Ritu Tawde: Mumbai’s Boss

 ALTHOUGH THERE had been much speculation over whether there would be a tussle between BJP and the Shiv Sena over the post of mayor in Mumbai’s Brihanmumbai Municipal Corporation (BMC), on February 11, the two parties jointly elected BJP’s Ritu Tawde as mayor. The post maybe largely cer­emonial, and the Sena might have been keen on it, but after having managed to finally break the Thackerays’ 25-year hold over the municipal body, there was no way BJP was going to let the chief’s post go to another.

Tawde had been a frontrunner right from the time the lottery process reserved the post for a woman from the General category. She was already a two-time corpo­rator, had built a profile through her work in BMC’s com­mittees (in the Education Committee, where she served as chairperson, and before that in the Works Commit­tee), was seen as an aggressive local leader and belonged to the Marathi community.

Her political career had started with Congress, but she switched to BJP in 2012, after which she would win her first election. Her rise from a first-time corporator to the city’s first citizen in the span of less than a decade-and-a-half is reflective not just of the opportunities that have come up in the political churn that the city has seen in the last 10 years, but also an ability on Tawde’s part to roll up her sleeves and grasp those opportunities. She’s often taken to the streets, whether to lead a protest to ban the display of lingerie on mannequins in 2012, which got her a lot of media attention, or morchas for more regular issues like water shortages and electricity tariff hikes. On her first day as mayor, with statements about removing allegedly illegal Bangladeshi hawkers from the city’s footpaths, she indicated her stint wasn’t going to be any less attention-grabbing.