City comes out to vote, but still can’t catch up with state
Mumbai’s turnout of 52.4% was nearly 11% behind state’s average, which has traditionally always been the case in Assembly polls
MUMBAI: It’s not an admirable tradition to follow but Mumbai has done it in this Assembly election too: lagged behind the rest of Maharashtra in average voter turnout.
Mumbai registered an average turnout of 52.4% on Wednesday, nearly 11% behind the state’s average, according to the Election Commission’s provisional data.
However, Mumbai went past the 50% mark, the first time since the 1995 Assembly election when the turnout was a shade more than 58%. Since then, the city’s turnout had not even reached 50%. The lowest so far has been in 1980, at 37.1%.
In the 2009 polls, 13 of the 20 constituencies with the lowest turnouts in the state were in Mumbai. They included Colaba, Mumbadevi, Dharavi, Versova, Malad and Bandra among others.
Colaba in south Mumbai has registered the lowest voter turnouts in five of the last six Assembly elections from 1985.
The 2014 general election too affirmed the trend: all six Lok Sabha constituencies in the city ranked among the 10 in Maharashtra with lowest turnouts.
Till the 2014 polls, the maximum difference between the average turnouts in the city and the rest of the state was in 1999, when the turnout in Mumbai was nearly 17% less than the state which recorded 60.9%.
It used to be the other way round till the 1978 Assembly election. Voter turnout in the city surpassed that in Maharashtra, though by narrow margins of 1.4% to 3%. In the 2004 and 2009 Assembly elections, the voter turnout in Mumbai lagged behind the rest of the state by 15% and 13.4% respectively.
In the local BMC polls in 2012 too, the average turnout was around 45%.
Why do Mumbai’s voters not turn up to vote? There could be a number of complex factors including low political mobilisation compared to the rural areas, the much-discussed middle class voter apathy, and the level of political intervention voters feel the need for, according to political scientists. “It could be a case of plain and simple apathy among the voters in the city,” said sociologist Nandini Sardesai.
On the other hand, the low turnouts reflect “a sense of the city’s auto-pilot mechanism”, according to political analyst B Venkatesh Kumar. “Systems and processes are in place here and the city runs in an autonomous mode. Also, irrespective of the political dispensation, the city’s needs are taken care of with priority. So, the incentive to vote is lower,” he said.