My column in today’s DNA

 When the BMC election results came out, pundits on main stream media as well as social media asked if the voting turnout (46%)was  an indication of the city that was apathetic. Actually it is not. Other metros have equally terrible turn outs. The voting ratio this time is the same as the last BMC elections. The low turn out is possibly for two reason. The first is because most do not know what their local Corporation or their local corporator does . It’s all very well to get them to fix your ration card or your child’s admission in the local municipal school but many in Mumbai neither use a ration card nor the municipal school system, and hence there is no value in voting in the elections. There is also a second reason – and that reason is that ward level elections are about the local community and about local community interests – roads, housing, schools, community spaces, health etal – and at a certain level the concept of community is disappearing in the city.

Mumbai  was never the city of the elite. It is not that the city did not have a  elite, rather it had many elites – a business elite, a political elite, a cultural elite, ethnic elites, a labour elite  – and different pockets in which these elites stayed. And in Mumbai – unlike many other metros there is social interaction not only between the various elites but the various groupings. The city is curiously egalitarian. You would not at all be surprised to walk into a ‘family restaurant’ and find a business man enjoying an evening out with his family at a table next to a worker with his family. You will find the older generations multi lingual, with multiple social circles cutting across class and community.

While many of these things that make Mumbai so special still exist, they has been a gradual erosion of the community feeling. What is called the spirit of Mumbai is actually the feeling of interconnectedness and oneness. That is being gradually forgotten.  Air-conditioned spaces cordon  off a minority from the rest of the city. A city, whose people took   pride in speaking multiple languages are confronted with people refusing to learn to  speak the State language. A city where the rich and the poor studied and went to the same schools, the same colleges and inhabited the same spaces are now ghettoised like other cities. And, also most startling is the unwillingness to look at the city that gives so much to people, as also the Capital of a prosperous, industrial state -Maharashtra. For many who have arrived in the city over the last decade or so, embracing Bombay the cosmopolitan metropolitan city is easy, to embrace Mumbai the capital of Maharashtra is difficult. Voting in General Elections is easy, voting for local or state elections means participating in the issues of the city and the State.

Electoral democracy rests on the principle of a candidate who represents the interests of an area either in the corporation or in the assembly or in Parliament. However, the way our system is structured, while we get to have choice between candidates of various parties, the parties themselves are undemocratic. Worse, they are dynastic. You usually end up with an imposed candidate – you know nothing about, or you end up with someone standing for elections in your area purely because of their blood line. There were a large number of candidates across party lines, in the current BMC elections, who were there purely because of their association with someone else who had held power. There is, in such a case, no local connect.

The second pivot of electoral democracy is the concept of ‘nurturing’ a constituency. An elected member as well as a person who hopes to be elected sets up base in a constituency and nurtures it over a period of five years – becoming accessible to people, helping solve their problems and representing their interests. However, with seats being declared as reserved at the last minute, there is no point in nurturing constituencies. You don’t know if your effort will pay off. And, hence there is no local connect once again.

The 54% who didn’t vote are of three main types – those whose name was left out of the electoral rolls; those who don’t feel a connect and therefore don’t vote; and the third who care deeply and are disillusioned and don’t vote. It is incumbent on the system to fix all three.

For the concept of local self government to work, the local has to be put back in it. Democracy can flourish best when people participate. Political parties with their behaviour are stifling democracy.