The Making of the 'Local': the Everyday Politics of Mitra Mandals on the Margins of the City Radhika Raj Introduction Severa

The Making of the ‘Local’: The Everyday Politics of Mitra Mandals on the Margins of the City Radhika Raj Introduction Several have lamented the fall of Mumbai‟s cosmopolitan and plural culture after the rise of the regionalist, right-wing politics of Shiv Sena. When Shiv Sena was founded in 1966, it stormed into the people‟s consciousness through its openly provocative call to the „Marathi Manoos‟ to stand up against the “alien” south Indians for allegedly stealing jobs from the original inhabitants of the city. In the Marathi newspaper Marmik, Bal Thackeray, founder and chief of Shiv Sena, published a list of flourishing South Indian businesses and eateries with a headline „Vachaa Aani, Shanth Basaa‟ (Read This, And Sit Quiet). He also coined the slogan 'uthao lungi aur bajao pungi‟ pushing young Maharashtrian men to fight back for what, he believed, was rightfully theirs. A series of attacks on Udipi restaurants followed. By 1970s, Thackeray had turned his attention to the Left mill workers movement, the dalit movement and Muslims in Mumbai, naming suburbs with greater Muslim residents, Pakistan. The anti-Muslim, Bombay riots of 1992-93, orchestrated by the Shiv Sena, irredeemably altered the social fabric of the city. Over two months, the city saw violent rioting followed by a mass exodus of Muslims and non-Maharashtrians. According to records, over 900 were killed and 2,00,000 abandoned the city for a safer refuge (Lele 1995). While the city suffered, the most gruesome episodes of violence were reported within informal settlements. Patel argues that Sena‟s Hindutva politics first built a stronghold within working class communities in the 1970s, when there was an acute shortage for housing and jobs amongst the poor. Sena‟s footsoldiers were young, Hindu men who not only forwarded the party‟s agenda but fashioned themselves as self-proclaimed guardians of working class neighbourhoods. It is in this backdrop of extreme spatial stress that the city‟s geography was reinscribed by the Shiv Sena as a Hindu space that framed the Muslim other as the encroacher (Appadurai 2000). In 1995, following the riots Shiv Sena won its first municipal elections and came to power. By early 2000s, Thackeray had started targeting the „bhaiyya‟ for allegedly stealing jobs that rightfully belonged to the Marathi Manoos, a term that he derogatorily used for describing North Indian migrants. North Indian taxi drivers were pulled out of their vehicles and beaten, a few of their cars were set on fire. In 2003, the Shiv Sena ransacked a railway recruitment office, claiming that 90 per cent of the successful candidates in railway exams were from Bihar. The exams had to be postponed. Extensive research on migration, migrants and the city has focused on the various vulnerabilities and violences faced by those who seek employment and refuge in urban centres, and how this in turn influences and shapes the city itself. However, these binary categories of the „local‟ and the „migrant‟ are rarely questioned. This paper argues that the binary is deliberately produced and mobilised to advance political agendas and is influenced by class, caste, religion and regional biases. Who is a „migrant‟ and who can claim to be a „local‟, and in turn demand rights to the city, is a political, strategic exercise. In the city of Mumbai, Shiv Sena regionalist politics has been central to defining who is a „local‟ and who is a „migrant‟. Gyan Prakash (2010, p232) argues that “no socio-economic reality, no cultural tradition, sufficiently explains the emergence of the Marathi manoos. It was Thackeray‟s political creation. He referred to the injustices, real or imagined, suffered by Marathi speakers in order to constitute them as the only legitimate “people”.” Hence, it did not matter if his allegations of “outsiders” stealing local jobs were based on factual evidence. Thackeray‟s intention was not to redress these problems – over the years, Shiv Sena has done very little to resolve the unemployment in the city barring a few tokenistic employment drives. Instead, he called Shiv Sena a movement, not a political party, for the “sons of the soil”, that was anti-politics and politicians and intended to fight for the right of the original inhabitant of the city. Through his speeches and spectacular celebrations of Hindu festivals, Thackeray created a „universal political subject‟ with a homogeneous narrative of a new ethnic identity (Prakash 2010). This paper unpacks and interrogates these produced categories, by studying sites of community organisation and the role of sport, religion, local social service, in fostering this sense of „local‟ at the level of a neighbourhood. Instead of focusing on the „migrant‟, it turns the lens to „local‟ to understand how „localness‟ is understood, packaged and sold as a productive, natural identity. Today, about 49% of Mumbai‟s population lives in slums, where people are forced to carve out life strategies in the face of state neglect, threat of evictions and market-friendly policies that limit possibilities for resistance and negotiation (Bhide 2017). These vulnerable informal settlements, mostly populated by religious minorities, dalits, migrants, are battlegrounds for mobilisations with conflicting interests. One route of mobilising is presented by right-wing organisations called the „mitra mandals‟ (friends‟ associations) that organise Hindu public festivals and sports events in working-class neighbourhoods. Mitra mandals are all-male associations, often sponsored by the xenophobic political party, Shiv Sena that propagates an aggressive brand of regional nationalism. Membership to the mandal requires a commitment to the party‟s ideals, and an embodiment of the party‟s jingoistic, hyper-masculine principles. Central to its politics is its fight against the encroachment of the „migrant other‟ on the city‟s limited informal housing and livelihood opportunities. Based on year-long ethnographic fieldwork in a slum that was the site of one of India‟s largest Hindu-Muslim riots, the paper presents a thick description of the collective life of one such mitra mandal. Through the mandal, young men establish themselves as self-styled guardians of the neighbourhood and decide who can and cannot live or lay claims to the locality. Their sense of pride and belonging comes from defining themselves as original „sons of the soil‟, and purpose, from their fight to safeguard their claims to city and culture against the Muslim and North Indian „other‟. These spaces, events, and institutions are keys to understanding how these categories operate in everyday life. While participation in such religious, nationalist movements may provide young men an escape from everyday feelings of marginalisation, they seriously diminish possibilities of collective public action and justice that is inclusive. The Politics of Belonging Politics of belonging is not the same as „belonging‟ itself. Crafting ways to belong, for instance, constructing legal/illegal homes in an alien city can be read as a radical exercise of claim making for those excluded from formal the processes of housing. Urban ethnographers, theorising the city from the Global South, have argued that this seemingly peripheral, everyday politics of place-making is central to city-building. The politics of belonging instead, as Yuval-Davis has argued, comprises of “specific political projects aimed at constructing belonging to particular collectivities which are themselves being constructed in very specific ways and in very specific boundaries” (Yuval-Davis, 2011,10). The legibility of these boundaries is key to its success -- how clearly can „one‟ distinguish oneself from the „other‟. Hansen (2001, p12) in his study of identity politics and Shiv Sena in Mumbai, argues that these seemingly rigid identity-based collectivities are never stable. The definitions and boundaries of these collectivities struggle and shift with changing socio-political contexts. “There are always multiple meanings, many narratives, and inherent instabilities within such entities. One can say that the rigidity of the designator ultimately is impossible or that the name never can become completely „proper.‟” Belonging, therefore, is a dynamic process that defies the fixity that most political projects accord it. Furthermore, different projects can construct the same collectivity in different ways and people can claim to be a part of multiple, sometimes opposing, collectivities at the same time (Yuval-Davis, 2005,10). For instance, many of the first Shiv Sainiks were men from the communist movement -- the very movement the Shiv Sena aimed to dismantle. In the 70s it was common for mill workers to support both Thackeray (leader of right-wing party Shiv Sena) and Samant (leader of left movement for mill workers) (Adarkar and Menon 2004). However, it is this very instability that the political projects strive to contain and fix in clear, immutable binaries of local/migrant, Marathi Manoos/North Indian. Who defines these boundaries and designates meaning to these collectivities remains a question of anthropological enquiry. Power structures that establish dominant ideas, treat these as „natural‟, as ever-existing, with references to a faraway (sometimes mythical) pasts. Hence, the efficacy of these political projects depends not just on building solidarities but also on investing heavily in repetitive (often spectacular) performances that try to fix boundaries and generate collective moods and memories. Following Butler, theorists have argued

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