There is a Bombay, a Bambai occupying expensive real estate, the the city to cast all women as potential and a . Just like there are differently-abled who we’d rather just victims and poor, dalit, Muslim and many different Bombay Girls there are ignore than allow any access to public increasingly, North Indian men as potential many different cities in ‘Mumbai’… space in the city, and, of course, in public perpetrators of violence.1 …In reality, both space, all women without legitimate women and ‘other’ men are outsiders Each Mumbaikar lives in his/ purpose, who should in any case be at to public space, and the exclusion of her Mumbai, occupying anything from a home as good wives and mothers… women from public space is inextricably few square feet of pavement to several linked to the exclusion and vilification thousand square feet of super built-up …The increased exclusion of other marginal citizens. However, the deluxe real estate. Each, moreover, has of marginal citizens is reflected in the expressed concern for ‘women’s safety’ very different claims to the resources increasing public violence against allows ever more brutal exclusions from Extract from and spaces of the city. This disparity those seen to not belong. This violence public space in the guise of the righteous is not something new or even unique takes the shape of ousting people from desire to protect women. This kind of to Mumbai. Cities and definitions of their homes and places of livelihood, unchecked violence is a more recent Chapter ‘The citizenship have always been based on of tolerating brutal acts committed by development in a city that once prided the principle of exclusion – on grounds private agencies and the state against itself on its diversity and tolerance. of class, religion, race, age, sexual certain groups and communities, and ______unbelongers’, preference and property ownership, generally ignoring the basic needs of among others. You could have lived in entire sections of the city’s population. Bombay/ Bambai/ Mumbai, all Socrates’ Athens and not been a citizen names for the city in English, and if you were a woman. You could have Interestingly, this endemic Marathi, respectively, became officially ‘Why Loiter? lived in Julius Caesar’s Rome and not violence is treated as separate from the only Mumbai in 1995. This change has been a citizen if you were a slave.… violence against women and often elicits not just been nominal but reflects an much less public outrage even though increasingly conservative economy and Women and …In Mumbai today, the they are in fact fundamentally connected. polity, signalled by the communal riots unbelongers are the poor, cast in the The perception that these two kinds of that the city witnessed in 1992–93.2 role of ungracious migrants who occupy violence are completely separate from Parallel to this have been large-scale Risk on Mumbai the city’s spatial assets without officially each other is so well entrenched, that socio-economic upheavals including a recorded remuneration; the dalits and popular rhetoric actually places women’s shift from a manufacturing to a service other lower castes whose presence is access to public space in opposition to economy, most tellingly symbolized in the barely acknowledged, except grudgingly that of other marginal citizens. It is this conversion of its historic mills to glitzy Streets’ when they take to the streets during perception that underlies fingers being malls. Prior to this, the working class Delhi: Penguin Books; 2011. (pg. 8-21) Ambedkar Jayanti; and the Muslims, pointed at North Indian immigrant men had a greater claim to the city than they who are increasingly stereotyped as by some right-wing politicians after the do now. In fact, the textile mill worker disagreeable outsiders, criminals and much-publicized molestation of two was one of the classic images of the potential terrorists. Then there are the young women near Juhu beach on New quintessential Mumbaikar, a claim that Shilpa Phadke, couples we don’t want sullying our park Years Eve 2008. Without awaiting any has been undermined by the near closure benches, the non-vegetarians we don’t evidence, ‘outsiders’ were cast as the of the textile mill industry in the city.3 Architect/ Researcher Professor at Industrial Design Centre, IIT Mumbai want residing in our building complexes, culprits responsible for ‘disrespecting Shilpa Ranade & the bhaiyas we don’t want selling our fish women’ and ‘giving Mumbai a bad name’. …Mumbai then is no longer Sociologist/ Writer and Pedagogue or driving our cabs, the gays and lesbians the city of dreams which welcomed we don’t want corrupting our young, the The common belief that these everyone but is now actively hostile to Sameera Khan North-Easterners we’d rather dismiss as two kinds of violence are separate and the poor and the outsider. Mumbai’s Freelance Journalist/ Writer/ Research Associate, Pukar ‘Nepali’, the elderly folk we don’t want disconnected phenomena then allows slum dwellers, numbering almost seven

308 / 10 open space 10 / 309 million, form more than 50 per cent of terrorist, and a promiscuous father forms—parental protection, fraternal act of molestation are denied legitimate the city’s population. Yet, slum demolition of umpteen children.5 All Muslims affection, husbandly possessiveness, access to public space on these grounds. drives are routinely undertaken using were uniformly coloured, ignoring the neighbourly nosiness or even the more the rhetoric of beautification. Hawkers reality that Muslims in Mumbai have formal strictures of the community Women, however, often perceive are moved around like pawns on a always been a very diverse group.6 (sharia jamaats, khap-panchayats some of those regarded as outsiders as giant chessboard under the pretext of and jati-panchayats) and state representing the familiar ‘eyes’ on the zoning and cleaning up the streets.4 Bar The last two decades have (constitutional laws and police acts). street. For instance, one woman points dancers, and in fact dancing in bars, communalized relations between Muslims out that the hawker who sold bhel across has been rendered not just illegal, but is and other communities to such an extent ….This then is the covert reason from her apartment building had been a surrounded by a problematic debate on that the Mumbai Muslim is now a pariah, why women are prevented from accessing familiar and therefore comforting sight morality and corruption of ‘Indian’ values. increasingly marginalized from the public space: the anxieties regarding the for several years unlike the security mainstream, displaced and excluded from seductive prowess of this undesirable guards who changed every month. This demonization is also many of the city’s heterogeneous spaces. ‘other’, which could adversely affect not reflected in the narratives on safety ______only the reputation of the middle-class Similarly women commuters articulated by combative middle-class woman, but equally significantly, that of who navigated the area between the citizens’ groups where the poor are So what does the exclusion of her extended family and community. office district of Fort and Churchgate seen as threats to the safety of the the unbelongers from city resources have railway station lamented that ever since middle classes. Safety and order are to do with the exclusion of women? This control of women’s the hawkers vending books on the prized in the new global city—both of movement is heightened in communities pavement were cleared in 2005, the area which are presented as the antithesis ‘Safety’ is the apparent reason that perceive themselves as being became uncomfortable after dark inducing of what is embodied, literally and why women are denied access to marginalized. This is because women, them to walk through it at a faster pace. metaphorically, by the poor: their slums the public. The unarticulated reason traditionally seen as unsullied by the are unsanitary, their homes makeshift, why women are barred from public vagaries of the outside world, often The argument that middle-class their bodies unhygienic, and their very space is not just the fear that they become the symbolic markers of a women’s, and indeed all women’s, access existence a source of threat not just to will be violated, but also that they will community, the keepers of its tradition, to public space will improve substantially the middle classes but to the city itself. form consenting relationships with and the bearers of its honour. Controlling if we remove lower-class men from the ‘undesirable’ men... This notion of safety them then becomes synonymous with scene is thus flawed even at the level If the growing affinity towards encompasses not just sexual assault but the protection of the community. of rationality. This argument is used neo-liberal economics has virtually also undesirable sexual liaisons even if ______to justify and reinforce various kinds legitimized violence towards the they are consensual. The focus on safety of exclusions from public space, thus poorest of the poor, then the deepening rather than sexual endogamy, allows Safety for women is framed rendering both women and other marginal of right-wing politics in the country, the erasure of questions of both class through the creation of a fallacious citizens outsiders to public space. and indeed the city, has normalized safety and unwanted sexual-affiliations opposition between the middle-class ______the hatred towards Muslims. across class and communal lines. respectable woman and the vagrant male (read: lower class, often unemployed, Today, even though various The spectre of the communal Apparently there is almost as often lower caste or Muslim). By gender-related issues are taken up riots of 1992–93, which sought much shame in choosing the wrong creating the image of certain men as the in the media, the focus is on singular to ‘cleanse’ the city of its Muslim kind of man as there is in being violated perpetrators of violence against women, events and sensational stories. In this citizens, continues to haunt Mumbai against one’s will. Women are then women’s access to public space is mélange, the fact that the various events and shape its imagination. The Hindu carefully monitored in an effort to not further controlled and circumscribed and are inter-linked is often lost. Issues like right wing garnered support across just prevent them from being assaulted acquires an unquestionable rationality. dress codes, the ban on bar dancers, the all classes in Mumbai by playing up but also to guard against their forming In an interesting sleight of hand, both rape of a college girl, and the violence the stereotypical image of the Muslim unsuitable alliances with men of their the person perceived to be the potential against women on local trains, all receive Other as a crude, Pakistan-supporting choice. This surveillance takes many molester and the potential victim of the attention individually. In reality, these

310 / 10 open space 10 / 311 concerns are related not only to each Addressing the question other but also to other processes of of women’s access to public space exclusion in the city: the demolition of then means engaging with the messy Notes slums, the attempts to clear spaces of intricacies of layered exclusion. It 1 In February 2008, Raj Thackeray, estranged nephew of chief and leader of the hawkers, the prejudice against minorities means confronting head-on the fact Navnirman Sena (MNS) launched a particularly virulent attack on the city’s north Indian population. North Indian taxi drivers and other ‘outsiders’, and in general the that the exclusion of the poor, dalits or were physically attacked by MNS goons and their cabs damaged. A movie theatre showing a Bhojpuri film was vandalised. desire to erase everything that does not Muslims are not acts of benevolence The attacks against particularly lower-class and working -class north Indians continued for several days in Mumbai and cohere with the vision of the city as a towards women but part of larger more also spread to other towns in Maharashtra with many north Indian migrant farm and industrial workers fleeing in terror from global sanitized space where things are complex processes where one group the townships of Nashik and Navi Mumbai. In April 2008, Raj Thackeray played the Marathi card with greater vehemence kept safely in separate compartments. of the marginalized are set against asking industrialists in Maharashtra to reserve 80 per cent of jobs in their factories and offices for bhoomiputras or another in a battle whose strings are sons of the soil. Earlier in January 2008, Shiv Sena leader Bal Thackeray in a long interview to his party’s newspaper, Once one understands that pulled by forces outside them. Saamna, had also raised the issue of a ‘permit system’ for all outsiders to live and work in Mumbai. Sporadic incidents these issues are inter-linked in complex of abuse—verbal as well as physical—on north Indian working-class men, are still not uncommon in the city. See ways, it becomes clear that they stem Placing these groups as the ‘Battleground: North Indians face attacks for second day, Mumbai shames nation’, Hindustan Times, Mumbai, 5 February from the same desire to maintain the threat to women’s access only means 2008; ‘Sena wants Mumbai permit for “outsiders”’, Hindustan Times, Mumbai, 22 January 2008; ‘Amchi manoos, tumchi status quo. Without subscribing to that all of them and all women will jobs: Raj Thackeray wants all corporates in state to employ 80% natives’, Times of , Mumbai, 10 April 2008). conspiracy theories, it is clear that this continue to remain outsiders to public 2 Some scholars have argued that Mumbai was a communally-volatile city even before the 1992–1993 riots; status quo is maintained by pitting space. Women’s open access to public see for instance, Varshney (2002). For a detailed discussion on the impact of the 1992–93 riots on Mumbai, see excluded groups against each other. space then cannot be sought at the cost Appadurai (2000), Chandavarkar (2004), Hansen (2001), Masselos (1994) and Robinson (2005), among others. The focus on safety for women clouds of the exclusion of anyone else. While 3 Historian Raj Chandavarkar (2004) suggests that the closure of the textile mills and the rise of communalism are the larger issue of civic safety—that there are particularities to women’s inextricably linked. He argues that the marginalization of the poor is reflected in the ways in which the workers’ resistance is, safety for all. It not only ignores exclusion, women’s safety or access was dealt with by the city’s ruling elites and points out that at the same time, the Shiv Sena’s explicitly communal concerns of a class- or community- to public space cannot be imagined in agenda actively damaged the workers resistance and weakened communist trade unions. It is this communalization based safety, but in a bizarre twist the absence of a more general claim and marginalization of workers, he contends, that made the pogrom of 1992–93 against the Muslims possible. actually presents these as the problem. to city public spaces for all citizens. 4 Sharit Bhowmik (2003) assesses that Mumbai has roughly 2.5 lakh street hawkers, about 30 per cent of them being former workers of the erstwhile textile mills. Jonathan Anjaria (2006) argues that since the late 1990s, elite NGOs and residents’ associations have been actively promoting the idea that hawkers are to be blamed for many of the city’s public problems. 5 This stereotype is based on the Muslim personal law in India, which allows Muslim men to have four wives. Thus, the common misperception is that Muslim men father many more children than Hindu men do. As per the Census of 2001, Hindus account for 80.5 per cent of all Indians, or 828 million while India’s Muslim community stands at 138 million, or 13.4 per cent of the total population. In recent years, Muslim fertility rates have fallen significantly. While the Total Fertility Rate (TFR) among Hindus fell from 3.3 in 1992–93 (National Family Health Survey [NFHS] I), to 2.8 in 1998–99 (NFHS II), the fall among Muslims was even more rapid: from a TFR of 4.4 in 1992–93 (NFHS I) to 3.6 in 1998–99 (NFHS II). (‘Religion and Fertility Behaviour: Canards and Facts’ by Rammanohar C. Reddy, Hindu, 10 November 2002). See www. infochangeindia.org/September 2004 and www. bbcnews.com, 8 September 2004; Indian Express, 7 September 2004; Asian Age, 7 September 2004) 6 By some estimates, Mumbai has the most heterogeneous grouping of Muslims amongst all cities in South Asia. Currently about 18.56 per cent or 2.2 million of Greater Mumbai’s nearly 12 million population is Muslim (Census of India, 2001). See, http://www.censusindia.net/ Besides, the general doctrinal classification of Shia and Sunni (which can be further divided by particular schools of theology), the city’s Muslims can be categorized in several different ways by place of origin, language, occupation, class and caste. The major groups in the city are the Dawoodi Bohras, the Sulaimani Bohras, the Aga Khani Khojas, the Halai Memons, the Kutchie Memons, the Konkani Muslims, the North Indian and Bihari Muslims, the Keralite Moplahs, the Deccanis and the Iranis.

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