by Suketu Mehta
I have to visit G. R. Khairnar, known as the Demolition Man, to fully grasp Sunil’s potential as a slumlord. “I have demolished two hundred and eighty-five thousand structures during my entire career of twenty years,” says Khairnar, a deputy municipal commissioner who has earned the ire of the Sena and all the other political parties. He tells me about the demolition process. There are twenty-three municipal wards. Each ward has a special squad to detect illegal constructions, which “are put up in connivance with municipal staff or police.” The squad is supposed to give a seven-day legal notice asking for documentation that the structure is legal. If the license isn’t provided, the demolition is supposed to go ahead. But “the staff is under great fear.” And there is the money; “if the notice is issued, the entire file will be sold for a lakh or two to the party concerned.” An employee can make more in bribes on a single building than the amount he earns in his entire career in the municipal corporation.
Khairnar won’t demolish a building if a portion of it is occupied. He realizes the consequences of his work, as he prowls about the city with his wrecking crew. Many of the people living in the hutments are very poor and have nothing to lose by fighting the wreckers. They throw stones; sometimes they burn their own huts. Before he demolishes a hut, his orders are to remove the cooking utensils inside. He describes his work like a movie: “The scene is the woman is wearing a dirty half-sari. She doesn’t even have drinking water; how is she supposed to wash it? The children are without clothes. I enter the hut and there are hardly any utensils inside. The corporation comes in like devils and demolishes their hut.”
Once he was demolishing a hut in the big slum of Dharavi. The woman whose house he was about to destroy stood up in front of Khairnar, lifted her small baby by the legs, swung the child around her head, and was about to dash it against the ground. “We caught her just in time.”
Even after he clears a slum colony, it will promptly be rebuilt with substandard material in the same place. “Settlement colonies cannot really be destroyed. They will reappear.” He was once determined to clear a section of footpath in Mahim of the slums built on top of it. Every time he would knock them down and leave, they would be rebuilt in hours. “We used to clear them twice, three times a day. They would keep reappearing. They would run away behind the railway tracks and come back after we left.” Each time Khairnar demolished a hut, it cost the municipality around 1,000 rupees. There were eighteen hundred huts in that area. The numbers were always against the Demolition Man.
Khairnar has been a ward officer since 1976. In 1985, when the Sena controlled the municipal corporation, the Saheb summoned Khairnar to Matoshree, the Thackeray mansion. The stepson of the chief minister had put up an illegal hotel, which Khairnar was about to demolish. Thackeray, according to Khairnar, asked him to desist; Khairnar went ahead and did his duty anyway. Eleven days later, as he parked his car in his office compound, two shots rang out, hitting a bystander standing next to him, and a third shot went clean through Khairnar’s leg.
He returned to work and took on the godfather of Bombay himself, Dawood Ibrahim, who owned an illegal building, Mehejebin, under his wife’s name. The day before the demolition, the police roamed through the building with dogs to check for explosives. The next day, Khairnar went in with an army of four hundred policemen, including paramilitaries from the Border Security Force, and destroyed the building with a three-ton wrecking ball. From 1992 onward, he demolished twenty-nine more buildings belonging to Dawood. His own officers, threatened by the don, begged him to back off, and the contractor that provided wrecking equipment withdrew from the contract.
Khairnar became a hero in the press. But the municipal commissioner told him he was getting a lot of pressure from above to rein Demolition Man in. When the commissioner tried to stop him by appointing a high-level committee to oversee the demolitions so he didn’t have control anymore, Khairnar decided to expose the politicians. He started making fiery speeches, wild allegations, in public meetings that were called by the city’s good and great, who saw in him a savior against corrupt politicians. The municipal commissioner asked Khairnar to desist from his denunciations and finally, in 1994, suspended him on the basis of insubordination. For a few years, Khairnar sat in his official bungalow, beneath a bust of Vive-kananda, without any work to do and plenty of time to talk. He started an NGO for prostitutes; he raided brothels and “rescued” underage girls. In 2000, he was returned to service and went energetically back to the demolitions and the front pages of the newspapers, a hero once again of the middle class, those who already had homes.
IT IS FIVE YEARS after the riots, and the entire city braces itself for the autopsy: the release of the Srikrishna Commission Report. “Here swords are being sharpened,” says a young man in the Muslim district of Madanpura, on the night before the report is to come out. Paramilitary forces have been put on alert. The Sena government can’t delay any longer; Justice Srikrishna has invited activist groups to sue him, making him a party to the petition demanding his report’s release.
When the report comes out, it is much more than the mere act of catharsis the judge hoped for. The Srikrishna Commission Report does Bombay proud. It is a detailed study of the riots and places blame where it belongs: on Thackeray and on the city police.
The Shiv Sena pramukh Bal Thackeray, like a veteran general, commanded his loyal Shiv Sainiks to retaliate by organized attacks against Muslims. . . . The attacks on Muslims by the Shiv Sainiks were mounted with military precision, with lists of establishments and voters’ lists in hand.
The Sena government officially rejects the report, accusing the judge of being biased against the Hindus. But this most learned judge is a Sanskrit scholar; nobody is fooled. Justice Srikrishna is a devout Hindu, much more so than Bal Thackeray.
In his report, Judge Srikrishna names thirty-one policemen who committed atrocities—who shot people dead or actively directed the Sena mobs. But in the end, nothing that the good judge has written will ever directly cost any individual a single minute’s time behind bars. According to the terms of the act under which the commission was formed, none of the testimony given before the commission can be used to prosecute anybody. So, after five hundred depositions and close to ten thousand pages of recorded testimony, if a single one of the policemen or political leaders or street thugs who participated in the riots has to be prosecuted, the work that the Srikrishna Commission did has to begin over, in a court of law. The same witnesses must testify again, getting lawyers to represent them, filing affidavits on their behalf, and then going to the magistrate’s court, to the sessions court, to the high court, to the Supreme Court. If a policeman is to be prosecuted, the government’s sanction has to be obtained because he is a public servant; the magistrate has to be convinced that what he did was not done in the line of duty. All that can be done with the report is that Justice Srikrishna’s conclusions can be shown to the magistrate. For many of the poorer victims, it is enough that the judge has listened to them, acknowledged that some wrong was done them. That’s how little they expect of the justice system.
In response to the Srikrishna Commission Report, the Times of India prints an editorial titled “The Healing Touch,” which calls for healing but not for justice. A Times reporter tells me that instructions have been issued to all the paper’s reporters to soft-pedal stories on the report; all articles dealing with it—even profiles of the judge—have to be personally cleared through the resident editor. The argument advanced by management is that running anything too supportive of the report will provoke rioting by the Muslims. At this time, the paper has just one Muslim reporter on its entire Bombay staff.
A few weeks after the Srikrishna Commission Report comes out, I go back to Jogeshwari on the night of Ganapati Visarjan, when idols of Ganesha are immersed into the water all around the city. There is a mob on the chowk; two floats on trucks are advancing very slowly onto the crossroads. One procession is led by Amol, a long-haired man of impressive size wh
om I had met when I was investigating the riots. He has the reputation of being an uncontrollable hothead. Only his neighbor Raju, Girish’s sister, can pacify him when he’s on a rampage; he considers her his own sister. Sunil, who is Amol’s partner in activities legal and illegal, tells me that Amol is unmanageable when drunk. “He’s done three murders.” Sunil touches his nose with his forefinger, to indicate that they were Muslims. “There was a man on a scooter. He poured petrol on him and burnt him alive.” But the same Hindu man also regularly travels for two days to get to Ajmer Sharif in Rajasthan, to pray at the tomb of a Muslim saint. His facial hair is visible proof of his allegiance to the saint; he has let his beard grow for eight months now and has stopped smoking and drinking, in pursuance of a vow he made at the shrine. On an auspicious day, he will go to Ajmer, cut off his beard, and offer it to the Sufi saint.
Amol’s procession features men dressed as Shivaji, Saibaba of Shirdi, and Lokmanya Tilak standing on top of the truck. All around them and swarming over the truck are about fifty other boys and men; three of them on top have caps and bandannas on their heads with the colors of the Union Jack, like early videos of the Spice Girls. The floats creep toward the mosque on the main road leading toward the station. “We’ll take an hour going to the masjid, and then to pass in front of the masjid it will take three hours. Fifty feet after we pass the masjid almost everybody will go home,” Amol tells me.
As we approach the mosque, the procession slows almost to a halt. The drummers are in a frenzy, and the entire crowd is dancing with abandon. It helps that many of the boys have bottles of liquor in their pockets. Although there is a small contingent of women in the back (one young woman is waving a large saffron flag, the Sena banner), the men are all dancing with men. One boy has his legs between another’s; as they dance, the one bends backward and the other bends over him, wriggling, humping. A child has his hand over his face; then he too begins jerking automatically to the drumbeats. Clouds of red gulal powder are thrown over the dancers. Then the explosions begin. Atom bombs. Looms. All the firecrackers the crowd has are let off in front of the mosque, and the air is thick with the smell of explosive, the stench from the open gutters, and, most of all, human sweat. It is an act of God that the fireworks don’t set people on fire, set off in the middle of the dense mob as they are. Then Amol gets on top of the truck, grabs the mike, and shouts out slogans in praise of Hindu kings and the Hindu country:
“Chattrapati Shivaji Maharaj ki jai!”
The crowd responds with vigor.
“Bharat Mata ki jai!”
Saffron flags are waved in wide arcs on tall poles.
“Jai Bhavani! Jai Shivaji!” This is the Sena slogan.
Amol gets down from the truck, but the slogans are still ringing out. The other two icons—Saibaba and Tilak—are forgotten in front of the mosque. Only Shivaji the warrior is invoked. A few Muslims are watching silently, from behind the ranks of policemen lining the road. It is an infernal din. As the drums pound, as the fireworks burst, as the flags wave, as the bullhorns blare, I realize what this is: It is a victory march.
Ganesha is an unlikely god for such provocation. In the Hindu legends, he is a pleasure-loving gourmand, not an angry god bent on slaughter. But in the Jogeshwari float, he is sitting on a throne; instead of the mouse that is his usual mascot, the throne is flanked by four ferocious plaster lions. From the back of the truck people are handing out prasad—coconut pieces—and little plastic bags of sheera. At the end of the block, true to Amol’s prediction, the crowd disperses, and the trucks speed on toward the swift sea to immerse their idols. The strutting past the masjid was the high point, the purpose, of the Ganapati procession: to show the Muslims that the Sena had won. This is where most riots in the country begin, in these aggressively public celebrations of a tribal, exclusive God rubbed in the face of those who would follow his rivals.
The amplified notes of the namaaz now begin coming out of the mosque. The police security cover has been excellent. Dhawle, the senior inspector and the man in charge of the Jogeshwari police station, is sitting down on a chair outside the police post, enjoying the cooling evening. The cops moved us on past the masjid in record time. A horde of plainclothes-men were constantly pushing us forward, urging the truck on. Uniformed cops were massed on both sides of the road, not allowing anybody to get too close to the building. Over the open gutters stood Muslim volunteers, a human guard against an unwary reveler falling into them in the dark.
It was not always this fraught. Before the 1993 riots, Arfin Banu, a member of the Mohalla Ekta Committee, remembers that the procession would stop making noise and bursting crackers on the block in front of the masjid and pass by quickly and silently, in deference to Muslim sentiments. This noisy display had only started in the years after the riots; some years it got very bad. Stones were thrown at the procession by the Muslims, and the possibility of a new riot was always looming. The police guard was much stronger in former years, as was the crowd. Amol would get up on top of the truck and whip the crowd up with his slogans; this year the police requested that he get down from the truck before it passed in front of the masjid, and he obeyed. So, provocative as tonight’s procession was—the invoking of Hindu warriors, the bursting of explosive crackers, the profane dancing—it was, in the Bombay of today, a best-case scenario. Nobody shouted invectives against the Muslims, no pigs were flung at the mosque, and four Muslim men came forward to dance with Amol and his friends, the Hindus who had slaughtered their families five years ago.
The taxi driver carrying me home has a little shrine of Saibaba of Shirdi enclosed in an illuminated arch, next to a verse from the Koran in Arabic script. “What is that?” I ask, pointing, as I’m about to leave the cab.
“This?” he asks, touching the arch. He thinks I want to ask about the colored lights.
“That.” I point to the Arabic text.
“This is Muslim.”
“And you have Saibaba also?”
“Yes.” He has turned around. He is smiling. I am joyous. There is still hope.
I GO TO VISIT Amol in his family’s room in the slum. He comes out of his bath, clad only in his towel, broad-chested, brawny-armed. He works in the big dairy on the highway. His sister-in-law brings me a cup of hot sugared milk. It is rich thick buffalo milk, and I find it difficult to swallow. There is a large black speck on the milk and a solidified lump on the inside of the cup. But it is hospitality, and so I drink it. Amol asks if I would like to stay for dinner. I decline. The sister-in-law laughs and says to him in Marathi, “He saw the room and got frightened.”
It is an even tinier room than his neighbor Girish’s, but with the requisite array of electronics: a fridge, a TV, a phone. There is a stair leading to another room upstairs. An adorable seven-month old, Amol’s niece, crawls about on the ground, reaches for a whiskey bottle filled with water, can’t hold it, and starts crying. Soon enough, she is picked up. Here there is no aloneness. Amol can sleep through babies crying and TVs blaring. These days he roams about at night and sleeps in the day; he has got a friend to take over his duties at the dairy for him, and he gives him his salary. This leaves the night free for strife.
Amol, like Sunil, thrives on strife; they cannot imagine a world without it. They owe their positions, the respect they are accorded, and the living they make to strife. Alliances must shift constantly to ensure that strife continues, so the definitions of friend, enemy, and human being are relative terms. Theirs is a constant scrambling for place on a ladder of allegiances: who is in whose group, who will be given a ticket for the legislative elections, who gets what cut of the constant flow of payments—to unions, to the police, to the government, to your enemies in return for not extracting vengeance.
The Bombay word for strife is lafda (which can also mean an affair or romantic entanglement). People flock wherever there is a lafda; you’ll notice a large group of men, watching intently, unblinking, as near as possible to the lafda, so as not to miss a single second of
it. “In Bombay there must be ten to fifteen lafdas a day,” Amol guesses. The foot soldiers of the lafda are the taporis: the street punks. The bhais—dons—and the netas—politicians—need a constant pool of taporis to maintain their positions. Amol is at heart a tapori: too passionate to be a shooter, too undiplomatic to be a neta, too stupid to be a bhai. He gets drunk and fights with his bare hands or with readily available weapons: glass jars from a roadside shop, swords, pieces of train track. He has a loyal following among the taporis, but he can never reach the heights that Sunil has. Sunil would never get hurt in a lafda. Amol leads out in front, but the back is where the real action is; in the back, smarter people are plotting the next move. When the time came to choose a divisional leader for the party, the shakha pramukh, Bhikhu Kamath put forward Sunil’s name. Angered, Amol entered the next legislative election as an independent. Sunil got Amol’s campaign workers drunk, and Amol lost out to the BJP—Sena combine.
Sunil, says Amol to me over dinner at a nearby restaurant, has a politician’s mind. “Even today he thinks he is an MLA,” a member of the legislative assembly. These are not words of praise from Amol, who is essentially a foot soldier, though he is a Brahmin and Sunil is a Maratha. But then, in today’s Bombay, it is the Marathas who are ruling, not the Brahmin Peshwas of old. Sunil generally decides how the spoils from their various illegal ventures are split and settles the ratio to his advantage. Amol is aware that Sunil cheats him. At some point, their rivalry will boil over into blood. But still, Amol feels obliged to beat up anyone who insults Sunil. “I believe Sunil is superior to me. He is the big man in my group.”
Amol has lost faith in the Saheb. “I used to respect Balasaheb more than God. Now he is sitting in Matoshree with a girl in one hand and a drink in the other, while we are getting beat 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 ate 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.