Mumbai Fables Page 24
Violence against its enemies was not an unfortunate by-product of Shiv Sena’s activities but an essential method. The Sena distinguished itself from all political parties by presenting itself as an organization committed to action.79 Its words were direct and hard-hitting, and its actions were immediate. Society had to be purged of the alien matter, promptly and completely. The submission of petitions and charters of demand could not achieve this end. The “people” could not depend on the bureaucracy and the political process. Thus, ridiculing terms such as consensus and public opinion, Thackeray declared in 1968 that if the central government did not cede the Marathi-speaking districts of Karnataka (then Mysore) to Maharashtra, he would ban New Delhi leaders from entering Bombay.80 He carried out his threat in February 1969, when Morarji Desai, the deputy prime minister, visited Bombay. As Desai’s motorcade attempted to avoid the Shiv Sena crowd, all hell broke loose. The Sena activists pelted stones, and the police charged the crowd with batons. Soon, the city became a battlefield between the police and the Sena. Thackeray and other Sena leaders were arrested. The news of the arrests spread like wildfire. The Sena activists went on an angry rampage, burning shops, torching buses, and attacking police stations. The police had to open fire to maintain order.81 When the police were unsuccessful, the army was put on alert. The Congress government stood helpless. Ultimately, it had to suffer the ignominy of requesting Thackeray to issue an appeal for peace. Smelling victory, Thackeray consented and signed a statement from his prison cell, expressing his anguish that the army had been deployed to maintain order instead of guarding the nation’s frontiers. He appealed to his Shiv Sainiks to restore peace and not to allow their struggle “to be exploited by the communists.”82 The government published and distributed his statement. After four days of violence, which claimed forty-four lives, order returned.83 The snarling tiger had become the keeper of the zoo.
The Marathi manoos’s abject state demanded concrete deeds and instant results. As opposed to lokshahi, or democracy, he advocated thokshahi, or the rule of force. His organization was Shivaji’s army, and he was called the Senapati, or commander in chief. He structured the Sena into shakhas, or branches, like the paramilitary structure of the Hindu supremacist group Rashtriya Swayamsevak Sangh (RSS). The imitation of the RSS’s militaristic order and discipline, however, did not mean that Thackeray shared its ascetic ideology. He thought of the RSS as a collection of glum old men.84 The Sena chief, by contrast, appealed to youthful, masculine virility. Only forty years old when he founded the Shiv Sena, Thackeray presented himself as a fearless, youthful leader of a new type, one able to bend feckless bureaucrats, the older generation, the elites, and evil enemies to the force of his will. Unlike most political leaders, he did not advocate asceticism and sacrifice. He expressed feelings that most disaffected young men may have felt but dared not articulate. Openly advocating material acquisition and pleasure, he absolved “them from their feelings of guilt for failing to support their families or for their attractions to the hedonistic pursuits of life.” He embodied “their desire to speak their minds, to be violent, fearless, self-made men.”85
The Sena struck a chord with the unemployed youth in poor neighborhoods, where it organized self-help ventures and employment agencies. But the secret of its success was that it wove itself into the urban fabric. It was not averse to dealing with extortionists, bootleggers, smugglers, importers and exporters, and builders, as well as the official economy.86 It developed a close relationship with the slum dwellers, where its ideology of masculinity, virility, and action found resonance in the struggles for survival.87
The Sena mobilized the youth with a plebeian ideology of open defiance to authority. The exhilaration of direct action offered them a fantasy of freedom from the malaise of reality. This was clearly the case in the Sena-led violence during the 1969 agitation to incorporate Belgaum and other Karnataka districts into Maharashtra. The Shiv Sainiks descended on the streets of Bombay and bonded as a “people” to violently reclaim the city. In place of the norms of liberal-democratic politics of reasoned discussion and debate, what drove the Sena-mobilized crowd were feelings of virility, hatred for the enemies of the Marathi manoos, and strong emotional bonds with each other and their Senapati, Thackeray. In place of process and protocols, the “people” advanced the populist reason of direct action as the dominant currency of politics.
ANNIHILATING THE REDS
The Sena threw the city into tumult. The liberal-democratic and left-ist politicians were appalled by its open and unapologetic violation of established norms of politics. They saw the Sena as an unruly force set to unravel the political processes and protocols that were already under great pressure. The economic downturn aggravated a sense of crisis in the late 1960s. After 1965, industrial growth dwindled to 3.6 percent.88 Budget and trade deficits, followed by the cutoff of U.S. foreign aid, forced a devaluation of the rupee in 1966. Politically, Nehru’s death in 1964 had created a void at the center. Lal Bahadur Shastri stepped into the breach, but barely a year later, India was at war with Pakistan. After a United Nations–mandated cease-fire, he traveled to Tashkent in January 1966 to sign a Soviet-brokered peace, but he died in Tashkent soon after signing the agreement. Indira Gandhi succeeded him, but she had yet to consolidate her power. In the 1967 elections, the Congress governments suffered defeats in a number of states. The postcolonial Nehruvian order was imperiled.
In Maharashtra the Congress’s electoral hold remained intact, but Bombay was in a state of turmoil. The newspaper headlines of the late 1960s paint a picture of relentless crisis and upheaval. Collapsing infrastructure and municipal dysfunction, rising crime statistics, exposés of corruption, political and economic scandals, strikes and lockouts in mills, and simmering unrest and outbreaks of political violence dominated the newspaper pages.
This maelstrom was both the context and the product of an intense contest to establish political hegemony. Different political groups and ideologies vied for influence and control. Among them were the Dalit Panthers. Drawing a leaf from the Black Panthers, the radical Dalit intellectuals mounted a militant challenge to the centuries-old oppression of the so-called untouchable castes. Influenced by Marxism, they penned biting critiques of the existing order and wrote influential poems and essays. But their challenge was largely literary and intellectual; the political leadership among the Dalits remained fragmented. The Communists pressed on with trade-union militancy and led strikes in the mills. Dange was elected to the Parliament in the 1967 elections, and the CPI won three seats to the state legislature from Bombay’s working-class districts. The Shiv Sena’s nativist campaign won legitimacy among the Marathi-speaking middle class and the unemployed youth in poor neighborhoods and slums in the city.
The Congress’s response to this roiling political crisis was administrative. For the ruling party, managing the city with an enormous population of poor and politically energized people was a matter of administration and planning. Accordingly, the state’s strategy was to deploy municipal regulation and planning to keep the city functioning as an industrial organism. To cope with the political demands of the population, the Congress depended on intrigues and manipulations, using the Shiv Sena to tame the Communists.
6.5. Cartoon war 1. A Thackeray cartoon showing the Sena slaying the Communist giant.
Critics routinely charge that Thackeray owed his rise to covert support by the state Congress leaders, particularly V. P. Naik, the chief minister, and the mill owners, who were keen to finish off the Communists. There is some truth to this argument; the Congress and the mill owners did find the Sena’s anticommunism useful. But this notion underestimates Thackeray’s political brilliance and misreads the Sena’s character. The Shiv Sena was no cat’s paw, and Thackeray was his own master. Feeding on the political and economic crisis, the Sena acted decisively to disgorge the populist force of the Marathi manoos on Bombay streets, changing the political landscape.
The Communists had to eat humble pie when
Menon lost the election in 1967. They could momentarily take comfort in the fact that Dange had won a seat to the Parliament and the CPI had performed well in Girangaon. Among its elected legislators was the firebrand Krishna Desai, from working-class Lalbaug. But Thackeray’s sights were set on them. On September 10, 1967, he declared in Marmik that his object was the “emasculation of the Communists.” Three months later, the Sena activists attacked the CPI’s Dalvi Building office in Parel.89 They burned files and threw out the furniture. It was an audacious attack, brazenly carried out to strike at the very heart of the enemy. What was the Communist response? Nothing.
6.6. Cartoon war 2. A Communist cartoon showing Thackeray performing cabaret for the elite.
Desai was not satisfied with inaction. At a meeting of the CPI state council in Aurangabad to discuss its response to the attack, he, along with others, argued for a counterattack. But they were overruled by a majority, which concluded that counterviolence would only invite police repression. Undeterred, Desai returned to Lalbaug from the meeting and founded the Lok Seva Dal (People’s Service League), a volunteer corps of young men, to confront the Sena.90
Starting a volunteer force was entirely in keeping with Desai’s militant personality. Small but strongly built, he was known and feared as a combative leader. Born in 1919 in Ratnagiri District, he came to Bombay when he was twenty.91 Starting work in the Finlay Textile Mill, he immediately plunged into labor activism, leading a strike in 1940. Two years later, he was busy working with the underground nationalist leaders of the 1942 Quit India movement in the city. This brought him to the attention of the police. During the naval mutiny in 1946, he was thick into the popular upsurge. He led young men from Lalbaug in pitched battles with the British troops, firing on them with one of their own machine guns, which he had snatched away.92
Wanted by the police for his actions during the naval mutiny, Desai went underground. But he did not remain there for long, according to the autobiographical reminiscences of Dinanath Kamat, who was a schoolboy in 1946 and tagged along everywhere with his mentor, Desai. What drew Desai out of hiding was the Hindu-Muslim violence that broke out on August 16, 1946, when Jinnah called for its observance as Black Day. Many Muslims fled their homes to escape Hindu rioters. Muslim rioters entered Desai’s neighborhood and killed several young men in a gymnasium. Never one to shy away from a fight, Desai attacked Muslim hoodlums in several neighborhoods. He even invited the RSS, the paramilitary Hindu right-wing group, to join him in the attack. This was not all. Accompanied by Kamat, Desai set upon sword-wielding Pathan rioters and attacked them with hand grenades.93
Desai’s brush with violence continued when his close friend became embroiled in a clash between two rival gymnasiums and was killed by a well-known neighborhood hoodlum, Moses Dada. Immediately afterward, Dada and his bodyguards were attacked. The bodyguards took to their heels, but Dada was killed. A gang war followed, resulting in many deaths. The suspicion fell on Desai. Already wanted by the police for his role in the violence during the naval mutiny, the gang violence put Desai in hot water. With the help of a worker comrade, he was spirited away to Calcutta. There, he was sheltered by members of the Revolutionary Communist Party (RCP), a group that had broken off from the CPI in the 1930s. The stay in Calcutta and his participation in RCP’s militant activities radicalized Desai. Upon his return to Bombay in 1947, he formed a branch of the RCP in the city and became involved in trade-union organization.
Desai had become a revolutionary, but he was not one who engaged in arcane ideological disputes and sectarian fights. A tough and militant activist whose feet were firmly planted on the rough Lalbaug streets, he itched for action and political and physical battles. Thus, when Goa’s liberation from Portuguese rule became an issue after Indian independence, he promptly got involved in procuring arms through a European Trotskyist. In 1948 he went to Goa in disguise and lobbed hand grenades at police stations.94 Ideological differences did not prevent him from joining hands with the Socialist leaders in trade-union activities. But when the RCP split into three factions, and the leader of one rival faction was killed in 1953, Desai was arrested as a suspect and spent a year in jail. He was expelled from the Municipal Corporation and replaced by a member of the Congress.95 When he got out of jail, Desai plunged into the movement to create the linguistic state of Maharashtra. He marched in processions and led rallies in his neighborhood. Riding on the crest of the popularity of the movement for Samyukta Maharashtra, he won back his seat in the Municipal Corporation in 1957.
His participation in the movement for the linguistic state drew him close to the CPI, which he joined in 1962, finding it a natural home for militant labor politics. When the party split in 1964, he remained with Dange and the pro-Moscow wing. Desai was a great asset to the CPI. Drawn from the ranks of the working class, he was a militant activist with deep connections to the social networks of the mill districts. The election to the Maharashtra legislature in 1967 dulled neither his militancy nor his attachment to his working-class roots. He continued to live with his family in their cramped room in a Lalbaug chawl, remaining actively involved in trade-union and Communist Party activities. He maintained ties with the gymnasiums in Lalbaug and Parel and enjoyed close relations with young men with whom he played chess and carom. Occasionally, he would watch English films for entertainment, but his daily life consisted of trade-union and political work in the neighborhood. He made it a habit regularly to visit the homes of workers, listening to their problems, offering help, and engaging in chitchat.
Alive to the pulse of the working-class neighborhood, Desai was well aware of the Sena’s appeal among the youth. He founded the Lok Seva Dal as much to counter the Sena’s ideological appeal as to confront its physical force. With these twin purposes in mind, the Lok Seva Dal held political-education classes as well as organized physical exercise programs and games.96 Since the party leadership offered no support, Desai raised money locally to pay for expenses. To build their esprit de corps, he would take the young volunteers to camps outside the city. Two to three hundred young men would get into buses and travel to weekend spots such as Lonavla for overnight camps. Once there, they would be given training in sword fighting and firearms.
Violence was not new to Bombay’s politics. Keshav Borkar, or Borkar Dada, was notorious from the 1920s to the 1950s for his strong-arm tactics in the trade-union field on behalf of the Congress. But the establishment of the Lok Seva Dal signified the growing intensity of violence in urban politics. Desai did not view the attack on the Dalvi Building as an isolated incident because the Sena’s activists frequently tried to disrupt Communist activities. In 1968 the formation of its trade-union wing, Bharatiya Kamgar Sena (BKS), which opposed the idea of class conflict and sought to broker peace between the mill owners and workers, rendered the trade-union field even rougher.97 According to his family members, the Sena had physically attacked Desai during the 1967 election campaign. He escaped with his life by using his briefcase as a shield.98 Apparently, Desai knew he was a target. A feared trade unionist and a political leader with deep roots in the neighborhood, Desai stood between the Sena and Girangaon. Anticipating an attack, he decided to send his family away to safety to his village in Ratnagiri. As for himself, he planned to go underground and take the fight to the Sena.
On June 5, 1970, Desai, as usual surrounded by Anil Karnik and others, was winding down for the day in his one-room hutment.99 His wife had laid out the dinner. Desai took off his shirt and was about to sit down to eat when he was summoned. His party associates wanted to discuss the next day’s planned Lok Seva Dal camping trip. Telling his wife and Karnik that he would be back shortly, Desai walked a few hundred yards down the winding lane to the office of a rice mill.
A mentally challenged man from the neighborhood interrupted Desai’s conversation with his comrades in the office, informing him that some workers wanted to meet him. The assembled group looked out toward the open field that faced the rice mill office. The power was
off, and it was raining lightly. At the head of the narrow lane that led out from the field, the silhouettes of a few men were visible. Desai called out to ask who they were. A voice shouted “Jai Bharat” (Hail to India) in response. Desai’s young comrade Prakash Patkar walked toward them. As he neared the group, Patkar saw a few men standing by a car. One of the assembled men had a gupti, a long-bladed weapon, tucked under his shirt. Patkar shouted out a warning to Desai, who rushed instantly to his side. Patkar was stabbed. Within seconds, Desai was surrounded and stabbed in the back, with his liver slashed. Having achieved their purpose, the attackers vanished into the darkness. Miraculously, Desai walked to the nearby house of a friend, who rushed him to the hospital, but he succumbed to the fatal wound.
6.7. Funeral procession for Krishna Desai. Source: Yugantar, June 14, 1970.
This was an audacious murder. After all, Desai was a member of the Maharashtra legislature. The GKU, of which Desai was the vice president, called for a strike to protest his killing. Nearly twenty-five mills observed a complete strike. Shops in Lalbaug pulled down their shutters. The word on the street was that the Shiv Sena had finished off the Communist leader. A twenty-five-thousand-strong funeral procession marched to Shivaji Park, the Sena stronghold, shouting anti-Shiv Sena slogans. The leaders of several political parties and trade unions denounced the Sena at a huge public meeting held at Nare Park, Parel.100
Under its crack detective R. S. Kulkarni, the police arrested nineteen suspects, all of them school dropouts and some with criminal records. Almost all were members of the Sena. The leaders of the group broke down under Kulkarni’s interrogation and confessed, spilling out the details of the murder conspiracy.101 The pro-Communist Blitz report on the discussion in the legislature following the arrests was headlined “SS Charged with Political Murder.”102 Thackeray denied any complicity in the murder, and none was proven. Ram Jethmalani, a high-profile criminal lawyer, defended the suspects, of whom three were acquitted; the rest were convicted.