Free India Rising: Tales from a Changing Nation by Oliver Balch Page A

looking up at the roof. ‘I shoo them off actually.’
    Trespassing children are just one of the daily annoyances that slum life brings. Other people’s rubbish dumped on his doorstep vexes Babu too. (Garbage collection is ‘privatised’ in as much as residents who don’t want to dispose of it themselves must pay someone else to take it away.) His biggest grouch is the thieving. Some mornings he tries starting his motorbike, only to find that the petrol has been siphoned out of the tank. ‘They do it with a Biseleri bottle,’ he explains, in reference to a popular brand of mineral water.
    ‘Is there much crime?’ I ask, interested to know how much weight Babu gives to such incidents.
    Mumbai’s shanties, like shanties in all of India’s large cities, have the reputation of being dens of vice and violence. For the tabloid press, the slums always provide the backdrop for grisly murders and massive drug busts. Middle-class friends would often look at me in horror on hearing I’d been traipsing around a slum. ‘Tell me you didn’t take your watch?’ one girl even remonstrated. ‘People get stabbed in those places for far less.’ It was the term‘those places’, spoken with such contempt, that kept me going back.
    In my personal experience (albeit limited), social solidarity in the slums often far exceeds that in the atomised worlds of expensive apartment blocks and walled-in communities. ‘Close-knit’, for Babu, represents far more than just a geographical description of where he lives. The willingness of his fellow residents to band together makes burglary a high-risk business. ‘We beat them very badly if we catch them,’ Babu remarks. ‘There’s no mercy for them.’ The consensus is simple: if people must rob or deal drugs, then they should do so elsewhere. Not, ever, on their own doorstep.
    ‘How about gangs? Do they operate in the slums?’ I enquire.
    The question isn’t asked entirely blind. Sitting on my bedside table back at my lodgings is an open copy of Suketu Mehta’s Maximum City: Bombay Lost and Found . A graphic description of the city’s teeming underbelly, a large portion of the book is dedicated to the Dawood Idrahim gang. Allegedly based in Karachi, with operations throughout Mumbai, the Indian mafia don oversees a genuine multinational corporation of crime.
    ‘They are no gangs exactly. Actually, they are more like teams,’ my host responds, uncharacteristically judicious in his selection of words.
    The description makes them sound harmless, as if it were all one big game, a case of supporting one football club over another. If so, then the rules are certainly unforgiving. ‘One of my friends was stabbed twice during the last Holi celebrations,’ says Babu, his tone almost blasé. The man was a gang member, he adds. It’s meant as an explanation, not a description.
    The slum is definitely no play park. The spectre of violence is forever lurking in the shadows. Shanties, by definition, host the poor. That impoverishment might give rise to petty theft. It could exacerbate domestic violence too. In some cases, it might even foster organised crime. Yet poverty rarely results in murder. India has religion and politics for that.
    Every now and then, India’s hard-won reputation for inter-faithharmony and secular plurality takes a blood-soaked battering. The weeks after Independence, when trainloads of slaughtered corpses trundled into Delhi and Islamabad, set a lamentable precedent for what – admittedly, very occasionally – was to come. One of the latest such outbursts occurred in 2002, when inter-sectarian violence in Gujarat left more than one thousand dead. Unofficial figures put it at double that. The majority were Muslims. Most were poor.
    Mumbai’s recent history bears the scars of similar inter-communal madness. In December 1992, the destruction of the Babri mosque in Ayodhya (the result of the same religious dispute that sparked the Gujarat riots a decade later)