Here is a question, and a proposition, rolled into one: Is Mumbai the new Calcutta? And the choice of the new name for one, and the old one for the other, is deliberate. There was a time when Calcutta was the globally celebrated metaphor for all that was wrong with India. From Oh! Calcutta to Dominique Lapierre?s City of Joy, the poverty, the dysfunctionality of that city was the benchmark for all that could go wrong with Third World urban sprawl. Rajiv Gandhi brought the decline of the city to national consciousness by proclaiming that the city was dead. Even the most die-hard Kolkata-walas will not protest when I say that their city has lost that dubious ?number one? status to Mumbai. In fact, not only has Mumbai become the new Kolkata, it also does not have the comfort of having a Mother Teresa to bring it succour, a sense of pride and a possible Nobel.
Check out the signals from popular culture. Four of the most prominent books centred on Mumbai (Sacred Games by Vikram Chandra, Shantaram by Gregory Roberts, Suketu Mehta?s Maximum City and, most recently, Aravind Adiga?s Last Man in Tower) have each drawn from the seamier underbelly of India?s clich?d city of dreams where streets were allegedly paved with gold. Two of the most celebrated India-themed foreign films, Slumdog Millionaire and Salaam Bombay, have followed the same pattern. Not to be left behind, Bollywood is also back to its old pessimistic view of its own city, as the success of Once Upon a Time in Mumbai (with a sequel in the works) shows. In fact, today, almost all that is optimistic in popular culture is north/Delhi-based, from Band Baaja Baaraat to Rab Ne Bana Di Jodi. Even the new bestselling chicklit is based in Delhi, Anuja Chauhan?s Zoya Factor and Advaita Kala?s Almost Single. And this, in a city with a well-earned notoriety for being wildly unkind to young women.
Repeated terrorist attacks and bombings are only the most visible symptoms of Mumbai?s decline. The boast of developing it into Asia?s new financial centre, a new Shanghai, is now an insult to India?s fastest diminishing city. Its policing is a disaster, the underworld is making a comeback (that is also the message from J. Dey?s murder, irrespective of whose story you believe). It has lost nearly 400 lives to terror attacks in five years. And the answer to the question, ?Why Mumbai??, may lie in the fact that here, more than anywhere else, do terror modules find refuge and protection from the underworld. It is also silly to go on and on insinuating that Mumbai is vulnerable because of its mixed population or communal divide. It is a horrible insinuation on its Muslims. A flourishing underworld and a sprawling slum provide Mumbai a unique sanctuary for terror. And what do we have to fight them? A most politicised and faction-ridden police leadership. And a police rank and file which, if it is fortunate, finds shelter in one of the city?s rotting chawls. I invite you to visit any of these. How can a man living such a poor quality of life with his family have a sense of pride in his city, or his uniform? It is still a marvel it manages to produce great heroes like Tukaram Ombale (who died clutching Kasab?s AK-47).
This is further compounded by the fact that the police reports to R.R. Patil, whose first holy objective is to fix Mumbai?s ?rotting? morality. So he would shut down the dance bars while the larger underworld and terror modules flourish and his police force gets more divided and demoralised. Such is the paralysis that most of the purchases planned after 26/11 have not been made. And while the chief minister blames complex scrutiny of acquisitions by the many three-letter monsters of New Delhi?CVC, CAG, CBI?the fact is the Central government belongs to the same coalition.
So these are thin excuses. A R500-crore plan to cover the crucial parts of Mumbai with CCTV cameras has been pending since 26/11, and if it gets approved by the cabinet later next week, it will be a collateral benefit of this week?s bombings.
You cannot build a global financial centre in a city whose law and order is so uncertain. Nor can you do so in a city which is adding no new and modern schooling and higher education facilities. Deepak Parekh, one of the most respected residents of Mumbai, speaks with great pain that he has so few seats in the reputed Bombay Scottish, which he presides over, that he has to deny admissions to the children of professors in its Powai branch from the neighbouring IIT. There are too few college seats, too few engineering and medical colleges of quality and repute. No surprise then that some of the most important figures in the financial and corporate world are now relocating to Delhi. Just over the past year, two of the shiniest stars of global banking have relocated to Delhi, harassed by the nightmare of traffic, infrastructure, and possibly also a sense of insecurity. Most of Bombay?s infrastructure decisions are lost in some kind of a dreaded politico-bureaucratic orbit, where these keep circling without getting anywhere. The city took nearly a decade to build a tiny sea-link at a time when the Chinese build one 14 times its size in four years and make no song-and-dance about it. What kind of a commercial capital can it be if it does not even offer its residents even one air-conditioned train seat for their daily commute? (Delhi now has 2.5 million, and Kolkata six lakh.) Can a city with just one north-south artery be Asia?s financial centre? Not when just one strategically parked, and booby-trapped, truck can slice it neatly into two, snapping all contact between its only airport and the downtown.
For a long time every decision taken by the Maharashtra government was presumed to carry the stink of corruption. Now we have a chief minister whose personal honesty nobody questions, but who does not take any major decisions. Preventing corruption by not taking any decisions is a bit like banishing AIDS by banning sex.
There is, however, an essential difference between the declining Calcutta of the old and Mumbai of now. Unlike Calcutta, whose residents always maintained their love and loyalty to the city and resented any criticism of it, Mumbai?s residents are now the angriest Indians. You see this anger spill over to the media, TV discussions, social networking sites and so on. A desperate sullenness has replaced what used to be eternal optimism, once upon a time in Mumbai. That is why the very idea of the ?spirit of Bombay?, which so fired their imagination once, now irritates them no end. Because it is just seen as a cynical mantra to fool them to accept their fate as it is.
These bombings will surely hasten some decisions. But that will not be a solution if Mumbai has to survive as a self-respecting modern city and not degenerate into a third-world equivalent of how New York was before Mayor Rudy Giuliani cleaned it up. The new Shanghai is a dream that never will be. It can, however, be redeemed only in one way: if we can free Mumbai, and other major cities (like Bangalore, Hyderabad, Kolkata), from being colonies of their state-level politicians. That would require autonomous city governance, and the shifting of state capitals, (and therefore the political class which gets its power from votes in the hinterland, and then monetises it in the big bad city), back to the state?s heartland. Take the American example, where the capital of almost no state is its biggest city (New York?s is in Albany, California?s in Sacramento, Illinois has its capital in Springfield, not Chicago, and so on). But that, in our system, is too radical a change to expect. Can we, instead, merely get the two-dozen-odd infrastructure-building decisions fast-forwarded in Mumbai, some de-congestion, and the police force cleaned up? Or could it be that these latest blasts haven?t quite claimed enough lives for us to be shaken up even that much as yet?
sg@expressindia.com
