Tragic Fable of Mumbai Mills

Indranil Mukherjee/Agence France-Presse â€" Getty Images Policemen walking through overgrown grass in the Shakti Mills area in Mumbai, Maharashtra, on Friday.

If a group of men had not assaulted a 22-year-old female photojournalist, on assignment in the derelict Shakti Mills building in the Mahalaxmi neighborhood in Mumbai on the evening of August 22, her photographs would have given us images of the city’s devastated mill district.

The mill neighborhoods of central Mumbai developed after the establishment of the first spinning mill in 1854. The rapid growth of the textile industry over the next five decades attracted migrants from the immediate hinterland and elsewhere. Pitiful wages and inadequate transportation forced the working-class migrants to live close to the mill sites in factory chawls.

The scarcity of affordable housing forced multiple households or five to 10 male immigrants to cram into a single cubicle. Those not lucky enough to be warehoused in these factory tenements found roofs over their heads in makeshift dwellings fabricated with corrugated iron, flattened tins and wooden planks. Forced to live together in such tight quarters, the linguistically and religiously diverse working-class residents of the area developed a flourishing community life. The area came to be known as “Girangaon,” the Village of the Mills.

The strong working-class solidarity in the mill districts provided fertile grounds for political mobilization. During the early decades of the twentieth century, Indian nationalists successfully rallied the workers against British rule. But politics took a radical direction when Communist trade unionists and intellectuals entered the arena in the 1920s and the 1930s. Drawing on the ties forged in factories and neighborhoods, they organized the mill workers in trade unions and led militant strikes.

Alert to local circumstances, Communist activists like the legendary Amar Shaikh and Annabhau Sathe drew on folk drama and songs to fashion people’s theater and cultural performance that expressed class demands in popular language. The Communist leader S.A. Dange used his knowledge of Sanskrit and the epics to explain class injustice. This combination of class politics and local culture helped to forge radical working-class solidarity in central Mumbai, the bastion of a left-wing force in the city. Progressive writers and artists who had flocked to the city and found work in Mumbai’s blossoming Hindi film industry formed strong connections with Mumbai’s working-class politics and drew from it in their work. Chetan Anand’s 1946 film “Neecha Nagar” (Lowly City), for example, told story of class injustice and went on to share the best film award at the first Cannes Film Festival that year.

The Communists were able to strike strong roots in the mill district because they situated their radicalism in the local context and culture. By the 1940s and particularly after Indian independence in 1947, however, party ideology and directions from the Soviet Union became supreme. The ruling Congress Party had to be challenged. The mill owners, whom the Congress Party was seen to represent, had to be militantly opposed.

Believing that workers had an inherent propensity for revolutionary action, and reluctant to address caste and religion, the Communists fixated on trade union agitations as the means to achieve proletarian solidarity and objectives. In practice, this meant an escalation of agitations for higher wages and bonuses. Revolution was reduced to an economistic struggle, pitting the Communists against rival trade unions in the competition to prove who could get the workers more. The mill district became a battlefield in which the Congress-led unions used the mill owners and government patronage to challenge the dominance of red trade unions.

The agitation in the 1950s to carve out a linguistic province of Marathi speakers out of the old Bombay state offered an opportunity to return to what had previously proved successful - the marriage of radical politics with local concerns. The Communists successfully mobilized workers and took the lead in the hugely popular Samyukta Maharashtra movement. They were rewarded with resounding success in the 1957 general elections. Worried that the Communists were going to take over the city and the state, New Delhi conceded the demand for the state of Maharashtra, with Bombay as its capital.

With the formation of Maharashtra in 1960, the Dange-led Communists proved that they were at the top of their game. But it was a double-edged victory. With workers rallied on linguistic and regional grounds, an opening was left for their ethnic mobilization. Bal Thackeray stepped in to exploit this opening. He began by starting a popular cartoon weekly in 1960 that showcased the plight of Maharashtrians. Six years later, he followed it up by founding the Shiv Sena, a political party named after Shivaji, a 17th-century warrior. Building on the Maharashtrian middle-class resentment that the formation of the state had not improved their well-being, the Sena plunged the city into a campaign against “outsiders” - South Indians, Muslims and Communists.

Sebastian D’Souza/AFP Shiv Sena Party Chief Bal Thackeray at his residence in Mumbai, Maharashtra, on July 21, 2000.

In addition to targeting South Indian restaurants and Muslims, the Sena moved to break the Communist hold in the mill districts because class mobilization was anathema to its nativist vision. With the patronage of Congress leaders and mill owners, it fought pitched battles against the Communists in central Mumbai. Its trade union broke up strikes by Communist trade unions by pitting Maharashtrian against non-Maharashtrian workers. Its cadre of young volunteers on motorcycles flying saffron flags roamed the neighborhoods, challenging Communists. Sena workers attacked trade union and Communist party offices, and even assassinated a popular labor leader and legislator, Krishna Desai in 1970.

Ethnic politics and violence now scarred the neighborhood’s community life. The fragile working-class solidarity built across regional, linguistic and religious differences cracked under the pressure of nativist politics and trade union clashes.

Still more trouble lay in store for Mumbai’s working-class world. The mills plunged into an irreversible decline by the mid-1970s as they lost out to the rapidly growing power loom industry. The mill owners committed the folly of using their substantial profits to pay handsome dividends to their shareholders, neglecting investments in new machinery. Capital-intensive but technologically stagnant, the old mills with unionized labor working eight-hour shifts could not compete with power looms that operated with unorganized workers toiling for 12-hour shifts on low wages. Employment in the mills plummeted and industrial conflicts escalated. A series of strikes, culminating in the crippling industrial action of 1982-83, brought Mumbai’s textile industry to its knees.

Agence France-Presse â€" Getty Images A man greeting Mumbai gangster Arun Gawli (right).

The collapse of the cotton mills tore apart the social fabric of Girangaon. As unemployment soared, the once thriving working-class neighborhoods became a landscape of despair and resentment. The underworld found it an ideal recruiting ground for its foot soldiers, as did the Shiv Sena. Arun Gawli, Rama Naik and Amar Naik, all children of mill workers, went on to become notorious gangsters. The children of some families that had once been Communist activists and supporters proceeded to turn into Sena street fighters. Prakash Bhogle, for example, joined the Sena after his father, a respected Communist leader, passed away. Like many other young men of Communist families, he was attracted by the Sena’s cult of direct action in comparison to what appeared to be the Communist obsession with ideology and speech-making.

The lands on which the defunct mills stood suddenly became prized objects in a space-starved city, drawing the attention of builders and real estate speculators from the1980s onward. Mumbai’s underworld, ever so nimble in adapting to the market, saw an opportunity and used its muscle for extortion and securing a stake in the developing real estate industry. Land was the prize in the bruising gang wars in the city during the 1990s.

In a brazen hit, Sunil Khatau, the scion of a family that owned mills for over a century, was gunned down in 1994. Mr. Khatau had entered into a devil’s contract with a gangster to help browbeat the workers into agreeing to the sale of mill lands. Fearing that the deal made the gangster stronger, his rival pumped bullets into Mr. Khatau. This spectacular hit unnerved the public and prompted a strong state response against the underworld. The mill lands were too valuable to be left to the mercy of criminals.

The stakes soared as the real estate sector boomed, fueled largely by investments by Indian developers and partially by the inflow of foreign capital following economic liberalization and globalization. To regulate the land use in mill districts, the Maharashtra government amended the Development Control rules in 1991. The amendment stipulated that the mill owners could develop their properties, provided they handed over a third of the land for low-cost public housing, another one-third to the Brihanmumbai Corporation, the civic body governing the city, for open spaces, leaving the remaining third for commercial development. But there was a loophole. If less than 15 per cent of the land was involved, it could be sold without regard to the one-third formula.

Mill owners and real estate developers immediately moved in to exploit this loophole to redevelop factory lands. The leader of the pack was the Atul Ruia-led Phoenix Mills Limited. Returning to India after earning a joint degree in 1993 from the University of Pennsylvania’s engineering and Wharton schools, Mr. Ruia first tried to modernize and revamp the textile factory. When that proved futile because of bureaucratic hurdles, he rebooted. Without destroying the mill structure, which would have triggered the one-third formula of Development Rules, he decided to redevelop the spaces around it.

Up came a 300,000-square-foot retail and entertainment complex in the old mill compound. Others followed. The Reliance Group, for example, bought a share in development rights in three mills, including Shakti Mills, the scene of the terrible gang rape.

Environmentalists and urban activists filed numerous cases, arguing that redevelopment would shrink open spaces and public housing that the city desperately needed. But, time after time the courts, including the Supreme Court, ruled against them. The Maharashtra government also amended regulations, permitting builders to develop properties for commercial purposes.

The effects are visible in the changed landscape of central Mumbai. Tower after tower, giant cranes and building equipment and materials are visible as you drive through the area. Where city’s workers once lived in tenements, luxury apartments, hotels, malls, offices and entertainment complexes geared toward the wealthy are steadily gentrifying the space.

But this private-capital driven gentrification works to generate profit-yielding buildings. The result is haphazard development that navigates through the thickets of litigation, the resistance of existing residents and civil society groups and market considerations. So the luxury towers often exist cheek by jowl with slums and abandoned buildings. Shakti Mills is one such space that has been left out so far from gentrification because of continuing litigation.

As recent events demonstrate, unfortunately women can be raped anywhere. But the fact that the photojournalist was brutally assaulted when she went to record a space wracked by the crosswinds of Mumbai’s emblematic social and economic transformation makes her rape doubly tragic.

Gyan Prakash teaches history at Princeton University and is the author of “Mumbai Fables.”