Maximum City

  He reminisces about his life as a cartoonist and the Mumbai of old. “When I was in Free Press Journal . . . population was there of course. But some glamour was there, some thrill was there. But slowly slowly slowly slowly, when more and more people started pouring it become very difficult. I remember during that time—it was somewhere in ‘forty-two, ’forty-four—the municipal people used to come whenever we used to complain there are rats, big rats. So they used to come with those hose pipes and there were hydrants on the roads. They’ll fit that hose pipe to the hydrant and you put that huge hose into the hole, that rathole, and the others will keep watch with those big rods in their hands—lakdi—and naturally the water goes according to their things you know, the holes inside, under center their thing. Then they will come out from some other hole. When water is coming from this side, they will take shelter from other side. The moment they used to come out, they will beat. At least six to ten—twelve rats were killed. Now water scarcity is so much you can’t afford to have that. But actually, in my backyard, when I was staying there in Dadar, the connection was given to hydrant, hydrant, from hydrant, immediately terrific force with the gust. It was somewhere in ’forty-four, ’forty-five, ’forty-six. But now you don’t see hydrants because it is being misused. The hutment people. They will keep it open and if they fail to put it back, water will go on coming out, actually, with a big flow.”

  I am unprepared for this aperçu. “Is there a serious rat problem?” I inquire.

  “Rats are bound to be there,” the Saheb responds, now looking at things from a more charitable perspective. “If not the BMC, the rats clean some of the portion of the debris. Yes. Some eatables are there.” He stops here, having delivered his soliloquy, and leaves me to make what I will of it.

  A visitor is announced, the film producer Vijay Anand. He whispers confidentially, “His sons are actually behind bars.” Actually, it is Anand’s nephews. “When this man comes he becomes my devotee.” The Saheb laughs.

  The nephews have been accused of murdering their father’s longtime mistress. But when Anand comes in, he does not immediately talk about the sons. He starts with a different kind of problem. Anand owns a theater. His assistant went to record some music using the sound equipment at the studio of another producer, Vinayak Raut, and the equipment broke down. Raut kidnapped the assistant, has held him since the afternoon of the previous day, and has now sent a letter demanding 35,000 rupees in damages. Anand shows the Saheb the letter. Raut has further informed Anand that he has worked on the Saheb’s security detail, that he has collected “vasuli” for the Saheb, and he is now collecting the same extortion payments for the Saheb’s own thuggish nephew, Raj Thackeray.

  The Saheb gets on the phone. He remembers every detail of Anand’s convoluted story and relates it to his aide. “I want to see this Raut at twelve tomorrow. I am going to appoint him head of extortion.” Here is the all-powerful leader, righting wrongs with an order and a witticism. The problem will be fixed. He will get the things done.

  Thackeray takes special pride in the fact that movie stars, directors, producers—“they all come here. They are all my good friends. They admire me. They have respect for me. I help them also. I solve their problems. That’s true.” The editor had told me that Thackeray didn’t give a damn about politicians from Delhi; if Vajpayee came to see him, he would not be overwhelmed. But if Amitabh Bacchan came to see him, he would make time and would be filled with pride. It is a typical Bombayite’s sense of priorities: entertainment first, politics second. When the film star Sanjay Dutt was jailed for eighteen months for his involvement in the bomb blasts, only the Saheb had the power to get him released on bail. Thackeray tells me that his great rival Sunil Dutt came to his house when his son was in jail. “He wept, he did an aarti around my wife.” Eight or nine producers were sitting in the anteroom, waiting for an audience, while Dutt circled Thackeray’s wife with a lamp. All their projects with Sanjay were on the line, and they stood to lose crores. Thackeray’s government let him out on bail.

  I ask him if he thought Sanjay was guilty.

  “They find one spring of a dismantled AK-420, and you are going to run a case against him?” He thinks that Sharad Pawar, then the chief minister, had fixed Sanjay because he was competing against his father for the Congress presidency. But if the court eventually finds him guilty, “hang him.” It is a phrase the Saheb often uses, an all-purpose solution for Bangladeshi Muslims and Sanjay Dutt alike. This leader doesn’t waste time on theory or process; he advocates direct immediate action: Hang them. A leader whom a young man, with little education but a lot of anger, can understand, can worship.

  Thackeray’s strongest support has at all times in his career come from sixteen-to thirty-year-olds. “Young blood, young men, youngsters without jobs are like dry gunpowder. It will explode any day.” As they get into their thirties, they start getting respectable or lose the zeal for strife. Curiously, for a man whose support is supposed to come from the young, he goes on, “That generation. They don’t have any culture or sanskar. Sanskar has no English alternative or word.” The closest is “values.” The Saheb is particular about his cultural tastes; Hindi movies and Michael Jackson are okay, but the city’s celebration of Valentine’s Day makes him furious. “Valentine’s Day. I am going to ban it next year. See. They dare not. I’ll tear their cards. What is Valentine’s? Ridiculous! These college boys living on their pocket money given them by their fathers. I don’t know it is white money or black. Enjoying life with girls and the girls are also like that. This what you call Coke generation Pepsi generation. Yes. With”—he gestures with disgust at his leg—“jeans on.”

  Sure enough, the next year on February 14, as he promised me, the Saheb bans Valentine’s Day. The call goes out to his Sainiks, who ransack shops selling Valentine’s Day cards and disrupt restaurants advertising Valentine’s Day dinners. Newspapers as far as Turkey, South Africa, and Australia prominently cover his fulminations.

  But he has mellowed; he is a tired, aging fascist. Now, after an outrageous statement, there is a gentle laugh, which robs the pronouncement of its “menaas.” At times, joking about the movie people, smoking his cigar, he seems almost avuncular. It is difficult to connect the man sitting before me with the homicidal fury he unleashed in people like Sunil only a few years ago. But then, he is seventy-three. “I can remote control on government,” he tells me, “but not on my age.”

  His fire reappears when he reverts back to his favorite targets. “The Bangladesh Muslims, they have come here. I don’t know who is their godfather mother in Hindustan.” He tells me about a recent bomb blast in Delhi, in which fifteen or twenty people were injured and the police arrested a Muslim man for the bombing. When the news of the arrest spread in the Muslim neighborhood, the call came from the mosque loudspeaker to attack, and a Muslim mob fifteen hundred men strong, according to Thackeray, invaded the police station and released the bomber. “We should tolerate this nonsense?” the Saheb thunders. “Who are you? What right do you have? You go back to your Bangladesh. This is very sad and bad.”

  Could this kind of incident happen in Mumbai?

  “That way they have a check as far as Shiv Sena is concerned,” he says with pride. No communal riot has happened since the Sena came to power, he points out.

  “What is your explanation for why the Bombay riots happened in ’ninety-two and ’ninety-three?” I ask.

  “Babri Masjid,” he answers. “No Muslim here knows where is Luck-now, where is Babri Masjid.” Neither, evidently, does Thackeray; the Babri Masjid is located in Ayodhya, hundreds of miles from Lucknow. The mosque was not a working mosque, he says; but there is a Ram Mandir underneath, where Hindu prayers have been offered. Then the mosque was demolished, and the Muslims in Mumbai took to the streets. “Then to save your secular face, dirty face, you say they were not local Muslims, they were outside Muslims, they came from Bihar and Uttar Pradesh, but how dare they come here? And inspire, instigated the locals. That is
shot dead then, must be. There was a retaliation from Shiv Sena. If my boys would have not come on the streets I’m sure Hindus would have been slaughtered.”

  They retaliated, he says, with “whatever means we had at that time. The stone—it can be stones or tube lights or iron bars. They had some ammunition, the pistols. But even then . . . they would have massacred Hindus. You ask any community, Gujaratis, these these these, they said yes, because of Balasaheb our life was saved.” As, indeed, my uncle had said.

  “And then they elected you?”

  “No. Once you are saved, you are saved. Then hell with you. We don’t bargain, don’t expect them to do. It is our bounded duty to save everybody’s life then.” The Sena would do the unpleasant work that my Gujaratis are too cowardly to do; they would fight the battle of Panipat against the Afghans all over again. After taking Bombay from us during the Samyukta Maharashtra movement—when they walked the streets looking for Gujaratis to beat up, shouting, “Kem chhe? Saru chhe! Danda leke maru chhe!”—they would now magnanimously protect us against the Muslim hordes.

  He warns the Muslims. “Don’t make us suspicious. You be free and frank. Every time you can’t say, ‘Islam is in danger.’ Why we should worry about Islam because ours is not a Islamic country.” He will oppose the Muslims if “their body is here and their heart is for Pakistan; I will be the first man to tell them get out.” Their status in India is questionable to begin with. “What is this Muslim community? After the partition, they should have gone back!”

  “Do you feel there will be another riot in Bombay? Is there social pressure bubbling?” I ask him.

  “I am not an astrologer, neither a palmist nor a foreteller, but I can tell you this thing—my prophecy you call it or intuition you call it. If the Vajpayee government falls, there is going to be chaos and we’ll be heading toward civil war. A civil war, mind you this.” He is speaking very calmly, not raising his voice, not making a threat; just telling me what will happen, sure in his knowledge. “And then you will know what I have preached, what I have said. I touch wood I don’t want that come true, but it will come true. The Muslims will come out. It is not just restricted to Mumbai. All over the country. It will be a civil war in the country itself.”

  What would the Sena do in a civil war?

  “By any means we’ll fight. By any means we’ll fight. We’ll have to fight. Retaliation is our birthright. Retaliation is our birthright.”

  I remind him about what he has told me: This time the Muslims are armed.

  “Let us see, let us see. Let the time come. Let the time come.”

  THE MARATHI EDITOR later tells me he was one of a group of journalists speaking to the Saheb when the leader declared that he could see the future. He had “hallucinations,” he remembers. “Of bloodshed. Blood across his eyes,” and the editor draws a palm across his eyes, wiping away a sea of blood.

  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.

  THE NEW CONGRESS 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; 89
4 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.”