Why the city needs a collective voice

GURGAON: Gurgaon, a city that has supposedly entered the 21st century, has just been pulled back to its roots. With the outlining of procedures for the delimitation of civic wards to enable elections to the Municipal Corporation of Gurgaon (MCG), most residents of what is touted as the Millennium City appear to have been clubbed in zones that appear to cater to the political sympathies of the minority and not the electoral wishes of the majority.
The move is supposedly being carried out to enable the state government to implement the 74th Amendment to the Constitution that says power should vest with the people; who are these people, one can only wonder. With the state government firm on carrying out delimitation of wards on the basis of population as given in the Census 2001, what is the task forward for residents of this so-called urban village, for that is what the delimitation exercise is seeking to achieve: fragmenting and grouping urban clusters with rural groupings, enabling the latter to give shape to the polity that is going to govern our city.
The state government has used the rules of the Haryana Municipal Corporation Act, 1994 after every official census, the total number of seats shall be fixed by the government on the basis of latest census figures to determine how the delimitation process shall be undertaken, it appears to have ignored the corporations own rules that govern delimitation. In case a certain area is included within or excluded from the limits of the municipal area, the population shall be ascertained on the spot in respect of such area and shall be added to or excluded from the latest Census figures:
If it is vote-bank politics that is governing the action that the state government is taking when it comes to delimitation of civic wards in Gurgaon, it is time for the groupings of different residents welfare associations (RWAs) to create another vote bank: one that will make the authorities sit up and take notice.
Thus, if minority vote banks are what governments in the country have always been catering to, it is time that we, the majority of Gurgaons residents, create another minority vote bank.
Such a vote bank exists, we only have to exploit it. Consider, for example, how the Delhi chief minister Sheila Dikshit sought to exploit the power of the various RWAs in the city through her Bhagidari concept. The concept was only floated after she realised the power that collective bargaining has for even individual grievances.
The difference that her effort has yielded is evident: the Delhi state government is spending lakhs of rupees to ensure that they remain on her side. Look at the advertisements that the Delhi government is issuing to ensure that the Bhagidari partnership works. It is time that we in Gurgaon got our different RWAs together on a common platform territorial and spatial differences are currently what is keeping them apart to voice a common concern: Gurgaon, the city, is ours.
While the RWAs have no prescribed legal authority, they have a voice that has made them major players in local governance, especially in the absence of municipal services and utilities.
It is the RWAs in Gurgaon that have become the conduits to the states urban development authority to demand access to basic needs like water and power. It is this that makes the RWAs a potential vote bank.
It is not as if this is the first time that RWAs in Gurgaon are gearing up politically; they have done so earlier too.
The difference is that today we have the chance of using such local bodies as vote banks to get results at the ground level. But, for RWAs to become vote banks, what is needed is a collective voice; a voice that addresses the needs of the majority, even though it may appear to come from the supposed minority.