Why Mumbai has a poor voting record

When the BMC election results came, media pundits asked if the 46% turnout indicated that the city was apathetic. It is not.

Other metros have equally terrible turnouts. And the voting ratio this time is the same as the last BMC elections. The low turnout is possibly for two reasons. The first is because most do not know what the corporation is or what their local corporator does. It’s all very well to get them to fix your ration card or your child’s admission in the local municipal school but many in Mumbai neither use a ration card nor the municipal school system, and hence there is no value in voting in the elections. There is also a second reason. Ward level elections are about the local community and about local community interests — roads, housing, schools, community spaces, health etc — and at a certain level the concept of community is disappearing in the city.

Mumbai was never the city of the elite. It is not that the city did not have an elite section, rather it had many elites — a business elite, political elite, cultural elite, ethnic elites, a labour elite — and different pockets in which these elites stayed. And in Mumbai, unlike other metros, there is social interaction not only between the various elites but various groupings. The city is curiously egalitarian. You would not be surprised to walk into a ‘family restaurant’ and find a businessman enjoying an evening out with his family at a table next to a worker with his family. You will find that the older generation is multilingual, with multiple social circles cutting across class and community.

While many of these things that make Mumbai so special still exist, there has been a gradual erosion of the community feeling. What is called the Spirit of Mumbai is actually the feeling of interconnectedness and oneness. That is being gradually forgotten. Air-conditioned spaces cordon off a minority from the rest of the city. A city whose people took pride in speaking multiple languages is confronted with people refusing to learn to speak the state language. A city where the rich and the poor studied and went to the same schools, the same colleges and inhabited the same spaces are now ghettoised like other cities. Most startling is the unwillingness to look at the city that gives so much to people, as also the capital of a prosperous, industrial state. For many who have arrived in the city over the last decade or so, embracing Mumbai the cosmopolitan metropolitan city is easy, but to embrace Mumbai, the capital of Maharashtra, is difficult. Voting in general elections is easy, voting for local or state elections means participating in the issues of the city and the state.

Electoral democracy rests on the principal of a candidate who represents the interests of an area either in the corporation or in the assembly or in Parliament. However, the way our system is structured, while we get to have choice between candidates of various parties, the parties themselves are undemocratic. Worse, they are dynastic. You usually end up with an imposed candidate you know nothing about, or you end up with someone standing for elections in your area purely because of their blood line. There were a large number of candidates across party lines in the current BMC elections who were there purely because of their association with someone else who had held power. There is, in such a case, no local connect.

The second pivot of electoral democracy is the concept of ‘nurturing’ a constituency. An elected member as well as a person who hopes to be elected sets up base in a constituency and nurtures it over a period of five years — becoming accessible to people, helping solve their problems and representing their interests. However, with seats being declared as reserved at the last minute, there is no point in nurturing constituencies. You don’t know if your effort will pay off. And, hence there is no local connect once again.

The 54% who didn’t vote are of three main types — those whose name was left out of the electoral rolls; those who don’t feel a connect and therefore don’t vote; and the third who care deeply and are disillusioned and don’t vote. It is incumbent on the system to fix all three.

For the concept of local self-government to work, the ‘local’ has to be put back in it. Democracy can flourish best when people participate. Political parties with their behaviour are stifling democracy.

Harini Calamur is a media entrepreneur, writer, blogger, teacher, and the main slave to an imperious hound. She blogs at calamur.org/gargi and @calamur on Twitter