No lal batti obsession: What is expected of Mumbai's new mayor Snehal Ambekar

When Snehal Ambekar, Mumbai’s new mayor, addressed her first press conference, televised live on Times Now, I sat riveted to the TV, notwithstanding her loud yellow sari. She was a newcomer to politics, just as a politician’s wife could be, and had just two-and-a-half years behind her as a corporator.

It was opportunity to hear the city’s first citizen lay out her road map for the city till the next elections which would bring another set of self-serving politicians to the Municipal Corporation of Greater Mumbai. What did she do? She put herself ahead of the city in no uncertain terms.

Being new to politics, two-and-a-half years being as good as freshly minted, one had expected her to bubble with enthusiasm to do her good turn by the city long fallen into bad times of poor management. But the lady is already moved into a different mould, unfortunately.

She needed some “standard”, and wanted a red beacon on her official car because it behoves a person holding the mayoral office. She often would be required to go to the airport to receive VIPs, including foreigners, and the red beacon would make it easier for her to discharge that duty.

No doubt the news channel raised it because it had aired her contention the night before and mocked her with Arnab Goswami saying she may as well get a red lamp fixed to her head. Once that done, the channel shifted to commercials and other stories. But she was truly caught on the wrong foot.

She didn’t know the chief minister had abandoned the beacon after the Supreme Court barred just anybody using it. She asked, not even in stage whispers, her colleagues if it were true. She had positioned herself to something akin to a chief minister of the city. Now she would check before insisting on the flasher atop her car.

As a long-time resident of Mumbai – I left to live in its less crowded city, Thane, only to find it as badly governed – it was my anxiety to hear say some good things from her, like wanting to deal with the bad things that is inflected on the Urbs prima Indis – the civic body’s self-description before the city fell to bad times.

A search of newspaper for reports on what she could have said beyond the lal batti, about the city after the Times Now took the camera off from her, revealed she said little. Of course, she had promised efforts to “get control of the administration”.

The morning newspapers revealed only the usual stuff plus some more, like improving the security of women, promoting self-help groups, organ donations, better education facilities etc. Every mayor would have said something like that, as is expected of them. They are, to me, sweet nothings compared to the long neglect of the basics.

That “getting control of the administration” was a metaphor for making the officialdom dance to a politician’s crooked finger. The hope was she would promise the city would be run on a principle that the city would get its due. Like value for the money spent by both the citizens via taxes and by the MCGM on facilities.

The expectation was she would reel of her position on contractors and the quality of work, as well as the time overruns on everything the civic body takes up as a notion of serving the city’s citizens. There would be no shoddy work, the blacklist would be respected, roads would not have potholes, and the drains wouldn’t clog after the first monsoon showers.

Neither was there a word about how the city’s half the population living in slums would get due attention vis-à-vis the essential services – not all get even a semblance of drinking water, and not all toilets, inadequate as they are, are in good trim. Her concern needn’t be rehousing them; the state is at it in the most inefficient manner.

No doubt there would be anger at the mention of slums, that stemming from a class attitude of the other half in this binary city, but there cannot be a city where half of it is left to fend for itself, not being included in the development plan at all. Such neglect is what stymies the city’s hope of becoming another Shanghai or Singapore.

Not a word about the shrinking sidewalks which are not conducive for the pedestrians to use either because they are in poor repair or are occupied by hawkers, legal and otherwise. Nor, for that matter, was anything spoken about the builder-mafia and irregularities. Also, nothing about petty corruption.

Then it dawned, that she had not read MCGM’s website which says “Mayoralty is held in deep respect. The respect demands that the Mayor abstain himself/herself from controversial activities”. She was demanding respect and trappings even before she did anything to earn even a whit of it. She has started off on a wrong foot.

Ambekar has failed to realise that the lal batti would make her travels within the city conspicuous, but every time she whizzes past in a city most of the time in a traffic gridlock, the citizens are not going to take it kindly. They will groan at her disproportional privilege, and lament at the plight the city has put them, the citizens, into.