The Incident That Wasn’t Supposed to Happen
On the morning of March 11, 2026, a photograph began moving swiftly across social media. It showed the official vehicle of Mumbai Mayor Ritu Tawde fitted with red and blue flashing lights, the kind you normally associate with police cars and ambulances. The image, posted on X by a user questioning whether such installation was legally authorised, did not stay quiet for long. Within two days, RTI activist Anil Galgali had written formally to the mayor’s office demanding clarification. By March 14, the Brihanmumbai Municipal Corporation had removed the lights entirely, from both the mayor’s car and the escort Scorpio that typically carried her protocol officer and personal assistants. A controversy that took four days to resolve had taken nearly a decade to make possible.
That sentence deserves a little unpacking.
What the Law Actually Says
The legal position is not ambiguous. In May 2017, the Central Government issued a directive banning red beacons on government vehicles with the express purpose of rolling back what officials then called VIP culture. The order was sweeping. It removed red lights from the cars of ministers, bureaucrats, and elected representatives across the country. Police vehicles and genuine emergency services were exempted. Everyone else was not.
The Maharashtra government had moved even earlier. In December 2013, following a Supreme Court directive, the state pruned its list of posts entitled to use beacons and published a revised version in 2014. The Mumbai mayor did not make that revised list. Prior to the revision, the mayor’s car had been permitted to use an amber beacon, but that entitlement was removed when the new list came into effect. So the mayor’s vehicle has not been legally entitled to any beacon for over a decade. And yet, when a brand-new official vehicle was handed over to Mayor Tawde after she assumed office, it came equipped with red and blue lights as a matter of apparent routine.
The question this raises is not about the mayor. It is about the BMC’s own institutional memory.
The BMC’s Convenient Amnesia
Mumbai’s civic body is among the richest municipal corporations in Asia. It manages an annual budget that runs into tens of thousands of crores. It employs a vast administrative machinery with legal cells, vigilance wings, and procurement officers. And yet nobody in the procurement chain, nobody in the motor pool, nobody in the protocol section thought to verify whether the lights being installed on the first citizen of India’s largest city were, in fact, legal. The escort Scorpio carrying the mayor’s support staff was separately fitted with the same lights. That suggests this was not a one-off error. It looks more like a standard operating procedure that nobody had thought to question.
The Political Layer
The opposition was predictably sharp. Kishori Pednekar, the Leader of the Opposition in the BMC, asked whether the Mayor of Mumbai had become bigger than the Prime Minister and the Chief Minister, invoking the 2017 ban that had stripped both offices of their red beacons. Chief Minister Devendra Fadnavis pushed back, saying the light had been positioned on the bonnet rather than mounted atop the vehicle and that attempts were being made to target the mayor without valid reason. It is a distinction that matters legally but lands awkwardly in public perception. A flashing red and blue light is a flashing red and blue light. Its position on the vehicle is unlikely to impress a pedestrian stuck behind the convoy on a Western Express Highway bottleneck.
Mayor Tawde’s own response was straightforward. She said she had no interest in a beacon car, acknowledged the administration had erred, and stated she had been using the vehicle provided to her, assuming compliance had already been verified. That is a reasonable position. The beacon had previously been removed from the mayor’s vehicle during the tenure of then mayor Vishwanath Mahadeshwar, which means the 2017 rules had once been followed correctly. Someone, somewhere along the line, forgot to keep following them.
How Other Countries Handle This
The question is worth asking plainly. Do other democracies have this problem at all?
The short answer is no. In the United Kingdom, red flashing lights on the front of vehicles are prohibited by law. Blue has been the designated colour for emergency response since the Road Traffic Act of 1988. The idea of a politician’s car fitted with a beacon is not something British law even contemplates. Across continental Europe, France, Germany, the Netherlands, and the Scandinavian countries restrict flashing lights strictly to police, fire, ambulance, and a small number of designated priority services. American mayors do not have beacon cars. Neither do senators or cabinet secretaries in normal circumstances. Security motorcades involve law enforcement escorts, not lights fitted to the official’s personal vehicle.
The Supreme Court of India, in its 2013 ruling on VIP culture, noted that the use of red lights on the vehicles of public representatives has no parallel in the world’s major democracies. That observation was made over a decade ago and remains accurate. The pattern of beacon culture broadly follows the subcontinent’s colonial administrative inheritance. Pakistan, Bangladesh, and Sri Lanka share comparable practices. What distinguishes India is that a serious legal effort was made to dismantle the practice in 2017. The Mumbai episode is a reminder of how quickly institutional memory around reform can erode.
The Feudal Mirror: What the Scholars Have Long Been Saying
The red beacon did not survive in India simply because bureaucrats chose to keep it. It survived because a significant section of the Indian public did not object to it. Some actively celebrated it. And understanding why requires going beyond the legal record.
Ashis Nandy, one of India’s most rigorous political psychologists, argued in his 1983 work The Intimate Enemy that colonialism succeeded not merely through physical force but through reshaping how colonised people understood authority and deference. Nandy’s central insight was that colonialism does not end when the colonial ruler departs. It continues in the psychological structures the colonial encounter built into everyday life. The subject people internalise the vocabulary of power. The trappings of authority become not just tolerated but desired, because they confirm a social order that has been absorbed as natural. The red light, in this reading, does not just say that someone important is coming. It says that some people are, by the nature of their position, more important than others in ways that must be made visible on public roads. That is a colonial idea dressed in civic clothing.
Dipankar Gupta, the sociologist whose published work addresses the gap between India’s democratic forms and its social reality, argued in Mistaken Modernity that India’s challenge is not a failure to modernise technologically but a failure to build what he called a culture of citizenship. A culture of citizenship requires that a person on the pavement be treated, in law and in practice, as equal to the person in the car passing in front of them. The beacon is a small but vivid piece of evidence that such a culture has not yet fully arrived. The political system produces voters. It has not yet reliably produced citizens in the sense Gupta means.
Gupta argued further that the distance between voter and citizen in India is maintained partly by a political class that finds it advantageous to keep constituents in a posture of dependence and deference rather than of informed demand. The neta who arrives with a flashing light and a small procession is performing something specific. He is telling the people around him what kind of relationship they have with power. Not a relationship of accountability. A relationship of proximity to the court.
This darbar logic has deep roots. Following the abolition of privy purses and princely privileges in 1971, India’s feudal hierarchy was dismantled on paper. But the culture of unquestioned deference that had characterised princely India did not disappear with the legal order that produced it. It migrated sideways, from princes to politicians, who absorbed the habits of the old order with considerable enthusiasm. The imported SUV replaced the royal palanquin. The flashing beacon replaced the ceremonial standard. The content changed. The underlying logic did not.
What makes this durably interesting is that it is not a one-sided imposition. Nandy argued in his essays on Indian political culture that ordinary people often participate willingly in the theatre of power. Deference is not always imposed from above. It is sometimes offered from below, because the social logic of the community makes it feel like the correct response. The red light announces the VIP. The crowd acknowledges the announcement. Both parties are confirmed in their positions. The transaction is complete.
You can ban the beacon. You cannot, by legislative act, dissolve the cultural appetite for hierarchy that makes the beacon feel natural in the first place.
The Larger Picture
Mumbai itself has been moving in a different direction. The same city that produced the RTI objection and the social media post that forced the BMC’s hand is a city where suburban train commuters travel without any expectation of deference, where auto-rickshaw drivers argue with ministers, and where a ward councillor who blocks a footpath can find himself photographed and reported within the hour. That democratic instinct matters.
The lights came off. The administration apologised. The political cycle moved on. But the habit that produced those lights in the first place, the unthinking assumption that authority must announce itself and that rank must be made visible on public roads, has not been addressed. And that is the story worth watching.
Subscribe Deshwale on YouTube
