Bye-Bye, B'Bay?

Of course, the average Mumbaikar will still swear by his city. He will tell you that Mumbai is the only truly cosmopolitan and liberal metropolis in the India: a city where women can pick up a bottle of whisky from a liquor store without inviting sniggers, a city that leaves you alone, lets you do your own thing and gives you the opportunity to make millions.

Yes. But with each passing year, each of these qualities has come under severe attack and the quality of life lived by those not fortunate enough to be part of the upper crust has been on a dizzying downward spiral. Says film director Shyam Benegal: "Earlier, if you had some money, you could find a piece of residence that gave you what you paid for. But today slums and filth and pollution and noise are everywhere. You cannot escape them."

Bombay was christened the city of gold by its biographer Gillian Tindall. The gold is now all dross. In industry and commerce, Mumbai is losing out to more competitive cities—Bangalore, Delhi and Hyderabad. Real estate prices, though some 40 per cent lower than their peak in the mid-’90s, are still a deterrent to investors. Endlessly stop-and-crawl rush hour traffic is so bad that it can take more time for a businessman to reach south Mumbai from the airport than it does to fly to Mumbai from Delhi!

All over the city, industries are closing down and jobs are difficult to come by. The closure of the cotton mills has led to the workforce of 2,50,000 in the late ‘’70s to be downsized by 80 per cent. Mill workers have sold off their chawls and moved to distant suburbs to work as casual labourers. But these suburbs, which once thrived on heavy engineering industries and chemical and petrochemical plants, are getting de-industrialised too.

Speak to Dada Samant, brother of the legendary union leader Datta Samant, and you are assailed with a litany of industrial closures. They include some of the biggest names in the country’s corporate pantheon: Hoechst, Rhone-Poulenc, Johnson & Johnson, Parke-Davis, Rallis Fans and Automobile Products of India. Novartis India and Ciba Speciality Chemicals are selling their real estate in Goregaon. In the Saki Naka-Andheri belt, entire industries have vanished. And the small-scale sector is almost extinct. Says former adman Gerson Da Cunha, who is the convenor of AGNI (Action for Good Governance and Networking in India), "The city is in serious decline—economically, physically and intellectually, and these are linked. There is no injection of new investment and new jobs in the city and the old formal sector jobs are declining. Housing stock has not increased and the slum population is rising. Crime and quasi-crime are on the rise."

What perhaps hit the city the hardest were the two riots—one following the demolition of Babri Masjid in December 1992 and the Hindu backlash in January 1993. In a month’s time, Bombay’s much-vaunted cosmopolitanism lay shattered. As the violence and looting spread, men shaved off their beards for fear of being mistaken for a Muslim. Families who had lived in the city for decades fled. This was the backdrop against which the Shiv Sena stormed to power in 1995.

Post-riots, things have never been the same again. Suspicion among communities has escalated. And the governing class has become increasingly intolerant to public sensitivities. This has rubbed off on the police and the Brihanmumbai Municipal Corporation (BMC), who seem to focus single-mindedly on implementing the letter of the laws that affect the common citizenry while closing their eyes to the rampant illegalities of those with pelf and power.

So you had the drive against food hawkers. The BMC suddenly decided to implement a 16-year-old Supreme Court order which prevents the hawking of food on the city’s streets after 10 pm. The order also decrees that only pre-cooked food should be served. If followed to the T, this could create a Mumbai without pau bhaji and vada pau! Imagine Kolkata without luchi and alur dum, imagine Chennai without idlis!

The Mumbai police is among the most active in the country when it comes to implementing the Supreme Court’s ban on the use of loudspeakers from 10 pm to 6 am in open spaces. In October, the police clashed with the organisers of mammoth navratri festivals in the city. Traditionally, the joyous dandia raas programmes, the high point of the Gujarati year, used to continue till the wee hours. In protest, several organisers cancelled their programmes. Two months later, many churches announced that they would hold "midnight" mass on Christmas eve between 8 and 8.30 pm. This is Bombay, India’s most cosmopolitan and liberal city?!

Old-time Bombayites will tell you that the city has lost its civility. Says poet Javed Akhtar, "Somehow, somewhere down the line the city began to lose its finer qualities. The average man was not so insensitive and so rude as he is today." Agrees painter Jehangir Sabavala: "There is a general breakdown in the gentlemanliness of the city that used to be its foremost character." Board a suburban train to Virar or Karjat to see serious urban angst. But then, people who travel four hours a day—very often without a place to sit—are bound to be frustrated. People who earn enough to have a good life in any other city—bank officers, marketing executives, computer professionals—but have to travel in hot, smelly, asphyxiating conditions for hours every day are bound to be on a short fuse. The citizens of Bombay were known for their discipline, their adherence to queues and traffic rules. Not any more. Something gave, some years ago. In today’s Mumbai, violence simmers every moment under the deceptively brash surface, ready to explode at an instant’s notice.

In the ‘’70s, when Bal Thackeray began his vendetta on south Indians for taking away employment from the sons of the soil, few could have imagined that his party would one day rule Maharashtra. Three decades later, the emergence of the Sena as a political force and the parochial tendencies it has promoted has ripped apart the healthy mix of communities that characterised Bombay. Says grassroots political leader Mrinal Gore, "Earlier, the various communities that came to Mumbai and enriched its cultural life identified more strongly with their work than with their religion. Today, the rise of Hindutva forces has resulted in stronger divisions on the basis of religion."

Today, with the decline of industrial worker jobs, the Sena support base of lower-middle-class and middle-class Marathis is a very frustrated lot. In the burgeoning service industries, where fluency in English and computer literacy is essential, the poor and Anglo-challenged Marathi manus are out of the race. Sainiks may bray about asserting their regional identity but Thackeray’s own grandchildren study in a convent, Bombay Scottish. It is not a coincidence, therefore, that many of the Sena’s recent victims have been heads of schools and colleges who refused to succumb to their demands for admissions.

The Sena has also appointed itself the guardian of public morals, violently detesting any deviation from what it construes as mainstream culture. Thus theatres screening of Deepa Mehta’s Fire were attacked and its release delayed by several weeks. As culture minister in the Sena government, Pramod Navalkar frowned upon artistes kissing on stage and cracked down on masseurs and so-called anti-social elements on beachfronts. In fact, at a meeting to discuss street furniture along a newly-built promenade, he cautioned the residents’ association not to install benches—these could be put to undesirable use—but to go in for single seats instead. Yet, on any night, you cannot walk a yard down the road adjoining Juhu beach without being accosted by three pimps.And the strict abhorrence of "western decadence" and the banning of celebrations on Valentine’s Day did not deter Thackeray from encouraging his nephew Raj to sponsor a Michael Jackson show to raise funds (Rs 27 lakh) for his Shiv Udyog Sena.

The Sena’s strong-arm methods touched a new low when last year it went on the rampage in a private hospital in Thane following the death of local strongman Anand Dighe. Dighe, a cardiac patient, had died of a heart attack but the Sainiks decided to ravage the hospital anyway. Not even the junior Thackerays—Raj and Uddhav—could subdue the mobs.

These parallel forces—the economic decline and rise of parochialism—have diminished Bombay tragically, in every sphere.

Girgaum was known for its flourishing theatre tradition. That tradition is virtually lost forever. The commercialisation of what used to be a forward-looking cultural tradition has taken its toll. Mumbai is where the Progressive Artists Association and the Indian People Theatre Association originated. But today art exhibitions are mere high-society soirees and theatre is defined by bedroom burlesques. It has been a free fall from Vijay Tendulkar to Bharat Dabholkar.

Naturally, as employment prospects have nosedived, young people have been forced to turn to the underworld for a livelihood. The number of educated unemployed who are sharpshooters for gangs is shocking. Gangsters have infiltrated real estate and entertainment. The extortion racket has spread its tentacles from the film industry to industrial houses to shops to professionals. Merely the renovation of an apartment or a new car can invite the attention of local hoodlums who demand a percentage of the money spent.

Appearances may be deceptive: spanking new high-rise apartment blocks keep rising in the ever-distant suburbs. Residential areas like Powai and a business district like the Bandra-Kurla complex can make you forget momentarily that you are in a city where, by official count, 55 per cent of the population lives in slums. In Greater Mumbai, that’s some six million people or over one million families, quite possibly the highest number of the unhoused in any city in the world. And they occupy less than a tenth of the city’s space. Says municipal commissioner S.S. Tinaikar: "Bombay is among the worst managed cities in the country. This despite the fact that the BMC’s budget of Rs 6,000 crore is higher than that of several state governments." Says the Shiv Sena’s Navalkar: "The city is so filthy now that I cannot believe that there was a time when every nook and corner of this beautiful city was washed every day. Sweepers started at midnight and completed the job by 4 am. Inspectors used to go to the fish market to keep a tab on quality. Today the system has simply vanished. There is no such thing called law here anymore." It’s perhaps time for Bombay to go through another renaming ceremony, this time to Slumbai.

The inhuman condition the slumdwellers live in, often within a stone’s throw from plush glass-and-brick vanity apartment blocks, is an invitation to a conflagration. And with every passing day, that conflagration seems more inevitable.

Even 20 years ago, Bombay symbolised all that Indians aspired for—a good job, a decent life, modern sensibilities. It was the original city of dreams, where a young man could arrive with Rs 10 in his pocket and have the chance to be a millionaire. Today, Mumbai is an urban nightmare. And at this point in time, it seems to be a nightmare without end.

Darryl D’Monte and Priyanka Kakodkar With Manu Joseph.