Life is extremely difficult for them and in no way do they compete with the local Marathi youth, who may be unemployed but are not ready to work for 16 hours a day in restaurants, laundries, shops or run taxis and sell bhelpuri and work as unlicensed coolies. They sleep on footpaths, railway stations, under the staircases, in cement pipes brought for massive construction work going on all over the cities. They have very few demands from life except seeing Bollywood films and catching the occasional glimpse of actors. Back home, in some village in UP or Bihar, they are believed to be part of glamorous Mumbai.

Their joys and pleasures are truly melodramatic and are perfectly understood by Bollywood’s dream merchants. Once upon a time, the Raj Kapoors and Dilip Kumars cashed in on their dreams, but in those days of Shehar aur Sapna, there used to be sympathy for the migrant poor. But in the new economy, as demand for unskilled, low-wage jobs increased, the so-called sons of the soil could not join their ranks, as they felt it was below their status to work on construction sites or in poor locality restaurants. Hence, in the process, there is a vast new army of the Marathi unemployed urban youth who see in Raj Thackeray a kind of angry hero from the Hindi blockbuster Arjun.

The migration from the Bimaru states to Mumbai and other cities in the state is primarily because there was access to jobs and, with it, liberation from the drudgery and exploitation of village life. This urban poor needed social and even economic protection. Vote-bank politics ensured that the migrants would have their leadership. And so a whole new political class emerged with new networks. The self-styled rural leadership of Maharashtra, actually the moffusil Maratha elite, had no comprehension or concern for the rapidly changing profile of cities like Mumbai. For them the city was vast real estate whose prices were escalating all the time. The deindustrialisation of cities like Mumbai fashionably became known as the rise of the “service industry”. The new IT business and the mushrooming of the BPOs as well as the blooming media and entertainment industry were the glamorous ends of the service sector. But the other side of the story was the generation of new jobs at the lower end. The glamorous service sector emerged as cosmopolitan and global islands and the unskilled jobs began to be seen as unofficially reserved for the backward castes and for the migrants of the backward regions.

... contd.