Maratha Morcha Turns Mumbai Into India’s BLM, Fadnavis Left Clueless
The images from Mumbai this past week looked more like a civil rights uprising than a routine protest. Young men were dancing atop BEST buses, some were bathing on the city’s roads, while others casually walked into Westside stores and Burger King outlets near the Taj Hotel. For a city that already suffers from broken civic systems, such spectacles of disruption were bound to capture attention. To many, it felt like India’s own BLM moment—anger spilling out in raw, theatrical form. But behind the symbolism and chaos lies a far greater truth: this is not a protest out of nowhere but a direct result of Chief Minister Devendra Fadnavis’ inability to prevent Mumbai from becoming a theatre of anarchy.
The protestors, often caricatured as unruly or misguided, are in reality just a toolkit in the hands of political actors. The Maratha Morcha has long been fueled by grievances, but what unfolded in Mumbai is less about the agitators themselves and more about the failure of governance. Ordinary protestors do not decide to storm South Mumbai overnight. They were allowed in, facilitated by the absence of dialogue and the lack of any serious attempt to contain the movement before it spilled into the city’s heart. Fadnavis’ indecision gave them both the stage and the spotlight, leaving Mumbai residents to pay the price.
For Mumbaikars, frustration runs much deeper than this one episode. They live in a city where potholes swallow cars, where water supply remains erratic, where public transport infrastructure creaks under the weight of millions, and yet they pay some of the highest taxes in the country. When protestors take over buses and roads, it only adds insult to injury. The people’s anger is not primarily directed at the Maratha Morcha; it is directed at a government that has consistently failed to deliver even the basics. Citizens are trapped in a cycle where governance collapses on ordinary days, and when protests erupt, they are left entirely abandoned.
This abandonment stems from one man’s failure. Devendra Fadnavis has been utterly incapable of handling the agitation. He has neither opened channels of effective negotiation with protest leaders nor shown the decisiveness required to keep them outside Mumbai. The result is a spectacle of chaos in the financial capital, where the chief minister has become a bystander to events he was supposed to control. His weakness lies in both politics and administration—too timid to confront agitators directly, yet too indifferent to engage them meaningfully. It is this leadership vacuum that has turned Mumbai into a stage for disorder.
Placed in the larger context of Maharashtra’s politics, the Maratha Morcha is not an isolated event. It is the byproduct of years of caste-based mobilization, coalition insecurities, and an opportunistic opposition eager to exploit unrest. But even within these dynamics, the onus lies on the state’s leadership to ensure stability. Instead, the ruling BJP under Fadnavis has preferred to look away, feigning helplessness while the city buckles under the weight of both protests and poor governance. Mumbai has been reduced to a bargaining chip in a political contest, its citizens left stranded between power games.
The parallel with BLM is not just about dramatic visuals of protest but about what drives such eruptions: the collapse of trust in state institutions. For America, it was policing; for Mumbai, it is the crumbling of governance. The Maratha Morcha exposed not just social fissures but the fragility of the state’s response mechanisms. At its core, this was not about agitators dancing on buses or storming stores. It was about a chief minister who failed to prevent his city from descending into chaos. Mumbai does not need more morchas; it needs leadership that can deliver governance and prevent spectacles of collapse. Until then, Fadnavis will remain the man who stood clueless as Mumbai had its BLM moment.
