I grew up in Mumbai. It remains my favourite Indian city, and every time I land at Mumbai airport and step out into the street, I feel completely at home. And I can?t speak Marathi. When my father?s job took him to the city in the mid ?70s, I was in Class VII. Marathi was the third language in my English medium school, and we knew it would be extremely difficult, if not impossible, to pick up Marathi now at that level and pass the exam. But the Maharashtra government knew that every year, thousands of non-sons-of-the-soils came to Maharashtra for work, and many of them had children who would be at sea with a new language to learn.

So you could get an exemption from Marathi, so you would not have that language as part of your syllabus; the trade-off was that you would not get a class rank when your marksheets came in. It was a wonderfully tolerant system, and to me, so many years on, it is still the most striking symbol of the cosmopolitan liberalism that has always defined my favourite city for me.

What a shame. What a shame that the Congress-NCP government in Maharashtra now wants to force all businesses to have Marathi nameplates, and ban cheerleaders at Indian Premier League (IPL) cricket matches.

This comes snapping at the heels of Raj Thackeray?s rant against North Indians, and, of course, the medieval and obscurantist moral policing attempts of the last BJP-Shiv Sena government. Maharashtra?s politicians, across party lines, seem to have decided that the only way to win elections is to take Mumbai back to the Dark Ages. The Dark Ages that have been missing from Mumbai?s history.

Yet, every incumbent government loses anyway.

Cheerleaders. I don?t even particularly like 20-20 cricket, and think that having cheerleaders in a cricket match is stupid and superfluous. But if it is simply a market activity that is not causing any harm to anyone, and if some businessman is willing to blow some money on something foolish, and the government can tax that money, what the hell? If people don?t find the cheerleaders enhancing their enjoyment of the proceedings, market forces and the profit motive will take care of it. The cheerleaders will go, to be replaced by magicians or acrobats or no one at all. But Maharashtra?s minister of state for home believes that ?mothers and daughters watch these matches on television. It does not look nice.? Who is this man? Has he changed his name and taken residence in India after fleeing Kandahar?

Okay, forget the ideology and the theories. Farmers are still committing suicide in Vidarbha, the state government is practically bankrupt, Mumbai remains under threat of terrorist attacks, there is no metro in India where debilitating poverty and lack of public sanitation is so visible wherever you turn your eye, the infrastructure continues to be appalling and the crime rate high, and a minister thinks that the moral degradation wrought by a few young women prancing around is a matter of priority, even something worth noticing and commenting on?

What sort of inane hypocrites are these men, who are also willing to give their right eye to attend film industry award functions and watch filmstars dance in as much or as little clothes as the cheerleaders wear, and then kill to be photographed next to these actresses? The only explanation is that they are both shameless and stupid. Because it doesn?t even win the bloody elections for them.

By the way, a suggestion for the Maharashtra government to consider. I think the Bombay Stock Exchange should be asked to rename the Sensex?it has ?sex? in it.

This cynical chauvinism in Maharashtra is scary, because it is not party-specific. As a boy, I saw the rise of the Shiv Sena, which was then a purely ?Marathi pride? party, and had not yet figured out the delicious potential of regressive Hindutva. Party goons would regularly arrive at Churchgate station at peak rush hour, ask commuters questions in Marathi, and if you couldn?t reply, you would get beaten up. And, just as the Congress-NCP government is doing today, in 1974, as an Opposition party of immense nuisance value, it decreed that all business nameplates have to be in Marathi. It gave the city?s businessmen a month to do so, and everyone complied?everyone except the businessmen in the Muslim-dominated Kalbadevi and Dongri. Those signboards remained in English and Urdu. The Sena could do nothing.

It is a truth known to most of us: that all bullies are also cowards. It is now for the people of Mumbai to send a message to these exploiters, a message which should tell them clearly what sort of men they should see when they look in a mirror.

?Sandipan Deb heads the RPG Group?s planned magazine venture.

Email: sandipandeb@yahoo.co.uk