Congress's Priya Dutt hopes to reclaim Mumbai North Central from BJP's Poonam Mahajan. In an exclusive interview with THE WEEK, she talks about a range of issues including her candidature, constituency and last five years of Modi government.
Excerpts:
The ideologies of the BJP and the Congress are so different, so seems the manifestos.
Ours is a breath of fresh air. The Congress manifesto is really a people’s manifesto. It’s what they want, as opposing to bulldozing their way through. That itself is a huge difference.
What are your goals through the campaigning period?
I think you have to give it your best. You have to try and convey the people what is right and wrong and make them see what the truth is. That is what I am focussing on. People have seen what has happened in these five years. This is not what they had expected and voted for. Wherever I am going to meet people, there is a lot of anger and disappointment.
Your re-entry to fight for one of the seats (in Mumbai) is surprising because you said you were going to be retiring from active politics.
I never said “retire”. It is too early for me to do that. I just didn’t want to be there in the electoral politics, but I would be working in the party. I was already working for the Nargis Dutt Foundation under which we had various projects all over India as well as in Mumbai and Maharashtra. That kept me very busy and I loved my work. That is something I am passionate about. It allowed me the freedom and I saw so much of an impact that the work from the Foundation made. I started enjoying my freedom in that.
Having said that, I also realised there was a lot happening in the country, which isn’t something we want to leave behind for our kids. The biggest issue is our freedom of speech, or our freedom in every way. It’s basically our democracy which is being attacked at every level. And, also our Constitution. I realised that people who think like the way I do—there are many who believe in peace and harmony, who believe in secularism, and who believe in a united India— have to really do something here—to give back, to make a difference. I realised if this is my way, coming in [again] and fighting an election, I would have to do that. That is one of the very big reasons for me to fight this election. I want my children to grow up in a country where they see peace and harmony, happiness and love…I know it’s being too utopian when I say so (laughs), but wouldn’t everyone want that? That’s the reason I really came back.
The 10 years (Mumbai North West in 2005-2009; Mumbai North Central in 2009-2014) of work that you’ve done being an MP may be there for people to see. But you haven’t been around for a while. Do you think people will remember your work and vote on the basis of that? Is it a tricky situation to be in?
I think people would remember my work. Right now, they would have a comparison on the basis of what has been done and what hasn’t been done. People will remember the work that has affected them personally. Otherwise, they may forget. For instance, my role in initiating or facilitating the Milan Flyover. I can understand that people may not remember that, but the people who were rehabilitated during that time will definitely remember what I did. That affected their lives. A lot of such work has happened. If you talk of infrastructure work during our tenure, it was at its peak. Milan Flyover, SCLR, Mumbai Link Road, Chembur Link Road, elevated Sahaar Road, T2 Airport—all these have been done during our tenure. The Kurla Terminus was developed during my tenure, where we raised funds from the railways. People won’t remember who did it. But people will remember things like ‘she came in when there was no water in our area’, ‘there was no toilet in our area, she built that’. We have done a lot of that.
A few citizen groups I spoke to mentioned that you could be contacted easily. Are you going to keep up with that approach?
For me, it was very important to work with the citizens. My constituency is very different. When you see the constituency, you have citizen groups, ALMs, buildings, and you have very educated and intellectual people living here (in the west of the constituency). In the east side, there are a lot of people from the middle-class, lower middle-class and people living in the slums. You’ve to address both the sides very differently. I did realise [during my tenure] that we have got such intelligent people from across the background that I could work with and have dialogue with. Involving them meant that they brought projects to us and we said we would support it. That works wonderfully, and at the end everyone is happy. The citizens took it very seriously. For instance, when we developed the Carter Road Promenade, or the Bandstand Promenade or the Fort, you have the citizens groups there who start taking care of that on a daily basis. We had these open spaces that we handed over to ALMs. Now, of course, the open spaces have been taken over by the BMC again (sarcastically laughs) even though they were much better maintained by the citizens groups.
I was trying to initiate the same model of working in the slums—educating the youngsters. See, they go to school, they learn a lot about health and hygiene. We tried at quite a few places where youngsters could take up the cleaning programmes in their areas and educating their parents. It's very important to get the civil society involved.
What do you have to say about your opponent’s work in the last term after she took over from you?
I don’t really like commenting on her work. I can talk about my strengths and weaknesses. But a lot of work that I had initiated before I lost the election, and had kept it as my agenda to take it up in the next term, all that work is still remaining (unfinished). I will continue focussing on that, like the rehabilitation of people from the airport slums, SRA projects and slums on government land.
What is going to be your immediate focus area of work if you are elected?
The first thing would be to address the larger issues that people are grappling with —the housing situation, which has to be dealt with on a national level to begin with. If I am handling a constituency, as a Member of Parliament, I can’t ignore the local issues. The national issue in my constituency is going to be the rehabilitation of people on the central government land. That’s the central government land and we had initiated it with Manmohan Singhji when he was the PM during my last tenure. Another very big issue is that today people are not getting ration. It’s a very sad situation. The UPA government had come up with the Food Security Act, which is not happening now. Plus, the ration is not reaching the people because their biometric is not functional, or there’s some other problem. Everything is in a mess. LPG rates are skyrocketing. People can’t afford it. It has to be fixed.
You have mentioned that the defeat in your last term was mostly because of the first-time voters who didn’t vote for you. How are you going to change it this time, considering there’s a huge base of first-time voters even now?
Yes, there are a lot of them. We have got a very strong Youth Congress team, who are working well with social media and trying to address the youth directly. Also, we are conducting meetings with youth groups in different areas so that they are well informed, especially the first-time voters. Youngsters have no clue about how politics works. Sometimes they don’t know who is talking about what. But just for them to understand, what voting is and how important their vote will be, that’s very important.
Coming to the voters, as you mentioned, yours is a very different constituency – a mixed bag. It has a considerable population of educated, intellectuals including people from the film industry, a lot of middle-class societies, a considerable Muslim population.
I don’t divide my constituency into Muslim group, Bollywood group or anything else. I believe that everyone needs to be addressed. Issues in the slums are going to be very different from the issues in the buildings—we are going to address each one of them separately. When you go to the areas that are more dominated by the SRA projects or the slums, the biggest issue is house over the head, water, food and toilets. Water and toilets are a huge issue.
But people from the BJP claim that the toilet problem has been solved.
Please show me where. You are living in Mumbai, please show me where are the toilets. You are a girl, if you need to go to the loo, where would you go? There’s nothing. I have spent so much of my funds in building toilets. Why? When you have Swachh Bharat Abhiyaan, which forces corporates to give money through their CSR-funds, why do you need to spend your funds for that? Corporates can come and build toilets in the areas that need them. You use your (MP) fund in something else. Everybody takes advantage of people not being aware. The biggest problem is that people are not aware and they don’t question.
There has been an increasing sense of religious extremism if the liberal point of view is taken into consideration. What’s the change that you have witnessed, personally, in the last five years in the social and political climate?
There was no tolerance to people who were too communal [during our regime]. But this government has turned a blind eye to this. That encourages people of that mindset to come out more openly. You talk about mob lynching, nothing is done to the people who killed a man because it was a mob, so who do you arrest? In the name of mob lynching, you get away with it. But you have taken a life, it’s a murder. These things that were not happening earlier are happening now. People have really started feeling that sense of insecurity. And, every single person—irrespective of the class-divide—has really started feeling uneasy with the whole situation. When this whole thing about beef-ban came, a subtle [religious] narrative slipped in. It was not needed at all. I don’t remember the year, but the cow has been declared as sacred many years ago. That was during the Congress regime. Suddenly, this cow thing came up. Then, the cow vigilantes came along. There has been a huge misleading situation in the country. This has affected actually the most lowest level of people. Earlier, everybody respected each-other’s religion. Nobody told you what to do, what to eat and what not to eat. The only time it was done was during the British regime, when they divided the Hindus and Muslims with pork and beef. This is the second time you are seeing this in this country. These are issues which may look very small in the face of it, but there’s an underlined message that needs to be addressed. Nobody noticed it till the time it blew out of proportion. It’s very sad to do it to a country that is so tolerant in every way.
