Tukaram Mundhe And The Fear That Mumbai Had Forgotten
By Gajanan Khergamker
There are moments in the life of a city when the arrival of one public servant manages to disturb an arrangement that has existed for so long that people have begun to mistake it for normalcy. Mumbai has witnessed such moments before, most famously during the tenure of G.R. Khairnar, the municipal commissioner who acquired the sobriquet of Demolition Man because he demonstrated, with unusual ferocity, that municipal authority was not merely a decorative concept and that those accustomed to getting their way could, occasionally, be made to answer to the law.
Tukaram Mundhe appears to have triggered a similar public memory, although the battleground this time is not merely one of illegal structures and encroachments but something far more intimate - the food that enters the homes of millions of Mumbaikars every day.
What makes Mundhe's current impact particularly interesting is that his resonance appears to cut across the city's otherwise formidable social and economic divisions. The affluent Mumbaikar and the middle-class family may inhabit very different worlds, but both eventually confront the same question when they stand before a dairy counter, a grocery shelf or a food outlet. Can what is being sold actually be trusted? The difference may lie in what each can afford to buy, but the anxiety is fundamentally the same.
That is perhaps why the sight of milk and curd disappearing from neighbourhood dairy shelves earlier than usual has acquired a significance far greater than its retail value. One should, of course, be careful about drawing sweeping conclusions from what is essentially anecdotal evidence, but if ordinary retailers are becoming more cautious about stocking or selling products because they fear regulatory scrutiny, then something important has changed in the atmosphere. For years, the consumer has lived with the fear of what might be in the product; now, perhaps, the seller has begun to experience some fear of what might happen if the product is found to be what it should not be.
And there is nothing inherently wrong with that fear. A citizen should never have to fear the State for simply going about his or her life, but a person who knowingly violates a law designed to protect public health ought to have a very healthy fear of being caught. Somewhere in our eagerness to describe every enforcement action as excessive, inconvenient or harassing, we have forgotten this elementary distinction. Regulation without enforcement is merely suggestion, and a law whose violation carries little likelihood of consequence eventually becomes an invitation to calculate the cost of breaking it.
That calculation has governed much of urban India for years. The encroacher calculates the likelihood of removal; the builder calculates the likelihood of prosecution; the polluter calculates the cost of compliance against the cost of being caught; the trader calculates the possibility of inspection; the food operator calculates whether a sample will actually be collected, tested and acted upon; and the politically connected calculate something more sophisticated - whether an inconvenient officer will still be in office by the time the consequences arrive. It is this mathematics of impunity that an assertive public servant disrupts. And, that is why Mundhe's significance extends beyond any particular raid, inspection or enforcement action.
Mumbai has never really suffered from a shortage of laws. It suffers from the gap between what the law says and what the administration is prepared to enforce. There are rules governing footpaths, yet pedestrians are routinely pushed onto roads; there are regulations governing construction, yet unauthorised structures continue to proliferate; there are elaborate provisions governing food safety, yet consumers remain uncertain about what exactly they are buying; and there are innumerable municipal regulations which exist in official records with far greater certainty than they exist on the ground.
The ordinary Mumbaikar knows this without requiring a policy paper to explain it. He knows that the footpath will probably be occupied, that the road will probably be dug up again, that the complaint may or may not receive attention and that the person violating the rule may well have a better understanding of the system than the person trying to live by it. What has been described for years as the resilience of Mumbai is sometimes nothing more than the extraordinary ability of its citizens to absorb institutional failure without losing their temper.
That resilience has a darker side, it breeds cynicism. Citizens do not necessarily become lawless when institutions fail them; they become resigned. They stop expecting the system to work. They stop complaining because they have complained before. They stop believing that the rulebook is meant for everyone equally. Eventually, they begin to treat the State not as an institution that protects them but as another obstacle to be negotiated.
That is an extraordinarily dangerous point for any democracy. It is against this background that the public response to Mundhe becomes significant. The affection he has generated is not necessarily an affection for the man himself; it is an affection for what his conduct appears to represent. In a city where public authority has too often been perceived as cautious before the powerful and uncompromising with the powerless, an officer who appears willing to take on entrenched interests provides something that citizens have been deprived of for a long time - the reassuring sight of authority being exercised without apology.
This is where the Khairnar comparison becomes relevant, even if imperfect. Khairnar's reputation was built in a different era and around a different kind of enforcement. Mundhe's methods and responsibilities are not identical, and there is little value in manufacturing a rivalry or equivalence between two officers separated by decades. What connects them in the public imagination is something simpler and far more important. Both demonstrated that a government officer could become uncomfortable for people who had become comfortable with the idea that government could be managed.
That is the real source of the disturbance. Not the petty shopkeeper alone. Not the trader alone. Not even the powerful food lobby alone. It is the possibility that the old assumption - nothing will happen - may no longer be entirely safe. For the ordinary citizen, that possibility is liberating. For those who have depended upon weak enforcement, it is understandably unsettling.
And perhaps this is why Mundhe has managed to strike a chord across classes. The wealthy may be able to insulate themselves from many of Mumbai's civic failures, but they cannot entirely insulate themselves from a breakdown in public health. The middle class may have more choices than the poor, but it too remains dependent on the integrity of systems regulating food, water, transport and public infrastructure. The poor, meanwhile, have the least capacity to absorb the consequences when those systems fail.
The suffering is different, the vulnerability is not. A contaminated food product does not first ask whether the consumer lives in Colaba, Dadar or Dharavi. A broken footpath does not recognise a bank balance. A failed public-health system does not stop at the gates of a gated community. The affluent may purchase better alternatives, but they cannot purchase an entirely separate civic ecosystem.
This is why food enforcement matters so much as food is where the State enters the home without knocking. The government may never know what happens inside a household, but the regulatory system determines, to a considerable extent, what is permitted to reach its kitchen. When that system works, the citizen rarely notices it but when it fails, the consequences can be deeply personal. Which is why the State has an obligation to be particularly unforgiving when commercial convenience is placed above public health.
Mundhe has also taken a broom to another comfortable myth Mumbai has lived with for years: that hygiene is a function of price, pedigree and postcode. The assumption was almost instinctive. The plush club must be clean. The venerable, family-run Parsi restaurant must be impeccable. The celebrated restaurant, the fashionable café, the famous food outlet with generations of goodwill behind it must, by definition, meet the standards expected of a clean establishment. The roadside vada-pav stall, the pani-puri cart and the humble neighbourhood eatery, on the other hand, were presumed guilty even before inspection. Mundhe’s inspections have unsettled that lazy hierarchy. Hygiene, he has reminded Mumbai, is not a matter of reputation. It is a matter of compliance.
That is perhaps the more consequential disruption. Mundhe did not merely target the visibly vulnerable; he challenged the powerful and, with them, the narratives that sway the Gram in particular and the Junta at large. He questioned the idea that exclusivity guarantees cleanliness and that informality automatically means filth. In one clean sweep, the old binary between the respectable food establishment and the allegedly unhygienic roadside vendor has been exposed for what it often was: a convenient social prejudice masquerading as public-health wisdom. The message is uncomfortable precisely because it is egalitarian. No club, restaurant, family name, celebrity chef or established reputation can substitute for a clean kitchen, safe food and compliance with the law.
But there is an equally important caveat. Mundhe must not become the system as that would be the ultimate failure. If Mumbai needs one extraordinary officer to make food businesses comply, then Mumbai has not solved its food-safety problem; it has merely found a temporary antidote to institutional weakness. If enforcement weakens the moment the officer is transferred, then what appeared to be administrative reform was only administrative personality.
The real success would be far less glamorous. It would be a dairy owner who follows the rules even when nobody is watching; a manufacturer who understands that adulteration will be detected irrespective of political connections; a food inspector who conducts a sampling exercise without waiting for instructions from above; a laboratory whose report cannot be influenced; and a consumer who no longer has to wonder whether the product before him is safe.
That is what institutionalised enforcement looks like. And that is ultimately what Mumbai should demand - not heroes, crusaders or officers with cult followings. Public servants who simply do the job they were appointed to do, and institutions strong enough to ensure that they can continue doing it without fear or favour.
Until that happens, however, Mumbai is entitled to take some comfort from what it is witnessing. Because after years in which the ordinary citizen has been made to feel that every rule has an exception, every complaint has a price and every powerful interest has a way around accountability, there is something almost restorative about seeing authority move in the opposite direction. For once, the question may not be whether the citizen can survive the system. For once, those operating beyond the law may be wondering whether the system has finally noticed them. That reversal matters.
It restores something that Mumbai has been losing for years: the belief that the law is not merely a piece of paper, that public office is not merely a designation and that government is not an arrangement between the powerful and those who know how to reach them. It belongs to the people.
Perhaps Tukaram Mundhe's greatest achievement, therefore, is not that he has frightened a few shopkeepers, unsettled a few operators or disrupted a few established practices. It is that he has reminded an increasingly cynical city that the State can still say no. And in Mumbai, where so many people have spent so many years hearing that everything is possible if one knows the right person, that simple word 'no' can sound remarkably like hope.
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