The city's traffic, road planning, bridges, open spaces are a joke. It's caught in a struggle far bigger than its own identity. It's the struggle for India and its riches, between old and new social forces.
The decline of Mumbai is the decline of urban India as a whole-if there was ever such a coherent dream. Mumbai is dirtier, crowded, more polluted than before, with the malls shinier and the foreign brands more expensive than they were. And in the last seven to eight years, there is both a dramatic rise of misogyny as well as of Muslim paranoia.
Mumbai was the last bastion of colonialism and commercialism. It was the city that looked out towards the sea, never looked in. But after the liberalisation of 1991, which saw Bengaluru, Hyderabad, Chennai and Delhi emerge as new capitals, Mumbai was a laggard. Its mills had been destroyed and not supplanted by a new industry. The small entrepreneurship spirit couldn't grow because the resources were controlled by the elite. Real estate was the biggest problem, a function of abysmal town planning left over from the 1960s and political elite control.
Till the business of Mumbai was merely business, it was religion-agnostic. Even in the underworld it didn't matter who you worshipped. Dawood could work with both Chhota Shakeel and Chhota Rajan. But it changed after the tumble of events brought on by L.K. Advani's Rath Yatra that led to the demolition of Babri Masjid and then the riots. Bombay paid the price in blood.
Also, the struggle intensified when the hinterland tried to break into the elite westernised core that ran Mumbai's destiny. People who now ran Bombay were not entrenched metropolitan Bombayites any more. This led to populistic roots, issues of labour, housing, employment, urban sprawl and development conflicting with the interests of pure commerce. Everyone was fighting to make their presence felt. It's evident every time there is a festival. I live on the twentieth floor of a building in the heart of Mumbai, in what was the mills district, surrounded by five different kinds of DJs belting out their music every evening till late-which is an expression of political muscle-backed local street power defying the elite high-rises representing elite immigrant colonisers.
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