On Wednesday, a move was made by the Maharashtra state government to issue permits to cab drivers only if they could speak Marathi and were domiciled in Mumbai for 15 years. A day later, the chief minister backtracked and said that the drivers should know how to speak any local language: Hindi or Gujarati.
Important Cabinet time and tax-payers? money was wasted on cynically going one-up on political rivals when it doesn?t require any debate or an erudite survey to know that Mumbai is a cosmopolitan city and, in fact, has its own language created by a pot pourri of immigrants. Any taxi driver in Mumbai will tell you that in their entire lifetime there would be just a few incidents when a passenger would speak only in Marathi.
The Congress-NCP government?s plan reeked of a politically motivated move to steal a march over the MNS, which rose to prominence in recent elections after it managed to capture 13 seats. MNS has been open about its stand on immigrants and its hooligans have been arm-twisting shop owners and establishments to promote the Marathi cause. Its bullying of establishments into displaying their boards in Marathi was seen as a huge success by some. Peculiarly, despite having won a majority in the recent election, the Congress-NCP combine is trying to stoke linguistic chauvinism.
There are several pressing matters that need to be dealt with, such as water shortage in Mumbai. The commercial capital faces a shortfall of about 400 million litres of the 4,300 million litres needed daily. In many parts of the city people receive water only for a few hours. There is a gap of around 4,000 mw of power, and industry suffers from outages. The roads in Mumbai are dug up and traffic congestion cause distress to commuters. The pride of Mumbai, the Bandra-Worli Sea Link, took a decade to be built. So only when the ministers stop their cynical shenanigans can one expect some action on projects that would alleviate the real woes of the people of Mumbai.
akash.joshi@expressindia.com