Ethnic and regional political tensions in Mumbai

Ethnic and regional political tensions in Mumbai are presented not as a conflict of identity alone but as a contest over police power, territory, commerce, and access to weapons. In Didier Levy’s account, the Shiv Sena’s Marathi regionalism gives political form to a deeper economic struggle; elsewhere, the stark inequality of the city and the slum community’s negotiated justice show the human stakes beyond party politics. Because much of the political explanation comes through Didier’s conversation with Lin, the novel also makes clear that its account is a character’s interpretation, not an impersonal report.

Identity, Belonging, and Regional Politics

Didier introduces the Shiv Sena through the Sainiks Lin sees eating near an entrance. He calls them workers for the party and describes them as its hatchet men. Their quiet concentration on their food contrasts with the force of the political organization Didier attributes to them. Lin has not heard about the Sena from his guide, and Didier treats that omission as deliberate before describing the party as the face of Bombay’s future, perhaps of politics elsewhere as well.

The politics Didier identifies are regional, language-based, and ethnic: an us-against-them appeal organized around fear. He argues that the Sena’s influence rests partly on the Maharashtrian composition of much of the police’s lower ranks. He also says the party controls many slums and unions and has influence in parts of the press. The description makes political power concrete: it operates through institutions and everyday urban spaces, not just speeches or formal elections.

Didier’s own account of belonging sharpens the contrast. He describes himself as French, gay, Jewish, and more or less a criminal, and says Bombay is the only city where he has found room to be all four at once. His attachment to the city coexists with his alarm at a politics that divides residents into insiders and outsiders. He reads the Sena’s regional identity not as a simple expression of local culture but as a vehicle for controlling the city.

Economic Competition and the Drug Trade

For Didier, the rhetoric of race, language, and region conceals a contest over money. He says the Sena has substantial political and institutional reach but lacks control over the largest sources of wealth: industrial capital and black-market money. In his account, those funds are held by Parsees, Hindus from other Indian cities, and, most resented by the Sena, Muslims. He describes this distribution as the economic struggle beneath the party’s public language of identity.

The closing of Bombay’s opium dens gives that analysis a specific example. Didier alleges that, only months earlier, some Sainiks—not the public-facing or highly placed members—made a deal with Rafiq, his Afghans, and the police. In exchange for cash and concessions, police closed all but a few of the city’s opium dens. Dozens of established smoking parlors were shut in one week. Didier condemns the alliance of big politics and big business, while his outrage is also personal: he sees the destruction of a familiar opium culture as a loss to the city.

The closures do not end the trade in intoxicants. Didier says heroin, or garad, brings in more money than opium and that former chandu smokers among the poor have become heroin smokers. Rafiq controls a substantial portion of Bombay’s brown heroin, though Didier stresses that no single person controls the many thousands of kilos moving from Afghanistan through Pakistan into India. In this telling, political intervention displaces one market while enriching another, and the poor bear the consequences of the change.

Weapons, Influence, and the City in Flux

Didier explains the politicians’ interest in the Afghan trade by pointing beyond drugs. Weapons, heavy arms, and explosives also move into India, he says. He associates those weapons with Sikh militants in Punjab and Muslim separatists in Kashmir, and argues that control of the drug trade can provide influence over the gun trade. The Sena, in his interpretation, is desperate to control the flow of weapons into Maharashtra because the weapons confer power among poor Muslims whom the party regards as enemies.

The city’s changing name becomes another sign of the same political struggle. Didier notes that Bombay has been renamed Mumbai, while maps have not yet caught up, and predicts that they will. For him, the change is part of a broader effort to remake the city, pursued through alliances that may cross the very group boundaries emphasized in public rhetoric. His account links identity politics to bargaining and control: factions may oppose one another openly yet cooperate when money and power offer common ground.

Inequality, Community, and the Limits of the Account

The novel places this political analysis against visible disparities in the city. At Cuffe Parade, a ten-acre slum of seven thousand huts and twenty-five thousand residents stands beside the World Trade Centre, with its shops, displays, lights, and fountains. The slum has no electricity, running water, or toilets, and its residents have no certainty that authorities will not sweep their homes away. The scene does not identify the Sena as the cause of every deprivation; instead, it shows the unequal urban conditions within which political control of slums and institutions matters.

A different form of power appears in Prabaker Kharre’s account of the people-market, where children displaced by cyclones, drought, cholera, and fighting are bought and sold. Their journey to Bombay and their vulnerability to purchasers reveal how crisis and poverty can make people available to those with money, even when they have no meaningful voice in the transaction. The episode broadens the article’s political frame beyond party competition: exclusion also works through markets that treat vulnerable lives as commodities.

Against these systems, the slum’s neighborhood council offers a limited but striking model of intercommunal justice. After Faroukh and Raghuram fight over religion, Hindu and Muslim neighbors decide that each must learn a complete prayer from the other’s observance. Qasim Ali Hussein describes justice as both fair and forgiving, and as an effort not only to punish people who do wrong but also to save them. This community practice does not resolve the larger political struggle Didier describes. It does, however, set fear-driven division against a local order in which difference is addressed through shared responsibility rather than domination.

The account remains deliberately mediated. Didier is perceptive but openly cynical about politicians and business, while the narrator encounters political tensions through conversation, observed scenes, and the explanations of people around him. That framing makes the tension more than a backdrop: it is a contest over who may belong, who controls the city’s resources, and whether power will deepen division or make room for mutual obligation.