Excerpt II - Maximum City

And yet another excerpt that in my view (too) describes the situation that many regional, ethnicity oriented political groupings face today. And more important, keeps them ticking. Whats described here has to do with the Shiv Sena, but it could just as well describe the RPI, the AIADMK and so on and so forth, isn’t it?

Amol has lost faith in the Saheb. ‘I used to respect Balasaheb more than god. Now he is sitting in Matoshree with a drink in his hand, while we are getting beaten up in jail. I am going to remove Balasaheb’s picture from my wall and put up my own. What the Congress didn’t eat in forty years the Sena has eaten in three.’ He has noticed that big companies are leaving Bombay; he has seen the jobs cut down in his own area. Men such as Amol are not dreaming of moving to Malabar Hill. Their dreams are more limited in scale. Amol has marked out the small open space in front of his house; he would like to expand the house there, build a balcony. Pleasure is taken at the beer bar. They are not especially devout, although they will follow the rituals readily enough> Most of them are loyal to the concept of the Indian nation, but they won’t go into the army.

Amol is thoughtful. He is eating his food with a fork and spoon. His head lowered, he says, ‘There are very dangerous days ahead.’

‘Why?’

‘People don’t have jobs. The boys have no work, nothing to do all day. And everything’s expensive. Now if a young man wants to go to a ladies’ bar and have a couple of drinks, he won’t have money to give to his people at home. You can get boys used to going to ladies’ bars, to the lifestyle, and then they’ll do anything for money.’

‘What will be the effect of this?’ I ask Amol.

‘Murders will cost two hundred rupees.’

‘How can a man kill?’ I ask Amol. ‘How can he bring himself to do it?’

‘You are a writer. After drinking you will say to yourself, Now I must write a story. If you are a dancer, after drinking you will feel like dancing. If you are a killer, after drinking you will think Now I must kill somebody.’ Amol flexes his arms. ‘It’s what you do; it’s in your nature.’

To keep from losing his boys to the underworld gangs, Bal Thackeray has to constantly channel their violent energy. He has to invent new enemies. The easiest to attack are the people in the arts, ill understood by the Sena’s rabble. In 1998, the Sena storms on to the stage at a concert by Ghulam Ali, the Pakistani ghazal maestro. ‘We can also sing,’ they proclaim. And they have their boys recite ‘Jai Maharashtra’. The Saheb’s diktat comes down: No Pakistani entertainers can stage a concert in their city, no Pakistani sportsmen can play. The gentry of Mumbai suffer the shutting down of the concert without a peep. The police commissioner tells the newspapers that no crime has been committed, as the organizers have not registered a complaint. After all, this is the city where murderers walk free in the streets and sit in the highest legislative chambers of the city. They have powertoni.

The Saheb also strongly objects to an art film made by a Canadian-Indian film-maker: Fire, which shows a love affair between two sisters-in-law in New Delhi. ‘Has lesbianism spread like an epidemic that it should be portrayed as a guideline to unhappy wives not to depend on their husbands?’ he demands. Indian culture could not tolerate the ‘so-called progressive culture of the West where they marry in the morning and take divorce in the evening’. Accordingly, his thugs destroy theatres showing the film, and it is taken off screens throughout the country. There are the usual editorials against Thackeray – in the English newspapers. Sunil and Amol and the boys in the Sena do not read the English newspapers.

But in January 1999, the Sena makes a big mistake: It takes on Sachin Tendulkar, the country’s most idolized cricketer. A mob of Sainiks storms into the offices of the Board of Cricket Control of India, angered by the Board’s invitation to the Pakistani cricket team to tour India. They destroy the office, including the World Cup that had been brought home to India in 1983, and threaten to ‘target’ members of the Indian cricket team, including Tendullkar and Azharuddin. Tendulkar is put under police protection and the party’s leaders speedily distance themselves from the incident. By this point it has just become mob frenzy; the tiger Thackeray rides is now out of his control. This latest foray is not about a particular leader or even ideology; it is about power and feeding the imagination of Thackeray’s hordes. The vandals are young men, who, after working twelve-hour days as peons in some office where they endure humiliation and even a slap or two from men who are richer and less Maharashtrian than they are, take the train home. Inside the train, they bathe in perspiration; the air is fetid with sweat and farts. When they get home to the slums, their mothers and their fathers and their grandmothers will ask them what income they have brought home. Such a man lives with a constant sense of his own powerlessness, except when he is part of a mob, part of a contingent of seventy patriots fighting for the country’s honor, walking unmolested into movie theatres, posh apartments, and offices of the cricket lords of the country, smashing trophies, beating up important people who drive fine cars. All the accumulated insults, rebukes and disappointments of life in a decaying megalopolis come out in a cathartic release of anger. It’s okay to be angry in a crowd; the crowd feeds on your anger, digests it, nourishes your rage as your rage nourishes it. all of a sudden you feel powerful. You can take on anybody. It is not their city any more, it is your city.

You own this city by the right of your anger.
…….
In the new century, the Sena is experiencing troubles. They are not able to respond with vigour 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 Muslim’s 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. He is going after people like ex-Mayor Milind Vaidya, who was named in the Srikrishna Report for having personally attacked Muslims. 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 ‘pensioner’s 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 build up of their anger; it is unable to corral it, stoke it, absorb it. the wave of young men in the 1980s and early 1990s who fought the Sena’s street battles 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.

From Maximum City: Bombay Lost And Found, by Suketu Mehta. Reproduced without permission.