The meaning of Mumbai’s vote for BJP

MUMBAI’s municipal elections were held four years late. That delay, amounting to constitutional breach, says much about Indian democracy. India’s richest municipality was kept in administrative suspension, without elected representatives and without consequences, indicating a deeper comfort with democratic deferral. Remember that constitutional self-government at the third tier is not optional.

The BJP has improved its seat tally compared to 2017 and emerged as the largest party, aided by the split in the Shiv Sena that had once anchored the alliance. Across Maharashtra, the BJP-led alliance has dominated civic bodies, winning most municipal corporations where elections were held.

Yet Mumbai’s result refuses to yield a single neat political interpretation. That is because Mumbai is not merely a city, but more like a city state. Its budget dwarfs those of many Indian states, and its economic weight is large enough to become a meaningful share of national output and taxes. It is India’s financial capital, Bollywood’s stage, the country’s biggest labour magnet, a playground for creative artistes and hence a cultural engine whose pluralism and a cosmopolitan nature are as valuable as its money.

And yet this Maximum City is embarrassed by minimum accountability. Its governance is famously complex, a “spaghetti bowl” of agencies like the BMC (civic body), MMRDA (regional planning), BEST (transport), MHADA (housing), SRA (slum rehab), MSRDC, railways and more, each with partial responsibility, overlapping jurisdiction and carefully designed escape routes from blame. Planning is separated from execution, transport from land use, housing from connectivity, and accountability from everything. When the city fails, no single institution can be held answerable. The electoral contest for the BMC was about control over patronage, planning, land, permissions, contracts and the right to shape India’s most valuable urban geography.

There is a striking paradox. Mumbai generates extraordinary wealth, and yet its residents experience extraordinary fragility. Mumbai’s real estate is as valuable as gold, and a gateway to power. Yet an enormous share of the population lives in slums with minimal civic promises fulfilled. In the same city that hosts the country’s richest households and its most expensive square foot, ordinary life is spent navigating broken footpaths, overcrowded trains, unreliable drainage and the annual monsoon lottery of whether water will enter your home.

This is why Mumbai’s ambitions have often collapsed. Consider the great promise made in 2006 when the then Prime Minister announced an ambitious plan to turn Mumbai into an international financial centre (IFC). Mumbai had the financial institutions, the human capital, the depth of markets and the global visibility.

If any Indian city could compete with Singapore, Dubai, Hong Kong or London in financial services, it had to be Mumbai. Plans were drafted, committees were formed, reports were published, and the story was told with conviction. Two decades later, Mumbai is still not an international financial centre. It remains India’s financial capital — a domestic title — but the global destination status never arrived.

The IFC plan did not fail because of lack of bankers, entrepreneurs, lawyers or capital. Mumbai failed because it lacked what global cities require: coherent governance and high-quality infrastructure delivered at scale. This is where Gujarat’s GIFT City managed to steal a march — not because it possessed Mumbai’s cultural or market depth, but because it offered policy alignment, friendly regulation, fiscal incentives and administrative push from the top. Mumbai remained trapped in the politics of discretion.

Mumbai’s financial autonomy is limited since even the property tax rates are determined by the state government. The impressive coastal road project needed funding from the Centre or other sources. The metro network depends much on an external purse. Mumbaikars, apart from their financial orphanhood, also pay a hidden tax, which is in terms of numerous permissions, for building, redevelopment or utilities.

The compliance cost is unpredictable, and consumes time. The delays impose a cost and become translated as higher real estate prices and eventually worsen inequality. There is a strange and perpetually large mismatch between excess stock of luxury supply and unmet demand for affordable housing. A few years ago, it was reported that Mumbai had an inventory of more than two lakh unsold flats.

The issue of affordable housing was hardly headlined in the manifestos. Nor was flood control, solid waste management or road repair. The BMC elections brought freebie theatre to civic polls. Manifestos promised rebates, concessions, free bus rides and cash transfers, with no mention of from where the finances would come. In this competitive welfarism, the voters are treated as beneficiaries rather than citizens who have rights. Civic accountability cannot be replaced by a relationship of gratitude from beneficiaries. The government closest to people’s lives is the civic administration, but civic politics is behaving like state politics.

The mandate for a triple engine again, like in 2017, signals that voters have chosen stability in a fragmented field, and remain committed to cosmopolitanism. The Opposition failed to offer a credible civic vision beyond anti-incumbency. The bogey of a threat to Marathi Asmita did not work. But the deeper message is that Mumbai has started voting with low expectations. The city has become habituated to dysfunction, not outraged by it. This is a dangerous normalisation.

Mumbai’s central problem is not only who rules; it is what powers the city-government actually has. Indian public finance and governance still treat cities as administrative appendages of state governments, not as economic engines that require autonomy, capacity and long-horizon planning. The Chief Minister holding the urban development portfolio has become predictable precisely because that department controls the golden goose: land, permissions, development control, and the levers through which politics can monetise urban growth.

If Mumbai is serious about being a world-class city, it needs structural change. It needs single-point accountability for metropolitan outcomes; de-fragmentation of agencies; fiscal autonomy that does not reduce the municipality to an accountant at someone else’s mercy; a predictable rule-of-law permissions regime; and a civic compact that treats public goods as non-negotiable. Most importantly, it needs citizens who do not outsource disappointment.

Mumbai has always been a city that contains multitudes: dreams and despair, wealth and vulnerability, glamour and grime, cosmopolitanism and cruelty. But it cannot remain, indefinitely, a city that funds the nation while failing itself. Mumbai voted for stability. But now it must demand fulfilment of its aspiration. The city of dreams can no longer afford the governance of drift.