The mood of Bombay was never quite what the TV channels told us it was

The shadow of Raj Thackeray hovered uneasily over Bombay (or Mumbai, as he would prefer) in the aftermath of

the events of 26/11. Though the junior Thackeray was not a participant in these events, his name was to crop up again and again in the instant post-mortems that

followed the incidents.

 

   Hour after hour, commentator after commentator and guest after guest on TV discussions made the same point. Bombay/Mumbai had been saved by the commandos of the National Security Guard, the overwhelming majority of whom were non-Maharastarians. The head of the NSG, a quiet, thoughtful man called JK Dutt was a North Indian. An officer who died in the siege of the Taj, Major Sandeep Unnikrishnan, was a Malayali.

 

   If Raj Thackeray had his way, the pundits said on TV, then none of these people would have been available to save the city from the worst urban terrorism it had ever known. (Though, on another note, I’m not sure that 26/11 was the worst thing to happen to Bombay but more about that later.)

 

   It was a point that set people’s heads nodding each time it was repeated and eventually, thousands of SMSs went back and forth, all asking how Raj Thackeray now felt about his chauvinism.

 

   As the Marathi manoos appeared to have turned into a Marathi mouse for the duration of the crisis, there was no reply from Raj Thackeray.

 

   I thought the sentiment was well-taken even if the specifics were dodgy. Raj Thackeray had never advocated secession from India. He had never denied that Maharashtra needed access to India’s services (such as the NSG) or its resources. All he had demanded was that people from the rest of India did not find employment in his Mumbai.

 

   So, judged in purely logical terms, nothing that the younger Thackeray had said was contradicted by the actions of India’s paramilitary forces. Raj had always been grateful for the protection offered by India’s soldiers. It was only when their sons came to Bombay to drive taxis that he wanted to slap them and send them back.

 

   But at the end of that terrifying November, who had time for logic?

 

   The overwhelming mood was one of weary relief that one of the world’s great cities had seen off an attack by a band of terrorists.

 

   Then, that relief was replaced by anger. Suddenly, the people who went on TV were no longer thanking the NSG. Instead, they were railing against the Centre. Minute by minute, new grievances kept blowing out of well-spoken mouths.

 

   Why did Delhi take so long to save Bombay? Where was the Prime Minister? When he appeared on TV, one famous person complained, Manmohan Singh looked like a robot.

 

   Did people have any idea how many thousands of crores in tax were paid by citizens of this city? How dare they take our money and do nothing for us? Who were these politicians anyway? What had the rest of India done for Bombay apart from treating it as a cash cow? Let’s stop paying income tax to the Centre!

 

   Then, the mood turned even more hysterical. It was time for the citizens of Bombay to tell India’s politicians what they thought about them. At the next election, people should refuse to vote. That would show them!

 

   Worse was to follow.

 

   This is a corporate city, some studio guests said. Why didn’t we corporatise our police force? Why didn’t we allow private corporations to run our security? Private police were more reliable than government police.

 

   On TV shows, the hysteria mounted. An elderly lady, possibly between face-lifts, turned the battle inwards. People like her were okay, she suggested. But what about slum-dwellers? She had seen Pakistan flags in the slums from “my suite at the Four Seasons.”

 

   But by bit, the situation degenerated so swiftly into farce that I felt that I was trapped in the kind of India that Arundhati Roy is always writing about: where the elite are morons, blind to the Indian reality and the poor live in virtual slavery.

 

   But even as this surreal drama played out on my TV screen, I thought of the shadow of Raj Thackeray.

 

   What had been Raj’s central theme?

 

   That Mumbai belonged to a single group and that the rest of India had no claims on it.

 

   What were the protesters saying?

 

   That Bombay belonged only to the citizens of Bombay (ideally, South Bombay, but not the slums, of course) and the rest of India had no claims on it.

 

   So, even at the moment when Raj had become a figure of ridicule, in TV, on the internet and on SMS texts, his ideology had won.

 

   Even those who sneered at Raj Thackeray were now saying much the same sort of thing (in the case of old lady who saw Pakistani flags, exactly the same thing) that they were attacking him for.

 

   Bombay/Mumbai is a sovereign state.  The rest of India can only engage with it on terms dictated by the residents of Bombay/Mumbai.

 

   The only difference between the two views was that Raj’s version of Mumbai’s residents consisted of Maharashtrians and began in Parel and Shivaji Park. The up-market TV guests, on the other hand, believed that they were the rightful inhabitants of Bombay (defined as south of Parel mainly, but Bandra was allowed because there were some nice buildings there now.)

 

   You see what I mean about the shadow of Raj Thackeray hovering over the events of 26/11?

 

   What has changed, one year after terrorists were able to hold South Bombay to ransom?

 

   Well, from where I am sitting, the only significant change of note is that Raj Thackeray has grown stronger. He now sets the agenda for the opposition, the Shiv Sena meekly follows it and BJP nods vigorously (not that anyone notices). It is now only a matter of time before he takes over the entire opposition space. The post-Bal Thackeray scenario is either a hostile take-over of the Sena by the MNS or a massive drift away from the Sena to Raj’s party.

 

   He may have looked like a Marathi mouse a year ago. But Raj is now, the state’s non-Congress future. Contrary to what we said then, the events of 26/11 did not convince Maharashtrians that they needed North Indians or indeed the South Indians who Raj’s Uncle used to call (perhaps he still does) “Madrasis”.

 

"Yes, Bombay will always have its extremists – whether on behalf of Maharashtrians or in support of the divine right of buffoons to appear on TV – but they will never take over any part of the city."

   Nothing else has really changed. R.R. Patil who became a hate object for the middle class after it was claimed that he had dismissed the events of 26/11 as “small things” (he had not; TV willfully misinterpreted his meaning) is back in the saddle. Vilasrao Deshmukh who was driven from office by a media outcry is now comfortably ensconced at the Centre and very nearly became Chief Minister again.

 

   Nor has the middle class changed too much. In the aftermath of 26/11 assorted self-proclaimed activists and publicity hounds went on TV to declare that they had awakened the political spirit of the citizens of South Bombay and that elections would now be dominated by large middle-class turn-outs

 

   In fact, turn-outs have remained pretty much where they were before the city was attacked. The middle class candidates who tried to enter politics on the back of the 26/11 bandwagon were rebuffed by South Bombay voters; the best-publicised of them, Meera Sanyal, lost her deposit!

 

   So why did the ostensible spirit of post 26/11 Bombay dissipate so quickly? Was it all a sham?

 

   The answers are complicated. But my sense is that the mood of South Bombay (let alone, Bombay) was never quite what the TV channels told us it was.

 

   I do not believe (and I didn’t believe it then, either) that the prevailing mood in Bombay was one of anger with Delhi or with India. Instead, I think the mood – at least among the many people I know in the city – was one of shock and horror. Yes, there was resentment entirely justified – that Bombay never gets the kind of attention it deserves from politicians (just look at the thousands of crores that keep being spent on Delhi if you want a contrast) but that did not translate into mass unwillingness to pay taxes or to participate in the political process.

 

   Nor was there the sense that this was the biggest ever attack on Bombay. I think the serial bomb blasts of the Nineties were far more shocking and horrific. (These rarely feature on TV because they are difficult to Google and young journos now think of the blasts only in terms of Sanjay Dutt and the trial). There have been other bomb blasts since then – on local trains, for instance – which have scared and terrified commuters in a city that depends on public transport to function.

 

   Even more traumatic for many citizens were the riots that preceded the bomb blasts when Shiv Sena thugs carried out a pogrom against the city’s Muslims, burning homes, stealing property and murdering fathers in front of their children. (For some reason, India journalists act as though there have been only two riots of consequence in modern India: the 1984 Sikh massacres and the post-Godhra pogrom.  The Bombay riots have been forgotten.)

 

   Those riots led to the bomb blasts and to a communal divide that has never quite healed. More significantly, they also led to the rise of the Shiv Sena. Bal Thackeray had been around since 1966 and stood no chance of winning office till the Sena radicalized Hindus (not just Maharashtrians) with the riots. (Small wonder then that the only change that Thackeray wanted in Mani Ratnam’s Bombay, about the riots, was the deletion of a scene where his character regrets the bloodshed. “I regret nothing”, he boasted to me in an interview.)

  

   To be sure, most people in Bombay (and not just in South Bombay) responded to 26/11 with horror. This was the first terror strike to be played out on live TV; the first one that went on for three days; and because it hit the centre of the South Bombay establishment, it led people to ask: “is nowhere safe?”

 

   For most of us that reaction would have been enough. But it is in the nature of all media to exaggerate the significance of each event they cover. And so the hyperbolic and overwrought TV coverage of 26/11 and of its consequences was merely TV doing what it knows best.

 

   When you want to amp up the public temperature, it helps to have guests who say extreme or outrageous things. And so just as TV coverage was over the top, so guests were similarly impassioned and their comments equally overwrought.

 

   That accounts for the parade of buffoons we saw on our TV screens during those days.  As somebody who thinks of Bombay as home I cringed each time one of these people opened his or her mouth. In a column written at the time, I described them as page three bimbos, small-time actors, fading actresses, pompous advertising men and midgets on the fringes of journalism. Looking back, that description seems apt. It was as though the TV channels set out to record a freak show featuring every caricature Bombay buffoon they could find.

 

   But none of these half-wits spoke for the people of Bombay – or even, of South Bombay. These days, the city has been caricatured as a Page Three wasteland full of Bombay-trash and it is easy for those of us who live in other cities to fall into the trap of believing that the real Bombay consists of buffoons who rush from studio to studio making fools of themselves in TV discussions.

 

   We forget that there is a silent majority that does not subscribe to outrageous, TV-friendly views. If every Maharashtrian in Bombay voted only on the basis of ethnicity then Bal Thackeray would have been Chief Minister for life and Raj Thackeray would be a shoo-in for the job. But the truth is that the silent majority of Maharashtrians votes more responsibly than the caricatures suggest.

 

   So it is with the educated middle class of South Bombay. Yes, the city has its share of publicity-hungry twits. But they speak for even fewer middle class people than do those Maharashtrians who support the Thackerays. At least the Shiv Sena (and eventually the MNS) can win some seats in the assembly. These guys couldn’t even fill up the bar of the Bombay Gymkhana.

 

   In the end, that’s what gives me hope. Yes, Bombay will always have its extremists – whether on behalf of Maharashtrians or in support of the divine right of buffoons to appear on TV – but they will never take over any part of the city.

 

   The crises will come and go. But Bombay will go on.

 

Note: This is the unabridged version of the article that appeared in the Lounge section of Mint