Authors: Suketu Mehta
The riots were a tragedy in three acts. First, there was a spontaneous upheaval between the largely Hindu police and Muslims. This was followed, in January 1993, by a second wave of more serious rioting—instigated by the Shiv Sena leader Bal Thackeray—in which Muslims were systematically identified and massacred, their houses and shops burnt and looted. The third stage was the revenge of the Muslims: on Friday, March 12, when every good Muslim was reading his namaaz prayers, ten powerful bombs planted by the Muslim underworld went off all over the city. One exploded in the Stock Exchange, another in the Air India building. There were bombs in cars and scooters. In all, 317 people died, many of them Muslims.
I wanted to speak to the rioters themselves, to the followers of Bal Thackeray. It was he who had formed, in 1966, a nativist political party called the Shiv Sena—Shivaji’s Army—after the seventeenth-century Maharashtrian warrior king who organized a ragtag band of guerrilla fighters into a fighting force that would humble the Mughal emperor Aurangzeb
and, in time, hold sway over most of central India. I wanted to find out how the business of rioting is actually planned and carried out.
One day I was at the computer office of Ashish, my old friend from Queens, talking with him about this. “I can take you to meet some Shiv Sena people who were in the riots.” We turned around. A bony bespectacled man in his early twenties was smiling at us, irregular white teeth offering themselves in two crammed rows. His name was Girish Thakkar, and he was working in Ashish’s office as a programmer. “Come to Jogeshwari.” Most of Jogeshwari, the Hindu and especially the Muslim area, is a slum. On January 8, 1993, a Hindu family of millworkers was sleeping in a room in Radhabai Chawl, in the middle of the Muslim part of the slum. Someone locked their door from the outside; someone threw a petrol bomb in through the window. The family of six died screaming, clawing at the door to get out. One of them was a handicapped teenage girl. The flames had spread from their house to set all of Bombay on fire.
So I went with Girish one evening to Jogeshwari and sat in his family’s room in the slum, talking to them about the riots. This was how I first met Sunil; he was a neighbor of theirs, sitting quietly on the one chair. Sunil was a deputy leader of the Jogeshwari shakha, or branch, of the Shiv Sena. He was favored to be pramukh, or head, of the entire shakha if the present pramukh won the legislative elections. He was in his late twenties, a short, stocky, mustached young man with a certain flair in dress and manner.
We walked outside the slum and past the highway, where there was a large circus ground for which Sunil held the parking concession. The Shiv Sena deputy invited me to piss with him. I walked with him to a patch of ground in the back, where we both unzipped. I was apprehensive. I remembered what he had said at Girish’s house: “Anyone that came, the bread man, the milkman, we would check his body. If there was a difference between our bodies, we would kill him.” That little flap of skin that the Muslims lacked could cost them their lives. I had an excuse at the ready for why I lacked it too: It was an infection when I was five, really, an operation, parents were much grieved. But I’ve atoned for it; I saved my son from the knife a day after he was born. I’ll recite a sacred shloka for you.
I must have passed the test, for he introduced me to his family. When we got back the loudspeakers were playing a film song, “Neither a temple nor a mosque. . . .” His parents were there with Sunil’s two-year-old
daughter. He put her through her tricks, as parents and ringmasters do: “Do namaste,” and she brought her palms together in front of her face. “Shake hand.” And she shook my hand. One of the Sena boys carried her off to buy her a balloon.
Later, Sunil and the other two Sena boys came to drink with me in Ashish’s apartment in Andheri. They looked around appreciatively. We were on the sixth floor, on a hill, and the agitated highway throbbed with traffic below us. Sunil looked out the window. “It’s a good place to shoot people from,” he noted, and made the rat-tat-tat motion of firing a submachine gun. I had not thought of the apartment this way. But then I was not accustomed, when I came into a new place, immediately to check out the strategic value of its location, its entrances and exits.
What sat on Sunil’s mind was the thought that the handicapped girl was raped, repeatedly and in the open. There is no evidence of it; the police report makes no mention of it. Sixteen to twenty Hindu women were raped in Jogeshwari alone, said Sunil. Again, this is without foundation in the press and police reports. But that didn’t matter. It was a powerful image, a catalytic image: a handicapped Hindu girl on the ground with a line of leering Muslim men waiting their turn at her while her parents matched her screams with their own as their bodies caught the flames. Many wars begin with an act of rape, real or imagined. It is always the men who are disturbed enough by the rape to go to war.
Sunil didn’t use the term “riot.” He used “war” instead, the English word. At J. J. Hospital, he saw scenes typical of wartime. Dead bodies all over, male and female, identified only by number tags. At Cooper Hospital, where both Hindu and Muslim rioters and victims were brought in and often lay next to one another in the same ward, fights would break out. Wounded men would rip bottles of saline out of their arms and hurl them at their enemies.
One of the men with us worked for the municipality. “These people are not Muslim, they’re all Hindu!” he said. “Every one of them is a convert.” Then he said they should go to Pakistan, the lot of them. The standard complaints were trotted out: They always cheered Pakistan at India—Pakistan cricket matches, the Muslim personal law allowed them to marry four wives and so they always produced ten or twelve children when Hindus stopped at two or three. In Bombay, numbers of people are important;
the sense of being crowded by the Other in an already overcrowded city is very strong. “In a few years they will be more than us,” the municipal employee predicted gloomily. Muslims engaged in underworld activities, he said, and they had no compunctions about killing people, while a Hindu would pause before killing and ask himself why he was doing it.
While Sunil was taking Muslim lives, he also found time to save a Muslim life. He had a friend, a Muslim woman, whom he escorted safely to her neighborhood. There he was surrounded by a group of Muslim men. He prepared to die. The girl’s grandmother then came out, talked down the Muslim mob, and, hiding Sunil under her burka, spirited him out of the neighborhood. There is a peepal tree at Radhabai Chawl, said Sunil; half its leaves are black and the other half green. He knew because he took his daughter there when she was sick. She had been crying continuously, and the doctors hadn’t helped. Then someone told him that the Muslims could get the evil eye out. He took her to the Radhabai Chawl area, and the Muslim holy man circled his daughter’s face with the bottle of water three times. Sunil could see the water level in the bottle going down after each circle. She soon got better. “He didn’t ask for money,” said Sunil, of the exorcist. “Even if you go to their dargah”—shrine—“they won’t ask for money. They are unselfish that way.”
Sunil saw no irony in the fact that when his daughter was sick he went to the same Muslim community that he massacred and burnt during the riots. Sunil also runs the cable TV for Jogeshwari and surrounding areas. He has Muslim clients, and he often eats at their houses “to keep relations.” The riots also didn’t stop Sunil from doing business with the Muslims. He would go in the morning to Mohammedali Road in the central city to buy chickens from the Muslims, bring them back to Jogeshwari by twelve, and sell them to the Hindus. In the afternoons he would kill other Muslims. The chicken sellers wouldn’t care that he was Hindu. Bombayites understand that business comes first. They are individually multiple.
Sunil asked me what my goals were, not just in Bombay but in the whole world. I replied that I wanted a better world for my son to grow up in. He nodded. He said he wanted the same for his daughter. “But what are your goals? What do you want to do in life?” My answers did not satisfy him. What he wanted was something beyond the happiness of his immediate family. He wanted the
nation
to be great. He bemoaned the fact that not
even the Shiv Sena was beyond corruption. “In Bombay, money is God,” he said in English. To him, the highest virtue was to be niswarthi, selfless. He liked to think of himself as someone who was niswarthi, who would give his life for a cause greater than himself. It was such a cause that he’d been hoping to elicit from me.
I
WAS GIVEN
a tour of the battlegrounds by a group of Shiv Sena men and Raghav, a private taxi operator, a short, stocky man wearing jeans labeled
SAVIOUR.
He was not officially a Sena member but was called by the shakha pramukh whenever there was party work to be done.
Raghav and a couple of other boys took me through passages between slums so narrow that two persons walking abreast could not pass through them. They were cautious at first. But as we passed a mosque, Raghav laughed, “This is where we shat in the masjid.” Another of the men shot him a warning look. The mystery was explained later by Sunil. “My boys broke the masjid,” he boasted. This was one of the high points of the war for them; the incident was recalled with glee. Sunil told me how one of them took a cylinder of cooking gas, opened the valve, lit a match, and rolled it inside the mosque. The bomber then enrolled in the police force, where he is still employed.
We were discussing all this not in some back room in whispers but in the middle of the street in the morning with hundreds of people coming and going. Raghav was completely open, neither bragging nor playing down what he did, just telling it like it happened. The Sena men, the Sainiks, were comfortable; this was their turf, the Hindu part of Jogeshwari. They pointed out the sole remaining shop owned by a Muslim: a textile shop that used to be called Ghafoor’s. During the riots, some of the boys wanted to kill him but others who had grown up with him protected him, and he got away with just having his stock burnt. Now it had reopened, under the name Maharashtra Mattress. Raghav pointed to the shop next to it. “I looted the battery shop.”
Raghav took me to a very large open patch of ground by the train sheds, a phantasmagoric scene with a vast garbage dump on one side with groups of people hacking at the ground with picks, a crowd of boys playing cricket, sewers running at our feet, train tracks and bogies in sheds in the middle distance, and a series of concrete tower blocks in the background. A
week ago, I had been standing at the other side of this ground. A Muslim man had pointed out where I now stood, saying, “That is where the Hindus came from.”
This is where Raghav and the boys caught two Muslims. They had strayed. “We burnt them. We poured kerosene on them and set them on fire,” said Raghav.
“Did they scream?” I asked him.
“No, because we beat them a lot before burning them. Then their bodies lay here in the ditch, rotting, for ten days. Crows were eating them. Dogs were eating them. The police wouldn’t take the bodies away, because the Jogeshwari police said it was in the Goregaon police’s jurisdiction, and the Goregaon police said it was the railway police’s jurisdiction.”
Raghav also told me about an old Muslim man who was throwing hot water on the Sena boys. They broke down his door, dragged him out, took a neighbor’s blanket, wrapped him in it, and set him on fire. “It was like a movie: silent, empty, someone burning somewhere, and us hiding, and the army. Sometimes I couldn’t sleep, thinking that just as I have burnt someone, somebody could burn me.”
I asked Raghav, as we were looking over the wasteland, if the Muslims they burnt would beg for their lives. “Yes, they would say, Have mercy on us. But we were filled with such hate; we had Radhabai Chawl on our minds. And even if there was one of us who said, Let him go, there would be ten others saying, No, kill him. And so we had to kill him.”
“But what if he was innocent?”
Raghav looked at me. “His biggest crime was that he was Muslim.”
A
LL GREAT CITIES ARE SCHIZOPHRENIC
, said Victor Hugo. Bombay has multiple-personality disorder. During the riots, the printing presses were running overtime. They were printing visiting cards, two sets for each person, one with a Muslim name and one with a Hindu name. When you were out in the city, if you got stopped your life depended on whether you answered to Ram or Rahim. Schizophrenia became a survival tactic.
People told people: The Muslims, angered by the destruction of the Babri Masjid, are stockpiling arms; there will be a bloodbath. The news was relayed at the panwallah’s, in the commuter train, during the office tea break. In the evenings, a small convoy of cars would drive onto the beach
at Shivaji Park, turn toward the wide Arabian Sea, leave their headlights on, and keep vigil all night. They were standing guard against the Iranian armada that was supposed to be just off the shores of Bombay, holds packed with all kinds of bombs and guns and missiles for the coming jihad.
After the riots, 240 NGOs united to put the city back together. Human chains of citizens were formed, stretching across the city, to demonstrate unity. Groups called Mohalla Ekta Committees were formed to bring together Hindus, Muslims, and the police, to identify fistfights before they could escalate into riots; Girish’s father became a member of the Ekta Committee for Jogeshwari. There hasn’t been a major riot since. But the fault lines had been set. An entire segment of the population had been made to feel like foreigners in the city in which they were born and raised.
“G
O BACK TO
P
AKISTAN
,” said the Shiv Sena to the Muslims. Jalat Khan, who lives in the Muslim slums of Mahim, was in a quandary. His mother had come the other way, from Pakistan to Bombay, when she was twelve. Had I heard the news from Karachi? he asked me. “It’s better here.” Jalat Khan wanted me to meet his mother. I went to the back room. There was a human being lying on a low cot. It was a very old lady, covered from the neck down by thick blankets. Her hands were misshapen; she was completely paralyzed below the waist, but she had not always been like this. For eighty-six years of Roshan Jan’s ninety years on earth, she had lived in peace. She remembered the British with affection. Bombay was so good in those days, she said, in the way very old people generally remember the past as being always and continuously better than the present. You could walk down the road with gold in your hands. The rice of those days smelled so good; the wheat was pure.