Maximum City (9 page)

For eighty-six years of her life Roshan Jan could walk about her neighborhood. She would hold big feasts, slaughter two goats, cook basmati rice, and feed all who came, Hindus too. After Gandhi was assassinated, in 1948, the Muslims were scared, because people thought at first it must have been a Muslim who killed him. But nothing happened. No riots.

One night in January 1993, a group of Hindu men broke down Roshan Jan’s door. One of them picked up the eighty-six-year-old woman and threw her down on the cement floor, breaking her spinal cord. Now she lay
there, telling me that other Hindus, who she knew were in the riots, come to her and ask for her blessing, and she gives it to them. But she wishes they had killed her then. It would have been better.

When the retaliatory bombs were set off by the Muslims, the windows of Jalat Khan’s son’s school were shattered, and Jalat ran to get him out. But that didn’t stop the swelling of pride he felt. “They used to curse us, tear down the burkas of our women in the trains. If the bomb blasts hadn’t happened, not one of us would have survived. After the bomb blast they got a little dhilla”—a little loose, a little scared.

Durriya Padiwala, the Muslim CEO of an upholstery company, was at home when the riots broke out. She got word of the progress of the riots, across Tardeo, across Byculla, across Mohammed Ali Road. “You knew exactly when they would come to your neighborhood.” In the thick of the riots, a Maharashtrian neighbor on the ground floor gave the Padiwala family shelter, and then they moved across the street to a building at the entrance of which was a Shiv Sena shakha. “We figured they wouldn’t attack their own building.” The building next to hers housed a wastepaper shop; it provided fine fuel for the petrol bomb that fell on it. The next day, Durriya, watching from her balcony, saw a man remove a part of the wall of the paper shop. A human arm fell out.

“The riots affected a lot of thinking, educated people. Very educated, very literate people became very anti-Muslim.” Durriya—who doesn’t wear a burka, or even a salwaar kameez, doesn’t have hennaed hair, and doesn’t look particularly Muslim—would hear comments made by people “in the strangest places. It could be in a five-star lobby. ‘Oh, they deserved it, they asked for it.’” She would not counter this. “I was too scared.” Durriya’s business was discriminated against because it was a Muslim company. Payments would come late; bigger deposits were now required from them than from Hindu suppliers.

Three months after the riots, Durriya, working in her office, walked out to get some papers and there was a mighty blast; the ceiling collapsed in the room she’d just left. One of the bombs had gone off in her building. Her brother was working in the Stock Exchange building; when the next bomb went off in its basement, the glass of the viewing gallery shattered and fell on him, wounding him. She was not entirely displeased.

“There’s no justification for the blasts,” Durriya emphasized. “An eye for an eye is a terrible thing.” At the same time, when the Muslims in
her office traveled on the trains, they felt the Hindus were looking at them with new fear. They could raise their heads. “Their self-respect had been restored.” It was the old story: the powerful wish of minorities all over the world to be the oppressor rather than the oppressed. Almost every Muslim I spoke to in Bombay agreed that the riots had devastated their sense of self-worth; they were forced to stand by helplessly as they watched their sons slaughtered, their possessions burnt before their eyes. When the bombs went off, killing and maiming people indiscriminately, the Hindus were reminded that the Muslims weren’t helpless. On the trains, proving ground of dignity, they could hold their heads high again.

T
HE RIOTS HAD ONE CONSEQUENCE
their planners couldn’t have foreseen: They became a recruitment bonanza for the Muslim underworld. I met one such man, Blackeye, who became a professional hit man for the Dawood Ibrahim gang. In 1992, Blackeye, then fifteen years old, was living with his family in a large housing development named Pratiksha Nagar. One Friday, some Maharashtrian men—their neighbors, their friends—went around the complex marking the Muslim houses. They found out that there were about five thousand Muslims in the colony. The next day, a Saturday, they held a maha-aarti, a massive public puja, and the streets rang with triumphant temple bells and the blowing of conches. On Sunday morning, Blackeye was watching cartoons on television when there was a knock on the door. “We are from the government,” a voice said. “Open the door. We need to see your ration card.” Blackeye’s father immediately slung a rod across the door, from the inside. The men started banging on the door, harder, and then broke it and stormed inside. They took the iron rod and went at his father, in front of his family. “I saw the boy who was beating my father. He was my friend. He used to come to my home to eat at Eid. He used to play cricket with me.” So Blackeye folded his hands and begged. “You used to come to our house!” His friend just looked at him and told him to get out of there, because he was so small. Blackeye fled to his uncle’s house, screaming for him to come help. His uncle refused; he was afraid for his own life.

Meanwhile, his mother and his sisters had locked themselves in the bedroom, clutching bottles of Tik-20, an insecticide; if the Sena men broke in, they would swallow the poison before they could be defiled. They
weren’t touched, but the Sena men broke everything in the house after they finished assaulting Blackeye’s father. Afterward, the family abandoned the apartment and stayed in a transit camp for three days. The nearby eateries wouldn’t even give them water to drink, and they lived on rotten tomatoes. But the worst was yet to come. “After the riots we had to beg,” recalls Blackeye, his eyes reddening even now, years later. “We had to put our hands out—for biscuits, for clothes, from the relief agencies.” He grew up, dropped out of school, joined the Muslim gang, and started killing people, including the devoutly Hindu music magnate Gulshan Kumar. “After the riots most of the boys from Pratiksha Nagar joined the Dawood gang. It was my main reason too.”

The Bombay Police see Muslims as criminals, much as some American police view African Americans. A newspaper headline from December 1996 read:
HOME TRUTH: MUSLIMS MORE LIKELY TO BECOME CRIMINALS THAN HINDUS.
The article stated that Muslims, who comprise just under a fifth of the population of the city, were responsible for a third of its crimes, based on a survey of various police stations. The cases registered against Hindus involved accidents, fraud, and theft while the ones registered against Muslims were more violent. An inspector from Cuffe Parade station was quoted: “Muslims are caught for crimes such as extortion, rapes and murders, gang wars and organized car thefts. Hindus are mainly arrested for cheating, eve-teasing”—sexual molestation short of rape—“fraud, theft and robbery.”

“The police gave us good cooperation during the riots,” Sunil said to me. “Deshmukh, the Jogeshwari policeman, would say with pride, Bala-saheb called me.”

Between January 10 and January 18, 1993, the activist Teesta Setalvad taped conversations off the police frequency as police squads on the road coordinated activities with the control room. This is some of what went out over the airwaves:

A
SAD BIN
S
AIF
, an activist in an NGO that is fighting hate in the slums, took me to Radhabai Chawl, where the Hindu family was burnt. Like everything else about the schizophrenic city, it had two names: a plaque outside identified it as
GANDHI CHAWL.
A women’s group, Rahe-haq, had arranged a meeting for me; their office was in the very building where the atrocity had taken place.

Before the women arrived, I was sitting in the room where an entire family was burnt alive, listening to an old Muslim man tell me, “Sir, please do something to remove the hate from people’s hearts, so that the Ganga and the Jamuna can flow together. You are young, do something. Some poison has entered.” The room had been turned into a library and community center by Yuva, an NGO, and this man, a neighbor of the family that
was killed, was the librarian. The library’s collection consisted of an old trunk full of books with titles that explained why the library had only three members: “Building development projects in partnership with communities and NGOs: An action agenda for policy makers.” He was born in Bombay—“my matrubhumi,” he said, using the Hindu word for motherland. Then he started singing, in a quavering voice: “Sara jahan se accha, Hindustan hamara. . . .” I was unexpectedly moved; I felt my eyes watering. This man was not cynical. He had no sense of irony. He was a Muslim man working in a library in a Muslim ghetto that had no books in Urdu. And he was singing a paean to Hindustan.

On January 17, 1993, L. K. Advani, then president of the Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP)—the Sena’s coalition partner and the instigator of the Babri Masjid demolition—came to Gandhi Chawl to highlight this atrocity against Hindus. Arifa Khan went to see the famed politician. He had stepped out of his car and was looking around the slum. Arifa Khan was suddenly moved to speak. She called out, “Why did you come here now?” Then this short, pretty Muslim woman from the slums of Bombay said to the man who wanted to be prime minister, “If you didn’t do your kar seva, your rath yatra, this wouldn’t have happened.” Advani had no answer to Arifa’s remark, which referred to his stoking of mass Hindu rage through nationwide processions on a chariot in the weeks before the demolition. He got back in his car, and his entourage, commandos, and cars left Jogeshwari to its fate.

Arifa Khan, along with about twenty other Muslim women, was now sitting in the room, which also functions as a day-care center. There was also a Hindu couple. Then a couple of tough-looking Muslim boys dressed in lungis joined us uninvited. Asad introduced me, and the women started telling me about the troubles: their men shot and stabbed, by the police or the Hindus. The azaan rang out from a nearby mosque; the women covered their heads. The Hindus and Muslims now lived apart in the slum, out of choice. It hurt the women I was speaking to that during the time of the curfew Hindus would not let them buy food from their areas.

Had they considered going to Pakistan? asked Asad.

“This is our watan”—homeland. “Whatever it is, it’s our India.” One of the women claimed the right to live here by virtue of the fact that she votes. “If we don’t get them seats, will they get seats?”

Bombay has one and a half times the proportion of Muslim residents as
the country has overall; Muslims in Bombay comprise more than 17 percent of the city’s population. In India as a whole, Muslims number 120 million, 12 percent of the general population. That makes India home to the second largest Muslim population in the world. Half a century after Partition, there are still more Muslims in India than in Pakistan. By choosing to stay, they have voted with their feet. But most Hindus in the city did not believe that Muslims were nationalistic. They believed, as Thackeray put it in his party newspaper just after the Babri Masjid fell, “Pakistan need not cross the border and attack India. Two hundred and fifty million Muslims in India loyal to Pakistan will stage an armed uprising. [They are one of] Pakistan’s seven atomic bombs.” Further, “A Muslim, whichever country he belongs to, is first a Muslim. Nation is of secondary importance to him.”

The Muslims of Bombay are the most diverse group of the followers of Mohammed in the country. It’s not just the division between Shia and Sunni; there are Dawoodi Bohras, Ismailis, Deobandis, Barelvis, Memons, Moplahs, Ahmaddiyas, and so on. The Hindutva parties spread fear of the Muslim horde, as if it were a monolith. The truth is that many of the groups, such as the Deobandis and Barelvis or the traditional and the reformist Bohras, often hate each other more passionately than they do the Hindus. But the riots united them too. The Dawoodi Bohras of Malabar Hill discovered what they had in common with the Bihari Sunnis in the Madanpura slums: a very public questioning of their claim to be citizens of India. They discovered their biggest crime was that they were Muslims.

One of the angry young boys said his brother was killed in the riots and nobody had been arrested. But when the Hindu family died, eleven Muslims were arrested and given life sentences. A Sena corporator, an organizer, they had heard, took the handicapped girl’s corpse all around Bombay to get the Hindus inflamed. “One woman died in Radhabai Chawl,” the angry boy said. “Fifty of our people died and nothing happened. The law is theirs; they can do what they want. If you have justice, let it be on both sides or tell us to fight! We know how to fight.” Gradually, the boys took over the meeting; the women stopped speaking. The Hindu couple got up and left.