The Mumbai Tiger

Tammany Tiger (Source)

This may be the last post before we get to India - we're off to London tomorrow and flying from Heathrow on Monday evening, arriving in Bombay/Mumbai on Tuesday.

As for what to call it, I'll stick with Mumbai since that's the common usage these days, but Suketu Mehta makes a pretty good case for Bombay. The official name change, he observes, was decreed by the Hindu nationalist Shiv Sena party when it won control of the Maharashtra state government in 1995. As Mehta describes it, after the Sena had formed a majority coalition with the BJP,

the government took a look at the awesome urban problems plaguing the city, the infestation of corruption at all levels of the bureaucracy and the government, the abysmal state of Hindu-Muslim relations, and took decisive action. They changed the name of the capital city to Mumbai.

Mehta compares the Sena to the old political machines of American cities, ensuring service delivery and delivering jobs to the urban poor in exchange for votes. The Tammany tiger lives again - the same animal is used to symbolize the Sena. And like Tammany, the latter organization's ascent marks, for better and for worse, the arrival in power of a new class of urban resident. The old urban elites and their noblesse oblige concern with good government are increasingly irrelevant:

The new inheritors of the country - and of the city - are very different from the ones who took over from the British, who had studied at Cambridge and the Inner Temple and come back. They are badly educated, unscrupulous, lacking a metropolitan sensibility - buffoons and small-time thugs, often - but, above all, representative....

The cities of India are going through a transition similar to what American cities went through at the turn of the twentieth century, when the political machines of the Democratic party dominated, bringing new immigrants jobs and political power while breaking a few heads along the way. Eventually, as in the American cities, there will be reform movements, reform candidates, to clean out the muck. In Bombay, this has not yet happened.

Mehta laments the impact of the new rulers on the city he loves - their violence, incompetence, and corruption - but he sheds few tears for the old ruling class, who hardly left the city in a good state.

One notable difference between Tammany and the Sena is that the former was an immigrant machine, while the Sena began as an organization of Maharashtrians - the mostly working-class locals who constitute the plurality of Mumbai's residents but who had traditionally been excluded from power by the city's cosmopolitan elites. The Maharashtrians had always called it Mumbai; the cosmopolitans had always called it Bombay. Now the Maharashtrians are in power.

In recent decades, the Shiv Sena has sought to move beyond its original Marathi base and style itself a party of Hindu nationalism in general. Most notoriously, the party was allegedly a prime instigator and organizer of the vicious 1992 communal riots during which hundreds of Muslims were massacred.

Some reports have suggested that the Sena may be losing its potency amid an internal succession battle and accusations of diluting its program, though it seems to have done well in Maharashtra's 2007 elections. As with Tammany, its legacy will probably live on long after the tiger itself is gone.