Hindu, 2 March 2008
KALPANA SHARMA
Was the recent violence in Mumbai just a passing phenomenon or will it alter the demographics of the State?
Amina presides over Dharavi’s Muslim Nagar like a monarch. She is the local ‘Dadi’, the woman to whom all kinds of people turn to for help. She is also the protector of her settlement, off Dharavi’s 90ft road. So when Raj Thac keray raised his call against so-called “outsiders”, the Biharis and people from Uttar Pradesh living in Mumbai, Amina was not bothered. Across her house — consisting of two rooms separated by several other similar rooms — are a bunch of “Bihari” tailors. They have worked there for at least a decade. The steady buzz of the machines rarely stops.
“When the police come and ask me about them, I tell them in Marathi, ‘Don’t worry, brother, they are our people’,” she says. Ironically, the same woman had to defend another group of “our people” during the 1992-93 communal riots when the police came hunting for young Muslim men. Then too she intervened with the local police and protected the youth, many of them children of her friends.
Calm in Dharavi
So have the recent events triggered by Raj Thackeray disturbed relations in a place like Dharavi? Not at all, Amina asserts. Dharavi has a sizeable population of people from North India. They have lived and worked in this sprawling settlement for decades. Amina laughs as she recounts how the Shiv Sena in Dharavi has now come out in support of the North Indians living there, the majority being Muslims. These were the very people who the Sainiks targeted during the 1992-93 riots, forcing many of them to lock their rooms and run away to their villages. Most eventually returned.
Raj Thackeray’s men cannot enter such settled places as Dharavi. They would find it impossible to target the individuals who are part of the fabric of Mumbai. So they pick on the easy targets, the visible targets — taxi drivers, bhel puri vendors.
And in other cities in Maharashtra, the temporary migrants, the construction workers, the casual labourers in the smaller industries who cluster together in temporary settlements. You can threaten them, scare them, demand they speak Marathi and force them to pack up and leave.
There are many ironies, contradictions, myths that lie exposed after the shameful events of last month, when ordinary, hard-working people were beaten up in full view of television cameras just because they happened to have been born in another part of this country.
Such “sons of the soil” campaigns have been seen in many parts of India. They have also been a part of Mumbai’s politics. Yet the visual images of that violence left many people shaken. Was it a passing phenomenon or would it permanently alter the demographics of not just Mumbai but other cities in the state? Is Mumbai’s apparent cosmopolitanism really in danger? What would be the long-term impact of this divisive campaign on the rest of the country?
Through his anti-outsider campaign, Raj Thackeray has exposed himself as little more than a Sena man pretending to be different. He launched the Maharashtra Navnirman Sena (MNS) on the grounds that he wanted to be get away from the politics of his parent organisation. He drew to it many of the younger Sena workers who were unhappy with the bureaucratic and cautious ways of his cousin Uddhav, anointed successor to Bal Thackeray.
And in the first year, he tried to attract Marathi intellectuals and professionals to advise him on how he should proceed. Some people believed that the man had changed from the days when he led the Shiv Sena cadre who beat up Biharis applying for jobs in Mumbai.
But with elections drawing closer, there is no time for such gradualism. So Raj Thackeray has taken a short cut in the belief that nothing succeeds like divisive politics.
He has his uncle’s example to follow. The Shiv Sena built its base by targeting non-Maharashtrians — South Indians, Gujaratis, Muslims — and by injecting fear through strategic violence. The Congress Party gave it a leg-up in the initial years as the Sena helped break the hold of the Left parties in Mumbai. As a result, the Sena took hold of Mumbai, held it to ransom at will and destroyed its inclusive image.
Divisive agenda
Raj Thackeray is building his base on the same platform. The politics of fear and hate are the easiest recourse for politicians with no other ideology. Such political formations, born of divisive agendas, cannot be reformed. Raj Thackeray has proved that.
The incidents of last month have also forced many in Mumbai to question yet again the so-called “cosmopolitanism” of this city. The last time we questioned this was after the 1992-93 communal riots. Even South Mumbai, considered the heartland of the city’s cosmopolitan culture, fell in line with the communal atmosphere as buildings with mixed residents hastily removed nameplates of Muslim residents and even requested some of them to leave.
Since then, with all the hype about turning Mumbai into a global city, perhaps some unreality has come in again. It is visible in the elite circles in the city where Mumbai is once again being called Bombay without any fear of being politically incorrect.
Mumbai might seem cosmopolitan for those with safe jobs and secure housing. But even among them, not all have the same experience.
Ask Muslim professionals from other parts of the country the problems they face finding a place to live. People are rejected not just if they are Muslim but even if they eat meat. There are entire areas in Mumbai where even restaurants serving meat cannot operate. This is not cosmopolitanism; this is the bully tactics by the majority.
At the same time, although the images of bhel puri vendors and taxi drivers being beaten up bring home the shameful reality that it is the poor who get trampled on when the politically powerful play games, the reality also is that in Mumbai (not the Bombay of the elite), economic interdependence has forged alliances and tolerance that survive such politics.
It is not an accident that the displaced people from Nashik, the city that saw the most violence, found their relatives in Mumbai and sank into the anonymity of a big city. It is this anonymity that works in favour of the “outsider” because he/she cannot be easily identified or targeted.
What the real outsiders to Mumbai do not recognise is that Mumbai is many cities within one. All those different entities come together during a crisis, as was evident during the 2005 floods. But on a day-to-day basis, they operate separately, even if interdependently.
Different entities
So there is the aspirational global city — restricted to a few handpicked areas where there is a mix of population in terms of communities. This is the city that is once again calling itself Bombay, pretending to be cosmopolitan and open but actually catering to a “globalised” class of people who would prefer the city’s poor people to disappear.
And then there is the inclusive city, evident much more in poor Mumbai than in the richer areas. Here tolerance is not a theoretical construct. It is forced on you.
It’s a survival tactic. You tolerate me, I tolerate you and both of us prosper. That is the mantra that drives Mumbai. And most of the time it works. Until an upstart politician decides to inject fear and poison. In places like Nashik or Pune or other cities in Maharashtra, the same formula does not work.
Here migrant workers live together in enclaves and are easy targets. Most of those who have left these cities in the last month are temporary workers employed in the construction industry and in small workshops. There are no Maharashtrian migrants lining up for these jobs and being denied them.
Disturbing developments
What is disturbing about the recent developments is the absence of a strong civil society response against the violence. Politicians like L. K. Advani pointed out that Thackeray’s statements were unconstitutional.
But where were the other voices that would normally come out against communal violence, for instance? And what about the Maharashtrian intellectuals?
Some Marathi newspapers did criticise Thackeray; some individuals appeared on television talk shows and expressed their dismay at what he was doing in the name of the Marathi Manoos. But there was little by way of mobilising the larger secular community.
One of the few statements that was circulated by e-mail and signed by younger Maharashtrian academics stated, “It is also true that Mumbai is a highly divided city and it’s very easy for some Maharashtrians to be manipulated by a nativist ideology. This is as true in many other parts of the country as well. However we firmly believe that the vast inequalities in the city need to be addressed in real ways rather than this shadow-boxing that Mumbai has been a victim of for decades. We the undersigned would like to place on record that Raj Thackeray does not speak for all Maharashtrians. He certainly does not speak for us.”
Those who believe that India is a free country where every citizen is entitled to live and work where he or she chooses cannot afford to remain silent and just observe such politics of hate and violence. If we fail to resist and oppose it today, in the long run it will take over all our lives.
E-mail the writer: sharma.kalpana@yahoo.com
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