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In print | Published December 4, 2008

“Mumbai,” wrote Suketu Mehta in an impassioned op-ed in The New York Times last Friday, “is a golden songbird.” It is “a mass dream of the peoples of South Asia.” Its people are hospitable to the point of recklessness, running toward explosions — “to help,” says Mehta. The city’s culture is pleasure-loving, sensual, shamelessly flirty. It is a city of “flashy cars and flashier women.”

Whatever the essence of Mumbai, Mr. Mehta is not alone in writing sentimentally about the wounded city. In the days following last week’s terrorist attacks, newspapers worldwide, e-mail lists, message boards and blogs were flooded with tearful reactions from expatriate Mumbaikars and sympathetic foreigners alike. Almost without exception, they praised the resilience of the city of Mumbai and the spirit with which its residents went about recovering and rebuilding. Mumbai is, by nearly every account, the indestructible city.

But it is also a broken city. Long before his piece in The Times went to print, Suketu Mehta wrote about Mumbai (and in a broader sense, India) in a less rose-tinted manner. In his semi-autobiographical ethnographic book, “Maximum City,” Mehta called India “the Country of the No” and described Mumbai as home to a dysfunctional local government, corrupt police officers and a perpetual gang war.

While it is tempting to gloss over the unsavory aspects of urban Indian life in the aftermath of a devastating terrorist attack, the world should aspire to accomplish more. If international attention is, for once, turned to the Indian subcontinent, let it be constructive. And most importantly, let the Indian government and the Indian people aspire to rebuild a better, more structurally sound Mumbai.

Horror stories about the sprawling Indian bureaucracy are commonplace. Even for wealthy immigrants such as Mehta, getting phone and gas connections or school admissions for his children without resorting to bribes and political back channels is close to impossible. Due to colonial legislative holdovers such as the Rent Act, which effectively ties the hands of landlords to the point where they can’t afford to rent out their own properties, housing is as scarce as it is exorbitantly expensive. It is even more impossible for the millions of urban poor living in cities like Mumbai to obtain such basic needs as plumbing and water, with people living in slums having to wait up to two hours, get numbers and stand in line with buckets in order to, hopefully, get a daily apportionment of potable water.

For a country already scarred by terrorist attacks, the broken bureaucracy is, in India, the wounded elephant in the room. Since coming to power in 2004 on a platform of increasing government effectiveness and accountability, Prime Minister Manmohan Singh’s proposed reforms have accomplished little. The Economist noted in March that a 16-year campaign to decentralize power from the myriad states in India, intended to cut out much of the bureaucratic mess altogether, has hardly moved. Employing approximately three million people in the central government and an additional seven million as state-level civil servants, the Indian bureaucracy seems simply to be too big to fix itself. No Indian, rich or poor, is exempt from the pitfalls of a bloated bureaucracy. The oreal of coping with a dysfunctional bureaucracy has become a fact of life for over 1.1 billion people.

But the impact of India’s ineffectual bureaucracy extends far beyond irritation for its residents. It is, in some regards, so staggeringly broken that citizens are forced to resort to extragovernmental forces to obtain the basic services that local officials are unable to provide them. And what are these extragovernmental forces? The militant gangs waging war in the city of Mumbai.

At first blush, it seems counterintuitive that a gang should be a political agent on the same level as a local government — and it is, in fact, mind-boggling. But the fact that gangs have become, for many residents, the de facto providers of vital public services demonstrates the extent to which the government has failed Mumbaikars. Rather than navigate the labyrinthine channels of the Indian bureaucracy, the residents of Mumbai are turning to the same gang members responsible for decades of street warfare, killings and, most famously, a series of riots in 1992 and 1993 that led to the deaths of nearly 1,600 Muslims in the city of Mumbai alone.

These gangs have become, in addition to practitioners of religiously-motivated violence, providers of basic services. When the local government fails to install a sanitation system in an urban slum, a gang might step up to fill the gap. When inept, corrupt or overwhelmed police forces fail to enforce justice, gang members provide their own forms of vigilante justice.

But a Mumbai gang member is not Batman, and India should not resemble a comic book in which citizens can take the law into their own hands. The freewheeling Mumbai lifestyle has endeared it to many of its residents, but as a political entity, the turmoil in Mumbai is unacceptable. The spirit of the city is not in its lawlessness, and so the first priority of the Indian government in the aftermath of the terrorist attacks must be the establishment, once and for all, of law and order.

Decades of lackadaisical policing and bumbling local politics should, despite the cost, difficulty and reluctance of many politicians, be swept away with one stroke. Years of insider politics have yielded an entrenched and largely worthless public service — resetting the order, if necessary by bringing in candidates from elsewhere in the country or recruiting officials from abroad, has the greatest chance of bringing much-needed reform to the city.

In a broader sense, it may be time for the Indian electorate to reexamine the track records of their elected officials. Despite unfaltering ineptitude, the Indian National Congress party has been in power for much of the country’s democratic history. To Americans used to the pendulum of administrative shift every four or eight years, the lack of direct electoral accountability is baffling. Why don’t the Indian people make a business of tossing their politicians out of office until, inevitably, someone rises to power and finally fixes the way public service works in the world’s second most populous nation?

There is popular anger among Indian citizens about how their government has handled the situation — there were too many warnings ignored, too few ambulances to rescue the wounded, too little in the way of substantive response and too much self-serving politics. Let that anger be channeled constructively in a setting befitting the world’s largest democracy: at the polls.

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