Arrival City_ How the Largest Migration in History Is Reshaping Our World - Doug Saunders [116]
By the end of the 1990s, the Shiv Sena had taken the place of many forms of government and public service in Mumbai—though only for the city’s Hindu residents—with vital public services emerging not from government or public-sector agencies but directly from the political offices and shakas of the Sena. “Mid-rung Sena politicians personally living in the slums are respected as patrons by the slum inhabitants,” one study observed. “Promises of flats were made by one, not in his capacity as a corporator [municipal official] but as the local leader of the Shiv Sena. His political position was not as important as his status as a Hindu leader in the Shiv Sena. Relief money for constituents came from Shiv Sena funds, not the government treasury … the Shiv Sena’s social work [provided] daycare centers, schools, and even medical help to its members. Shiv Sena ambulances race sleekly to the rescue through the streets of Mumbai in contrast to the government’s ramshackle vehicles.”32
Sanjay Solkar’s move to Mumbai had its impetus in the opening of Shiv Sena offices in his village. At the time of his birth, his family had little or no knowledge of Bombay; the transportation links were poor, and the family was able to grow enough food to keep from starving, though they were malnourished. But when the Sena set up shop there in the early 1990s, as part of its move from being a strictly Bombay-centered movement into Maharashtrian state politics, it forged a tight link with the poor farmers. The Sainaks built wells and schools, repaired roads, and provided assistance to the “sons of the soil,” all in the name of Marathi and Hindu purity. When a cash economy began to develop in the village, Sanjay’s relatives, and many of their neighbors, began seeking work in the city. The Shiv Sena was there to help, its village office tied to the shakas of the arrival city. In the name of excluding others, Bal Thackeray’s movement ended up making rural-to-urban migration easier and more efficient for some, enabling the further growth of the arrival city.
Nevertheless, the Shiv Sena’s haphazard, gangsterish form of organization has meant that, for the past 20 years, Mumbai has done little about the paralyzing housing policies and sources of corruption that stand in the way of successful rural-arrival communities. It has meant that Hindu–Muslim violence is an enduring feature on Mumbai’s ideological landscape. In 2002, when Hindu nationalists in northern Gujarat led a massacre that killed 2,000 Muslims, Shiv Sainaks in Mumbai participated in actions that killed 700 people, most of them Muslim. This violence continued during the period of BJP-led government, which lasted until 2004. The movement continues to dominate Mumbai, though it has metamorphosed. In 2006, disgruntled relatives of Bal Thackeray formed a breakaway party, the Maharashtra Navnirman Sena (“Maharashtra Reconstruction Army”), which claims to abandon the Hinduvta politics and “bureaucracy” of Shiv Sena and return to the Sena’s radical Marathi-rights roots. The MNS quickly won a large following in Mumbai, leading the uprisings against English-language signs in 2008 and 2009, and may yet eclipse Shiv Sena. However, its forms of organization, its tactics and its arrival-city constituency are nearly identical.
This migrant-driven ethnic movement has permanently changed the politics of the world’s preeminent arrival-city megalopolis. It has meant that the arrival city is sometimes treated with respect, since the slum-based Shiv Sena has granted land ownership,