On The spot
Tavleen Singh
For several years now I have been a citizen of both Mumbai and Delhi. But, I continue to vote in Delhi at the same polling booth in which you would have seen Rahul Gandhi voting on April 10. Had I moved residence totally to Mumbai I would count as a voter in the constituency represented by Milind Deora that is probably the most interesting Lok Sabha constituency in India in terms of income diversity. In this constituency in a modernistic palace that from the outside resembles a tall car park lives India’s richest man. And in this constituency, not far from the Oberoi Hotel, lives a community of street people whom I have known for many years. They want more than anything else in the world to be able in their lifetime to be able to afford a roof over their heads. They cannot afford even to rent a hovel in this city of vast, sprawling slums.
The contrasts never cease to astound me and more poignantly at election time. So of an evening earlier this week I went for the first time to the twin buildings called Imperial Towers in the unfashionable quarter called Tardeo that lies directly behind Mukesh Ambani’s Antillia. It remains as it was when I first came to live in Mumbai twenty years ago: a place of narrow, crowded alleys and ugly bazaars with old fashioned socialist names like ‘air-conditioned market’. Today just beyond the air-conditioned market like a vision from some futuristic film rise majestically the Imperial Towers, one of Mumbai’s newest and most expensive apartment buildings. No sooner do you enter their hallowed heights than you find yourself transported into another country. All around are glistening glass spaces, swimming pools, gardens and opulence. Near the swimming pool on this particular night a neat arrangement of white-covered chairs had been placed for one of the candidates in this election to address the residents of Imperial Towers. This is what election meetings will be like, I found myself thinking, when India starts dreaming of prosperity instead of wallowing in poverty. This is what India will be like when we break free from the shackles of the socialist mindset that has kept India among the poorest countries in the world when it could be among the richest.
In a magnificent apartment in Imperial Towers over glasses of chilled white wine and beer I found myself discussing the elections with Indians who belong to the top 1% of our income brackets. When I told them that I thought Narendra Modi would be India’s next prime minister they were shocked because according to their calculations the Congress Party will not do so badly and will get more than 120 seats which could help them decide who the next prime minister will be. They based their calculations, they said, from what they heard from their servants and from conversations with taxi drivers. They were certain that Milind Deora would win again because the other candidates seemed weak when compared to him. They said they had heard that Mr. Ambani had managed to use his influence to ensure a victory for Deora. It is a rumour doing the rounds of south Mumbai and is the sort of rumour that is never possible to verify.
The next morning I visited my street friends to ask their view of the election. Surekha, her sister Roopa and their friends were in the process of sending their children off to the Sulabh shauchalya for their baths when I arrived at the pavement on which they live. They were surprised that I should be asking them political questions because they admitted that they had never voted and were not even sure who their ‘nagar sevak’ was. When I told them this was not a municipal election but for the Lok Sabha they looked confused and said that someone had come and given them little slips of paper and told them that their polling booth was in Colaba but they were not sure whether this meant they could vote. They had no idea who the MP was from South Mumbai but Surekha, always ready with an opinion said, ‘They say we should vote for Narendra Modi this time because Sonia Gandhi has done nothing for us in ten years…look at us we are still living in the streets with no improvement in our lives.’ When I asked if they knew who Modi was they said they did not but had heard of him on FM radio.
These are people who have not benefited from a single anti-poverty scheme or a single public service. They eat, live, sleep and die on the pavement where Surekha and her sisters and brothers were born. Today they have children of their own whom I feed daily through a small programme I started long ago called Naashta. Whenever I ask what they want more than anything else in the world they will tell me that they long to have real homes to live in. So desperate are they for this that Surekha and her mother once traveled to Delhi to meet Sonia Gandhi because they were told she was giving poor people houses. ‘We didn’t manage to meet her,’ Surekha told me when they returned ‘even though we stayed in Delhi a whole week sleeping and eating in a gurudwara. We went to her house many times but they would not let us in.’
I became acquainted with these street people through Naashta that I started fifteen years ago with the hope that feeding the children a good breakfast every morning would help me persuade them to go to school. I failed on the school front but Naashta continues and whenever there is a problem with the police, who regularly arrest small children and lock them up, I try to help. In all the years I have known them I have not seen their lives improve even slightly. Nor have I seen the smallest improvement in their access to public services like hospitals and schools. But, the sad truth is that despite the desperate poverty and deprivation that they face daily they continue to live on the pavements of Mumbai because life is better here than in the villages their parents left behind forty years ago. The tragic irony of their situation is that by the measure used by the Planning Commission they are not poor at all. They earn an average of Rs 100 a day and that puts them well above the urban poverty line.
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