Perhaps Mumbai ensures this. Larger than the state it is situated in, the city alone accounts for 23 per cent of the state’s gross domestic product. It is Mumbai’s evolution from being a manufacturing hub in the 1960s to a global financial and services centre today that has helped to mould peripheral urban clusters like Bhiwandi, Malegaon, Echaklakaranji and Madhavpur. They reflected, in a microcosm, the more brutal aspects of the megapolis. The one big event in this trajectory was the Bombay textile strike of the early eighties. Dutch sociologist H. van Wersch, in his book Bombay Textile Strike 1982-83, observed how the share of handlooms and powerlooms in export earnings gradually increased at the expense of the mill sector. Powerlooms, which had accounted for only 1 per cent of the exports in 1975, shot up to corner 6 per cent of exports by 1983, and Maharashtra itself emerged as the powerloom centre of the country. Today a little less than half of India’s registered powerlooms are located in the state.

Throughout the Bombay textile strike the availability of cloth in the market remained relatively unaffected because production was increasingly sub-contracted to the powerloom owners located in what came to be known as the powerloom towns of Maharashtra. The boom in these small towns — perhaps it could be termed a redistribution of manufacturing capacity — created by the textile strike also provided employment opportunities on an unprecedented scale. But the jobs came at a price. The powerloom owners invariably transferred the problems and risks inherent in their operations to their workers. According to van Wersch, a visit to Bhiwandi reminded him of the beginning of the industrial revolution: “Thousands of persons sleeping in or next to numberless ramshackle sheds in which the deafening sound of looms is heard 24 hours of the day, no ventilation, no proper light, children doing tedious work for long hours, dust and dirt everywhere. The situation is such that employers do not even make the pretence of hiding the total lack of proper working conditions.”

Fifteen years after van Wersch wrote this, the picture is not all that different. In Malegaon today, a town with over 84,000 powerlooms, a worker earns less than Rs 2,000 a month, although the minimum stipulated wage in this sector is Rs 3,000. Over time the town expanded to accommodate the growing number of powerlooms by throwing up foetid, overcrowded clusters of semi-pucca houses, with no electricity, no water supply, no toilet facilities, and lined by overflowing drains. It existed as part of prosperous Maharashtra’s underbelly, a state marked by some of the sharpest disparities in the country. When a group of Malegaon’s residents recently returned the cheques given to them by a visiting delegation of Congress leaders, including the state’s chief minister, it reflected widespread public alienation and resentment over the monumental neglect accorded to a town where even a decent civil hospital does not exist to date.

Against this rather dismal backdrop, another dynamic was at work, evident in one figure much bandied about recently, following last Friday’s blasts. Of Malegaon’s population of around 7 lakh, almost 75 per cent are Muslim. The town had become, in other words, a huge, communally polarised pool of cheap labour, largely unprotected by laws, largely unserviced by civic facilities. But how did Malegaon gain its strong Muslim identity? Some clues are provided in the remarkably detailed ‘Concerned Citizen’s Inquiry Report into Malegaon Riots’ of November 2001.

The town’s history and location appear to be the primary reasons for its communally polarised profile. Situated on the road linking Mumbai and Agra — now National Highway No 3 — it was once a small junction known as ‘Maliwadi’ (hamlet of gardens) and quickly gained the reputation for being a source of employment. When a local jagirdar, Naroshankar, started building a fort in the area in 1740, a project that took 20 years, a sizeable number of Muslim workers and artisans from places like Surat and northern India settled in the area. After the British capture of the Malegaon fort in 1818, Muslims from Hyderabad migrated to the region. The 1857 revolt saw many Momins from the north locate themselves here, and the pattern kept repeating itself over the years. Malegaon, with its growing Muslim presence, became something of a shelter and a source of employment for the community whenever it faced reversals. If famine in 1862 forced Muslim weavers in the Varanasi area to move to Malegaon, the political upheavals in the Hyderabad of the late 1940s and ’50s saw a similar exodus to the town. As for communal riots, which became a regular feature of the country from the ’60s onwards, they have also undoubtedly contributed to swelling the number of Muslim migrants to Malegaon.

All this makes for an uneasy equilibrium. When people are forced to work and live in the most primitive conditions, when disgruntled and unemployed youth are caught in forces far more powerful that they can even comprehend, when the promise of education remains unfulfilled, when the political environment is extractive, indifferent and sometimes violently hostile, it cannot but lead to an ending of options and a closure of minds; a ghettoisation that leads inevitably to a deeper ghettoisation.

The tragedy of the September 8 blasts in this town served to uncover the greater tragedy of Malegaon, a town that Maharashtra — and India — remembers only in times of blasts and riots. Securing Malegaon, and indeed every potential site of targeted terror, would need more than security personnel and the identification of the criminals behind Friday’s blasts. It also demands securing the lives of ordinary people.