Control freaks and fixes

What's it about Maharashtra’s netas that makes them into instant cultural despots and morality police? The moment they feel confident e...

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What’s it about Maharashtra’s netas that makes them into instant cultural despots and morality police? The moment they feel confident enough to flex a political muscle or two, they demand the right to decide what the Mumbai resident reads, wears, thinks, sees, eats, drinks. What movies they should watch, which ads they should scorn, which books they should burn, which plays they should pelt with stones, which art exhibitions they must tar. Ever since Morarji Desai imposed prohibition in the metropolis with an iron hand and gave the Haji Mastans of the region sustainable careers in bootlegging and gun-running, Mumbai’s political guardians have proved to be control freaks of a very high order indeed. Some of this also came with a healthy dose of ethnic chauvinism. The sub-text is that Mumbai is for Mumbaikars and Mumbaikars are decent people who do not like advertisements of models in tight jeans, who object to films like Fire because it could turn all married women into lesbians and bring human reproduction (as we know it) to an end, or boycott litterateurs who dare to embrace a different cultural paradigm.

The latest guardian of Mumbai’s fragile moral universe is the state’s deputy chief minister, R.R. Patil, who has decided that the city’s bar-girls need to be rescued from themselves, just as Mumbai’s “young generation” needs to be spared the “corrupting influence” of the bar culture. If he sounds like a latter-day clone of the one-time Shiv Sena street censor, Pramod Navalkar, his boss — Chief Minister Vilasrao Deshmukh — sounds very much like Bal Thackeray himself when he decries the baleful influence of the “outsider” on Mumbai.

This striking mutation of Congress leaders into wannabe Sainiks could well be prompted by political compulsions and the need to marginalise political challengers by assuming their agenda and patois. But it does great injustice to a city that has always been the enemy of the closed society. Indeed, Mumbai could not have become a true metropolis of international scope and proportions, if it had allowed itself to be cast in the mean moulds of variegated politicians. The freedom and multiplicity of choice it offered to its citizens were crucial to its own evolution. Forcefeeding it with morality would be to defeat its spirit and stunt its growth. Those who are elected to rule Maharashtra and its capital must understand the limits of their power. They should, by all means, ensure law and order and keep the systems of governance functioning efficiently. But this cannot and should not mean an unwarranted attempt to control the private lives of citizens or decide the rights and wrongs of life for them.