For the Mumbai poor: Why Medha Patkar's perseverance might pay off

One half, or 60 percent to be more precise, of Mumbai knows Medha Patkar as their tai, the sister who has stood for them on numerous occasions, to be dragged into police vans, wearing slippers just as worn out as theirs while marching to Azad Maidan or announcing brazenly that those whose shanties were demolished should simply reconstruct without further ado. The other half has seen Patkar in more grey shades, as a crusader, a vaguely inspiring figure captured in photographs alongside a river. They understand nothing of big dams. And while they can admire her perseverance on the river’s course, they have traditionally viewed her opinion on Mumbai’s teeming shanty towns with suspicion. [caption id=“attachment_146000” align=“alignleft” width=“380”]  Medha Patkar at a campaign rally in Mumbai. AFP[/caption] Nearly eight million Mumbaiites live in slums, constituting 60 percent of Mumbai’s population but viewed as the ugly fringe, occupying 10 percent of Mumbai’s land but seen as the financial capital’s biggest eyesore. And the average middle class Mumbaiite perceives these eight million as encroachers who pay no taxes and who continue to occupy prime real estate as a quid pro quo for their role as a cushy votebank. “That’s not true any more,” avers Medha Patkar, one of the Aam Aadmi Party’s candidates in Mumbai, speaking to Firtspost after a gruelling morning of campaigning on foot. “There will be just a handful of those who remain insensitive. Otherwise any sensitive person has by now gathered enough information to know that Mumbai is built and run by the poor. And is also cleaned by the poor. And those belonging to the upper classes have to depend on the services of these people. The poor are thus also the producers.” She calls the discrimination against slumdwellers who settled after a certain cutoff date (the law provides for a cross subsidised pattern of free rehabilitation by private builders who get incentive FSI in return) a “ridiculous” denial of the right to shelter. A rapidly changing Mumbai has dynamic views on the slums too, Patkar says. “We are explaining our position on the slums, but to those middle classes who live in MHADA colonies, government buildings, in LIC Colony, old chawls, we do not have to explain. These people have suffered at the hands of builders. They are in a worse situation than slum people, who at least know how to fight. They know they can erect a shelter anywhere and stay. But middle class people living in transit camps for 18 years and more are not able to bear it. They are not able to survive.” The middle classes, an increasingly diverse and complex group, actually share many of the slumdwellers’ problems, she contends. They come running to civil society, papers and documents in hand, but are far less capable of hitting the streets in protest than the slumdwellers who are by now experienced aandolankaaris. Besides, middle class Mumbai is no longer living only in residential colonies. “You know now that the slums, especially those that are pucca structures with two and three storeys and have lanes and drains, are home to the lower middle classes too. The residents are factory workers, people working with slum dwellers, all kinds of professionals. They have this feeling that after even 100 years, if their community can be destabilised, displaced, then the state doesn’t function for them. These middle class people I meet are clearly taking a position that when they went to the state, their grievances could not be redressed,” says the 60-year-old activist. She says these aggrieved people are not as capable of running from pillar to post as the poor. “They cannot with dignity sit on the streets, they haven’t sat on the streets, they can’t say zindabad. They want us to mediate.” This experience of Mumbai’s middle classes, now reflected in their view of the poor, or those poorer than them, has brought with it a wide acceptance of Patkar. Roam the streets of Mumbai north-central and the opinion on AAP is mixed. There are supporters and there are detractors, overzealous party workers and those who scoff at the 49-day Delhi misadventure. But there is a surprising depth of support for Patkar. Even Aam Aadmi Party supporters in the constituency agree. Take the Mulund Asembly segment, for example: Called the Bandra of the eastern suburbs and the new queen of the suburbs, to the newcomer, Mulund is a raucous township with multiple malls, all full of laughing youngsters and pub-goers, where residential apartments in multi-storey buildings are mushrooming everywhere, complete with the mandatory pools, squash courts and clubhouses, some with jogging tracks on the 20th floor, others with central air conditioning and concierge services. But there is also a more diffident Mulund. It comprises the detritus of the labour movement that died a rapid, unsettling death. Those who lost jobs when factories along what was once an industrial area announced lockouts and closures do not view Mulund’s glitz with awe, they see betrayal and despair. “I am putting my faith in Medha Patkar completely,” says George D’souza, a committed volunteer and a Mulund resident, also a former employee of one of Mulund’s erstwhile industrial units, still battling for his dues and more or less fed up with a series of unionists who did little for his peers. “She will take up a cause and fight it to its logical conclusion. She will be unstoppable if she enters Parliament,” D’souza says. Elsewhere in the Lok Sabha constituency too, in Vikhroli, Pant Nagar and Kanjurmarg for example, there are old chawls and crumbling buildings housing residents who do not dare to dream of redevelopment for fear of unscrupulous builders. As Patkar says, these segments believe Patkar – or other activists – could help. The other big segment of support Patkar enjoys, of course, is in the vast slum swathes of Govandi, Mankhurd, Shivaji Nagar. Patkar’s big rival will be the BJP’s Kirit Somaiya, a former MP who has a committed voter base of Gujaratis in the upper middle class areas of Mumbai North-Central, including Ghatkopar and Mulund, as well as the traditional BJP voters. “But there are Sena voters who may not support Somaiya – I met a Shiv Sainik who said he would have to vote for Somaiya, but he would make sure his wife and family vote for Medha,” says a close associate of the activist. The Gujarati voter is also no fool, Patkar believes. “Modi is making claims, but people are also seeing Modi as just a superhero. They know that he is not going to come down to earth, to the small trader and slumdweller and those facing injustice.” Mumbai’s Kutchis were reportedly among those who accompanied Arvind Kejriwal to Gujarat where the AAP convenor questioned the Gujarat model of development. Still, Somaiya is an established leader with a sizeable support base who lost by a slender margin in 2009. As for the minorities – the slum segments of the constituency have a very large number of Muslim voters – the faith in the Congress is broken, even unlettered residents of Govandi know about the Sachar Committee recommendations, Patkar says. “The minorities feel they have voted for Congress enough.. And they will certainly not vote for Modi because they know that although today’s speeches are full of Sarva Dharma Samabhava, that is not his ideology,” says Patkar, adding that she senses a disconnect between the Modi wave said to be sweeping India and the belief in him at the grassroots. On Modi’s recent apparent acknowledgment that this is not a two-horse race and his AK-49 comment, Patkar’s view is that it is better to forgive rather than whip it up. “As far as the remark is concerned, it is full of violence,” she says, adding that Kejriwal’s immediate dismissal of the comment was sufficient. But Modi should have been countered more strongly by the Congress, she believes. “The Congress with Rahul as star campaigner has not been able to counter Narendra Modi and show that it is a challenge. Thats what Arvind Kejriwal has done,” she says. Rahul has also not had enough dialogue with civil society members working on various issues, perhaps not even as much as Sonia had in the past, Patkar adds. “Also, at every time of crisis, when injustice occurred, instead of taking up the issue as a challenge to the ruling party, studiously taking up the issue till the end, like the farmers’ suicides, he has always avoided the issue. He went to Bhatta Parsaul, where we had reached the previous night. We had finished with our work. He did not like to have a word with those who were active in the area already… So, whether land acquisition, displacement or education or health, as a leadership quality, he should have engaged in much more constructive dialogue. That would have reflected in his speeches also. " Ask her about her chances and she says she’s happy with the response, but clearly the team knows the odds are heavy – much depends on whether the MNS declares a candidate. The party has not fielded candidates in several constituencies where there are BJP leaders in the fray with a chance of winning, apparently the outcome of Gadkari and Co pursuing Raj Thackeray. Somaiya lost the last Lok Sabha election because the anti-Congress vote was neatly halved between him and the MNS candidate. And then there is money power, rules that permit parties to fund hoardings and other expenses, well beyond the candidate’s limit of Rs 70 lakh. Regardless of how much money AAP has raised for the polls, the party’s campaign in Mumbai appears, for now at least, limited to candidate-specific advertising and even that is hardly in your face. But anti-incumbency is much stronger this year, and NCP MP Sanjay Dina Patil is said to be staring at odds stacked even heavier than those against the AAP. “It’s very awkward for me to talk about my own work. In that sense politics is different from movements… " Patkar says. “But people surely know this much, they see a possibility that their issues we couldn’t take up earlier, we know of them now and want to take them up now. And they know our perseverance. They know we are against corruption, against criminalisation. And that’s what we are seeking a vote for.”