A polarising battle

This election to the Brihanmumbai Municipal Corporation (BMC) has turned out to be the mother of all battles, as the saying goes. Every party and every alliance has gone out of its way to be polarising—some playing the communal card with that distasteful map of the city turning green in a veiled attempt to show ‘Islamisation of Mumbai’, and others playing the xenophobic card, drawing on 60-year-old impulses of Marathi Asmita—while also promising the moon and the stars for the city’s future in the name of development.

Alliances of convenience

The alliances stitched together represent not ideological allyship or programme-based common ground; yesterday’s rivals, even the most bitter ones, became today’s political pals. Political formations, not only in Mumbai but across the state where elections were held for urban local bodies, turned out to be dalliances of political convenience and little else. That’s why their manifestos held little relevance. How many voters study manifestos anyway before deciding whom to vote for?

The responsibility ahead

But whichever party or alliance gets the maximum seats will be in control of the BMC, India’s richest civic body by a long mile, for the next five years. The party or the alliance will have to get down to the business of urban governance of a city of more than 16 million, an estimate based on the last census, with political-economic interests pulling in different directions. The party or alliance may have an agenda, but this need not be in the best interests of the city.

The BJP–Shiv Sena........

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