Arrival City_ How the Largest Migration in History Is Reshaping Our World - Doug Saunders [114]
From the beginning of the movement, Thackeray had kept a portrait of Hitler in his office, next to a snarling Bengal tiger. In 1984, as Shiv Sena was becoming a national political movement and the first major anti-Muslim riots were sweeping across Bombay, he explained in an interview exactly how his anti-Muslim campaign was modeled after the Third Reich: “Now I like some Jews, they have a warrior-like thing … But Hitler found that not only were they the corrupt people but they also didn’t behave. He realized that ‘if I don’t drive them out, then my country won’t come up.’ You may condemn that kind of act—even I would condemn. It is not the only way, this gas chamber and all. I don’t like. But you may drive them out—things like that. It is all right. But don’t blame the man. He wanted to bring his country up and he knew what were the evils.”28
So Thackeray invited Gujaratis and South Indian Hindus to join his movement, began publishing his newspapers in Hindi as well as Marathi, and fomented a Hindu–Muslim conflict where none had existed. Muslims were not obvious targets: It was impossible to claim that they were taking jobs or educational opportunities away from Marathi speakers or that they were migrating to Bombay to steal jobs. Muslims are at least as well established in the city as Hindus are and had lived as neighbors for centuries. But there was a new atmosphere in Bombay in the 1980s. The big textile mills were closing down forever, after the catastrophic strike of 1982 drove the industry to seek lower-wage locations around the world. Suddenly, people on the lower rungs of the working class were thrust into the informal service economy, out of the one-room concrete chawls and into the proper slums, out of permanent lifetime employment and into the chaos of selling, hustling, and finding a living. This created insecurity and discomfort and made nationalist, jingoistic politics seem more appealing.
This mood was particularly acute for rural-migrant women, who, during the fabric-industry boom, had often maintained ties to the villages, calling themselves “visiting wives.” Now, they were finding themselves transformed into permanent urban residents, full-time workers in domestic service and retail, and often their family’s primary breadwinners. Shiv Sena, heretofore a very masculine movement, suddenly held an appeal to Hindu working women, and the shakas eagerly incorporated them by organizing the Aghadi, a women’s branch. The social anthropologist Atreyee Sen, who spent a year living undercover within the Shiv Sena women’s organizations, found a movement that used rural–urban migration to build an ideology of hate.
Poor slum women joined the violent Sena ethno-nationalist movement because the organization provided shade from what they described as “the scalding effects” (man jalana) of urbanization, industrialization and migration in Mumbai … Within the Sena they felt “connected”; the feeling of community that was lost through rural-urban and intra-urban migration was replaced by “Maharashtrianism” … Most women, who mourned the lost vitality of community life in villages, seemed to have regained their traditional group solidarities. Thus the Aghadi gave slum women a chance to assimilate into a new social and political network, within which they could resolve their urban insecurities and experiences of alienation.29
On the other hand, for the hundreds of thousands of men who flooded into the city from the villages, a migration that accelerated to record levels in the 1980s, there were two possibilities: You could join the Shiv Sena’s cult of violence, benefiting from the Sena’s many forms of assistance in exchange for participating in acts of gangsterism,