Arrival City_ How the Largest Migration in History Is Reshaping Our World - Doug Saunders [115]
By the end of the 1980s, it became possible for the Shiv Sena to turn that dichotomy into a city-wide ideology. Starting with its municipal election victory in 1985, the Shiv Sena controlled the Bombay mayor’s office and other municipal bodies continually for the next two and a half decades. By 1992, it had an active membership of 300,000, exceeding the size of the Bombay police force (of course, many police were also Shiv Sena members). That strength of force, and the rising pitch of intolerance emanating from Bal Thackeray and the dadas, combined to form a highly combustible mixture.
In December of 1992, it ignited. The cause was unlikely. In a remote corner of Uttar Pradesh state, in northeastern India, a crowd of 150,000 Hindu nationalists destroyed the historic Babri Mosque. In faraway Bombay, there were rumors of Muslim reprisal killings; these were inflamed when the Shiv Sena decided to hold a march in support of the activists implicated in the destruction of the mosque, and to hold it in the narrow laneways of the Dharavi slum, whose 800,000 residents include sizable Muslim communities. Some Muslims reacted angrily, and then Bal Thackeray declared an all-out war. The pages of his Saamna newspaper, popular among poor Marathis, had been filled with tales of shiploads of armaments from Pakistan arriving on the coast. Then, on January 9, at a moment when tensions had increased to a dangerous level, Saamna provoked the mob to mass murder, in an editorial apparently written by Thackeray himself: “Muslims of Bhendi Bazar, Null Bazar, Dongri and Pydhonie, the areas we call Mini Pakistan that are determined to uproot Hindustan, took out their weapons. They must be shot on the spot … the next few days will be ours.”31
The next six weeks saw furious Hindu mobs overtaking the city in a reign of terror; a thousand people, most of them Muslim, were killed by burning, shooting, beatings, or drowning; Hindu mobs burned down entire neighborhoods and Muslim-majority industrial districts and drove at least 150,000 Muslims out of the city. When it was over, the geography of Bombay was permanently transformed. No longer could Hindu and Muslim families live comfortably as neighbors, as they generally had for centuries; the Sena-dominated Hindu slums were transformed into “gated communities” to be feared and avoided by Muslims. The riots were followed by a Muslim bombing campaign, the first act of Islamic terrorism within India, and this cycle of reprisal continued for the next decade. Almost overnight, the world’s most multicultural city became far more segregated.
The riots boosted the Shiv Sena’s fortunes, even though an official inquiry would hold the party responsible for starting them and provoking their most serious acts of violence. (It would not be until 2008 that anyone would be punished, when three Shiv Sena officials, one of them a member of Parliament, were jailed.) In the 1995 elections, a coalition of the Hindu-nationalist Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) and the Shiv Sena won control of Maharashtra state, ending decades of Congress rule. Among their first acts was to rename the city’s capital Mumbai—a pronunciation traditionally used by Hindu speakers of Marathi and Gujarati but not by Urdu-speaking Muslims or by any speakers of English or Hindi (the latter including most religious minorities), who had always called it Bombay. Even in its name, the city became more segregated. And the party used its official power