about Bombay—”
“Mumbai,” he corrects me.
“Mumbai,” I agree.
He speaks to me in fractured English. He is a thin, bony man of average height, with a thick suspiciously jet-black crop of hair, wearing very large square spectacles. He is clad in a cream silk kurta and lungi, with matching sandals. Periodically he reaches up under his kurta and a ripping sound comes forth; he is loosening the Velcro attachments of a girdle, worn for a back problem. Around 1990, Thackeray had a religious reawakening. He shed his western clothes and started wearing a kurta and lungi, usually saffron. He also started wearing rudraksha malas, long strings of beads, around his neck.
The air-conditioning is kept low for his comfort, and sweat pools in the channel between my lip and my nose. The tea, as in other Sena offices, is vigorous; it can incite insurrection. Thackeray drinks from a glass of milky gray broth. He lights a cigar, holding it in a cigar holder. I remark that
they’re Cohibas. He asks if anybody smokes in the United States. I tell him that Cuban cigars are embargoed there.
Why? he asks. I try explaining the embargo. He digests the information. He is intrigued. “Now if American girl might have married to a Cuban boy, then what they do? They are living there for years, then what? They ask them to part?”
People can come, but not their products, I explain.
“That’s a good one,” he comments. “Good idea.” I am afraid of what I might have set in motion.
The Saheb gives me a little story about his childhood. His father was a teacher—“he was a social reformist, he was a writer, he was everything.” His mother wanted Bal to be a government servant, at that time a prestigious occupation, but his father said, “My son will never be a clerk. I want him to be an artist.” And his father’s word was the law in the household: “When Father’s order came, we wet our pants.” He bought his son a bulbul-tara, a stringed musical instrument played with both hands. Bal proved to be an inept musician. “I tried and tried. One this, this hand would work and the other would stop working; if the other would work, then this one here would totally—” His father got furious and pressed his son’s hand hard into the strings, pushed down till it started bleeding. “I started crying, and my father said, ‘Get out from here! This sala will not learn.’”
Around this time, World War II broke out. Bal would look at Banbury’s cartoons on the front page of the
Times of India
, and his father would watch him. He instructed his son to make sketches every day, which he would inspect in the evenings. Along the way, Bal got a sense of the larger political struggles around the city, whose rule was in dispute between the Gujaratis and the Maharashtrians. The Maharashtrians wanted their own state, with Bombay as its capital. Bal would listen as his father held meetings of the Samyukta Maharashtra movement in their house in Dadar and started his career as a cartoonist at the
Free Press Journal.
In 1960 he launched his own cartoon weekly, which turned into a forum for the Sons of the Soil, the term for the Maharashtrian movement. (Actually, the soil in Bombay, much of it between the original seven islands, was filled in by the British.)
In the battle for Bombay, the Maharashtrians won out over the Gujaratis; in 1960, they got their state and the city. But still Bal’s readers
were complaining, writing him letters. “We got Maharashtra, we got Mumbai, but what about our jobs?” One of them gave him a telephone directory to see for himself. “And to my surprise my goodness it was full of South Indian executives, and you find out there are more pages for Patels. And lot of Shahs.” And that was how he started his movement: as an employment organization. It was a war fought over the right to be a typist. They finally managed to get up to 80 percent of jobs reserved for Maharashtrians, but they were always the lowest 80 percent: stenographers and clerks. “That will not give you justice. Unless you come in power it will not be done,” he realized. And so, in 1966, Thackeray reluctantly formed a political party, holding his nose. All political parties are responsible for the mess that the city is in today, Thackeray says, “including my Shiv Sena party also.” That is due to the lamentable need to garner votes, which disgusts him. “For the sake of votes you are going to ruin the country and the city? Is it?”
Even after the Sena entered politics, its focus on reservations for Maharashtrians was not lost. In 1998, the Maharashtra government turned down an affiliate of the Wharton School that wanted to set up in New Bombay, because the school refused to reserve 10 percent of the seats for Maharashtrian students. Bangalore and Hyderabad promptly jumped in with offers that included no such strings, and Bombay lost the school, which could have been the linchpin of revival in New Bombay.
The editor had told me how startled he was to find out, in a meeting with Thackeray, that the Saheb lacked a basic knowledge of the geography of the state of Maharashtra. The Sena is essentially a Bombay-based party where Maharashtrians are rapidly disappearing. Bombay itself can no longer be called a Maharashtrian city. The Maratha population of the city was 51 percent at the time of the Samyukta Maharashtra movement. The people employed in the mills were mostly Maharashtrian; with the decline of the mills, they had to leave Bombay to find jobs. Maharashtrians now comprise only 42 percent of the city’s residents; 19 percent are Gujarati, and the rest are Muslim, North Indian, Sindhi, South Indian, Christian, Sikh, Parsi, and everybody else. As of July 2000, all of the MPs that the Sena has nominated to the Rajya Sabha, the upper house of parliament, are non-Maharashtrians: Gujaratis, Bengalis, Parsis, North Indians. The Sena is trying to expand its base, to include Hindus generally, because it knows it can no longer stay in power just on the basis of the Maharashtrian vote.
I ask Thackeray if Mumbai is still a Maharashtrian city. He responds
immediately and aggressively. “One thing. Nobody can dare separate Mumbai from Maharashtra. We still have that fighting spirit. As long as Shiv Sena is guaranteed forever nobody will do it.” It is obvious I have touched a nerve. Much of this struggle is over a question of place: Who has the right to live in Bombay? The Shiv Sena is primarily a party of exclusion. It sought from the beginning to say, This or that group does not belong here. It was the Gujaratis first, then the South Indians, then the Communists, then the Dalits, and now the Muslims. Bombay is, like any other Indian city, full of people in search of answers to the question “Who am I?” and who believe that the answer, when they find it, will allow them also to answer the other question: “Who is not I?” People like Thackeray approach the question backward. If they answer the question “Who is not I?” they will, by a process of elimination, find the answer to “Who am I?”
The editor leaves, and I am alone with the Saheb. Why do people keep coming to Bombay? I ask.
“Here crime has a good scope,” he answers. “You can earn without doing anything. It can be pickpocketing. Good scope in railways.” Extortion is also a growth industry in Bombay. “Telephone somebody. ‘I want so much I am coming, my man will be there.’” And out of sheer fear they will pay up. Here is a novel answer to what attracts migrants to Bombay: Crime is good business here. It has a measure of truth to it. The ratio of police to criminals, he points out, is very low. “This menace”—he pronounces it
menaas
—“is increasing, this hutment-dweller menaas. You can play hide-and-seek with the police. Once you do something, even a murder, even a murder, you just simply murder anybody and just walk away, just walk. And go into the zopadpatti.” As had his men, Sunil and the others, during the riots: murdered and walked away into the zopadpatti—the slums.
He tells me what can save Bombay. “Migration has to be controlled. The Bangladesh Muslims to be driven out, not only out from Mumbai but outside the country, back to Bangladesh. Find out who are the miscreants, mischief-mongers as far as ISI”—the Pakistani intelligence service—“is concerned. Hang them. Don’t send them back. Hang them. These are my straight policies.” He speaks admiringly of the strict policies of the Americans when anyone applies for a visa, and contrasts it with the ease of obtaining an “emigrant permit” to come to India. Thackeray says there needs to be a visa system to enter Bombay. Many of the people living in Malabar Hill, who would not otherwise support him, agree with this.