Mumbai siege mobilizes the prosperous

By Somini Sengupta

Published: December 7, 2008

E-Mail Article

Printer-Friendly

3-Column Format

Translate

Text Size

MUMBAI: An extraordinary public interest lawsuit was filed Wednesday in this city's highest court. It charged that the government had lagged in its constitutional duty to protect its citizens' right to life, and it pressed the state to modernize and upgrade its security forces.

The lawsuit was striking mainly for the people behind it: investment bankers, corporate lawyers and representatives of some of India's largest companies, which have their headquarters here in the country's financial capital, formerly known as Bombay.

The Bombay Chamber of Commerce and Industry, the city's largest business association, joined as a petitioner. It was the first time it had lent its name to litigation in the public interest.

The three-day siege of Mumbai, which ended more than a week ago, was a watershed for India's prosperous classes. It prompted many of those who live in their own private Indias, largely insulated from the country's dysfunction, to demand a vital public service: safety.

Since the attacks, which killed 163 people, as well as nine gunmen, there has been an outpouring of anger from unlikely quarters. On Wednesday, tens of thousands of urban, English-speaking citizens stormed the Gateway of India, a famed waterfront monument, venting anger at their elected leaders. There were similar protests in the capital, New Delhi, and the southern technology hubs, Bangalore and Hyderabad. All were organized spontaneously, with word spread through text messages and Facebook pages.

On Saturday, young people affiliated with a new political party, called Loksatta, or People's Power, gathered at the Gateway, calling for a variety of reforms, including banning criminals from running for political office. (Virtually every political party has convicts and suspects among its elected officials.)

Social networking sites were ablaze with memorials and citizens' action groups, including one that advocated refraining from voting altogether as an act of civil disobedience. Never mind that in India, voter turnout among the rich is far lower than among the poor.

Another group advocated not paying taxes, as though that would improve the quality of public services. On Saturday an e-mail campaign began called "I Am Clean," urging citizens not to bribe police officers or drive through red lights. And there were countless condemnations of how democracy had failed in this, the world's largest democracy. Those condemnations led Vir Sanghvi, a columnist writing in Mint, a financial newspaper, to remind his readers of 1975, when Indira Gandhi, then the prime minister, imposed emergency rule.

Sanghvi wrote, "I am beginning to hear the same kind of middle-class murmurs and whines about the ineffectual nature of democracy and the need for authoritarian government."

Perhaps the most striking development was the lawsuit, because it represented a rare example of corporate India confronting the government outright rather than making backroom deals.

"It says in a nutshell, 'Enough is enough,"' said Cyrus Guzder, who owns a logistics company. "More precisely, it tells us that citizens of all levels in the country believe their government has let them down and believe that it now needs to be held accountable."

In India's city of gold, the distinction between public and private can be bewildering. For members of the working class, who often cannot afford housing, public sidewalks become living rooms. In the morning, commuters from gated communities in the suburbs pass children brushing their teeth at the edge of the street. Women are forced to relieve themselves on the railroad tracks, usually in the dark, for the sake of modesty. The poor sometimes sleep on highway medians, and it is not unheard of for drunken drivers to mow them down.

Mumbai has been roiled by government neglect for years. Its commuter trains are so overcrowded that 4,000 riders die every year on average, some pushed from trains in the fierce competition to get on and off. Monsoon rains in 2005 killed more than 400 people in Mumbai in one day alone; so clogged were the city's ancient drains, so crowded its river plains with unauthorized construction, that water had nowhere to go.

Rahul Bose, an actor, suggested setting aside such problems for the moment. In a plea published last week in The Hindustan Times, he laid out the desperation of this glistening, corroding place. "We overlook for now your neglect of the city," he wrote on the newspaper's opinion page. "Its floods, its traffic, its filth, its pollution. Just deliver to us a world-standard anti-terrorism plan."

None of the previous terrorist attacks, even in Mumbai, had so struck the cream of Bombay society. Bombs have been planted on commuter trains in the past, but few people who regularly dine at the Taj Mahal Palace and Tower Hotel, one of the worst-hit sites, travel by train. "It has touched a raw nerve," said Amit Chandra, who runs a prominent investment firm. "People have lost friends. Everyone would visit these places."