Central Park Dreams Trigger a Battle in Mumbai

Rajanish Kakade/Associated Press A view of the promenade along the Arabian Sea in Mumbai, Maharashtra, on July 5, 2012.

MUMBAIâ€" Few places in congested Mumbai are as unexpected and uplifting as its racecourse, a 225-acre expanse located near a sweep of coastline in the island city. Built on the swampy flats of Mahalaxmi in 1883, the racecourse hosts a 2,400-meter (2,600-yard) track for the annual races, as well as tony restaurants and South Mumbai’s only helipad. But it’s the oval of green - and the inner walking track - that brings people here every day for a dose of open sky and earth.

The future of this exceptional space is now under debate with a recent move by some political parties to convert the racecourse into a large public park - the newest version of an old dream for a Central Park in Mumbai.

The trigger is the expiration of a 99-year-old lease. Since 1914, the Royal Western India Turf Club has rented these grounds from the municipality, but the lease ended May 31 amid calls by the city mayor and the Shiv Sena, the nativist party that controls the municipal body, to close the track and make a theme park. The party’s chief, Uddhav Thackeray, has argued that racing is an elite sport and promotes gambling.

There has been no official decision from the authorities yet. But leaders of the Congress Party, which runs the state government, have indicated that they favor renewing the Turf Club’s lease. Their governing ally, the Nationalist Congress Party, recently criticized Mr. Thackeray’s proposal which referenced New York’s Central Park.

Every time Mr. Thackeray goes abroad, mocked the Nationalist Congress Party chief Sharad Pawar, “he comes back with new ideas.”

Prashanth Vishwanathan for The New York Times Luxury cars lined up in a ground at the Mahalaxmi race course in Mumbai, Maharashtra, on Feb. 25.

The dispute carries all the hallmarks of a classic Mumbai real estate battle - political rivalry, colonial legacy, complicated land ownership (the municipality owns one-third of the racecourse, the state government owns the rest), myriad laws and competing interest groups, including neighborhood associations, environmental activists and horse-racing fans.

The past decade has seen several such battles over land in the British-built part of Mumbai, in part because historical uses are ending - as in the city’s old mill district - or, as with the racecourse, century-old leases are expiring.

These contested spaces often reflect competing visions for the city. As colonial legacies fade, new groups and interests seek to claim a share of the land pie or at least to shape the urban landscape, with varying degrees of success.

Last year saw a standoff over a 12.5-acre textile mill between the National Textile Corporation and the Republican Sena, which represents Dalits, or untouchables. The corporation, which owns the mill, had planned to convert the prime waterfront plot into a five-star hotel and convention center. But the party wanted the land for a memorial for B.R. Ambedkar, their leader and one of India’s founding fathers. The mill is located near Chaitya Bhoomi, where Mr. Ambedkar’s ashes are interred and where hundreds of thousands of Dalits come to pay homage every year on the anniversary of his death.

In December 2011, Republican Sena workers, led by Anandraj Ambedkar, B.R. Ambedkar’s grandson and party leader, occupied the mill for 20 days to make their demand. The Indian government officially cleared the idea a year later, triggering a variety of proposals for the space.

One design seems inspired by New York, where the elder Mr. Ambedkar studied for a master’s degree at Columbia University. The plan proposes a 109-meter-tall sea-facing sculpture of Mr. Ambedkar, called the “Statue of Equality.”

Foreign cities loom large in most political vision statements for Mumbai, especially skyscrapered global business centers like Singapore. Mr. Pawar may scoff at importing ideas, but his own party’s platform for the 2004 election promised to “make Mumbai a Shanghai.”

Oddly enough, Shanghai offers the closest parallel for the debate over the racecourse. The Shanghai Race Club was set up in 1850 in the famous Bund area, which was occupied by Western powers after the Treaty of Nanking. Chinese were not allowed to enter the racecourse, unless they were servants of foreigners or workers at the racecourse, and the grounds were often used for foreign military reviews, according to the Chinese scholar Xiong Yuezhi in a 2008 paper for the journal Frontiers of History in China.

After World War II, however, there was a popular movement against reopening the racecourse on the grounds that it was a symbol of imperialism and that it promoted gambling. In August 1951, Communist authorities took over the racecourse to make it into a People’s Square. Today, the area is a recreational hub, with the club building converted into an art museum and part of the track turned into the large People’s Park.

Mumbai’s racecourse does not carry the same historical baggage; nor is it the tinderbox that is Gezi Park of Istanbul. But the debate over whom the racecourse is for and how it gets used is part of a larger, recurring conflict over space.

Some of that conflict was on display at a recent public meeting organized by the Observer Research Foundation, a local institution. The forum began with a presentation on famous city parks, including Hyde Park in London, Lodhi Gardens in Delhi and Central Park in New York. An architect, Allan Abraham, then showed a potential redesign of the area that would connect the racecourse to the local railway station via a green walkway. The suggestions included an underpass so the grounds could be extended across the arterial road that currently divides it from the sea.

Many were excited by these ideas. A 40-something South Mumbai resident expressed frustration at the fact that Delhi has opened several new parks and a subway in recent years while Mumbai’s public infrastructure has stagnated. He recalled that when he was young, he and his friends played games in the compounds of their apartment blocks.

“But now the compounds are full of cars,” he said.

Others were less convinced. A Turf Club member, Manek Daver, argued that the racecourse was an important part of city history and that it was not as exclusionary as it seemed. He wondered whether the municipality would be able to protect this space, as many local gardens have been swallowed up by legal and illegal development.

Some spoke of a “trust deficit,” with not just public bodies but also with the Turf Club, which was recently fined for unauthorized sublets.

“We’re struggling for incremental change, to save one footpath here and there,” said Rishi Aggarwal, a local environmental activist and an Observer Research Foundation fellow. “There’s so much cynicism, it doesn’t allow us the liberty of really dreaming big for the city.”

On Mr. Aggarwal’s mind, and those of some others present at the meeting, was the last big dream for Mumbai - and how it was lost to commercial interests.

That fight also had to do with old textile mills, which occupy almost 600 acres in central Mumbai. From the late 19th to the mid-20th century, the colonial government leased out large plots for 99 years and 999 years to entrepreneurs, who turned the city into textile powerhouse. But by the 1980s and 1990s, mill owners were moving their operations to the hinterland, in the teeth of worker opposition, and the state government had begun to look for ways to allow their closure.

In 1996, a government committee led by the renowned architect Charles Correa came up with an urban renewal plan for the mill district that included developing eight adjacent plots into a “Golden Triangle” of business around a “Central Park.”

Mr. Correa’s plan was never taken up, but the land-sharing formula on which it was based - to divide the land between mill owners and public agencies - was tweaked in 2001 to favor the mill owners. Trade unions, environmental and citizens groups challenged that rule change but eventually lost their case in the Supreme Court in 2006.

By one estimate, the rule change brought down the share of land that might have been available for public housing and parks from 326 acres to 57 acres.

Mr. Correa’s dream of a Central Park was effectively ended. But the current debate shows that the idea remains deeply seductive in a city with one of the worst ratios of open space to people - 0.03 acres per thousand persons, compared with 1.5 acres in New York.

Still, many are wary of the Shiv Sena. The party, known for its divisive anti-immigrant politics, recently tried to get land allocated for a memorial to their late leader and party founder, Bal Thackeray. The racecourse proposal is seen by many as another way to achieve that goal, as well as to show that “its writ still runs in Mumbai,” as Prakash Akolkar, author of a book on the Shiv Sena, told a local paper.

Getting the Turf Club out of the racecourse seems unlikely, however. The state government rarely takes back old leasehold land, says Vidyadhar Phatak, a retired urban planner.

What the authorities could do, he said, is make the grounds more accessible to the public - just as they did in the 1970s when they got the club to throw open the grounds on nonrace days to walkers and joggers.

Vaishnavi Chandrashekhar is a journalist based in Mumbai. She has worked with The Christian Science Monitor in Boston and The Times of India in Mumbai and is a former editor of Time Out Mumbai .