Arrival City_ How the Largest Migration in History Is Reshaping Our World - Doug Saunders [113]
But this ethnic-rights movement soon encountered the problem, and the opportunity, of the arrival city. By 1965, the increasing pace of migration had created over 3,000 Bombay slums and more than a million slum- and pavement-dwellers. For the first time, they were seen as a major threat to the city’s well-being and a potential key political constituency. For the arrival-city residents, the constant, burning issue was the scarcity of livable land (and, in Bombay, the concept of “livable” has always been stretched to human limits) and the struggle to hold on to it. This was really an issue of land tenure and housing policy, but it was easily recast by Shiv Sena leaders as one of inter-ethnic competition. In the early 1970s, the party made its first major moves into the slums. It organized its rural-migrant dadas (shaka leaders, or literally “big brothers”) and sent them out to encroach on public land—both to create new arrival-city enclaves for the Maharashtrian villagers entering Bombay and also for the developers of middle-class housing blocks, who now had to pay the Shiv Sena to obtain it.
While they engaged in this lucrative franchise, the dadas became big brothers in a more personal sense. For the Marathi-speaking rural migrant, the Shiv Sena became the sole point of comfort and order amid the chaos of the fast-expanding city. The ruling Congress party, which had heretofore served Bombay well with its Nehruvian mission of inter-ethnic harmony, had become a threat to the slum-dweller. In the 1970s, it turned to economic and demographic authoritarianism, its signature policies being mandatory birth control and slum clearance, and its near-exclusive focus on India’s rural development treated cities as an inconvenient afterthought. Those policies missed the point of rural–urban migration and failed to see that Indians did not, on the whole, want to be farmers with large families but were lacking effective pathways to urban life. The rural-focused policies of Congress left migrants trapped in a limbo that was neither rural nor urban. Shiv Sena was able to step into this space. The typical rural migrant, the sociologist Sujata Patel observed in her study of this period, has
broken the bonds of village community life but has not become part of an urban-industrial culture. In these circumstances the need for an equivalent “village community” becomes translated into an affiliation with the other members of small slum communities, with the slums being organized into clusters of regional, ethnic and religious groups … The Sena’s policy of organizing people at their point of residence has helped to mobilize this deprived populace, especially the young male migrants. For young male underemployed slum dwellers the Shiv Sena represents the family, and its local chief becomes the “father” or the elder brother, “dada.” It gives them a sense of identity, organizing them into various cultural activities as they “hang around” in corner paan shops. It taps their restlessness and articulates their anger at being part of an unrecognized element in the city.27
By the end of the 1970s, Bal Thackeray’s movement had become a fixture in the slums, but it had produced no discernible political or demographic gains. It had, however, turned Thackeray himself into a major celebrity, the “Al Capone of Bombay,” the subject of a cult following. But his movement was losing its impetus. By this point, most Marathi speakers were more successful and no longer saw southerners and Gujarati businessmen as a threat. Thackeray realized that he needed a larger target and a more sensational approach. He found it in the politics of Hinduvta, the Hindu-supremacist movement that views India’s Hindu communities as the original, authentic Aryan race of India, drawing on the same confusion