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Mumbai needs political will to find its feet

— FILE PHOTOS

ADDING FUEL TO FIRE: Even as the stock markets were coming to terms with the global recession, the terror strike in Mumbai has worsened investor sentiment.

Mumbai’s aspirations to become an international centre of finance, an idea articulated by Prime Minister Manmohan Singh in March 2006 to much applause from the India shining set, appear to have been grounded by the devastating terrorist attacks that paralysed the city for three days. But there are other reasons why the country’s commercial capital will struggle, even in the best of times, to join the likes of London and New York, Hong Kong and Tokyo as a global financial hub. A large share of the blame for this must rest with a political and bureaucratic class that has over the years, slowly at first and then with increasing brazenness, milked the metropolis dry.

The terrorist attacks have numbed Mumbai, it has dealt a body blow to the morale and confidence of its citizens and it may have permanently scarred a city that has had to suffer plenty in recent times. Mumbai will always have top-quality human capital, as Mr. Singh has pointed out, and the commercial acumen that comes from being a trading and business powerhouse for centuries. However, it will need more than that to win the trust of investors and others looking for safe havens and security. The power dispensation presiding over the city clearly does have capability or the inclination to improve the situation.

The latest bloodbath was different from the earlier terrorist attacks that it had to live through. The resilience that Mumbaikars once claimed as their principal quality seems to have vanished (nobody’s evoking the city’s mythical spirit with any sort of conviction). What’s left is a lingering fear of the unknown, that looking-over-the-shoulder feeling, a distrust that will likely be as permanent a presence in the city as the squalor in its midst. Is there a way out of this morass for Mumbai?

Political will is a critical requirement if the city is to, first of all, find its feet again, and then give itself a serious shot at realising the potential it has. A little history would be helpful in understanding whether Mumbai’s political bosses have it in them. When communal troubles enveloped the metropolis following the destruction of the Babri Masjid in 1992 industrialists and other business people approached the then chief minister Sudhakarrao Naik to calm matters. Mr. Naik asked them to go and request Bal Thackeray, the Shiv Sena boss, to stop the violence. So much for political will.

Cut to 2008 and you have another Thackeray seemingly free to run amok. The hostility unleashed by Raj Thackeray and his party, the Maharashtra Navnirman Sena, against the so-called North Indians, has had a mostly-mute witness, the State government, and a mostly-lame onlooker, the Mumbai police. Not much evidence of political will here, either.

The pattern followed in the latest terror attack suggests that the intentions of the perpetrators were as much to cause widespread causalities as to attack foreign nationals and the symbols of business India. The mayhem at the Taj Mahal Palace, the Oberoi and Leopold Café were carefully crafted and deliberate attempts to open a new front in the terror wars.

It’s not as if we were not warned. In May 2008, Islamist militants, specifically the shadowy Indian Mujahideen, threatened to attack tourist sites across India unless the government stopped supporting the U.S. The mayhem in Mumbai will achieve that sinister objective at one shot, discouraging tourists and business travellers from coming to the country that suddenly seems thoroughly unsafe.

There is no disputing the truth that terror attacks, no matter how deadly they may appear in the immediate aftermath, will not fundamentally destabilise the Indian economy. Yet, the loss in business confidence that it breeds will have an impact, especially in the place where it happens, in this case Mumbai. The terror attacks from outside have an ally in the violence from within, as represented by Raj Thackeray and his goons. Together they create a canvas in which the city is painted in dark hues, and a climate that is decidedly chilly to visitors with dollars and euros in their pockets.

Businesses across the world thrive on ‘trust’. The Prime Minister would have understood that when he said, back in 2006, that “Mumbai can emerge as a new financial capital of Asia, and be the bridge between Asia and the West in the world of finance”. A committee set up by the Central Government to suggest ways and means to make Mumbai a global financial hub stated that it needed a ‘manager’ (whether elected or appointed) who is directly accountable to its citizens and is supported by the Central and State governments.

It also stated that the city needed an administrative apparatus for governance that is under the direct control of such a manager, with its own revenue base and financial independence to match. Corruption is a big issue in this city, the report added: Mumbai has contributed a lot to the State and Central treasuries, and got little in return; this is an asymmetry that has to be corrected.

The report concluded that apart from the physical infrastructure that pushed it so far from being world-class, Mumbai confronted a serious ‘governance deficit’.

The reasons for that the report said are well-known and have been discussed ad nauseam in media and academia, in policymaking circles at the Central and State levels of government.

The report hit the nail on the head by stating the absolute necessity, for Mumbai’s sake, of that elusive creature, political will.

The fight to preserve what’s left of Mumbai, to regain what the city has lost and to help it acquire what it deserves — that’s the good fight we all have to care about. This is a fight that needs more than political will.

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