On the margins of conscience

Today, Govandi is preparing for a general election. Or so the Congress and the Bharatiya Janata Party would like to think. A huge, indigenously built speaker outside Jai Hind Electricals blares out Chappa Chappa Charkha Chale instead of election speechesand Madhuri Dixit is still the preferred "wall flower" to Pramod Mahajan wishing Happy Eid in Urdu. Of Gurudas Kamat, the Congress candidate, there is no sign. And it’s not just on the posters. In the two days spent in the area, one was waylaid, several times, by smooth, young men: "Reporter? English Press? Myself (it could be Nanhe Bhai, Kamaluddin, Ashraf) from BJP. Madam, please write BJP is misunderstood, it is not the dushman of Muslim People." If there were similar young men from the Congress floating around, they were a lot more decorous.

But what of the Muslim People? Roughly four lakh of them, most living in the narrow lanes of Shivaji Nagar 1, Baiganwadi (rechristened by the Sena-BJP government as Shivaji Nagar 2), Cheeta Camp and Lotus Nagar. "Who is Pramod Mahajan?" asks Jamnat-ul-Nissa, wife of a gunny-bag seller about the sitting MP. At another place, Kausi Begum, wife of dhobi Aftab Alam asks: "Yeh Gurudas Kamat kaun si party ka hai?" Perhaps when your world exists in a 5by 6 tin-shanty, it’s difficult to keep tabs on the universe outside.

Twenty-five-thirty years ago, Govandi was a vast swamp, known as the dustbin of Mumbai. Land, because it kept sinking millimeter by millimeter each year, was cheaper compared to the rest of the city. And so the poorest of Bombay’s poor came and settled here. Each claimed a little piece of land somewhere on the edge of the main dumping ground that tucks the city’s refuse. They spent small treasures in getting brick after brick to increase the ground level, seeking their upward mobility.

Most worked in what is euphemistically called cottage industry — embroidery, packaging, retreading tyres, selling used gunny bags, ragpicking. All this halted, at least when the riots broke out.

Forty-year-old Haji Abdul Kalam was washing his taxi on December 7, 1992, when a policemen came, asked him to come to the police station to say what he knew of the desecration of Datta Mandir. There, without even registering his offence, he was thrown in theslammer. Kalam only heard about the riots raging outside in the snatches of conversation of his captors. Until the news came home: On the tenth day of his arrest, he was informed that his 18-year-old son Arshad Ali had been killed on December 8 and that he had to identify the body at the Cooper Hospital morgue.

Jannat-Ul-Nissa and her husband had just returned from Mankhurd after buying a new Kholi when, on the morning of December 8, they heard a commotion. "The masjid has been set on fire," someone shouted. Even as his 16-year old pregnant wife tried to stop him, Jannat’s brother, 22-year-old Mohammed Shafi, rushed out with a bucket of water. "We heard there was police firing. But my brother wasn’t one of the victims. The cops came and took him away baquaida."

When Jannat went to get her brother back, a policeman told her he had gone to the "muluq". "I knew it wasn’t true," she says. After five days someone told her that the police had kept the clothes of those killed for identification.Jannat’s husband went looking for them. "The policemen took me upstairs and brought out a huge gattha (pile) of blood-stained clothes. He went through them and found my brother-in-law’s shorts," he says.

Then began the efforts to reclaim the body. "I went to Javed Khan, the Congress MLA, but he expressed helplessness," she recalls. After much running around, on December 19, someone asked her to check out the morgue at Cooper Hospital, the same day that Abdul Kalam was going to fetch his son’s body.

"The smell," Jannat’s husband crinkles his nose as he remembers. "The bodies — as most had been dead nearly a week ago — had bloated. If you turned someone to look for identification marks the flesh came loose," says Kalam.

There are many such stories of the dead or still missing in Govandi. Only the names vary. "But you must not think of it as a communal riot," says Sher Ali Sheik, a member of the BJP.

"It was police and administrative failure." His contention seems borne out by People’sVerdict, a book by Justice H Suresh and Daud. "The Hindu-Muslim rioting appeared to have occurred on a comparatively minor scale. The major attacks, arson, looting and killing had been carried out by the police on the Muslim community in the area," it says. At another place though, the book says: "There was a clear nexus between the Deonar police station and Shiv Sena… Police themselves shouted Jai Shree Ram and Jai Shivaji."

There are many answers to why despite well knowing the Sena’s collusion in the riots, people like Sher Ali, Nanhe Bhai and Amina Banu are rooting for the BJP. "We think why not try and change the doctor to cure our ills," says Mohammed Yasin, vice-president of BJP’s North East Mumbai Minority Cell. Sher Ali who until two months ago was a Congressman, says, "I know the Sena is not our friend but at least these people are honest. We know what to expect from them." While Jannat-Ul-Nissa says, "I’ll vote BJP because Sher Ali Bhai tells me to. I’ll vote BJP because therehaven’t been any riots since they came to power here."

In Govandi, it’s not about lofty ideology, it’s not about the netas, it’s not even about the most basic of amenities like a public toilet, forget schools and legalised electricity. Elections are about choosing someone who will keep your killers away.