Maharashtra is no longer the well administered state it used to be. Politicians in power have played havoc with it especially in recent years. The fact that no one in the Maharashtra administration had an inkling that a storm was brewing and could burst at any time speaks for the lackadaisical way it functions. The intelligence set-up has clearly failed to do its duty and so have the police, which is why the army had to be called in. The chief minister has himself confessed that he did not take a serious view of the situation when the trouble first broke out . . .
With the Congress in disarray and showing little capacity to renew itself and with no other political organisation ready to take its place, a political vacuum is emerging in the state.
A period of great stress and strain is clearly ahead of us. The riots in Bombay might turn out to be a warning signal.
*
It is received wisdom in and about India that Hindu-Muslim antagonism continues to run deep despite the secular and democratic nature of the Indian state. It is, therefore, only natural that the current riots in and around Bombay have been viewed in communal terms both in India and abroad. But this conventional wisdom needs to be questioned, though an adequate explanation has yet to be found.
Before we do that, let us face up to the fact that the riots are communal on two counts. First, Hindus have killed Muslims and Muslims have killed Hindus; no Hindu has killed another Hindu and no Muslim another Muslim. Secondly, the apparent cause of the conflict is communal.
The story goes back to April 21 when the Shiv Sena chief, Mr. Bal Thackeray, made a speech which was critical of the Muslims. The reasons for it are not clear. Indeed, there are various theories about it. One of them has it that Mr. Thackeray has been “inspired” by the example of Sant Bhindranwale who has carved a place for himself in the Sikh community through the reign of terror that he has unleashed in Punjab.
Whatever his reasons or calculations, Mr. Thackeray appeared to have decided to end his long political oblivion. During the Antulay regime he thrived on government patronage; but after the exit of the former chief minister, he looked as if it was lost. Meanwhile, however, the Sena had expanded its activities. It had set up more centres – it is said to have 22 branches in Bhiwandi now against one at the time of the previous riots in 1970 – and it had won over a number of South Indians against whom it had run a fairly violent campaign in Bombay in 1969. But by and large Mr. Thackeray had ceased to be a major political force in the state. So when he made the speech on April 21 which the Muslims found objectionable, neither the news agencies nor the major newspapers carried it.
Here we run into two problems. First, there is a dispute over what Mr. Thackeray said in that speech. According to the Urdu weekly Akhbar-e-Alam, he made derogatory references to the Prophet and used a derogatory term to describe the Muslims. Mr. Thackeray denies this and claims not only that he in fact praised the Prophet, contrasting his conduct with that of some of his followers, but also that he sent a clarification to all Urdu papers which they ignored. According to him he criticised only those Muslims who continue to look up to Pakistan and advised them either to give up this attachment to Pakistan or to migrate there.
Secondly, it is impossible to say whether Mr. Thackeray had made the speech in a casual manner, or whether he was pursuing a deliberate plan to foment Hindu-Muslim antagonism in order to increase his influence among the Hindus. But whatever his intention, the Urdu press cast him in the role of the devil incarnate and once it had done so, it no longer mattered whether he had in fact criticised Prophet Mohammed or not.
As this campaign was going on, on the occasion of Shiv Jayanti on May 3, for the first time since the previous Bhiwandi riots in 1970, the state government allowed the Hindus to take out a procession in the face of opposition by various Muslim organisations. The event passed off peacefully thanks to extensive police arrangements. But as ill-luck would have it, it was followed by an “incident”.
A “garland” of chappals was put around a sketch of Mr. Thackeray in Parbhani on May 11. The Shiv Sena regarded it as provocation enough to order a bandh in various parts of Bombay. While the bandh was on in Bombay, there took place the so-called battle of the flags in Bhiwandi on the occasion of the Muslim festival of Shab-e-Barat. The local Muslims put up a large number of green flags and pulled down the Shiv Sena’s. This triggered the first clashes. Mr. AR Khan, a Congress MLA, who had addressed the meeting in Parbhani on May 11, denied that the Shiv Sena chief was so insulted but only after the riots had raged for several days.
If one is inclined to take a wholly communalist view of the riots in and around Bombay, as most of us are, all this would clinch the issue. Indeed, one can take the story a whole decade back – to 1973 when the oil boom began in the Arab world and hundreds of thousands of Indians, a fairly large percentage of them Muslims, took up lucrative (by Indian standards) jobs in various Gulf countries.
As in other such cases, there is some merit in this proposition. Muslims, like Christians and Jews, see themselves as part of a world community. As such Muslims all over the world were elated at the sudden rise in Arab power, as were the Jews at Israel’s victory over the Arabs in 1967.
It might be recalled that the Israeli victory provided a great stimulus for the Jews in the Soviet Union to emigrate to Israel even if it involved, as it did, defiance of Soviet authorities.
It was also natural that some Arab governments, especially the Saudis who see themselves as guardians of Islam by virtue of their custody of the Muslim holy places of Mecca and Medina, should send some funds to India specially for Muslim institutions and that Indian Muslim workers employed in the Gulf should contribute fairly generously for the renovation and construction of mosques which, according to them, is the best form of charity.
The theory is that these developments have caused considerable uneasiness among the Hindus, especially after the mass conversion of Harijans to Islam in Meenakshipuram and other places in South India, and have helped revive the old siege mentality among them. This may well be the case.
Those of us who are cut off from the mass of our people by the barriers of the English language, our western life-style and ways of thinking and our residence in upper class fashionable colonies should be wary of rushing to the opposite conclusion. A perusal of the Urdu and the Marathi press on the one hand and of the English language press on the other in connection with the current trouble in Bombay would show how wide is the gulf and how different are the perspectives.
Let us now put the theory aside and concentrate on facts. The one that stares us in the face most forcefully is that jhuggis and jhonpris have invariably been the principal targets of attack by both Hindi Muslims. A couple of places of worship have been attacked or sought to be attacked but attention of the arsonists has been concentrated on the slummiest of the slums and the murder squads on the residents of these slums.
It is notable that even in Bhiwandi, which is said to be particularly vulnerable to communal violence in view of its living and working conditions and the position of its population, the clash triggered by the so-called battle of flags quickly shifted to the slums on the outskirts. Hundreds of jhuggis and jhonpris there went up in flames and a number of residents were murdered on the first day of trouble on May 17. The same pattern was repeated in one slum after another. Hardly was a middle class locality affected sharp. In contrast to 1970, the powerlooms in Bhiwandi were not damaged.
This does not quite knock down the wholly communalist explanation; slum-dwellers be as communal as anyone else. But it does weaken it. Slum dwellers cannot possibly be sole victims of the communal virus. Indeed, the theory, if are to go by it, is that communal parties get their cadres most exclusively from among the lower middle class.
It is tempting to rush to another theory which is that the sub-human living conditions in jhuggis and jhonpris breed such intolerable tensions that the residents are ready to explode at the slightest provocation. But those who have witnessed the riots in and around Bombay would testify to the absence of spontaneity. They have not been an expression of pent-up frustration and bitterness. And in not a single case have the slum-dwellers turned on their supposed tormentors – those who live in comfort or those who make them keep long hours and pay them low wages.
On the face of it, there must have been a method in this madness. It is in fact difficult to resist the conclusion that there was. But who were master-minding it all?
Most Muslims have no doubt at all that the Shiv Sena has been behind the arson and the murders. But even if we assume that the Shiv Sena is as bitterly anti-Muslim as many Muslims believe it to be, the question regarding the purpose of burning down jhuggis and jhonpris and terrorising the inhabitants into leaving the city and its suburbs remains obscure. Unless it was to create fear and terror among them. But then why has the Shiv Sena concentrated its attention on these areas only? And who has masterminded the similar operation on the part of the Muslims? In their case, no organisation has even been mentioned, though there is no dearth of communal bodies among them.
Large parts of Bombay have virtually been parcelled out among themselves by slumlords. These characters have always existed in that city. But their number and power have grown in recent years as jhuggi-jhonpri colonies have multiplied since the end of the emergency in 1977. After which no state government has been interested in stopping the growth of these plague spots. The slumlords have a great deal to gain by the wholesale vacation of sites which they can re-allocate to new or old immigrants against payments which go up to Rs. 25,000 for a jhuggi. In the absence of evidence, however, it would be rash to infer either that the slumlords have instigated the arson in jhuggi-jhonpri colonies or that the Shiv Sena and its Muslim counterpart (if it exists) have been in league with them.
This leaves one possible explanation. The jhuggi-jhonpri colonies have been burnt down precisely because they are the most vulnerable. But it suffers from a serious weakness. It does not indicate the motive of the supposed master-minds.
Anyone who knows anything about Bombay would also know that the city is a paradise for smugglers, currency racketeers, illicit distillers, bootleggers and gamblers (the matka being the best known form); that these crimes yield enormous profits, those from smuggling alone placed anywhere between Rs. 1,250 crores and Rs. 1,500 crores a year; that gangs are organised broadly, though not wholly, along communal lines and that the gang leaders in search of social acceptability and respectability finance religious and communal organisations.
Rumours have also floated in Bombay to the effect that some of the well-known smugglers, Muslims and Hindus, have contributed generously to communal organisations. It is obviously not possible to confirm these reports. But true or false, these cannot be cited as evidence that the leaders of the underworld have instigated the riots. They could at best have financed those engaged in them.
As we reach this point in our analysis we confront two mutually contradictory facts. If it is true, as it apparently is, that most of the arsonists and assassins have come from the underworld, it becomes difficult to explain the absence of modern firearms and the dependence of the desperadoes on the old lathi, curved knife, sword, tubelight, sodawater bottle and kerosene-soaked rags. Some individuals would have us believe that firearms have been held in reserve – for the final round. But that is the output of the rumour mills which have been overactive.
Be that as it may, the steady growth of crime and the rise of what can be called crime empires in Bombay have effectively undermined the administration and respect for law enforcing agencies. This in turn has created conditions in which explosions like the present one can take place and become extremely difficult to control.
Even otherwise, Maharashtra is no longer the well administered state it used to be. Politicians in power have played havoc with it especially in recent years. The fact that no one in the Maharashtra administration had an inkling that a storm was brewing and could burst at any time speaks for the lackadaisical way it functions. The intelligence setup has clearly failed to do its duty and so have the police, which is why the army had to be called in. The chief minister has himself confessed that he did not take a serious view of the situation when the trouble first broke out in Bhiwandi on May 17. Apparently he did not have adequate warning.
Bombay has in some ways been ready to move into the 21st century. But it has political leaders who are straight out of the 18th century. The two cannot match.
Finally, with the Congress in disarray and showing little capacity to renew itself and with no other political organisation ready to take its place, a political vacuum is emerging in the state. It will be rash to predict the future course of events. But it is evident that the vacuum forebodes trouble for Maharashtra as it does for much of the rest of the country. A period of great stress and strain is clearly ahead of us. The riots in Bombay might turn out to be a warning signal.
Sunday Review, the Times of India, 3 June 1984