City Adrift by Naresh Fernandes

Author:Naresh Fernandes [Fernandes, Naresh]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: Mobilism
Publisher: Aleph Book Company
Published: 2013-10-02T00:00:00+00:00

PART TWO

ONE

The last time I’d visited Bharat Nagar, it had been a little inconvenient to get to. Located on a spit of land protruding into the mouth of the Mithi river, the Muslim-dominated settlement had only one swampy road running through it—and that road had been blocked by the skeleton of a bus that had been set afire by about fifty young men, protesting the demolition of the Babri Masjid in Ayodhya the previous evening. As the bus went up in flames, policemen shot at the protestors with pistols, .303 rifles and Sten guns. A little while later, hundreds of people surrounded the police outpost at the tip of the slum, hurling stones and tube lights that left holes in the corrugated asbestos roof. The four men on duty attempted to fight their way out, killing three attackers and wounding fifty-four. When I got there in a Times of India jeep a few hours later on the evening of 7 December 1992, the road was littered with shards of metal and glass.

Twenty years after the violence, everything seemed so unfamiliar, I couldn’t even locate the police chowki. I realized that it had shifted into a solid building down the road and its place had been taken by a barber’s shop, run by a man named Shaikh Mansoor. It was a slow day, so Mansoor offered to walk me around the neighbourhood. We wandered past Ambika Jewellers, Stallion the Design Master and Zaika—Chinese Mughlai and Sea Food. Mansoor was fourteen when the riots broke out and he had watched the attack on the police post from behind the wall of a neighbour’s home. ‘The guns sounded like thunder,’ he recalled. Much had changed in the two decades since the dangal. The flimsy metal-sheeted shanties had been replaced by brick structures, he pointed out, and the tidal pools had disappeared because the Mithi river was now held back by thick concrete walls.

But the changes in his slum colony, Mansoor observed, were nowhere as dramatic as the transformations across the street—a six-lane road that didn’t even exist at the time of the riots. Since 1992, a 370-hectare business district called the Bandra Kurla Complex had been reclaimed from the creek that once surrounded Bharat Nagar. The glass-fronted National Stock Exchange now looms over Mansoor’s settlement, while the US Consulate and a branch of the Michelin-starred restaurant Yauatcha are a short walk away. Also in the vicinity is the head office of the Securities and Exchange Bureau of India, an institution that was established months before the riots in 1992, to regulate the recently liberalized financial markets. Less than two weeks after it had been constituted, it was called on to investigate a $920-million stock market swindle executed by a young trader named Harshad Mehta. Like Premchand Roychand, Mehta was a master at squeezing through the loophole and like Roychand, he was lionized—until thousands lost their savings when the market crashed.

The Bandra Kurla Complex isn’t the only reclamation project undertaken in the city since the riots.

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