Pyramid’s bottom

If you can’t beat them, join them. Literally. After the recent strong-arm tactics, Raj Thackeray’s Maharashtra Navnirman Sena has enlisted young Maharashtrians to hit north Indian migrants where it hurts: their livelihoods. By selling milk and street-food, they hope to shove these workers out of Mumbai and reclaim lost turf. This drive might only be a symbolic stunt so far, but it distills the essence of the MNS’s paranoid political pitch.

Migrants into Mumbai are a wide and various category. Much like New York is celebrated to be, Mumbai is also a rich concentrate of art and commerce, sport and religion, entertainment and finance, and it is sustained by people who come here seeking their own individual grails, small and big. There are large numbers of poor workers pouring in from north India (although much less than commonly held, relatively less than in the ’70s) to take on the low-paid, low-skill jobs that the locals aspire to leave behind. Coming from contexts of abject deprivation, they come seeking sanctuary or fulfilment in Mumbai, and they provide the abundance of informal services that define the city. They’re not scroungers, they’re service providers. The cobbler, the dhobi, the chaiwallah, the coolie, the cab-driver, the construction-worker, the bhelpuri seller. Labour is not one lump, more people does not mean smaller portions. What’s more, in a flexible economy, the labour market adjusts to increase in supply. The myth that migrants “steal jobs” has long been busted, but it provides political arrivistes like Raj Thackeray a broad emotional plank to exploit.

But that this “anything you can do, we can do better” should be directed at the least skilled section of Mumbai’s migrants is revealing. That disaffected Maharashtrians should be asked to focus on fighting north Indians at the very bottom of the labour market shows a slump in self-image and ambition — one that canny politicians can play on. Maybe they should simply square their shoulders and grow up to Mumbai. Like the migrants do.