Old Bombay-Delhi battles used to go like this. Delhi : Look at our wide roads, our grand homes, our lovely winter.
Bombay: You are an overgrown village.
This then changed to —
Delhi: we now have the Metro, great restaurants, flyovers and our lovely winter.
Bombay: But you also have fixers, too many babus and you are still an overgrown village.
Today, the discussion would go like this —
Delhi: You are a small-minded, filthy city where the government tells you what to eat, a local party decides who you can listen to and cabbies are beaten up because they are from another state.
Mumbai: (silence).
It is painful to admit, but this is a pretty accurate description of what Mumbai has become. Xenophobic, nativist and grumpy, where any kind of fun and enjoyment is forbidden. If the government — and this cuts across party lines — is not coming down on bars or banning bar dancing, it is making possession of beef a crime that can land you in jail for five years. (In most of these cases, it is the poor who suffer, but then who cares about them?)
Then there is the Shiv Sena, forever ready to save this country from an attack by Pakistani musicians. Every now and then the Sena, and its cousin, the Maharashtra Navnirman Sena, will get het up about something or the other and declare, with all the courage of the bully, “we will attend to this in our typical Sena way”. Mumbai residents know this means a gang will descend on a poor helpless soul and beat him to a pulp (or the matter will be sorted out with behind the scene negotiations) but over the years, have come to take it in their stride. This is the famous Mumbai spirit, i.e. look the other way and get on with your business.
But why blame the politicians alone. It’s not as if the citizens are not showing their narrow-minded, bigoted approach. They gang up to disallow Muslims, single-women, non-vegetarians and many others who do not meet their high standards of morality to purity from sharing the same space in their buildings. There are neighbourhoods where rich and influential residents have got non-vegetarian restaurants shut down and stopped small shopkeepers from selling eggs. This happened a long time ago and no one protested, so naturally the government was sure there would be no problem when beef was banned or when the sale of meat was shut down for four days (in the end it was reduced to two, but thanks to the courts.)
Community organisations have begun flexing their muscles, aware that collective action can push the government to action. While a lone wolf was blamed for trying to get the play Agnes of God stopped, what escaped everyone’s attention is that the first to object to it were the nuns who controlled the hall where it was to open. The local Archdioscese issued a strong statement against the play, stopping short of demanding a ban. Old timers will tell you that Bombay was a cosmopolitan city, with a laissez faire attitude to things and a free-spiritedness not seen in other parts of India. It had a glorious night life, it was safe and it was welcoming. Migrants from all parts of India came here to make a living, carrying with them their dreams and hopes. Only merit counted, not contacts or the family name.
Much of it still holds true, but let’s face it, India itself has become more egalitarian than it was, so that is by no means only Mumbai’s USP. Today, a young, talented person has so many places to choose from and given the city’s absurdly stratospheric real estate costs, that person is likely to give Mumbai a miss. With the old ethos of embracing all who came here now under threat, why would anyone want to choose Mumbai? (Unless they want to join Bollywood.)
Friends from different parts of India often ask: how can a party like the Shiv Sena survive in a city like Mumbai? It is a good question, to which there is no single answer. It could be that the Sena taps into an anxiety that bubbles under the surface and which many of us scarcely notice. Or that a common citizen cannot be expected to stand up to bullies, especially since the forces of law and order cannot be banked upon to protect him. Or that even the government finds it difficult to tame it, as we saw when the Sena declared that Ghulam Ali would not be allowed to perform in Mumbai. Chief minister Devendra Fadnavis offered protection, but the organiser, after a meeting with the Sena’s chief, decided that it was better to be safe than sorry. In effect, the Sena snubbed the chief minister, showing whose clout really mattered in the end.
With each such success, the Sena gets bolder. No other rival force — no political party or citizen’s group — is ready to take them on. Mumbai’s greatest asset, its people, seem to have just given up, accepting without struggle the gradual erosion of all they held dear. So is this the dirge of one man, a cri de coeur of someone who thinks the essence of this “urbs prima in indis” has now dissipated for ever and all that is left is a shell, full of memories? Is Mumbai a gone case, as they say? The answer to the last is a firm no, but when a city starts indulging in nostalgia, it can only mean it is avoiding looking at the present.
