Why are confected capital cities so conspicuously unloved? Critics of Canberra do not tire of repeating the jibe about "a good sheep station spoilt". Opponents of Brasilia claim that city comprises a few striking buildings, surrounded by slums, surrounded in turn by a jungle, then surrounded by nothing at all. Canadians hostile to Ottawa mock the place as a sub-Arctic lumber camp now putting on airs. Pretoria is so ridiculously subordinate to Johannesburg that it may one day become a suburb. Those sceptical of Washington ridicule the city for its extreme humidity, mock its politics as "Hollywood for ugly people", or contend that thinking "inside the Beltway" bears no resemblance to the "real" America beyond. Israelis living on the coast do not dare to disparage Jerusalem, but they certainly regard that city as in a peculiar, cocooned world, with little in common with Tel Aviv or Haifa. Even residents of crime-riddled, disease-raddled Lagos look down on Nigeria's newish capital, Abuja.
This unseemly inter-urban animosity reflects all manner of unworthy considerations. Simple jealousy is one. In manicured cities, the grass really is greener. In planned capitals, public spaces are laid out on a grander scale, fountains and frippery abound, parking spots are easy to find. The second grievance is the judgment that any new capital comprises an indulgent, pretentious waste of money. Everyone wants money wasted to buy indulgence and pretension close to home. The conviction that you live in the real capital – be that Rio, Montreal or Sydney – is a third. The Canadian and Australian capitals represent the revenge of federation. If sophisticates from Toronto or Melbourne will not come to work in Ottawa or Canberra, then the government can be stocked with folk from the poor, distant, outlying provinces, the Maritimes or prairies in Canada's case, Tasmania and Queensland in our own.
Those rivalries are real enough but still a bit milquetoast, the stuff of comedy stand-up routines or set-piece quarrels about budget shares. Squabbling between cities becomes rancorous and venomous only in one country, India, in the mutual disdain between the business-commercial-financial capital, Bombay-Mumbai, and the formal seat of government since 1911, New Delhi.
Chinese scholars suspicious of their capital used to claim, defensively but a bit wistfully, that "the mountains are high, and the Emperor is far away". With Mumbai and Delhi, no such distancing is credible. No single mountain is to be found between the two cities. The capital is only an hour and a bit's flight away. Trains may be delayed and highways dilapidated, but anyone in the bossing-around business can be relied on to fly. Moreover, the worst brand of Delhi bureaucrats have been known to bump other passengers off flights to ensure they can travel whenever they wish. Abuse of power is not the prerogative of "the creamy layer": any number of petty-ante bureaucrats at the Centre pretend to speak in the name and with the authority of their latter-day emperors.
In my experience, familiarity between the two cities does not breed the mutual contempt. Other things do. Locals in Mumbai were not oblivious to Delhi's charms. They often had family there. They visited regularly. They enjoyed spending time in Delhi's galleries, among its designers, with its writers. They respected Delhi's column, its observatory, royal tomb, fort and bazaar. They earnestly wished Delhi had a more benign location, a tolerable climate, a safer environment for women, or a modicum of decent restaurants. The point of contention for residents of Mumbai was not the city, Delhi itself, but the Centre, the national government.
Delhi returned the favour with interest. All credible national leaders in Delhi might sense that managing a country so vast, so disparate and so fissiparous as India sometimes seems like an imperial fantasy. Those leaders know that they have to govern and control Mumbai if they are to succeed at all. India runs on the basis of an informal, grudging duopoly, with Delhi having power Mumbai covets, and Mumbai wealth that Delhi needs to tap. To an outsider, this might appear a little like Jack Sprat and his wife. The powers that be in Delhi face a straightforward choice in dealing with Mumbai. They can either serve as the mother-ship, providing resources, technical expertise, funding and logistics support. Or they can turn into the Indian mother-in-law: intrusive, impatient, bossy, domineering. Occasionally, they pick the wrong option.
People in Mumbai are wary of Delhi, sceptical of the place, but never really respectful. One retired secretary from the Centre vowed to me that he would never visit Mumbai. There nobody took his exalted rank seriously, let alone his associated pretensions and assorted privileges. Rather, Mumbai locals assumed that anyone working for the government – in however senior a job – would be a dumb, cheap crook. If they were willing to accept low wages, they were dumb. If they were prepared to live amidst dust and heat, well away from the sea, they were cheap. If they were disposed to exploit their job corruptly for personal enrichment, while gratuitously hobbling those generating wealth, then they were crooks too.
The cheap, dumb crook tag might seem pejorative, but there are whiffs of collateral evidence to back up the stereotype. Mumbai wariness denoted a sour recognition of the manifold ways in which the Centre could and would damage your interests. The Centre had a formidable lick in its tail, and Bombay business folk in my time delighted in competing in telling horror stories about Delhi. Some were surely embellished, but the gist was that rules might be amended to favour competitors. Clearances might take forever to process. Retrospective taxation demands might devour profits. Bureaucrats might lose your file. Any attempt at arbitration or dispute settlement might drag on for decades. (In Bombay itself, you can wait nineteen years for your case to come to trial, by which time costs have soared and damage settlements evaporated with inflation.)
Nobody fears Ottawa, Brasilia or Canberra in the same way. In those three federations, much of governments' capacity to be irksome and meddlesome rests with the states rather than the Centre. The national government may plan and direct, meddle and muddle, but daily life is largely the preserve of state authorities.
In Mumbai, even if much of the smothering over-regulation of the post-colonial licence Raj has been abolished, vestiges of the inspector Raj are alive and well. Inspectors turned up at one spick-and-span factory, had a perfunctory look around with their "peons" slouching behind them, then advised it that it was gravely in breach of a law. The law in question had been passed before India's First War of Independence (1857) to ward off plague in the city by requiring that every wall in the building had to be whitewashed to a height of one metre.
One executive insisted that no inducement in the world would persuade him to have anything to do with the government at the Centre – as a partner, a contractor, a consumer, a supplier or an adviser. Another business figure claimed that junior clerks in Delhi, puffed up by position and pomposity, grossly misunderstood his business, misread the relevant regulations, misapplied the law, and refused to pay any heed to the financial commitments or deadlines which would determine the profitability of the business.
Perhaps those complaining about ATO assessments take a similarly self-righteous tack. Indian business figures with no specific axe to grind – for the moment – would invariably grumble about Delhi bureaucrats who had never met a payroll or filled a contract. In other federations, there seems to be more credence given to the view that winning a government contract or finding yourself on a government payroll can provide a handy aid to a struggling business.
Everyone wants money wasted to buy indulgence and pretension close to home.
Hostility between Mumbai and Delhi might be too deeply entrenched to change. Both cities find point-scoring politically nourishing, even enjoyable. If Mumbai-Delhi is a lost cause, then Montreal-Ottawa and Rio-Brasilia might well be too. As for us, though, we could have done better. We had the option of a stunningly beautiful site for a capital city, one which could have wrapped itself around beaches and wound itself up into forests. Our capital would have boasted a sea breeze, glittering sand and good fishing. Nobody, let alone the inhabitants of Sydney and Melbourne, would have presumed to condescend to Jervis Bay.
Mark Thomas is a Canberra-based writer.
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