Maharashtra elections 2024: Put Mumbai front and centre in Maha politics

Pic/PTI

In the Maharashtra assembly election results declared on Saturday, the Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) emerged as the single-largest political outfit, capping an exhaustive (and exhausting) political campaign that ran for months. The question that most Mumbaikars will ask on Sunday, however, is: Will their city get the short shrift again?

Of the 288 seats in the state assembly, 36 (or 12.5 per cent) are from Mumbai City and Mumbai Suburban. This is significant representation for a city that has more than two crore residents and is one of the most important urban agglomerations anywhere in the world. Yet, ever since the state was formed in May 1960, the perception among Mumbaikars is that successive chief ministers have either neglected the city's issues or ignored them altogether.

Take affordable housing. Over 60 per cent of the city's population lives in slums. Given that the average Mumbaikar cannot afford to buy an apartment within the city limits, they are forced to buy or rent property in the larger Mumbai Metropolitan Region, where political representation is much lower.

Mumbai's slum redevelopment policy over the last three decades has been ineffective, as political leaders have continuously pushed the cut-off date closer to their election years, allowing slumlords to expand unchecked. Mumbai needs a dedicated housing policy and infrastructure that can accommodate its growing population.

BJP supporters celebrate the party's assembly poll triumph. Pic/Shadab Khan

The biggest point of pain for the city is commuting woes. The typical Mumbaikar spends up to, and sometimes more than, four hours to just reach the workplace and back home. The suburban railway system, though one of the most efficient in the world, is at breaking point. More than 80 lakh people travel daily in the city's suburban and Metro services. Besides, the Metro network lacks effective last-mile connectivity, and is of limited use for commuters travelling from outside Mumbai.

According to Shiv Sena (UBT) leader Aaditya Thackeray, the city's famous BEST bus service is severely under-equipped and needs at least 10,000 more buses to ferry lakhs of people every single day. With new business and residential districts mushrooming, enhancing BEST's capacity will be one of the key deliverables of the city's municipal corporation and the state government.

The less said about the roads the better. With a municipal budget larger than many state governments in India, Mumbai should have had some of the best roads in the country. However, for decades, the city's roads have had only piecemeal improvements, with little or no attention given to connectivity and quality concerns. The last time an overhaul took place was in the 1990s when new flyovers were built, and highways and arterial roads were concretised.

Even basic services like water need urgent attention. The city's two-crore-plus residents have an aggregate demand of close to 4.5 billion litres of water a day. The seven lakes that supply water to the city have a combined capacity of 3.95 billion litres a day. The demand is expected to reach 7 billion litres a day by 2041.

One could argue that correlation is not causation, but Maharashtra's roster of chief ministers has not seen proportional representation from Mumbai. Western Maharashtra (Yashwantrao Chavan, Vasantdada Patil, Sharad Pawar, Sushilkumar Shinde, Prithviraj Chavan), Vidarbha (Vasantrao Naik, Marotrao Kannamwar, Sudhakarrao Naik, Devendra Fadnavis), Marathwada (Shankarrao Chavan, Vilasrao Deshmukh, Shivajirao Nilangekar, Ashok Chavan) and Konkan (AR Antulay and Narayan Rane) have dominated the CM's chair.

There have been notable Mumbaikar exceptions such as Manohar Joshi (1995-99), Babasaheb Bhosle (1982-83), and Uddhav Thackeray (2019-22). The incumbent CM Eknath Shinde is from Thane, though it is part of the larger Mumbai Metropolitan Region (MMR).

The other question to ask is whether Mumbai featured at all in the political discourse leading up to the elections. Prime Minister Narendra Modi and Congress leader Rahul Gandhi had rallies in the city where the Metro network and the Dharavi redevelopment became talking points.

In an interview to this newspaper, Aaditya Thackeray expanded on his party's vision for the city, but the overall election discourse was dictated by BJP's focus on "vote jihad", Congress' insistence on the caste census and the Shinde Sena's schemes such as Ladki Bahin. The largest parties in the election never made Mumbai a talking point. The fact that there have been no civic elections in the city for over two years did not find significant position even in the Opposition parties' campaigning.

Parties bickered over alliances, seat-sharing and their respective chief minister candidate, but did Mumbai matter? Hardly. By Sunday evening, we should have a fair idea of who the next chief minister of Maharashtra will be. Can Mumbai then assert itself in state politics?

Together with neighbouring MMR constituents like Thane, Vasai-Virar, Kalyan-Dombivli, and Navi Mumbai, it can indeed make a significant political impact. The electorate, especially the middle-class and the working class, have an opportunity to unite and push lawmakers to address their specific needs. If this does not happen, Mumbai's cycle of doom will continue, and it will forever remain a cash cow for politicians that tend to prioritise land deals over the city's long-term welfare.