Maximum City (14 page)

I
ASK
S
UNIL
to take me to his slums. He and two of his Sena friends have set up three rooms on railway property. We walk through a pitch-dark alley till we get to a patch of ground with newly demolished huts set amid concrete housing for low-level railway workers. Just past this is a larger plot of land, meant to be a dumping ground for the railways. I can see the lights of a suburban train go by on the far side. We walk on wooden boards bridging open sewers and stand at the edge of the dumping ground; it is sopping wet from the rain, and my feet, shod in sandals, are covered in mud and God knows what else. “There”—Sunil points—“those three rooms with the oil lamps.” That’s his property. “We have captured the land.”

Currently, it is occupied by laborers to whom Sunil has given the huts for free, so that tenure may be established over the land. They have been demolished twice by the railways. Each time, they have been reconstructed. They are built against the wall of a factory. Two sticks of bamboo in front support sheets of cardboard, and lots of black tarpaulin is draped over the whole structure. The cost of the material, which Sunil gets from Goregaon: 1,500 rupees. The time it takes to rebuild the shack after a demolition: an hour or two. “If you give it three kicks the whole thing will fall down,” says Sunil. If they are demolished a third time, he is determined to build them again, and this time he says he will erect brick structures.

Above is a wire stretching between buildings, over poles. “All that is
my cable,” says Sunil. He walks me to the other side of the plot. A wall demarcates a construction site where housing for railway officers is to be built. We are now standing on a new road that will link the officers’ housing. This is the reason he might hit the jackpot, Sunil says. If there is a road there will be shops, and shops can be demolished innumerable times, and each time they will be re-erected. There is already a water tap in the back of the factory. Electricity is more of a problem, since if Sunil’s laborers tap into the electric wire around here, their legitimate neighbors, the railway workers, will get accused of stealing it, and there will be tension. So the shacks are lit by lanterns. The right of the slum dwellers to live here is protected by Sunil and his friends. “We are the bhais”—the dons—“of the area. So nobody will trouble them.” They pay nothing in rent, and when Sunil decides to build a permanent structure, they will be paid 5,000 rupees to vacate. We go back through the funereal dark. Shapes of people walk past us in the half-light. If someone from the Sena is elected to the legislative council, says Sunil, he will be able to convert the shack into a brick house and he won’t be bothered. Then the illegal slum will be made permanent and legal. But even if the land were to be sold now, he stands to make a profit of ten to twelve lakhs.

The last of the demolitions happened after the 1998 general election. The railway police, under the jurisdiction of the local BJP member of parliament, demolished nine different hutments put up by Sunil on railway land, along with some fifty others. Sunil went to the house of the member of parliament and spoke to his daughter, to tell her father to get the police to stop demolishing the shacks. “You don’t know what I’ll do,” he told the daughter.

“What can you do?” she asked, keeping him waiting in the anteroom.

Did she know what would happen if, in the next election, the voting stopped in a station for three or four hours? The Jogeshwari station under Sunil’s domain voted in large numbers for the Sena—BJP alliance. He had several boys, he told the minister’s daughter, who would create a riot and stop the voting for four hours. His boys would go to jail for a few months, but did she know how many votes her father would lose in that one station during the time it was closed?

“There was a silence,” Sunil recalls. “She said, ‘Come inside.’ I said, ‘From now on, the decision to demolish or not is yours.’” He is confident of the outcome. “Now they won’t demolish.”

I have to visit G. R. Khairnar, known as the Demolition Man, to fully grasp Sunil’s potential as a slumlord. “I have demolished two hundred and eighty-five thousand structures during my entire career of twenty years,” says Khairnar, a deputy municipal commissioner who has earned the ire of the Sena and all the other political parties. He tells me about the demolition process. There are twenty-three municipal wards. Each ward has a special squad to detect illegal constructions, which “are put up in connivance with municipal staff or police.” The squad is supposed to give a seven-day legal notice asking for documentation that the structure is legal. If the license isn’t provided, the demolition is supposed to go ahead. But “the staff is under great fear.” And there is the money; “if the notice is issued, the entire file will be sold for a lakh or two to the party concerned.” An employee can make more in bribes on a single building than the amount he earns in his entire career in the municipal corporation.

Khairnar won’t demolish a building if a portion of it is occupied. He realizes the consequences of his work, as he prowls about the city with his wrecking crew. Many of the people living in the hutments are very poor and have nothing to lose by fighting the wreckers. They throw stones; sometimes they burn their own huts. Before he demolishes a hut, his orders are to remove the cooking utensils inside. He describes his work like a movie: “The scene is the woman is wearing a dirty half-sari. She doesn’t even have drinking water; how is she supposed to wash it? The children are without clothes. I enter the hut and there are hardly any utensils inside. The corporation comes in like devils and demolishes their hut.”

Once he was demolishing a hut in the big slum of Dharavi. The woman whose house he was about to destroy stood up in front of Khairnar, lifted her small baby by the legs, swung the child around her head, and was about to dash it against the ground. “We caught her just in time.”

Even after he clears a slum colony, it will promptly be rebuilt with substandard material in the same place. “Settlement colonies cannot really be destroyed. They will reappear.” He was once determined to clear a section of footpath in Mahim of the slums built on top of it. Every time he would knock them down and leave, they would be rebuilt in hours. “We used to clear them twice, three times a day. They would keep reappearing. They would run away behind the railway tracks and come back after we left.” Each time Khairnar demolished a hut, it cost the municipality around 1,000
rupees. There were eighteen hundred huts in that area. The numbers were always against the Demolition Man.

Khairnar has been a ward officer since 1976. In 1985, when the Sena controlled the municipal corporation, the Saheb summoned Khairnar to Matoshree, the Thackeray mansion. The stepson of the chief minister had put up an illegal hotel, which Khairnar was about to demolish. Thackeray, according to Khairnar, asked him to desist; Khairnar went ahead and did his duty anyway. Eleven days later, as he parked his car in his office compound, two shots rang out, hitting a bystander standing next to him, and a third shot went clean through Khairnar’s leg.

He returned to work and took on the godfather of Bombay himself, Dawood Ibrahim, who owned an illegal building, Mehejebin, under his wife’s name. The day before the demolition, the police roamed through the building with dogs to check for explosives. The next day, Khairnar went in with an army of four hundred policemen, including paramilitaries from the Border Security Force, and destroyed the building with a three-ton wrecking ball. From 1992 onward, he demolished twenty-nine more buildings belonging to Dawood. His own officers, threatened by the don, begged him to back off, and the contractor that provided wrecking equipment withdrew from the contract.

Khairnar became a hero in the press. But the municipal commissioner told him he was getting a lot of pressure from above to rein Demolition Man in. When the commissioner tried to stop him by appointing a high-level committee to oversee the demolitions so he didn’t have control anymore, Khairnar decided to expose the politicians. He started making fiery speeches, wild allegations, in public meetings that were called by the city’s good and great, who saw in him a savior against corrupt politicians. The municipal commissioner asked Khairnar to desist from his denunciations and finally, in 1994, suspended him on the basis of insubordination. For a few years, Khairnar sat in his official bungalow, beneath a bust of Vive-kananda, without any work to do and plenty of time to talk. He started an NGO for prostitutes; he raided brothels and “rescued” underage girls. In 2000, he was returned to service and went energetically back to the demolitions and the front pages of the newspapers, a hero once again of the middle class, those who already had homes.

I
T IS FIVE YEARS
after the riots, and the entire city braces itself for the autopsy: the release of the Srikrishna Commission Report. “Here swords are being sharpened,” says a young man in the Muslim district of Madanpura, on the night before the report is to come out. Paramilitary forces have been put on alert. The Sena government can’t delay any longer; Justice Srikrishna has invited activist groups to sue him, making him a party to the petition demanding his report’s release.

When the report comes out, it is much more than the mere act of catharsis the judge hoped for. The Srikrishna Commission Report does Bombay proud. It is a detailed study of the riots and places blame where it belongs: on Thackeray and on the city police.

The Sena government officially rejects the report, accusing the judge of being biased against the Hindus. But this most learned judge is a Sanskrit scholar; nobody is fooled. Justice Srikrishna is a devout Hindu, much more so than Bal Thackeray.

In his report, Judge Srikrishna names thirty-one policemen who committed atrocities—who shot people dead or actively directed the Sena mobs. But in the end, nothing that the good judge has written will ever directly cost any individual a single minute’s time behind bars. According to the terms of the act under which the commission was formed, none of the testimony given before the commission can be used to prosecute anybody. So, after five hundred depositions and close to ten thousand pages of recorded testimony, if a single one of the policemen or political leaders or street thugs who participated in the riots has to be prosecuted, the work that the Srikrishna Commission did has to begin over, in a court of law. The same witnesses must testify again, getting lawyers to represent them, filing affidavits on their behalf, and then going to the magistrate’s court, to the sessions court, to the high court, to the Supreme Court. If a policeman is to be prosecuted, the government’s sanction has to be obtained because he is a public servant; the magistrate has to be convinced that what he did
was not done in the line of duty. All that can be done with the report is that Justice Srikrishna’s conclusions can be shown to the magistrate. For many of the poorer victims, it is enough that the judge has listened to them, acknowledged that some wrong was done them. That’s how little they expect of the justice system.

In response to the Srikrishna Commission Report, the
Times of India
prints an editorial titled “The Healing Touch,” which calls for healing but not for justice. A
Times
reporter tells me that instructions have been issued to all the paper’s reporters to soft-pedal stories on the report; all articles dealing with it—even profiles of the judge—have to be personally cleared through the resident editor. The argument advanced by management is that running anything too supportive of the report will provoke rioting by the Muslims. At this time, the paper has just one Muslim reporter on its entire Bombay staff.

A few weeks after the Srikrishna Commission Report comes out, I go back to Jogeshwari on the night of Ganapati Visarjan, when idols of Ganesha are immersed into the water all around the city. There is a mob on the chowk; two floats on trucks are advancing very slowly onto the crossroads. One procession is led by Amol, a long-haired man of impressive size whom I had met when I was investigating the riots. He has the reputation of being an uncontrollable hothead. Only his neighbor Raju, Girish’s sister, can pacify him when he’s on a rampage; he considers her his own sister. Sunil, who is Amol’s partner in activities legal and illegal, tells me that Amol is unmanageable when drunk. “He’s done three murders.” Sunil touches his nose with his forefinger, to indicate that they were Muslims. “There was a man on a scooter. He poured petrol on him and burnt him alive.” But the same Hindu man also regularly travels for two days to get to Ajmer Sharif in Rajasthan, to pray at the tomb of a Muslim saint. His facial hair is visible proof of his allegiance to the saint; he has let his beard grow for eight months now and has stopped smoking and drinking, in pursuance of a vow he made at the shrine. On an auspicious day, he will go to Ajmer, cut off his beard, and offer it to the Sufi saint.