Wounded Mumbai

COMMENTARY

Is Mumbai “dogged by the demons of terror” as some television channels put it the day after the recent bombings? Is Mumbai more vulnerable than other cities in India? Not really. Other cities have also been hit by terror attacks. What makes people in Mumbai feel as if their city has been singled out is the dramatic nature of the three big terror attacks – the 1993 serial blasts, the 2006 train bombings and the 2008 terror attack on locations in south Mumbai. In that sense no other city in India has experienced anything of this size and proportion, or frequency.

Terror of Daily Life

But there is also the terror of daily life in the city, one that kills and maims many more than a single terror attack. More people are killed in accidents on Mumbai’s trains each year than in a single attack.3 New investments in enhancing public transport, used by almost 90% of the city, are always too little and too late. So what exists

– the trains and buses – are simply not enough. A daily commute is just one of the daily terrors of life in the metropolis.

Every monsoon hundreds of people in the city are killed – by disease, by crumbling buildings, by retaining walls built to protect precariously perched slum settlements that collapse, and by flooding. There is no romance in the monsoon for half the city that lives in impermanent or dilapidated housing.

When there is no rain, there is no water. The daily terror of finding enough water is something that people in cities around India understand. But in a city where so many live in slums, the torture of ensuring that you are around to catch the stream when it flows (with water being released only for a few hours everyday) is a daily challenge that women, in particular, must overcome. It generates on a daily basis high levels of tension, of suspicion and of violence. But there is always enough water for the few who have private “lap pools”.

For Mumbai’s Muslims, the 1992-93 riots permanently altered their relationship to the city. Now, routinely, they experience a special brand of terror each time the city experiences a “terror” attack. There are marked localities where the police round up “suspects”, often former members, sympathisers, or even friends of sympathisers of the banned Students Islamic Movement of India (SIMI). They are hauled over to the police station for questioning, sometimes detained for several days without charge. The police justify this saying this is part of their job. For the community that sees it happening repeatedly, it is a reminder that they will never be accepted as trusted citizens of the city.

There is also the terror that every “north Indian” vendor feels each day that he ventures out with his wares in this city of growing intolerance. Could this be the day when goons from the Maharashtra Navnirman Sena or the Shiv Sena will decide that his wares have to be trashed and he has to be given a beating in full view of television cameras to teach “outsiders” a lesson that they are barely tolerated in “Amchi Mumbai”? If one adds up the daily levels of violence that are being perpetrated in the name of cleaning up Mumbai, or making it more livable, they would easil y exceed the violence of the repeated bombings.

Special Brand of Violence

In the last two decades, it is this special brand of violence that often surfaces without any warning, and whose victims are always those who are denied citizenship of the city and who cannot fight back, that has terrified thousands of ordinary, hardworking people in Mumbai. Tragically, it is precisely these people who fall victim to the bombings. In the crowded by-lanes of Zaveri Bazaar and Opera House, many of those who were injured or died were street vendors. It was the same story in 2003, when serial bombs went off in the car park near the Gateway of India and once again in Zaveri Bazaar.

The question of security constantly resurfaces after a bombing. Are Mum bai kars insecure? Has the government failed them in providing security? Who is to blame for the recurring pattern of “terror” attacks?

In Mumbai today, old neighbourhoods where people knew each other, are rapidly being replaced by indifferent so-called “modern” housing, where people lock themselves out of the city and their neighbourhood. A city where housing opened out onto the street in the classic mixed neighbourhood is now increasingly becoming one where gated communities build their own disconnected yet apparently “secure” world. That security consists of high walls, CCTV cameras and security men that screen those that do not fit the profile of these housing estates. The highly monitored sanitised world is deemed to be “secure”.

Yet ask slum-dwellers how they view security. They will tell you that they are secure in their neighbourhood because everyone knows everyone else, no outsider can enter without someone noticing the person, and at times of need most people come out to help. Gadgets like CCTV cameras cannot enhance their sense of security. What they want is “secure” housing, a place where they do not need to worry about the municipality’s demolition squads, or the designs of a builder wanting to redevelop the land on which they have lived for decades. No one speaks of that kind of “security”.

They want security from the people who set fire to a slum. That is also terror of a kind. People lose their lifetime of belongings. A builder steps in to redevelo p the land. And those who lived there peaceably for generations are told they have to prove their “eligibility” by producing the very documents that have been destroyed. Can there be anything more terrifying than finding yourself homeless and documentless in a city like Mumbai? Everyday life is terrifying for the majority in the city. It is a terror to which you get inured; you do not even think of it as terror.

None of this diminishes the sadness, anger, helplessness that attacks like the 13 July bombings bring out in the ordinary citizen. More so when they learn that funds allocated for enhancing security lie unused and that even the chief minister of their state could not reach the police chief for a full 15 minutes after the first bomb went off because the cell phone networks were jammed.

Clearly, the issues of funding, of governance, of intelligence failures, etc, have to be addressed. The talk that follows each incident ends up leading to no perceptible change, thereby enhancing people’s sense of despair and their cynicism about the political class. Yet, even if Mumbai had efficient policing, more CCTV cameras, an efficient intelligence gathering system and an efficient state government, there is no guarantee that the attacks would

Economic & Political Weekly

COMMENTARY

stop. The factors that are responsible for India’s vulnerability go beyond one city in the country.

At the same time, as the focus has turned on Mumbai, the vulnerability of Mumbai needs to be addressed. And one of the key issues is of enhancing a sense of

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citizenship in all residents of the city, not just the privileged. It is the erosion of that sense of association with the city, exacerbated by divisive politics, that needs to be addressed – not to deal with external terror attacks, but to tackle the terror of people’s daily lives.

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Notes

1 http://www.satp.org/satporgtp/countries/india/ database/mumbai_blast.htm.

2 Gyan Prakash, Mumbai Fables, HarperCollins, 2010, p 324.

3 See Cehat website on accidental deaths and injuries on Mumbai’s trains “5,513 Railway Deaths in a Single Year of 2002-03”: http://www.cehat.org/ railwaypil.html.

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