Global Gangs: Street Violence across the World

9. “For Your Safety”: Child Vigilante Squads and Neo-Gangsterism in Urban India

193 9 “For Your Safety”: Child Vigilante Squads and Neo-­ Gangsterism in Urban India Atreyee Sen In December 2003, riots broke out between Hindus and Muslims in the northern quarters of Hyderabad, a communally (religiously) sensitive city in southern India. Arshed, a ten-­ year-­ old boy from a slum area that was particularly affected by the rising interreligious tensions, was sent off for safekeeping to his uncle’s house in another part of the city. His brother, a six-­ year-­ old, remained behind as his parents were sure that a small child could be hidden in a box or a barrel if communal antagonisms escalated into violence. Arshed returned to the slums after a few weeks and found his mother sitting at the doorstep of their small family shack; she had a glazed look and held her head in her hands. His father sat on a creaky bed, swaying from side to side and whispering , “He is gone, he is gone.” Their neighbor walked up to Arshed, put his hand on his shoulder, and said, “Come and say good-­ bye to your brother.” He walked with Arshed to the cemetery and explained how his brother had been struck on the head while trapped between rioters on the streets and had succumbed to his injuries after two days. The neighbor pointed toward a freshly covered grave. When Arshed bent over and touched the earth, his hand caught the stringed net of flowers resting over the grave. “My small brother was tugging at my arm,” he told me. Later, Arshed’s uncle said to him, “You are all that your parents have right now, you will grow up and be their crutch,” to which Arshed replied, “Let me grow up first.” That evening, Arshed was summoned by the local vigilante group made up of other riot-­ affected slum boys, 194    atreyee sen who expressed their concern about the survival of younger children in similar social and familial circumstances. One of the older boys in the group gave Arshed a crude sword, “for your self-­ protection” (tere suraksha ke liye). Arshed realized that “there was no looking back” and that he was now officially a member of the local child patrol. He insisted, however, that he did not belong to a gang but had rather volunteered to join “soldiers” battling in the midst of an “urban war.” Certainly it has to be said that urban gangs in India are rarely at the heart of contemporary scholarly debate about violence and conflict. The study of criminal tribes, criminal gangs, and dacoits (bandits), especially in the northern belts of India, has long been of interest to historians and anthropologists (Nigam 1990; Major 1999; Radhakrishna 2001), but the role of widespread city-­ based gangs has been largely marginalized by academics in analyzing the nature and culture of organized violence. Most academic research on urban violence, “antisocial elements,” and youth cultures in the region focus on the despairs of poverty and unemployment , the allure of terrorism and militant organizations, the significance of caste, communal and communist politics, the crisis of masculinity and unfettered consumerism, violence as sport, and the vulnerabilities generated by migration and dislocation (e.g., Bonner 2004; Jeffrey 2008; Hansen 2001; Verkaaik 2004). Yet the search for both brutality and humanity within gang cultures, the romance of powerful yet ethical gang lords, and the intrigues of international crime syndicates operating out of cities remain vibrantly alive in blockbuster films, scattered police records, comics and crime fiction, journalistic and editorial pieces, criminological discourses, political reflections on urban societies, and personal confessions of celebrities and ordinary citizens threatened and attacked by land sharks and extortionists.1 Scholars and public intellectuals often attribute this discrepancy to the fuzzy boundaries (in terms of rhetoric and practice) between the religious, political, police, and crime mafia in urban centers of India.2 In this chapter, I explore how these porous and permeable borders between crime, communalism, and conflict impact the internal dynamics of young people acting as violent collective units on the ground. I use an ethnographic lens to comprehend how and why groups of “armed and dangerous” urban slum boys openly embrace a number of ganglike behaviors and yet emphatically refrain from labeling their mobilization strategies and violent actions as being gang related. My “for your safety”    195 research site is Sultanpur, a communally fraught Muslim-­ dominated ghetto in the northern quarters of Hyderabad, where large sections of...