Mumbai Amchi but Bombay is Everybody's

- Meghnad Desai
Courtesy of New Quest, NQ 161.

I left Bombay in 1961 and have always regarded it as my home base. I have come back again and again to it and have marvelled at how it managed to be a City in which people can move around with ease, where the public transport works [try Delhi for a change] and where by and large people are tolerant. Like Dilip Chitre I too supported the Samyukta Maharashtra Samiti's campaign: Mumbai saha Samyukta Maharashtra Zalach Pahije was the slogan we shouted.

The twin crises of Bombay came from the disappearance of the textile industry and the founding of the Shiv Sena. The causes of the textile industry's demise are not just due to the Datta Samant power grab or even the real estate attraction of demolishing a mill and building housing. It is also due to the failure of the dirigiste economic policy followed by the Congress until 1991 in which a world beating textile industry was hobbled by output quotas and restrictions on machinery imports while handloom was encouraged. Economists pointed out as early as the 1950's –--Dr Sandesara for example---that handloom was inefficient and wasteful of scarce capital. But there we are. Even now with WTO allowing unlimited textile exports from the developing countries to the developed countries, India cannot benefit.

The Shiv Sena began by attacking the cosmopolitan culture of Bombay. Its interest was not in Bombay's welfare but in aggrandising its own power for financial gain. It is not unique in this in Indian politics but was the first specific urban ethnically exclusive party. Its capture of the Bombay Municipal Corporation, whatever it is called nowadays, was fatal for Bombay. When Bombay was renamed Mumbai, it epitomised the killing of a cosmopolitan city.

It is not even as if the Shiv Sena has redistributed income or wealth to poor Marathi speaking people of Bombay. It has just used them to feather its own nest. Simultaneously, Indira Gandhi corrupted politics by destroying party democracy in the Congress and made it into a feudal fiefdom where provincial Chief Ministers and Congress Chiefs were her feudatories. Monthly tributes had to be collected and paid in cash to Mrs G. by her satraps. No wonder a Chief Minister of Maharashtra –--Antulay--- spent his time personally signing cement permits.

Towards the end of the 1950s Bombay was dug up downtown to lay new telephone cables and to rebuild the sewers. I doubt if any such effort has been made since. In the heavy rain, the sewers clogged and floods could not recede. No investment has been made in the infrastructure, not during the glory days of Nehru-Gandhi Socialism nor since 1991 with economic liberalisation. The citizens of Bombay [as I still like to think of them] have to demand where their municipal taxes have gone. They need to hold their corporators to account. They should force the municipality to raise money for infrastructure with a levy on real estate values. They should do this in a non-political citizens forum for clean and efficient governance. Bombay had good corporate governance till 1947. It declined after that; but since 1960, it has been abysmal. We all love democracy but you can't leave running a city to its municipal corporators.

If Mumbai is to be amchi , it has to be for everybody in every language.

Lord Meghnad Desai, British M.P. is an economist of international repute. After graduating from the Ramnarain Ruia College, Mumbai and doing his post-graduate degree from the University of Bombay, he went to the London School of Economics where he distinguished himself and laid the foundation of his later career. Author of many books on economics, he still remains a Bombay Hindi cinema buff who recently wrote a book on the matinee idol Dilip Kumar and is currently working on a book on the star actress Nargis. He has an infectious way of articulating his nostalgia and documenting the history of his own sensibility.

We thank him for responding to our Editorial Article (NQ 161) in three parts of which The Indian Express carried the first .
-Editor