Pedigreed Hypocrisy

South Mumbai likes to imagine itself as the custodian of Mumbai’s heritage. Its colonial facades, art deco apartment blocks and seafront promenades are presented as the city’s irreplaceable crown jewels. Yet, each time a new project is proposed, residents of these gilded enclaves discover reasons to resist. For them, development is fine so long as it is built in someone else’s backyard.

The latest tantrum concerns a jetty at Colaba. The Supreme Court has dismissed a petition against the project. South Mumbai Residents, banding together under the banner ‘Shift Jetty, Save Colaba’ had been staging protests by invoking marine ecology and heritage preservation.

The State government has long argued that the facility was a crying need for 25 years as the existing jetties near the Gateway of India are inadequate to handle commuter traffic. Passengers must often hop precariously from one vessel to another in choppy waters, risking accidents. Chief Justice Gavai, while dismissing the petition, observed that the issue could not be seen only from the perspective of nearby residents.

This hypocrisy on part of South Mumbai’s elite is hardly new. South Mumbai residents enjoy the best schools, the plushest clubs and property values that rise inexorably. Their children grow up with every urban advantage that collective investment has conferred. Yet they behave as if civic development were a zero-sum game: every metro pillar, jetty or station that comes up in their vicinity is deemed an intolerable intrusion. The price of their obstinacy is paid by millions of ordinary commuters who endure suffocating trains, collapsing bridges and endless traffic jams so that a few can preserve their sea-facing tranquillity.

London has dug metro lines under Georgian squares; Paris has bored tunnels beneath Haussmann boulevards; New York has extended subways under century-old brownstones. Yet South Mumbai residents invoke ‘fragile heritage’ as if colonial facades must forever be treated as holy relics. At the same time, slum-dwellers elsewhere are told to accept displacement as the unavoidable price of progress. The irony is that South Mumbai’s own exclusivity was built on collective infrastructure. The old docks, railways and business districts that created its wealth were public projects. Today, when the State proposes to extend the same principle to water transport or mass transit, the beneficiaries cry foul. Their protests are dressed in the garb of environmentalism and heritage protection, but the real motive is to freeze their neighbourhood in amber while the rest of Mumbai sweats and heaves.

To block change on principle is to turn Mumbai into a museum curated by elites who want modernity without the inconvenience of sharing it. Mumbai is a city of toil, powered by millions who pour in daily from the suburbs. They are compelled to endure the city’s infrastructural chaos so that South Mumbai residents can sip cocktails in colonial clubs while railing against a jetty that might save lives. This is pedigreed hypocrisy and Mumbai can no longer afford it.