Authors: Suketu Mehta
Thackeray has never read a book, the editor tells me. Indeed, I don’t spot a single book in what I see of Thackeray’s bungalow. His points of reference are movies and cartoons. He gets into trouble with writers—with Pu La Deshpande, when he compares him, punning on his name, to a falling bridge; with the All-India Marathi Litterateurs’ Conference, when he withdraws their pathetic subsidy and jeers at them as “bulls on sale”—but he likes and is liked by people in the movie business, his natural kin. He feels comfortable with images and with action, but not with ideas. His conversation is studded with references to Hindi movies and such things as children’s nursery rhymes. His answers, at times, don’t seem to flow from my questions; they are not responses to them so much as they are stray thoughts that have been generated deep within his brain and are given free rein to surface at that particular moment.
What the editor had pointed out, and what strikes me now, is the mismatch of scale: this small-minded man controlling this very big city. “He lacks what George Bush called ‘the vision thing,’” the editor had observed. The Saheb’s solutions to the enormous problems of the city are precise and petty. There should be water in the hydrants so rats can be flushed out. Valentine’s Day should be banned so our youth stays pure. There is no overall explanation for what ails the city, beyond general complaints about excess migration and Muslims. There is no understanding of historical process, of the vast and delicate gears and sprockets that power the city’s massive economic engine. All he is concerned about is that his people are not getting rich; his solution is to demand, with the threat of mob violence, that a percentage of the jobs simply be set aside for them.
His approach is ad hoc, an immediate, forceful response to the present. Even Hindutva, which is getting developed into a full-fledged theory of race, has been borrowed from the Hindu nationalists of the RSS and the BJP. There is no connection made between two or three events, no theory, grand or minor, that he can use to explain what connects them.
In 1984, Thackeray invited a veteran Communist leader, S. A. Dange, to address a Sena meeting. Although Dange was a bitter enemy of the Sena, the men had respect for each other because they both saw themselves fighting for labor rights and had participated in the Samyukta Maharashtra
movement. Dange got up and told the Sena what he thought of them: “The Shiv Sena does not have a theory, and it is impossible for an organization to survive sans a theory.”
The next day, Thackeray responded. “He merely displayed arrogance by suggesting that the Shiv Sena didn’t have a theory and said an organization can’t survive without a theory. Then how has our organization survived for the last eighteen years?” Then he added, knife blade plunging for the final thrust, deadly because so true for the old Communist, “And how is it that, despite a theory, your organization is finished?”
The Sena had survived, flourished, because of a lack of theory. It adapted itself to changing theories; it was vaguely capitalist now, but at one point in the early 1980s Thackeray had been entranced with “practical socialism.” The Sena had always hitched a ride aboard the theory of the day: anticommunism, fascism, socialism, anti-immigrant, and, now, anti-Muslim, pro-Hindu. The organization did not need a theory. It was all about praxis. Thackeray likes people who can get the things done.
I too have felt that craving for action. At night, after a hard day slogging in the turbulent city, full of anger and frustration over its bureaucratic delays, its political gridlock, I soothe myself to sleep by giving myself dictatorial powers: to abolish the Rent Act; to ban cars from the central city; to fill the judgeships on the high court and eliminate the backlog at a stroke. I am moving the city government to New Bombay, the state government to Pune. I am tearing up the mills and building parks and schools but most of all creating housing: thousands and thousands of six-story blocks, each six sharing a little play space for the children. A vast Levittown with minor variations in pattern, cheap and fast. All those who are here already shall be housed. The rest can’t come in just now; I am making some space. I would need to consult no legislature to implement my sweeping plans; no consensus would need to be formed, because I know best. Enough talk; I would now act. It helps me sleep.
T
HE NEW
C
ONGRESS GOVERNMENT
that comes to power in Maharashtra in 2000 does so partly on the strength of its promises to implement the findings of the Srikrishna Commission Report. It lied. “More than four years after the publication of the Commission’s report in 1998, no
significant steps have been taken by the Government of Maharashtra to implement its recommendations,” Amnesty International reported.
The commission had named thirty-one police officers for killing innocent people, acting in a communal manner, being negligent, or rioting themselves. Seventeen were formally charged in 2001, but as of 2003, none of the policemen had been put on trial. Ten of them were actually promoted. The majority of the rioters were charged under the Terrorist and Disruptive Activities Prevention Act, usually preceded in the press by the adjective “draconian.” A total of 2,267 cases were lodged; 60 percent of them were closed by the police for want of evidence, under the “true but undetected” category; 894 cases were charge-sheeted. By March 1998, 853 were pending, 42 went to trial, 30 resulted in acquittals, 3 were dismissed, and a grand total of 8 resulted in convictions—for 1,400 murders. The masterminds of the bomb blasts were arrested or fled abroad, because the city’s best detectives were put on the case; the masterminds of the riots, which killed many more people, got to be the government of Maharashtra and members of parliament. “Ten years of impunity for those responsible for the Mumbai riots send a deeply disturbing message to the nation and shatter public confidence in justice,” Amnesty concluded.
The Sena government had gotten rid of thirteen of the fourteen cases pending against Bal Thackeray’s role in the 1992 riots. The new Congress government revives the remaining case, which holds him accountable for inciting communal passions during the riots through his
Saamna
editorials. It was the least of his sins and would have brought the civil libertarians rushing to his defense in a country such as the United States. Thackeray has never been arrested. The new deputy chief minister, Chaggan Bhujbal, who earlier defected from the Sena to the Congress, has always wanted to arrest his former mentor, even if it is for one hour. He declares he will implement at least one of the recommendations of the Srikrishna Commission Report and arrest the Saheb.
“This has never happened and is not possible in future . . . If I go behind the bars they [those who arrest me] will not be able to roam freely,” the Sena chief thunders while addressing the annual Dussehra rally at Shivaji Park. If he is arrested, Thackeray declares in
Saamna
, “Not only Maharashtra, [but] India could burn. This is a call for religious riots and everybody should prepare for the consequences.” Sanjay Nirupam, a Shiv
Sena MP, sees opportunity if his leader is arrested. “After the ’ninety-three riots we won thirty out of thirty-four seats in the election,” he points out to me. “If this is a democracy, the people have spoken. Another riot is to our political advantage.”
The Sena leaders have gone underground in anticipation of the arrest. Sunil has received his orders and is in hiding. He calls me periodically. None of the Jogeshwari boys sleeps at home these days; they are constantly on the move, constantly alert. They are highly mobile, in cells of fifteen or twenty people, in small cars and motorcycles. Their orders are to target state and central government property: buses, trains, offices. It might get down to religion, and then Sunil thinks the Hindus will unite. “When it comes to religion you forget that you are a Gujarati or a bhaiyya. You are all Hindus, against Muslims. And this time we will drive them out of Bombay.” All over the city, the Sena is preparing for the next war.
One Saturday night I get a call from Sunil; he is closing down the city with his boys. At the nightly meeting of the shakha, the report is that the Saheb will be arrested early the next day. In the background I can hear the angry roaring of the Tiger’s troops. I sense a new vigor in Sunil. It is like the old days.
The next day, Sunil keeps calling on my cell phone to keep me apprised of his activities, as he goes about stopping trains. Sunil’s boys are sent to Goregaon; the Goregaon shakha sends Sainiks to Jogeshwari. This way, they aren’t recognized by their local police, who are alternately their friends and jailers. At one point, a force of two hundred policemen stands by as Sunil’s boys enforce the strike. The police make ineffective noises, like taking down names and threatening to make arrests. Sunil’s squad stops a bus and the driver tells all his passengers to disembark. Then the squad destroys the bus. They go into large glass-fronted shops and point out to the owner how much damage he would incur if he kept the shop open and a stone were to come hurling through his precious glass. He pulls down the shutters. Seven to eight hundred Sainiks fan out across Jogeshwari, stopping the trains and forcing taxis and rickshaws off the roads. They march into the bus depot; the manager himself offers to pull his buses off the streets so they won’t be damaged. The city is effectively shut down.
What finally occurs is not civil war but farce. The Saheb declares he will voluntarily present himself in front of the court. He does so—escorted
by an army of five hundred policemen, which maintains the facade of an arrest for Bhujbal—and the magistrate dismisses the case, saying it should have been prosecuted within three years of the offense. Thackeray is in and out of court in under forty-five minutes. Bombay starts breathing again.
But the view from Cuffe Parade is different. The new Miss Universe is returning triumphant to the country. During this time, “all Bombay cares about,” declares the socialite columnist Shobha De, “is who’s coming to Lara Datta’s homecoming.”
T
HE IMPULSE TO GENOCIDE
springs from the desire for cleanliness, for a clean homogeneity, because it is well known that chaos and disorder result from a messy mix, from heterogeneity. Iqbal and Jinnah split from India because they wanted to create a pure nation, the Land of the Pure. The ethos—that much-abused word—of India is against such homogeneity. But a fair-minded person can look around Bombay and see that it really is too crowded. Somebody needs to go. But who? Well, you start with the poorest. Or the newest. Or the one farthest away from yourself, however you define yourself. Immigrants hope, ultimately, to be in a position where they have the right to keep out new immigrants, to tell the next person to get off the train in your city that he must go back, he can’t stay. That’s when you know you’re truly native.
The 1992—93 riots were a double disaster for Bombay: They made the city much worse for the people already living here, and they did not make it less attractive for all the new people from upcountry wanting to come and join them. The next civil disturbance will be no different. It will be a worse city, but it will not lose people for being a worse city. It will not even slow down in accumulating new people.
In the new century, the Sena is experiencing troubles. They are not able to respond with vigor when the Muslim underworld goes about picking off their pramukhs. Some are killed, some are threatened. In Jogeshwari, Bhikhu Kamath gets a letter, in “Muslim language,” as Sunil describes it, telling him he’s next, because he has killed Muslims in the riots. Chotta Shakeel, the operational commander of the Muslim gangs, is doing what the government has failed to do. He is extracting revenge for the riots. And he is going after the right people too: the guilty people, such
as ex-mayor Milind Vaidya, who was named in the Srikrishna Commission Report. Shakeel is consulting the report; he is the executive to Srikrishna’s judiciary.
The Sena leaders do the worst thing you can do if you are to have the respect of the taporis: They plead for police protection. The shakha pramukhs and their deputies surround themselves with bodyguards. The Tiger squeals loudly when his security is reduced from 179 bodyguards to 149; after the killings of the pramukhs, it is raised again. The Tiger is losing his teeth. He has heart trouble, and there is a succession struggle in the offing between his son and his nephew. Power has made the senior leadership fat, rich, and soft. They can’t do anything too outrageous because their people are cabinet ministers in Delhi. The BJP has acted as a moderating influence on the street army. Under the leadership of Thackeray’s son Uddhav, the Sena is at risk of turning into just another regional party, a party of politicians. Things get heated within the Sena; the Tiger accuses his men of having become a “pensioners’ organization.”
There needs to be a new outlet for the rage of the young and the poor. The gangs will provide that if the Sena can’t. The Sena needs to keep pace with the buildup of their anger; it is unable to corral it, stoke it, absorb it. The wave of young men in the eighties and early nineties who fought the Sena’s street battles, like Sunil, have been rewarded and have become successful bourgeois businessmen and Special Executive Officers; they are strutting around, putting their children in English schools. The boys that have come after them are finding it harder to get by. If the Sena doesn’t tap their anger, some other force will; and this time it may not be a political party. It may not be a religion, it may not even be a gang. It may just be an explosion of formless free-floating urban anger generated in young men without ideology, without faith. Young men in transit within their own city, within their individually multiple selves.
T
HE HISTORY OF EACH CITY
is marked by a catalytic event, just as each life has a central event around which it is organized. For New York, it is now the September 11, 2001, attacks on the World Trade Center. For the Bombay of my time, it is the riots and the blasts of 1993. Bombay was spared the horrors of Partition in 1947. The only event related to war I remember growing up was during the war of 1971 over Bangladesh: A civilian aircraft blundered over the city by mistake one night, the airraid sirens went off, the antiaircraft tracers started streaking from Raj Bhavan, the governor’s residence nearby, and my father put us all under mattresses. In school we practiced hiding under the desks if a bomb were to fall on us.