Mumbai Fables Read online

  Doga’s mission is to save Bombay from the scourge of criminals running rampant in a city out of control. The street—an archetypal urban space of freedom and public life—is rife with danger and violence. Crime lords oppress ordinary citizens. The common folk going about their daily business to earn an honest living are defenseless against the unscrupulous forces that conspire against them. The law is helpless. The state’s authority is corroded. The police force is riddled with corruption. The few honest officers are vastly outnumbered by the ever-growing power of menacing criminals. Besides, they are stymied because they have to follow the law, whereas the outlaws have no such constraints. But neither does Doga. Matching bomb for bomb and AK-47 for AK-47, Doga is the only one who can protect Bombay’s beleaguered law-abiding citizens. A creature of the street, he dispenses street justice.

  In the nearly 150 issues published since 1993, Doga has annihilated numerous criminal gangsters, unscrupulous builders and businessmen, terrorists, corrupt politicians, and instigators of communal riots. Remarkably attentive to contemporary events, the comic book’s supervillains are often ripped from newspaper headlines. Sometimes their names rhyme with those of real underworld dons. At other times the stories derive from actual events. Doga is often preachy, drawing clear moral lines while fighting his adversaries. Enemies of the nation, Pakistan-backed terrorists, violators of communal harmony, oppressors of the poor, double-faced politicians, crooked policemen—all face Doga’s righteous tongue and deadly power.

  Doga is clearly a nationalist, but Bombay is the scene of his superhero exploits. An urban imagination underwrites the series, both as a form of storytelling and as a specific representation of Bombay. The actions take place in Bombay’s neighborhoods, which are often named. The superhero’s primary goal is to safeguard the urban society from its enemies, foreign-backed or indigenous. The comic book sells approximately seventy thousand copies per issue at the suburban railway station bookstalls and through direct subscriptions. This sales figure underestimates the actual readership because each comic book is passed along from reader to reader. Its online availability in more recent times has vastly increased the readership, as is evident in discussion forums and fan clubs on the Internet. This widely circulated comic series invites us to see the city through the eyes of its ferocious urban vigilante.

  THE UNRULY CITY

  There is a background to Doga’s dark city. The series portrays a widely shared view of Bombay as a lawless space, where state and police authority routinely succumbs to criminal predators. It is a view that has developed since the late 1960s when Bal Thackeray and the Shiv Sena fired the opening salvo against lawful authority. As the Sainiks repeatedly took the law into their own hands on the grounds that it was rigged against the Marathi manoos, they forcefully thrust the street against the authority of the postcolonial liberal order. The Nehruvian model of modernization and national development, based on the edifice of law and parliamentary government, faced a serious challenge from the assault mounted from below.

  Close on the heels of the Sena’s assault came the declaration of the National Emergency by Indira Gandhi on June 26, 1975.2 Citing a “deep and widespread conspiracy” against her progressive policies and India’s integrity, she suspended civil rights, censored the press, and cracked down on her political opponents. Actually, it was Indira, not India, who was under threat. But since the Congress’s slogan was “India is Indira, and Indira is India,” it proceeded to arrest several prominent opposition leaders. Among them was Jai Prakash Narayan, the aging Gandhian socialist who spearheaded a popular upsurge against her regime. Ironically, his movement’s call for the summary dismissal of unpopular but elected provincial governments was fundamentally anticonstitutional. That the constitutional order was attacked from rival political sides, both invoking the “people,” was telling commentary on the state of India’s liberal democracy.

  In Bombay the Emergency’s slogan of discipline and order received full-throated support from Thackeray, who had already displayed his impatience with democracy. Also in the cheering section, albeit from the opposite end of the political spectrum, was Karanjia’s leftist Blitz, which lauded Indira Gandhi’s promise to deploy her newly seized power to implement progressive policies. As elsewhere in the nation, Bombay’s Congress regime censored the press and hunted down political dissenters.3 However, unlike elsewhere, Bombay was saved from the pet projects of Indira’s son Sanjay Gandhi—the dreaded roving sterilization vans equipped to perform on-the-spot vasectomies and the ruthless slum demolitions for beautification.4 Though the city escaped the worst excesses, the Emergency inspired Rohinton Mistry’s unremittingly Dickensian novel A Fine Balance (1995), which paints a city thrown out of balance, the equilibrium of its diverse population upset by the anarchy let loose by the exercise of arbitrary power.

  Indira Gandhi got her just desserts when she lifted the Emergency and called for elections in 1977. In an intense anti-Indira wave, the incensed electorate washed her out just as thoroughly as the 1971 pro-Indira wave had carried her to power. The Congress was trounced in much of North India and lost all five parliamentary seats in Bombay. Constitutional order was restored, but it concealed a deeper transformation. The street had emerged as a powerful force. The politics of the people, championed by both the JP (Jai Prakash) movement and Indira Gandhi in their different ways, had permeated the soul of the body politic. The image of the state as an institution standing above the everyday hustle and bustle of politics stood battered.

  But nothing darkened Bombay’s mood more enduringly than the collapse of the textile industry, which began in the late 1970s. Several factors contributed to the fall of the cotton mills.5 One was the failure to update technology. World War II brought huge profits to the mill owners, but instead of investing in new machinery, they used the money to pay handsome dividends to their shareholders. Three decades later, nearly half of the machines were forty years old. Sanguine in their protection by tariffs, the industry failed to embrace the high-growth ready-made sector of the garment industry.6 The cotton mills’ share of employment dropped from 28 percent in 1976–77 to 13 percent in 1991; approximately 133,000 jobs were lost.7

  The rapid growth of power looms compounded the industry’s decline. The mills, based on eight-hour shifts and unionized workers, could not compete with power looms, which operated on twelve-hour shifts and paid lower wages to its unorganized labor force. As capital-intensive but technologically backward mills faltered before the competition from the unorganized power looms, a process of deindustrialization set in. The government took over the management of several “sick” Bombay mills, which were subsequently nationalized, but this only confirmed the malaise in the industry. The 1982–83 workers’ strike dramatized the fall of the cotton mills from the exalted position they had occupied for a century in the city’s history.

  The leader of the strike was Dr. Datta Samant. He was reviled by critics as a terrorist thug and lauded by supporters as an uncompromising leader of workers; his name dominated the newspaper headlines in the late 1970s and the 1980s. By this time, the Communist AITUC, previously the dominant trade union among mill workers, was a spent force. The murder of its most militant leader, Krishna Desai, in 1970 and the pounding by the Sena had taken its toll. The Sena’s influence, in turn, had dwindled because it resisted the workers’ militancy. The Congress-affiliated Rashtriya Mill Mazdoor Sangh (RMMS) unions enjoyed official recognition, but there was intense competition for influence among mill workers. Datta Samant flourished in this environment. Though no revolutionary, he enjoyed a well-earned reputation for being combative and uncompromising. His chosen methods were direct action, with little regard for legal niceties and negotiated settlements. Interunion rivalry suited him just fine; it provided an opportunity to browbeat his opponents with violence and intimidation.8 A series of electrifying strikes and work stoppages between 1977 and 1980 turned him into the leader to go to for militant industrial action.

  In their struggle for high
er bonuses and wages and the regularization of casual workers, the mill hands turned to Samant.9 On January 18, 1982, his newly formed Maharashtra Girni Kamgar Union declared an indefinite strike. Nearly 250,000 workers downed their tools. Datta Samant’s union was clearly supported by a majority of workers, but the Congress government, eager to protect its labor union, denied it recognition. The red-flag unions, never enthusiastic about the economic focus of workers’ agitations, lost the little support they enjoyed. Datta Samant studiously avoided infusing politics into the strike, focusing exclusively on the economic demands. In return, he received the workers’ enthusiastic support.

  Backed by militant workers, the strike was total. But the mill owners dug in their heels, and violence broke out between the strikers and strikebreakers. As the months wore on, the workers’ militancy flagged. Samant had miscalculated, believing that the mill owners would retreat in this war of attrition. Instead, they sent their inventories for weaving to the power looms (a decision they would soon sorely regret). The workers were defeated. Though the strike was never officially called off, the mill owners, the government, and the Congress-affiliated union declared it over on August 2, 1983. The mills reopened but never recovered their former vitality. More than one hundred thousand workers were never rehired. In the ensuing decade, as Bombay’s textile industry steadily lost ground, the city lost not just an industry but an entire way of life.

  Since the late nineteenth century, the mills had formed the city’s backbone. King Cotton provided steady employment to immigrant workers and made great fortunes for mill owners, producing both legendary capitalists and trade-union leaders and creating vibrant neighborhoods and stately mansions. The manufacturing compounds, the factory chimneys, and the chawls packed with workers were the principal threads in the city’s social and mental fabric.

  As the collapse of the mills tore apart Bombay’s urban fabric, there emerged an ominous web of connections between real estate, the underworld, and politics. The murder of Sunit Khatau in 1994 brought this to light.10 Khatau was a scion of a family that had owned mills for over a century. When the textile industry went into crisis, he decided to sell his mill but was stymied by the opposition from mill workers. Determined to go ahead, he entered into a devil’s contract, with criminal muscle, to browbeat the workers into agreeing to the sale of the mill lands. Khatau successfully engineered the defeat of the existing union leader, paving the way for the infiltration of the underworld. Influential politicians were roped into the conspiracy, tempted by the huge sums of money involved. Datta Samant alleged that the mill owner had even enlisted Dawood Ibrahim, the dreaded don who fled Bombay in the 1980s and set up shop in Dubai. But the scheme fell apart when two gangsters on a motorcycle drew alongside the textile tycoon’s car at a traffic signal and pumped eleven bullets into his body. Apparently, it was a targeted hit by a rival gang.

  Violence and intimidation had always been part of the trade-union scene in Bombay, but the collapse of the mills scaled everything up. The defunct mills stood on highly prized lands in a space-starved city. Builders and real estate speculators hovered over the mill districts like vultures while the government and the planners debated the fate of the land. The stakes soared even higher as the real estate sector boomed in the early 1990s, largely due to the massive investments by Indian developers and, to a lesser extent, some inflow of foreign capital following globalization and economic liberalization.11 Bombay’s criminals were nimble in adjusting to the market.

  Like any other city, the criminal underworld had always been part of Bombay’s urban life. From time to time, the newspapers, tabloids, and magazines would titillate readers with sensational exposés of crime, which, until the 1970s, centered on smuggling, distilling illegal country liquor and bootlegging, drug trafficking, illegal gambling called matka, protection rackets, and prostitution.12 In response to Prohibition (gradually dismantled in the seventies and eighties) and antigambling and antismuggling policies, enterprising criminals formed powerful gangs.13 The leaders of these gangs in the sixties and the seventies were Vardharajan Mudaliar and Haji Mastan (both of whom were Tamil migrants), Yusuf Patel, and Karim Lala. Emerging and recruiting their foot soldiers from the slums and poor neighborhoods of the city, the gangsters bought the services of corrupt police officials to facilitate their criminal enterprises. The Pathan gangs, headed by Karim Lala, were the lords of violent crime. In the late seventies, however, they crossed paths and swords with an emerging gangster named Dawood Ibrahim.

  A police constable’s son, Dawood began his life of crime in 1974 when a fledgling political outfit called the Young Party, of which he was a loyal member, was left without support by its patron.14 In a desperate bid to fund the organization, he turned to robbery. He was arrested, but the court acquitted him. The constable’s son then turned to palti, a con game that involved showing a gold biscuit or an imported wristwatch for sale to a customer, and then switching it for something worthless, with the hapless customer realizing only too late that he had been swindled. But Dawood soon left these petty crimes behind. He graduated to transporting, protecting, and delivering smuggled goods, turning the Young Party into a criminal gang. Karim Lala was not amused. His decision to teach the aspiring gangster a lesson led to skirmishes between the Pathans and Dawood. It soon turned into vicious gang warfare in 1981 when Dawood’s brother was killed on the orders of two Pathan brothers, Alamzeb and Amirzada Khan. Dawood avenged his brother’s assassination by hiring a killer, who brazenly shot Amirzada in a courtroom. Karim Lala tried to forge a truce, but Dawood was adamant; he finished off the Pathan don’s nephew in 1984 but then fled to Dubai in 1985, as he was wanted by the police.

  In Dubai, Dawood established a legitimate construction and trading company. From his Gulf residence—called the White House—he organized Bombay’s gangs into the most feared and dominant crime syndicate in the city. Haji Mastan had retired from smuggling and turned to politics and films. Hounded by the police, Vardharajan Mudaliar left the city. He died in Madras in 1988. Karim Lala bought peace from Dawood and withdrew from the crime scene. Through his hirelings, Dawood enforced his control over several gangs in the city, with distance posing no obstacle. The diminishing cost and ease of communication enabled him to exert tight control from Dubai over his criminal enterprise in Bombay, popularly known as the D Company. With a strong network of foot soldiers and lieutenants, accountants, agents, lawyers, corrupt police personnel, and judicial officials to manage the gang’s legal hurdles, D Company rose to the top of the underworld by the early 1990s.15 Real estate provided it with a golden opportunity to extort money from builders and enter into partnerships with them. Lording over a powerful business and criminal empire, Dawood hosted and consorted with Bombay film stars and even moved into film production through his associates. Like the public, the underworld was fascinated by the glamour of the tinsel town. In equal measure, the Bombay stars found hanging out with a feared don irresistible.

  In the popular imagination, Dawood has become not merely a criminal but a gangster, a mythical figure of terrible daring and lurid artistry. If you walk into the neighborhood of Dongri, people will point to his house with awe. He is viewed as a classic Bombay figure, one bred by the illicit opportunities that the city offers and adept at creating others out of its pulsating daily life. Legends about how he used his skills in exploiting cracks in the gangland to become its lord are as much about him as they are about the city. So are stories about his use of violence to mow down rivals and traitors and the murderous control he currently exercises from Dubai over his criminal network in Mumbai. These accounts lend a fablelike quality to both the criminal world of the city and Dawood as a gangster. Not surprisingly, newspapers regularly report his sightings—now in Dubai, then in Karachi, but always allegedly nostalgic about his native city. Surrounded by glamorous personalities, he is a figure of glamour himself. In the gangster film Company (2002), Dawood’s rise to the top and his murderous enmity with his onetime associate Chota Rajan
acquires a legendary status. So does the idea that the city provides a space for conspiracy, that cops and criminals, politicians and builders, plot and scheme behind everyone’s back to render Mumbai a place of crime and murder.

  The rise of Dawood Ibrahim and his criminal network coincided with the collapse of the mills. The mill workers, who remained jobless after the prolonged strike of 1982–83, were targeted for recruitment by the gangs as foot soldiers. The densely packed chawls became their hideouts.16 As the Khatau Mills case shows, the underworld infiltrated the unions to grab a piece of the defunct mill lands. It was against this background of growing lawlessness and a complicit state authority that the communal riots of 1992–93, followed by the serial bomb blasts, tore apart the city.

  On December 6, 1992, a right-wing Hindu mob razed the sixteenth-century Babri Masjid in Ayodhya. Television footage repeatedly beamed the destructive act, showing exultant Hindu militants dancing on the mosque’s debris. A thousand miles away in Bombay, jubilant Shiv Sainiks celebrated the demolition by holding a rally in Dharavi, twisting a knife in the wounded Muslim psyche. The city, already on edge with months of Hindu nationalist propaganda and the retaliatory calls to defend Islam, exploded in bloody violence.17 The Muslims attacked Hindu temples and shrines and struck out at the police in retaliation for the official inaction during the Babri Masjid’s demolition. The Hindus assaulted mosques and looted and set fire to Muslim-owned shops. In the mill districts, which seethed with the disaffection and frustration of laid-off workers, the Sena, like the underworld, found willing recruits for its violence against the Muslims.18 Knives and swords flashed while stones and Molotov cocktails rained down. The sky darkened with the smoke from burning shops, hutments, and motor vehicles. The police resorted to firing, ostensibly to maintain order, but they ended up killing many more Muslims than Hindus. “This was not a Hindu-Muslim riot, but a police-Muslim riot,” said an eyewitness.19