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  The celebration proved short-lived. The Supreme Court used Nanavati’s special leave to appeal his conviction petition to deliberate on the constitutionality of the governor’s order. The legal drama took a twist when Attorney General M. C. Setalvad and Solicitor General C. K. Daphtary excused themselves from defending the governor’s order. The explanation was that they were members of the Supreme Court Bar Association, which had criticized the governor’s order. In their absence, H. M. Seervai, the advocate general of Maharashtra, rose to defend the governor’s order. For several weeks, the court heard opposing arguments on the order in relation to the principle of the separation of powers between the executive and the judiciary. Finally, the Supreme Court ruled on September 5: While the constitution gave the governor the power to suspend sentence, it also empowered the court to enforce its rules. In this situation, a “harmonious” construction of the respective constitutional powers of the executive and the judiciary required that Nanavati surrender before his petition of special appeal against his conviction by the High Court could be heard.48 The court had averted a clash with the executive while protecting its domain.

  On September 8 a deflated Blitz published a photo story capturing Nanavati’s journey to jail.49 The newspaper’s spirit was down, but not its instinct for theater. Nanavati, dressed in a suit, was shown leaving naval custody in a car, a large crowd lining the motorcade. According to the story, a “cool, calm, but sad-faced” Nanavati bade farewell to Commander Samuel, kissed a sobbing Sylvia good-bye, and took a seat in the car that drove him in the afternoon to Arthur Road Prison. There, a huge crowd stood waiting for him. Amid cries of “Nanavati Zindabad!” (Long live Nanavati) and flashing camera bulbs, the “tall, handsome, cool” Commander Nanavati came out of the car, “determined to face his destiny.” After a fleeting look at the formidable jail, he bent gracefully to enter the tiny wooden door and disappeared from view. A momentary silence hung in the air. Then, mayhem, as the crowd dashed toward the door, shouting “Nanavati Zindabad! Nanavati Zindabad!”

  The Supreme Court commenced its consideration of Nanavati’s appeal on October 9. The murder case had now escalated into a national legal spectacle. Back onstage were star jurists. Once again, long lines formed outside the courtroom. G. S. Pathak, an eminent lawyer who later served as India’s vice president, led the defense team. M. C. Setalvad, the attorney general, represented the government. Reiterating the theory of an accidental shooting, Pathak asserted the matter concerned not law but fact, which only the jury could decide. The High Court, he argued, was wrong to overrule the jury and to try the case de novo. Setalvad defended the High Court’s decision to overrule the jury and its finding of Nanavati’s guilt. While the legal battle went on for several weeks in the Supreme Court, Blitz ran a tireless campaign. Week after week, it splashed “the Case of the Eternal Triangle” on its front page, illustrated with photographs of the three protagonists.

  5.6. Nanavati goes to jail. Source: Blitz September 17, 1960.

  On Friday, November 24, the Supreme Court delivered its judgment: Nanavati was guilty. In a unanimous judgment, the four-member Supreme Court bench upheld the right of the High Court to overrule the jury decision and consider the evidence afresh. The murder was deliberate and calculated.50 Blitz responded to the decision with a front page emblazoned with an eye-catching headline, “mercy for nan avati! An Appeal to the President for Pardon.”51 In the lead article, Karanjia was careful not to challenge the Supreme Court’s confirmation of Nanavati’s conviction. But he cited mitigating circumstances to plead for a pardon. Nanavati was a brilliant and patriotic naval officer; his only crime was that he had avenged his honor. Articles by its legal experts echoed the editor’s argument. It was a Grecian tragedy, involving the destruction of the life of an honest officer by a notoriously “gay Lothario.”52 Ahuja’s conduct represented an invasion of “unprotected homes” by the rich. The defense had bungled the case, it argued, by offering the accidental-shooting theory. This plea, according to the tabloid, denied the psychological shock underlying Nanavati’s action and had lowered the brave officer in public esteem.

  Invoking all these moral and patriotic reasons, Blitz launched a mass petition campaign for mercy. To buttress the grounds for mercy, it consolidated the story line that its coverage had developed over two and half years. This was presented in a series that it published over several weeks, comprehensively recapitulating the chain of events leading up to the murder and conviction.53 With photographs and illustrations—now ever more creative—this series once again presented the case as a story of the tragic unraveling of a patriotic naval officer’s life. It described Nanavati’s illustrious career; the romance with the “beautiful, blue-eyed, brunette” Sylvia in England; the happy family life with three children; the Garden of Eden disturbed by the snake Ahuja; the news of the shocking betrayal and the murder; and the two and half years’ legal ordeal ending in a fourteen-year sentence. This series and the pardon campaign capped the tabloid’s successful effort to transform a quotidian urban episode into a national legal and moral spectacle.

  5.7. Case for prosecution. Source: Blitz, December 2, 1961.

  SEX, LAW, TABLOID, AND THE CITY

  The Nanavati case’s life as a media event is a quintessentially modern story of the entanglement of the city, mass culture, and law in a single circuit. But it is a story located at a particular juncture in the cultural modernity of Bombay. There was something very specific about the city that the case brought into view. So too were the modes of the case’s circulation in mass culture and the issues of the law, society, and politics it raised.

  5.8. Case for defense. Source: Blitz, December 2, 1961.

  The sensational media coverage brought to the surface the elite milieu of the late-colonial and early-postcolonial city, a milieu rooted in the colonial experience. Here, English was the mode of communication. An anglicized and colonial lifestyle was utterly normal. It is the Bombay evoked in Salman Rushdie’s fictionalized story of his childhood in the city. It is also the city of the golden fifties, which are nostalgically remembered today. Daily life in this world included visits to the trusty department stores on Hornby Road and Mahatma Gandhi Road—Evans and Fraser, Whiteway Laidlaw, and the Army and Navy Store. The hair salon Fucile and cafés and confectionaries—Cornaglia, Mongini, Comba, Bertorellis, and Bombellis—were familiar spots.54 Clubs and dinner parties, bearers and servants, were fixtures of elite life. Going to an afternoon show of Tom’s Thumb at the Art Deco Metro Theatre was not out of the ordinary. The exclusive enclaves of Cuffe Parade and Malabar Hill, the locus of the drama of adultery and murder, were well known in the elite geography of the city. Ahuja and Sylvia’s affair, the love letters, and the details of the daily lives of the main protagonists did not appear exceptional in this setting.

  It is this elite city that Blitz presented on its pages. Its relentless attention to the story was remarkable, given that this was a period of very important political developments. The Bombay State was divided into the linguistic provinces of Gujarat and Maharashtra in 1960. The border dispute between India and China was heating up at this time, and Blitz covered these developments as well, with front-page headlines and special features. Blitz also published the usual stories on political and financial malfeasance. But the Nanavati case was Blitz’s mission. It turned what could have been a tawdry revenge killing in Bombay’s upper-class social circuit into something more. It enlisted patriarchal and nationalist sentiments to forge populist support for Nanavati. In its framing of the story, the rich did not just oppress the poor but threatened the very moral fiber of the nation, which Blitz identified with the armed services. Thus, a routine upper-class drama of sex and murder became a spectacle of patriarchal honor and law in the modern, cosmopolitan city. If Nanavati was guilty of anything, it was of honor killing. Ahuja got what he deserved.

  Blitz was not alone in prominently covering the case, but it alone was loud and partisan, in contrast to the sober and impartial dailies suc
h as the Times of India. The bourgeois public sphere may well be an arena for speaking truth to power, but the speech had to be colorful, vivid, and visual. It confronted the elite discourse of cold reason with a populist politics expressed in the culture of sensations and emotions. Thus, it played the Nanavati case with classic tabloid techniques—screaming headlines, exciting stories, rumors, photographic scoops, and graphic illustrations. Reporting the case as a big-city scandal, it claimed to unearth the moral and political perversions that lurked under the surface of the city’s elite life. Glossing over the fact that Nanavati was a member of this elite and had received special treatment since the time he walked into Lobo’s office, Karanjia cast him as a hero of the “people,” someone who stood for patriarchal and patriotic values. Drawing on its self-representation as a radical paper, Blitz pointed fingers at the right-wing forces allegedly determined to use the case to embarrass Nehru. Accounts of cheering crowds and petition campaigns for Nanavati were used to construct a “people” ranged on the naval officer’s side.

  Everyone appeared to have played along in a public drama that was largely stage-managed by Blitz. Nanavati was superb in his role as a patriotic naval officer and a devoted husband and father. Sylvia came across as a duly repentant wife who had strayed temporarily. Ahuja’s image as a villainous playboy hung over the case, with the replica of his skull in the courtroom—according to Blitz—“grinning sinisterly” at the proceedings. Star attorneys dressed in their court uniform uttered high-sounding dialogues on law, evidence, and the constitution. The pronouncements of the judges from their bench cast an aura of order. The Gothic Revival buildings of the Sessions and High Courts in Bombay, and the imperial Indo-Saracenic architecture of the Supreme Court in Delhi, provided weighty authority to the spectacle in which the law strained to assert its supremacy over society. The teeming crowds shouting “Nanavati Zindabad” and college girls swooning at the sight of the commander also played their part in this riveting public theater.

  Karanjia mobilized mass culture to influence the legal theater. Against the “people” whom the state claimed to embody in bringing the case against Nanavati, Blitz assembled an alternative collective body. On one side was the abstract citizen of the law; on the other side were flesh-and-blood “people.” In the confrontation of these rival conceptions of the “people,” patriarchal and patriotic values asserted their superiority over the interests of law and order. This assertion appeared momentarily successful when the jury gave a not guilty verdict. Although subsequent court decisions went against Nanavati, Blitz raised the stakes by its persistent orchestration of the public opinion. Under the glare of the media, the case became a spectacle of the law’s capacity to resolve social conflicts. The law offered the premise of “sudden provocation” to justify the unlawful act of murder as a crime of passion.55 Popular sentiment, summoned by Blitz, also goaded the courts in this direction by portraying the murder as an honor killing. Ironically, Karanjia’s public campaign to influence the legal process helped the judicial system to assert itself emphatically in the theater of mass culture.

  But it was a Pyrrhic victory. Commander Nanavati enjoyed powerful support. The entire naval hierarchy, including the navy chief, was in his corner. Governor Sri Prakasa and Prime Minister Nehru had already intervened on his behalf. The government had provided funds for his legal defense. After his conviction, Sylvia petitioned the governor, imploring him to pardon her husband, who was paying the price for her “stupid infatuation and selfishness.”56 Nanavati’s parents and his son Feroze also submitted mercy petitions. Spearheaded by Karanjia, Blitz launched its mass petition for pardon.

  The liberal order buckled under the populist pressure mounted in favor of the powerful. But the government feared antagonizing the Sindhi community. A behind-the-scenes intrigue developed.57 Sylvia and Rajni Patel, Nanavati’s lawyer, who was an influential power broker, visited Ram Jethmalani, a prominent Sindhi lawyer who had represented Mamie Ahuja. Patel offered a deal. The government was prepared to pardon Bhai Partap, a well-known Sindhi businessman convicted for financial fraud. The condition was that Jethmalani secure the concurrence of the Sindhi community for Nanavati’s pardon. This also meant obtaining Mamie’s consent. The deal was struck. Ahuja’s sister gave it in writing that she had no objection to Nanavati’s release from prison. With the communal calculus settled, Viyalakshmi Pandit, Nehru’s sister and Maharashtra’s governor, pardoned both simultaneously.

  On March 17, 1964, Nanavati was released from Sundown, the small bungalow in Lonavla where he had lived for six months on a month-to-month parole.58 He had spent less than three years in prison. A few years later, he left for Canada with Sylvia and the children, never to return or be heard from again. He passed away in 2003.

  As for Karanjia, he delighted in Nanavati’s release and continued to edit Blitz with his characteristic aplomb for the next several decades. But long before the tabloid ceased publication in 1998 and his death in 2008, Blitz’s Bombay had changed. The elitist late-colonial and early-postcolonial urban milieu and the legal theater that it had brought into prominence never again achieved such spectacular cultural influence. It was the mythic Bombay’s last hurrah, facilitated by Karanjia, also a member of the classic cosmopolitan set.

  Ironically, it was also Karanjia and his Blitz that inaugurated the politics of the “people” that was to hammer the nail in the coffin of the city’s mythic openness and sophistication. The stage was set for Bal Thackeray and his Shiv Sena.

  6

  FROM RED TO SAFFRON

  On the night of Friday, June 5, 1970, Krishna Desai was stabbed to death. By all accounts, he was a popular trade union and political leader. Well known and admired in the city’s working-class districts, he had been a member of the Bombay Municipal Corporation for most of the period from 1952 to 1967. At the time of his assassination, he was a Communist representative in the Maharashtra Legislative Assembly.

  The murder made front-page news.1 The government appointed a senior police official, R. S. Kulkarni, deputy police commissioner (Crime Branch), to oversee the investigation. The arrests were swift. By Monday, June 8, seven suspects were apprehended. In all, sixteen youths, all members of the right-wing nativist party, the Shiv Sena, were charged and convicted.2

  The Communist weekly, Yugantar, pointed fingers at the Shiv Sena and its chief, Bal Thackeray.3 The pro-Communist Blitz alleged that Desai’s murder was “Nazi-type tactics to liquidate the Left.”4 As evidence, it cited the “SS chief” Thackeray’s speech, delivered five days prior to the murder, exhorting his supporters to liquidate the Communists.5 Indeed, since its inception in 1966, the Sena had opposed the Communists, and Thackeray frequently aimed vitriolic rhetoric against them. This was met with an equally sharp Communist riposte, alleging that Thackeray was a pawn of the Congress chief minister, V. P. Naik, and that the Sena was nothing but a gang of Fascist storm troopers acting at the behest of mill owners. Thackeray denied complicity, but in the charged atmosphere after the murder, accusations and counteraccusations flew fast and furious.

  The Desai murder signaled a far-reaching transformation in the city. While the Communists grappled with the loss of an immensely popular leader with deep roots in the working-class community, the Shiv Sena established itself as a powerful, intimidating force. Today the color saffron is ubiquitous in the city. Golden yellow is the upper band of the Indian national flag, but it is more generally associated with the Hindus and Hindu nationalists and is also the color of the Shiv Sena. You can spot the Sena’s saffron flags fluttering at virtually every important street corner. Its billboards, and slogans are visible everywhere. The portraits of Bal Thackeray and his son, Uddhav Thackeray, greet you on major streets and crossroads. Even the breakaway Maharashtra Navnirman Sena (MNS), formed by Raj Thackeray, the Sena chief’s nephew, who earned his spurs by sparking a violent outburst against North Indian immigrants to the city, now enjoys a significant presence.

  The saffronization of Bombay is an oft-told stor
y. Many read and lament it as an assertion of Hindu communalism and regionalism in a city that remains multireligious and multiethnic. The Shiv Sena’s rise in alliance with the Hindu nationalist Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) and the communal riots of 1992–93 lend support to this narrative of a growing Hinduization and nativism and a vanishing cosmopolitanism.

  Undoubtedly, the city’s ideological color has changed since the sixties. Both the Sena’s supporters and its detractors agree the city looks and feels different. Though red flags did not flutter much beyond the mill gates, they signified the working class’s claim on the city. Workers, intellectuals, and political activists saw radical urban dreams expressed in the color red. Behind the saffronization of the city is the story of the destruction of its working-class politics, the extinction of the red city dreamed up by the Communists and trade union activists. But this transformation was not only ideological. Saffron displaced red not just by crushing radical thought but also by fashioning and entrenching an urban political culture of populism. Karanjia’s invocation of the “people” and his endorsement of Nehru as the leader offered a glimpse of this populism, albeit from a diametrically opposite ideological spectrum. Of course, his effort was episodic, and he was not engaged in leading and building a political movement. The Sena took up this task in earnest, successfully establishing populism as a coherent and effective style of mobilization of the street. Its populist politics divided society into two rival camps—the “people” and their “enemies.” Positing a direct relationship between the people and their leader, the Sena installed the crowd as a forceful political actor and unleashed it on the streets to slay the “enemies” of the “people.” Scorning “business as usual,” Thackeray openly advocated and deployed direct and violent methods to advance the cause of the “people.” With the Communist red flag lowered, Bombay was swathed in Sena saffron.