ENTANGLED URBANISM
Sanjay Srivastava
Oxford University Press;
317 pages; Rs 950
In the recently concluded Assembly elections, an overwhelming majority of Delhi's underclass voters voted for the Aam Aadmi Party (AAP). And they are the ones, at least 66 per cent of them, according to a survey by the Centre for the Study of Developing Societies (CSDS), who ensured the AAP a landslide victory.
It is not that Delhi's poor have always voted for the AAP. In the two previous elections soon before - the 2013 Assembly and the 2014 Lok Sabha - the Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) got more votes among the poor than the AAP, according to CSDS surveys. In fact, in the 2014 Lok Sabha elections, the BJP received nearly 54 per cent of votes from Delhi's underclass as opposed to a mere 25 per cent for the then new entrant AAP.
Yet there was a reversal in a matter of just few months. The same survey showed that in the 2015 elections, the AAP gained a massive 44-percentage-point lead over the saffron party when it came to getting votes among the poorest sections of the electorate. Such sharp swings in political behaviour of an urban underclass will baffle most pollsters, preoccupied as they are with data sets and voting patterns. For someone with a fair idea of the living conditions of Delhi's underclass, however, these swings should not come as such a big surprise.
The book under review adds to our understanding of the most deprived sections of Delhi's underclass, the basti or slum dwellers. The author explains their dilemma in these words: "For basti residents, the search for intimacy with the state and assertions of distance from it constitute enmeshed strategies of securing the material means of life as well as the emotional comforts of fellow-feeling in a hostile urban environment. The constant calibration of identity - the relay between strategic statism and quotidian communitarianism - is the irreducible condition of life at the margins of the city."
The operative words are hostile urban environment, intimacy and distance from the state, and calibration of identity. Hostile because the city is always in denial mode when it comes to acknowledging the existence of slum dwellers. It is precisely for this reason that they "search for intimacy with the state" just to legitimise their claim to their share of urban space. But then, the state's priorities keep changing, forcing slum dwellers to make constant adjustments, mostly very painful.
The author did most of his field work in the slum settlement of Nangla Matchi. The settlement was located on the western bank of the Yamuna river near Delhi's Pragati Maidan before it was demolished in 2006. He brings the settlement alive through the life histories of individuals. "These biographies are full bodied narratives of experiences of work and unemployment, settlement and displacement, violence and its cessation, intimacies and stranger-hood, and the myriad cultural economies of the city through which poor women and men negotiate life, death and the pleasures and sufferings that fall in between," the author explains.
What is common to all characters is their desperation to be on the right side of the state and its machinery on the ground. A favourable state can get them a below-poverty-line card and the multiple benefits that come with it, an elusive proof of identity and a legitimate claim over the space they call their home. A hostile state, however, can be disruptive and at times life-threatening for them. Such desperation is amenable to exploitation by politicians. It is likely that the AAP leaders helped them, at least in perception, find answers to their "search for intimacy with the state".
The book, however, is not just about slums and their inhabitants. It is also about the transition of the Delhi Improvement Trust (DIT) to the Delhi Development Authority, of middle-class activism and resident welfare associations, of the culture of consumption and shopping malls, and of the connection between slums and malls. It seeks to make intelligible connections among all moving parts of a megacity. It does so with the help of characters - some unique and some like the boy next door.
In that sense, the book is an ethnographic account of Delhi in all its dimensions. It could have been very interesting, too, given the diversity of issues and subjects it covers, if only the author had chosen to use more everyday language and less sociological jargon. But then, for a reputed sociologist addressing mostly the exclusive club of social scientists, such a choice is difficult to make.
