Statehood for Bombay

Fat chance. The response of the political classes has been muffled and cynical and smug. The one shining exception is P. Chidambaram, the new Home Minister. He has been the only politician to say sorry to people of Bombay. Otherwise, the country was asked to get back to its foetal position and start blaming Pakistan. Police and politicians went on air repeating the story that the one surviving terrorist was telling them, as if the man is telling the truth. The BBC sent a reporter to where he is supposed to be from and found no one who had heard of him. He is as likely an Indian as he is an Arab, for all anyone knows. Of course, what he told them was what he was instructed to say, since the enemy knows how gullible Indian authorities are. The familiar names of Dawood Ibrahim and ISI and LeT were fed to the interrogators.

So we send off the old laundry list of names to Islamabad and ask in menacing tones for Pakistan to surrender them immediately. Is anyone serious? It is one thing for the TV newscasters to shout at Pakistanis onscreen about what they must do. They have soap to sell and TRPs to watch. But I can say with confidence that the UK government would not entertain such a request, even from an ally, even for known convicted terrorists. There is a human rights framework, which does not permit extradition of people, who are unlikely to get justice at the other end. The arrested terrorist, Ajmal Ameer Kasab, may not even get a lawyer to defend him. Condoleezza Rice must have had to suppress her laughter when confronted with such amateurish performance. Indians can do complicated nuclear negotiations, since that is like an exercise in Vedantic hairsplitting. But when it comes to real world terror, all we get is clichés.

But what are Bombayites to do? First, let us stop calling it Mumbai. Then I suggest, why not start a movement for statehood for Bombay? Why don’t Bombayites field candidates at the forthcoming elections, who would demand a separate state for Bombay, as was Nehru’s wish? That way they need not vote for any of the political parties, whose leaders abused Karkare till the day he died, and equipped him with a bullet-proof vest which was useless and a pistol to face an AK-47. Bombayites would not have to suffer the humiliation of their CM selected after several days’ delay, not on grounds of competence but of caste. A Bombayite may even qualify to be CM of Bombay! No one else in Indian politics gives a toss for Bombay and its millions.

Of course it won’t happen all at once. But if at the next election a few MLAs or an MP or two can be unseated by Bombayites, then the demand would be taken seriously. Delhi has a state for itself, so why not Bombay?