The Hindu : Sena renews bid to keep out `outsiders'

Online edition of India's National Newspaper
Tuesday, Apr 29, 2003

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Sena renews bid to keep out `outsiders'

By Mahesh Vijapurkar

MUMBAI APRIL 28. The executive president of the Shiv Sena, Uddhav Thackeray, will write to all political parties in and outside Maharashtra requesting them to keep the "me Mumbaikar" campaign above politics so that "Mumbai stands to benefit". His call will include pleas to keep the city walls clean but the issue of how to keep people living in the city since 1995 out of it remains. Asked about it, Mr. Thackeray said the party remained steadfast in its resolve to keep 1995 as the cut-off year but "it does not mean we will stand next to the ticket checker on a railway platform with a stick in hand".

While there has been growing opposition to this or any cut-off date, the party apparently is yet to evolve a strategy. Some concede that it may well be difficult to impose it. As future strategy, Mr. Thackeray cited the party's bid to expand in other States to provide a good alternative and also create jobs there so that the pull of an overcrowded Mumbai is weakened.

During his interaction with several leading lights of the city, where he wanted to sell the idea of "me Mumbaikar" (I am a Mumbai resident), Mr. Thackeray conceded that people told him that the "solution" to Mumbai's ills of overcrowding lay "outside", in Maharashtra's hinterland and outside the State. His focus, however, remains on beautifying the city, providing public spaces and "curtailing the influx".

The Sena's enduring soft corner for the Maharashtrian, however, did not escape to surface. A person from within Maharashtra has a greater right to access Mumbai for his livelihood because it is the capital, "just like a person from Uttar Pradesh has on Lucknow or a Bihari on Patna". Also, the better-off have means to "serve Mumbai", Mr. Thackeray told an audience of former migrants who had done well for themselves, "than the poor who rob the other poor who are already here of their jobs". Some home truths were delivered by those who were present at the interaction, the second after the one at the Indian Merchants' Chamber: that laws of the land allowed people the right to chose their place of residence and there could be no curtailment on that. That Mumbai needed better management which politicians failed to deliver. That the poor, too, were an asset — they were creators and not a mere burden. None disagreed with him that the city needed to be improved.

"Why," he asked the audience — brought together by Sanjay Nirupam, a first generation migrant from Bihar and now the Sena's MP in the Rajya Sabha — "should Mumbai generate 40 per cent of the country's revenues and not get even ten per cent of it for its up keep and then also face the burden of the migrants?" Mumbai was not able to service and maintain the existing infrastructure, leave alone add to it. This did not stop Javed Akhtar, lyricist and himself a migrant, from asking whether one "had to keep others out to keep this city clean and beautiful". If that were so, then "it would be inhuman and un-Indian". But he conceded that the ills of Mumbai were due to overcrowding and sprawling slums, which needed to be replaced with good and affordable housing. He brought along an architect to prove the point.

Mr. Thackaray insisted that "enough is enough" and that his party had asked its elected representatives to cease "protecting the slums".

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Sena renews bid to keep out `outsiders'