Months ago I posted a little history lesson about the Cult of Thugee in India, from which the overused term “Thug” originated. Today Slate.com, in its dispatches, features a look at a modern day Indian thug cult of sorts, which is known as Hanuman the Monkey God’s Army.
One hundred years ago, Dharavi, which is now Asia’s largest slum, was a fishing village at the edge of Mumbai. As the growing city dumped its junk here, the salt plain turned to swampy landfill. Then, from the 1950s, as rural Indians arrived in Mumbai, or Bombay as it was then known, looking for work, they came to Dharavi. Now the teeming slum, which used to be the most marginal of all marginal communities, is right smack in the middle of Greater Mumbai.
Babalu is a clean-cut 27-year-old with a freckle embedded in the white of his right eye who works on the street hawking barrettes. He is also the head of the Lord Ram Unit of the Bajrang Dal, the paramilitary youth wing of the Vishva Hindu Parishad, the religious wing of the Rashtriya Swayamsevak Sangh. The RSS is a Hindu nationalist organization that has supported a host of unsavory bigots from Adolf Hitler to Nathuram Godse, the man who assassinated Gandhi in 1948. Although the RSS claimed Godse was not a member of the organization at the time of the assassination, this was an attempt to distance the RSS from the scandal.
“As a member of BD, I’m a notorious troublemaker,” Babalu said as he sat at a back table in Venus, a vegetarian restaurant in the slum. The Bajrang Dal, otherwise known as Hanuman the Monkey God’s Army, is extremely violent. They claim to have 1.3 million members throughout India. I’d met Babalu through a lanky community leader who as a teenager had also been a member of the Bajrang Dal. The lanky man had left the organization years earlier because he was disgusted by their violence.
Reading through Slate’s dispatch I couldnt help but see similarities between this “Army of the Monkey God” and the notorious American prison gang Nuestra Familia.
Take a look first at this quote:
At first, for Babalu, being a member of the Bajrang Dal meant only attending a weekly meeting. But soon, he was invited to attend a training camp that takes place twice a year in several locations throughout the country.
“We get up at 5:15, we learn karate, how to use air rifleswe learn how to talk to people about the Bajrang Dal and the RSS,” Babalu said. Seven hundred to 1,500 young men attend each camp, he said, blowing into his glass of hot tea. They run for 10 days, and return transportation is paid for by the organization.
And now, this quote from last night’s 60 Minutes:
The gangs at Pelican Bay [a California prison] are organized like the military, with strict discipline that includes going to school, but not in the traditional sense. They go to gang school, learning, for instance, how to make weapons from materials the state is required to give them.
In a prison video, an inmate demonstrates how he constructed a crossbow out of elastic from his underwear, writing paper rolled tightly, and a plastic spoon sharpened into a lethal point. Its made specifically to be fired through the mesh door.
The regimen of Thugs from around the world is strikingly similar it seems. White supremacist gangs function is a similar manner, just waiting for “the eventual race war.” The dispatch continues:
Despite their dislike of the Christians, for the RSS and the Bajrang Dal, Muslims are the primary enemy.
“Of course they have the right to live in India, but they should live like Indians. During a cricket match, everyone should feel happy if India wins,” Babalu said.
Babalu has been arrested seven or eight times for inciting mob violence against Muslims.
“We are in such large numbers, they have to empty schools or hotels to hold us all,” he said, laughing. “If I have numbers on my side, and there’s a struggle, someone will get killed.”
