The Mumbaikar vs Gujarati Divide in This Election

(Kumar Ketkar is a senior journalist, political commentator, globe trotter and author. He has covered all Indian elections since 1971 and significant international events. He is a frequent participant on TV debates.)

Normally, the Chief Minister of Gujarat would not have had a role in the state election in Maharashtra. But Shrimati Anandiben Patel has managed to accomplish just that. She appealed last week, to the business community in Mumbai at the Indian Merchants Chamber, to leave the crowded and filthy financial capital and move business and their families to the peaceful and rich Model State of Gujarat, a sort of heavenly abode built by Narendrabhai Modi.

Her appeal was made primarily to Gujarati traders, industrialists, diamond merchants and all types of businessmen. But it's unlikely to resonate because Gujaratis have based their businesses in Mumbai for decades, if not centuries. They have made their fortune here and also bought posh apartments in high-rise buildings. Their children studied here and later went to America to make life richer. All those NRGs (non-resident Gujaratis) were seen cheering at Madison Garden in New York when their Narendrabhai gave a mesmerizing speech.

So Anandiben's appeal achieved nothing except creating a fresh divide among the people of Mumbai. Not only the Shiv Sena, but also the Maharashtra Navnirman Sena of Raj Thackeray and even Narayan Rane of the Congress retorted harshly. There are nearly 4,000 Gujarati stock brokers (bulls and bears), and several thousand diamond merchants and hundreds of thousands of traders in Mumbai, a city they help power commercially. Modi had promised the NRGs (and of course other Indians too) permanent visas. Anandiben offered them a truly Gujarati home-coming.

There was nothing like a Gujarati vote bank earlier in Maharashtra elections, though there was considerable hostility between the Marathi Mumbaikars and Gujaratis during the Samyukta Maharashtra Movement of the 1950s which demanded the creation of a separate Marathi-speaking state with Bombay as its capital. That is how the states of Maharashtra and Gujarat were carved out on the same day, May 1, 1960.
 
Yet, a large number of Gujaratis supported the Congress in those days. Later in the 70s, many of them joined the Janata Party under Morarjibhai. Then they began slowly to migrate towards soft Hindutva. After the arrival of Modi on the scene, they became a strident Hindutva community. Though this is not true of all Gujaratis, it surely represents a sociological trend.

But in this election, the electorate is so fragmented that it is not easy to identify any caste-community wise trend except among the Gujaratis. It has a strident Hindu angle -  and as a reaction, a minority (Muslim) consolidation, a new upper caste Brahminical dimension and OBC as well as Dalit mobilization, white-collar and blue-collar voting blocks, and the agricultural and service or trade sector. But the important factor is even these voting blocks are fragmented. To this already very confounding scenario, Anandiben has added confusion by injecting another divide. If the BJP and Shiv Sena were not split, perhaps this Gujarati issue would not have become an important element.

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