Mission Mumbai, and other moments of truth for the new government

Narendra Modi's decision to go it alone in Maharashtra has borne fruit. Power makes for unlikely partners. So, whether it is with the outside support of NCP, or an alliance with the Shiv Sena, the BJP will form the next government in Maharashtra. This would be the first time that a BJP-led government assumes power in a state that once fuelled India's growth.
In the last 10 years or so, that role is being played by Karnataka, Haryana (where also the BJP has made a clean sweep), Andhra Pradesh and Gujarat. The story of Maharashtra's decline is visibly discernible in the slide and decline of the once famously cosmopolitan Bombay, which perhaps coincides with the Marathification of its nomenclature: Mumbai, in 1996.
Mumbai has been a pale shadow of the promise that Bombay once held out to Indians at large. Since 2001, according to Census figures, the inflow of people to the city from other parts of India has declined by 7.57 per cent from the previous Census when it showed an increase of 5.14 per cent. The figures are even more startling for the rest of the state. When a city stops attracting the best of talents and ideas, it's time to call the undertaker.

This correspondent has spent close to 15 years in this city. After an eight-year break, which included a longish stint in Delhi, he returned to Mumbai, last year, to experience with some sadness the dramatic decay of a once great city: the packed inner roads, the crawling highways, the too-delayed — and so inadequate — flyovers, the poorest of the population subsisting under them, the shocking lack of footpaths, hawkers selling their wares right on the road and funding a billion dollar extortion business run by the BMC, and the intellectually impoverished regional political parties, the near non-existence of open spaces, trains packed like a bag of sand, and the nearly 7.5-million-strong commuters too tired even to protest at the inhuman conditions that must cost them an average of five hours every day of their one and only life.

The last will eventually kill this city because the man hours lost in the exhausting expeditions to and from office must affect their productivity. If this is what is happening to Mumbai where decision makers and money bags are living, what utter anarchy must guide fate of hinterlands like Vidarbha?

The new government has its task cut out. They would be largely right in saying that the squalid Kolkataisation of Mumbai is the doing of successive Congress regimes. But they would be mistaken if they do not move ahead, and arrest the slide. This city needs actions of revival on a war footing, just like the rest of the state.

But the fact that about 15 million people live here, and that this is incredibly still the financial capital of India, lends Mission Mumbai an absolute urgency. Mumbai will live or die depending on the clarity of vision of the new government and its will to implement hard decisions. In the short term at least, that means management gains the upper hand over politics. The choice is between past and future; burial, or resurrection.