In the mid-1980s, Manchester moved to abolish lord mayors, and have plain mayors. Outraged, The Economist, the custodian of traditional English values, wrote: if that lad Dick Whittington had gone to London with his cat and become the city’s chief metropolitan councillor, nobody would have remembered him. The exact words might have been a bit different; I am quoting from my fading memory. The idea was to highlight why mayors were ‘worshipful’, and lord mayors ‘right worshipful’.
There are several versions of that lad’s tale. The most popular, told as a fable, is that orphan Dick walked from Lancashire to London hearing that its “streets are paved with gold”, but found it all cold. A kind-hearted merchant Fitzwarren gave him bed and a cook’s job. When his master’s ships were sailing to distant lands, Dick gave him his cat to be sold. The ship landed at Barbary coast which was infested with rats; Dick’s cat and her litter killed them all.
Pleased more than a Cheshire cat, the host king, a Moor, rewarded the merchant with pots of gold. On return to London, the good Fitzwarren gave it all to Dick, who too took to trading, made a fortune, lent money to the king, was knighted (who would have remembered him as Sir Richard Whittington?) and became the Lord Mayor of London for four terms from 1397 to 1419.
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The story has the right period setting—the Black Death, the early sea-faring days, the rise of mercantile cities, and the early signs of what Karl Marx called a new bourgeois class’s rise to political power. Though we no longer have ‘lord’ mayors, and though no Tom, Sir Dick or Harry is known to have adorned the post, India’s most mercantile city still holds its mayors in high esteem. Why else are Devendra Fadnavis, Eknath Shinde and their partymen, allies in the Maharashtra government, scrambling like a clowder of cats over the mayorship of Mumbai?
Truth be told, Mumbai’s mayor wields hardly any power. A civil servant, of the ubiquitous IAS kind, wields it as chief commissioner, and a standing committee of elected councillors virtually holds the purse. No small kitty that. Mumbai has an annual budget of about Rs75,000 crore, more than four times of Delhi, and much more than of several states. Though wielding little statutory power, just being in that worshipful seat gives the mayor tremendous political clout, next perhaps to the chief minister, home minister and finance minister of Maharashtra. No wonder, Shinde is ‘herding his cats’ and hiding them in a hotel, knowing well that fatter cats from the rival Uddhav Thackeray camp of the Shiv Sena may pounce on them.
But who among their councillors are the parties thinking of as mayor? That would depend on who Dame Luck favours. Literally! The rule is that the mayorship ought to be available to scheduled castes, tribes, backwards and women. Which category would get the job is decided by a draw of lots and not by rotation. Unfair, isn’t it? Parties can propose candidates only after the raffle decides which category would get it this time.
The problem is that no party has enough councillors of its own, and every party would need an ally’s or an opposition party’s support to make a mayor of its choice. Shinde has asked the larger BJP’s support to make his guy a Mr or Ms Mayor, but the BJP is turning the tables on him by asking for the mayorship of neighbouring Thane, where Shinde’s men have a majority of their own to make their man the mayor.
Give it, Shindeji! After all, Pitt is to Addington, as London is to Paddington. So is Mumbai to Thane.
prasannan@theweek.in