Column

Sotto Voce

Cities, like human beings have a heart and a soul too. It follows therefore that they have feelings and they get hurt. Just such a hurt was inflicted on Bombay, as it was then called, when bombs went off all over the city in March 1993. The city’s iconic landmarks were among the targets — the stock exchange building in Dalal Street, the Air India headquarters, the Sea Rock hotel, all close to the Bombay heart.

The scars of that wound have gone away; the wounds, however have remained, hidden beneath the surface, but never quite fully fixed. When Salem fled, this city was Bombay, justly proud of its cosmopolitanism and diversity and its attitude. Salem has come back to Mumbai, still very much a city with a buzz and still very much mixed, but with a lot changed. And the events of 1992-93 played a big role in that change.

Though Salem is linked with the Bombay blasts, to fully understand them we need to go back to the riots of December 1992 and January 1993 and earlier to the demolition of the Babri Masjid. They are all connected seamlessly and much as the Hindutvavadis deny it, one led to the other which led to the third. Had the Babri Masjid not been brought down, and the temperature against Muslims not been raised to dangerous levels, the Bombay riots would not have taken place and in turn the avenging blasts would not have happened.

In the aftermath of the Babri demolition, the mood in Bombay was dangerously flammable. Sections of the Marathi press were building up an ugly mood;Bal Thackeray wrote in Saamna that “dissent on the Ramjanambhoomi-Babri Masjid dispute would be an act of treachery for which the Muslims would be banished from the country”.

The rioting that followed left 900 people dead and over 2,000 injured, most of them Muslims. Bombay burned for days. This was before non-stop television news, but right outside their own doorsteps they could see their fellow Bombayites in a rabid, unhinged mood. I remember covering the story and meeting perfectly “decent” white collar workers roaming about, looking for a shop to burn, a house to gut and a family to torch. One of them was a rather meek looking youngster who turned out to be an accountant with a multinational company, who gleefully told me that he was out to teach “those bloody Muslims a lesson.”

More than the killings, which were horrific enough, was the destruction of the city’s soul. Thousands of people left the city, never to return. I know of many well-settled professionals who took jobs elsewhere, as a quiet protest against this barbarism in the city they had lived in and loved. How could it have happened in Bombay, the most secular and tolerant city in India?
But we had been fooled all along. Beneath that cosmopolitan veneer, Bombay had always been closed and insular.

The secrets began tumbling out: of the large companies that had never hired Muslims, the housing societies that discouraged non-Hindus, the daily prejudices against anyone who did not belong to the right community and ethnicity.
After the riots those prejudices only got solidified.

Today, Mumbai is far more provincial-minded and parochial than ever before. Whole neighbourhoods are dominated by communities that prevent outsiders from moving in; why, in some areas the vegetarians will ensure that no non-vegetarian restaurant gets a licence. The city is more “happening” than ever before,but the small-mindedness has only increased.

The bomb blasts did show the resilience of everyone who lives here, as did the recent floods. That is the indomitable spirit of the Bombayite, the Mumbaikar, call it what you will. But memories that had been quietly buried away will now be revived, and raw wounds will be opened up. Abu Salem has come back not for closure, but to haunt this city once again.

Email: sidharth01@dnaindia.net