MVA in Maharashtra completes two years in office: Mumbai bristles; Delhi remains cold & combative

Mumbai aahe aamchi. Naahin konacha baapchi! (Mumbai belongs to us. Not to anybody else's father).

The aggressive claim was directed at Gujaratis in Mumbai by the Samyukta Maharashtra Sangathana as they agitated to retain Bombay as Maharashtra's capital. The retort was swift in coming.

“Burra. Dila Mumbai tumchi. Ata bhaandi ghasaa aamchi!” (OK, Given Mumbai to you. Now get back to washing our utensils!), snapped Morarji Desai, the then chief minister of the bilingual Bombay state that included parts of Kutch and Saurashtra. Desai's condescending and somewhat contemptuous response implied that Gujaratis owned Bombay and Maharashtrians were only fit for scrubbing their utensils.

That bitter exchange of acrimonious words, the subsequent morcha against Desai, his orders to the police to fire on people and martyrdom of 106 protestors had set the tone for Marathi-Gujarati relations and distrust over the decades.

While Desai’s jibe at Maharashtrians being unequal or inferior was contained by the statesmanship of towering leaders like Pandit Jawaharlal Nehru and Y.B. Chavan, six decades later the bitterness and rivalry seem to have been resurrected by Narendra Modi and Amit Shah. Both are perceived to have misused their absolute power at the Centre and brute majority in Parliament in defiance of all Constitutional norms in Centre-State relations.

Most states not ruled by the BJP have had cause for a complaint in this regard but Maharashtra has been receiving exceptionally stepmotherly treatment from the duo. But it goes beyond even the stepmotherly. It has to do with the very survival of Mumbai as a Maharashtrian city and its asmita (pride in its existence).

Even before the Maha Vikas Aghadi government came to power in Maharashtra, Devendra Fadnavis, the previous BJP chief minister, was accused of quietly signing away Mumbai’s assets to Gujarat. Fadnavis (he hailed from Vidarbha and in any case did not care much about Mumbai) neither had the heart nor the stomach to stand up to the duo in Delhi.

Now it is different. Maharashtra chief minister Uddhav Thackeray belongs to Mumbai and the raison d'etre of his party is the Mumbaikar. He is clearly opposed to allowing any decimation of the Marathi soul and essence of the city (Maharashtrians are around 45% of the population, North Indians being another substantial group, Gujaratis a smaller portion of the larger whole).

Let us begin with the much-hyped bullet train project of Narendra Modi. It was not originally Modi’s idea. The UPA under Dr Manmohan Singh had ordered a survey and found the project was not feasible and was not commercially viable. They then dropped the project but Modi saw in it just the weapon to crush all opponents including an industrial house whose head in 2002, as a member of the Confederation of Indian Industries (CII), had had the temerity to say to Modi’s face that riots like the one that happened in Gujarat did not make for a conducive atmosphere for investment.

It was Maharashtra Navnirman Sena president Raj Thackeray who first spotted the game that was afoot and warned the people. During his 2019 Lok Sabha campaign he warned his constituency that if they did not resist the project, they stood to be rail-roaded by the Bullet train.

The UPA had dropped the project because there were too many buildings across the train route in crowded Mumbai and a superfast train like the bullet train needed a straight run without too many twists and turns to avoid derailments and accidents.

But Narendra Modi decided to bulldoze all the buildings on the mapped route of the Bullet train, most of which were occupied by middle and lower middle-class Maharashtrians. Affluent Gujaratis living in posh areas away from the train route would have continued undisturbed but the demographic balance in the city between Marathis and Gujaratis, it was feared, would get altered forever.

On the train route was also some private land belonging to a business house, which had earmarked it for a future project. They offered to buy the government a bit of adjoining land that would have merited a shallow “S" diversion of the Bullet train. But Modi was not having any of that. He had a score to settle with the business house and its head. The business house resisted and found the Devendra Fadnavis government stalling many of their projects. They went to the Bombay High Court.

Shortly thereafter the Maha Vikas Aghadi government was sworn in. The new chief minister Uddhav Thackeray decided Modi could run his Bullet train in Gujarat but it would not cross the threshold of Maharashtra. But the business house continues to be at the receiving end of Modi and Shah’s wrath.

The Bullet train was, some sections in Mumbai believe, a diabolical plan to rid Mumbai of native Maharashtrians and give the city an overtly Gujarati flavour.

Morarji Desai had wanted Bombay city for Gujarat's capital in case of a bifurcation of the bilingual Bombay state because he felt the city was built by Gujaratis. The Gujaratis had migrated to Bombay after the British had shifted their main commercial port from Surat to Bombay. Bombay until then was just a naval command and a fishing hub of the original inhabitants, the Kolis. The fishermen were unlikely to have turned themselves into the kind of entrepreneurs that the Gujaratis were. Shifting the port city from Surat, which the Mughals too had used for trade, was a loss for Gujarat, which lost some of its traditional significance.

Narendra Modi, suggest these conspiracy theories, was determined to reduce Bombay/ Mumbai to its former insignificance. The best way to do this was not just to alter its demographics but also to destroy all its British era and post-independence institutions that made Mumbai the commercial capital of India.

Accordingly, his earliest attempt soon after 2014 was to try and shift the Bombay Port Trust to Porbander. It was fiercely resisted by the Shiv Sena, which had a robust workers’ union there. They would not have moved to Gujarat unlike the white collar staff. Had they lost their livelihoods and returned to their villages, it would have devastated the Shiv Sena. That is when the cracks in the BJP-Sena alliance first widened.

The Sena was in power with the BJP at the time but Subhash Desai, a close confidant of Uddhav Thackeray, who was Maharashtra industries minister then wrote to Modi bitterly protesting the move. It did not happen because all the commercial stakeholders too resisted, finding it easier to do business from Mumbai rather than Porbander. But Narendra Modi held the Sena leadership responsible for instigating them.

What would have happened to the vast acres of Bombay Port Trust – the largest tract of institutional land in Mumbai?

Union minister Nitin Gadkari, who was also the surface transport minister, was believed to be ready with a huge redevelopment plans involving malls, amusement parks, high end housing etc. Who would have benefitted and who could have afforded all that?

Not the displaced port workers certainly, who may have ended up scrubbing utensils in the rich homes there, thus realising the role that Morarji Desai, the first Gujarati who set off such distrust and resentment between the two communities, had visualised for Maharashtrians years ago!

Modi has also tried to shift the Reserve Bank of India (RBI) to Ahmedabad but failed again as it was a well thought out postIndependence strategy to link it to RBI in Nagpur which holds all of India's gold and mint reserves -- so placed to prevent easy raids by air or sea. Ahmedabad does not have the same strategic value.

He was also foiled in his attempt to shift the diamond bourse from Mumbai to Surat by fellow Gujaratis themselves. It is a business based on trust and the most important part of this trust are the angadias or couriers who move crores worth of diamonds across and to other cities without losing even a single gem.

It is a family tradition for the traders as well as angadias, a significant number of whom are Muslims. During the 1992-93 Mumbai riots many of them had escaped to their ancestral villages, bringing the diamond business to a standstill for months-- the traders trusted no one else; they wouldn’t trust couriers in any other city.

These are some of the resentments that have clouded Centre-state relations between Maharashtra and Delhi as Prime Minister Modi and the Union Home Minister are unable to resist turning the political into the personal and the personal into the political.

Chief ministers of Maharashtra have in the past complained of stepmotherly treatment to Maharashtra, but mostly for economic reasons. Not quite understanding the devolution of finances, they have cribbed about the low share of taxes when Bombay’s collections are the highest. The state has complained in the past for proportionately receiving less funds than Uttar Pradesh and Bihar from the Planning Commission. Even after the abolition of the Planning Commission, the grievances of the state have remained.

“It is as though we are being punished for being richer and more progressive,” more than one CM has complained in the past. But now MVA grumbles that the state is being punished for political reasons.

Besides holding back GST dues and other GST related issues, faced by all states, New Delhi has sought to punish Maharashtra by starving the state of funds and by delaying clearances and permissions.

Nothing has come to Maharashtra in recent years from the central road funds, despite the Union Minister for Roads Transport & Highways Nitin Gadkari being from Maharashtra. Environmental clearances have been withheld and much needed funds for disaster management after excessive rains were not provided – though New Delhi had given Kerala such funds, demanding it back later!

(Views are personal)

(This article was first published in National Herald on Sunday.)