Election In Pincodes: From grit to glitz, Mumbai is home to all classes

South Mumbai has two distinct faces. There is Malabar Hill and Altamount Road where the billionaires are; a few kilometres down are the crumbling chawls of Mumbadevi, the deity from whom the city takes its name. Parag Chavan has lived here his whole life – from the time when mill workers, the municipal conservancy staff and government bus drivers unionised under George Fernandes and Datta Samant, formed the backbone of the city’s famed working class, and occasionally brought it to a standstill to the present, when there has been an explosion of glitzy buildings owned by the nouveau riche.

Chavan lives at Parel, the old heart of Mumbai’s mill area which is now being rapidly gentrified. He says the schism has widened so much that disparities between these two extremes now extend to basic amenities such as water. Residents of the water-starved Girgaum- Sewri-Lalbaug-Byculla areas resent the fact that their affluent neighbours get round-the-clock water supply, used for purposes such as filling cavernous swimming pools and lush lawns.

“We, on the other hand, have to skip baths thrice a week because of water scarcity,” said Shaqeel Ahmed, a welder from Sewri. “Sometimes we are forced to tamper with fire hydrants just to get a bucket of water.”

According to Hurun’s Global Rich List, 2024, Mumbai now has the third-highest concentration of billionaires among the world’s cities, after New York and London. A majority of the city’s 92 billionaires live in south Mumbai, or SoBo, as they like to think of it. The enclave of Mumbai South, where corporate India’s compact with successive ruling dispensations is made or broken, will be among the most-watched when the city goes to polls on May 20, and not just for the billionaires that reside here, or the hordes of boutique coffee shop frequenters, bankers or traders who make up the popular image of the neighbourhood. Instead, the focus might be trained squarely on the people who actually show up to vote – the turnout in 2019 was only around 51%, among the lowest in the country – and they are not PLUs.

While the Shiv Sena (UBT) has renominated Arvind Sawant, their two-term MP as candidate, the parlaying between Amit Shah and Raj Thackeray in Delhi recently has given rise to speculation that latter’s Maharashtra Navnirman Sena may be used to pacify the “Marathi manoos”. This is because 38% of the constituency’s 1.6-million plus voters identify Marathi as their mother tongue.

“The BJP’s dilemma is that while it is set to reduce the Shiv Sena’s legacy to dust, it wants to win over the sons of the soil as well,” said poll campaign designer Vivek Surve. The befuddlement among BJP activists who were all set to canvas for Rahul Narwekar, the incumbent Maharashtra assembly speaker who was tipped to be the BJP’s candidate, is apparent.

“Too many political moves, too many ‘dand-baithaks’ for one Lok Sabha seat,” grumbled one of them. “Our party workers will have a tough time facing Mumbai South’s Hindi-speaking voters as the MNS is seen as a party with an anti-north Indian stance.”

BJP leader and real estate developer Mangal Prabhat Lodha, who is changing Mumbai’s skyline, too, has evinced interest in contesting from Mumbai South, stirring the pot further.

The Mumbai South constituency comprises six assembly constituencies that present a composite of India’s cosmopolitanism — Colaba, Malabar Hill, Mumbadevi, Byculla, Sewri and Worli. “The best part of Mumbai South is that it represents urban diversity. Chawls and colonies, charming bungalows and the idyllic Mhatarpakhadi village of Byculla cheek by jowl with the skyscrapers lend a unique character to the constituency,” said Shehernaz Nalwala, former professor of Wilson college and vice-president of the Asiatic Society of Mumbai.

For decades, the seat was the Congress’s stronghold, thanks to the efforts of SK Patil and then Murli Deora. After Patil was trounced by a fiery George Fernandes in 1967, Rajni Patel, the Cambridge-educated Congress leader, groomed Murli Deora, the ever-enterprising Marwari, as the then Bombay Congress chief and the party’s face from south Bombay. It was he who bridged the Bombay-Delhi divide for the Congress for decades.

Such was Murli bhai’s impact that years after his death, when his son Milind contested on a Congress ticket in 2019 from Mumbai South, industrialist Mukesh Ambani made a public appeal in his favour. (Deora still lost to Sena’s Sawant who won on the back of another Modi wave).

More recently, after Milind Deora switched to the Eknath Shinde-led Shiv Sena, the Godrej family threw a dinner for him with 100-plus industrialists on the guest list.

The BJP, on the other hand, has always played on the fringes of the constituency. In the early 1990s the party, resurgent on the back of the Ram Janmabhoomi movement, made steady efforts to breach this Congress citadel and Deora’s keenly-fought battles with Jayawantiben Mehta became part of the city’s political folklore.

“That Milind bhai should enter Rajya Sabha as a Shiv Sena nominee and that Arvind Sawant today enjoys the support of the Congress are examples of both poetic justice and political expediency,” said a Mumbai Congress politician, requesting he not be named.

Sawant, the two-term MP from Mumbai South, will no doubt be hoping that he does not have to clash against another Marathi leader Bala Nandgaonkar of the MNS because that will cleave his grassroots support among former mill worker families of Lalbaug-Parel and Worli. In the assembly constituency of Mumbadevi, Sawant pulls support from the mix of Marathis, Muslims, Gujaratis-Marwaris and backward communities while the assembly constituency of Byculla has a strong Christian population, and an equally sizeable Muslims and Marathi voters.

Sawant seeking Muslim support would have been an unthinkable proposition during the era of Balasaheb Thackeray but a substantial chunk of Muslims grew closer to Uddhav Thackeray after he severed ties with the BJP and joined the INDIA bloc. This should be a matter of concern for the Mumbai Congress.

“The Mumbaikar Muslim is aware of political and social realities. They have left behind the ghetto mindset, thanks to social media and the younger among them take a modern pragmatic view of life,” said Zubair Azmi, head of Urdu Marqaz, a Nagpada-based socio-cultural group.

For the BJP, the increasing verbal skirmishes over vegetarian and non-vegetarian food, with several buildings in the neighbourhood disallowing even eggs, is causing concern.

“Bad blood over food choices has been brewing in the predominantly Marathi enclaves of Girgaum, Grant Road, Walkeshwar, Tardeo and Parel-Lalbaug,” said a BJP leader who asked not to be named.

Last month, a delegation of senior Rashtriya Swayamsevak Sangh functionaries held talks with local BJP leaders and advised them to quell these mini uprisings before the elections. There is, a senior RSS functionary admits, “a streak of anti-BJPism” in certain parts of Mumbai South.

However, the party hopes to tide this over as electioneering gathers pace. “The Lok Sabha election will be centred around PM Modi and the lotus symbol. People will transcend caste and community barriers, ignore local feuds and think of the nation,” said Niranjan Shetty, BJP’s chief media coordinator for the Mumbai elections.

The BJP’s poll machinery is working round the clock to translate Modi’s Ab ki baar char sau paar (this time, cross 400 seats, a target for the larger BJP-led NDA) mantra into votes. “We have set up several teams to reach out to senior citizens, women, small traders and the youths. Also, we are in close contact with the countless labharthis (beneficiaries) of Modi-ji’s various development schemes,” said former BJP MLA Atul Shah.

Mumbai BJP chief Ashish Shelar, too, has been visiting Muslim strongholds to garner support for the party.

If the ruling alliance harps on the ongoing infra upgrade in Mumbai South, the Trans Harbour Link, the swanky coastal road or the upcoming Metro 3, the Opposition will focus on the deteriorating air quality, the rampant construction of high rises that is choking roads and blocking skylines. “The city is so dug up that it looks like an archaeological site,” said broadcasting expert Rajil Sayani.

South Mumbai has seen some epic events that have shaped the history of modern India – from Gandhian crusades, the Samyukta Maharashtra stir, the Backbay Reclamation row to George Fernandes’s Bombay bandh and Datta Samat’s textile mills strike. It is also the territory that has borne the brunt of the worst terror attack in India. The 2024 election will be a test of the resilience and political wisdom of what many consider the country’s most famous pin code.

This is the third in a series of election reports from the field that look at national and local issues through an electoral lens.