Arrival City_ How the Largest Migration in History Is Reshaping Our World - Doug Saunders [112]
This is the local shaka, or branch office, of the Shiv Sena, or Army of Shivaji,§ which counts Sanjay among its hundreds of thousands of members. It is an ethnic movement, political party, and organized-crime body that has ruled the city since the mid-1980s. In the process, the Shiv Sena has irrevocably transformed the city’s character, its mood, and even its name. Across Mumbai, and especially in slum neighborhoods, 224 shakas and about 1,000 sub-shakas serve as organizing points for a startling range of activities, from social work and housing aid to extortion and protection rackets to election campaigns and violent battles against non-Hindu street vendors and shops that dare print their signs in English. These more aggressive activities, all in the name of defending the Marathi-speaking Hindus of Mumbai, have earned the Sena its reputation as a threatening and fascistic movement, one that has terrified India’s secular establishment and launched waves of violence against Muslims on an unprecedented scale.
But to see the Shiv Sena strictly as an ethnic-chauvinist movement is to miss its crucial role in the process of rural–urban migration, in the settlement of slums, and in the building and maintenance of the arrival cities, which are the key feature of modern Mumbai and home to half of its 20 million people. This arrival-city role may seem surprising in a movement that was built on opposing the migration of outsiders into the city. But, in violently enforcing its ideas about who should be excluded from and invited to join the arrival cities of this megalopolis, the Shiv Sena has come to be the quintessential political movement of the great migration: a fascism-from-below that has taken the bitter struggles of rural–urban arrival, the competition for scarce housing resources, and transformed them into the defining politics of a city, a state, and, sometimes, an entire nation.
Bombay, as Mumbai was known historically, is located near the intersection of Gujarat and Maharashtra states, the former traditionally known for commerce and the latter more for farming; it has always been a polyglot city, its mixture of Muslims and Hindus speaking Gujarati and English in business, Marathi (the language of Maharashtra) and Urdu (the main Muslim tongue) in the workplace and the home, and, in the streets and shops, usually Bombiya Hindi, a variant of the national language peppered with words and expressions from those other tongues. In the decades after the Second World War, Bombay’s rising cotton-industry fortunes drew millions of poor Maharashtrian farmers to migrate into the city, especially after India decided in 1960 to redivide its states along strictly linguistic lines, creating a larger Maharashtra with Bombay as its capital. Many of the Marathi-speaking migrants expected this new status to turn them into a dominant class, and they were surprised to find themselves just the same as before, a plurality but not a majority, neither the wealthiest nor the poorest group, suffering the same unemployment as anyone else during the economic downturn of the mid-1960s.
When the editorial cartoonist Bal Thackeray launched the Shiv Sena movement with a protest rally in a park in 1966, the targets of his rage and resentment were fellow Hindus—those who, he claimed, had moved to Bombay from Gujarat and other northern states to take control of businesses and those who had migrated from Tamil Nadu and other southern states to take all the white-collar jobs. Sena volunteers began torching South Indian cafés in efforts to stop the “invasion” and launched campaigns to lobby