To see Mumbai the Bal Thackeray way, just hang around his house. The small middle-class colony he lives in is buffeted on one side by Dharavi, Asia’s largest slum, and on the other by Garib Nagar, an urban cesspool where Azharuddin, Slumdog Millionaire’s child star, lives. During the 1993 riots, Dharavi and Garib Nagar saw pitched battles between Hindu colony residents and Muslim slum-dwellers, each accusing the other of hurling lit, gasoline-filled bottles across the compound walls. This is the paranoia of Bal Thackeray, the paranoia that these “outsiders” will squat outside his house, erect tents, lob missiles and take over his city. The outsiders keep varying — from south Indians to Muslims, and now, to north Indians — but the solution is always the same: taller walls to keep them away, stronger arms to chuck them out.  

This is the terrifying vision of Mumbai, variants of which the Shiv Sena-BJP alliance offers voters time and again. In the 2004 general elections, the Congress won all but one seat in Mumbai; in the 2004 assembly elections, the Congress-NCP combine was rewarded for pathetic governance with a second term; and in the recent general elections, the Shiv Sena-BJP once again failed to win a single seat (Mumbai North-Central, where Thackeray lives, was won by Congress’s incumbent, Priya Dutt). Mumbai’s electorate, around 60 per cent of whom are slum dwellers and 47 per cent “outsiders”, have spoken clearly. So have many “colony” dwellers, who, though appalled by the quality of the city’s governance, held their noses and voted for the hand.  

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