Mediating “Slum”

On February 8, 2012—a week before polling day in the run-up to Mumbai’s 2012 municipal corporation election—I received a frantic phone call from Seema, the candidate on whose ultimately unsuccessful bid to municipal office my research attention that winter focused.1 Please come to her home straight away, Seema said; she had something “serious” to talk about. When I arrived, she served me tea and nervously explained that the copartisan MLA (Member of the State Legislative Assembly) in whose district Seema was contesting—a man named Mastan Aziz, popularly known as Mastanbhai, who by all accounts had been responsible for Seema’s having been awarded the National Congress Party (NCP) ticket—had phoned her that morning, instructing her to ask her “university friend” (me) to make an official press statement declaring that we were, in fact, “friends.” Seema explained that an opposition party candidate, a man named Shaffir (who was not only Seema’s next-door neighbor but also a not-too-distant relative by marriage), had been spreading rumors about her tenure as elected councilor in an area I’ll call Chikoowadi—a nearby constituency where Seema currently held elected office but from which she was now ineligible to recontest due to changes in the district’s gender and caste reservations.2

I had been back in Mumbai for a few months already when Seema’s call came that February morning, following up on lingering questions from my previous research—which had been about everyday politics of water provisioning and access.3 That earlier work, carried out between 2008 and 2010 for my doctoral dissertation, had focused on what I had initially—and wrongheadedly—been thinking of as a sort of “informal politics”: the everyday material processes and practices by means of which Mumbaikars actually made everyday substantive claims to urban resources (say, water) but which existed (by definition) outside the official institutions and rhythms of democracy and bureaucracy. Once in Mumbai, however, this tidy analytical divide between “formal” institutions and “informal” infrastructural practices readily collapsed under ethnographic inquiry; everyday material authority and urban expertise, I quickly discovered, are intimately intertwined with the formal institutions, offices, and rhythms of democracy and bureaucracy. As I wrote in the conclusion of my book Pipe Politics, which was based on that research:

The intricate webs of knowledge, trust, and authority that shape informal political interventions can be (and increasingly are) articulated precisely through the formal institutions of electoral democracy, official procedures of municipal governance, and sometimes even policy frameworks that they challenge and reconfigure. This is not a politics of concession, corruption, or clientelism, nor is it a politics of subaltern resistance or revolution. This is representative politics in full swing, whereby claims to urban land and resources are fought out on the battleground of electoral democracy. The result is not necessarily a prettier, more just or equitable city but rather one whose future is hotly contested.4

I headed back to Mumbai in 2011–12 to study this “battleground of electoral democracy”—to learn more about the material-infrastructural politics of elections—for what would become (although I didn’t realize it at the time) the first phase of a decade-long study for this book.

I chose to focus the initial phase of research on an area of the city with which I was already somewhat familiar—a low-income neighborhood I’ll call Daulat Nagar, which is situated in the swampy reclaimed areas of Mumbai’s eastern suburbs. I selected Daulat Nagar on the suggestion and invitation of Seema herself. Seema was a sitting member of Mumbai’s Municipal Corporation—known as the BMC5—an elected city councilor, or nagarsevak—a word that literally means “city servant” but in Mumbai is glossed (in English) as “corporator.” Seema and I had gotten to know one another over the years I’d spent trailing plumbers and engineers around her incumbent district in Chikoowadi. Over years of regular contact and conversation, our research relationship settled into an easy familiarity and mutual appreciation: we were women of roughly the same age, each navigating an overwhelmingly male-dominated city and society. Notwithstanding the dramatic differences in our life trajectories and circumstances, our connection was one of mutual respect and curiosity. I’d been struggling to gain reliable access to an election campaign in Chikoowadi and had asked Seema for advice. She shrugged and offered: Why not just follow her campaign in Daulat Nagar instead?

Sitting in her living room that February morning in 2012, a few days before polling, Seema nervously explained to me that Shaffir and his campaign team had been spreading rumors that she was infamous in her incumbent district in Chikoowadi for making official “complaints” to the municipal authorities about “unauthorized constructions” and then extorting cash payments from residents in exchange for withdrawing the complaints. Seema recounted anxiously how reports that she was a virtuoso player of this “complaint natak” (complaint game)—a not-uncommon pastime in Mumbai—was spreading through Daulat Nagar like wildfire.6 Mastanbhai hoped that a press statement about Seema’s “friendship” with an international scholar affiliated with an esteemed area university might be helpful in propping up the candidate’s flagging reputation.7

Seema’s (and Mastanbhai’s) desperate appeal and frantic effort to rescue Seema’s reputation gestures toward some of the most pressing issues confronting voters not only in Daulat Nagar but in Mumbai’s popular neighborhoods more generally—neighborhoods that tend to be treated for policy purposes as “slums,” and thus are often associated (inaccurately) with ideas of illegality. Although the word slum is frequently used in Mumbai interchangeably with terms like encroachment and illegal area, there is nothing in the 1971 Maharashtra Slum Areas (Improvement, Clearance and Redevelopment) Act’s (hereafter Slum Act) official definition of “slum” that associates this category of settlement in Mumbai with formality or legality of tenure claims, with planning or lack thereof. Legally speaking, the Slum Act allows to be “declared” a slum “any area [that] is or may be a source of danger to the health, safety or convenience of the public of that area or of its neighborhood, by reason of the area having inadequate or no basic amenities, or being insanitary, squalid, overcrowded or otherwise.”8 The declaration of a neighborhood as a “slum” does not distinguish “legal” from “illegal” land use; rather, it renders a neighborhood eligible for various “improvement” schemes and facilitates public investment in underserved neighborhoods.

The vagaries and contradictions of the policy frameworks governing built space and material infrastructures in areas of Mumbai treated as slums means that the built fabric of such neighborhoods is profoundly vulnerable to the vagaries of “law enforcement.” To unpack what this means in practice, consider Daulat Nagar, a residential and small-scale-industrial neighborhood in Mumbai’s eastern suburbs, home at the time of research to anywhere between 100,000 and 300,000 people (estimates vary). It was created as a municipal resettlement colony in 1976, when the Emergency-empowered municipal authorities issued a demolition notice to the nearby neighborhood of Indira Nagar (itself a resettlement colony), citing a need to reclaim the municipally owned land for another “public purpose.”9 Indira Nagar’s households were each officially allotted ten-by-fifteen-foot “plots” on a swampy swath of public land on the edge of the city—an area that had been zoned in the Development Plan for “public housing.” The official record (a thick file of correspondences among various public and private offices between 1972 and 2014) reveals that land on which Daulat Nagar is situated was supposed to be leased to the residents of Indira Nagar upon registration of cooperative housing societies; however, a tussle over the details of a hastily executed land exchange (in the context of the Emergency) between two government bodies resulted in a forty-year bureaucratic tussle between residents and various state offices over the status of the official lease. In the interim half century, and in step with the city more generally, the neighborhood’s population and housing stock grew.

Meanwhile, the policy framework by means of which Daulat Nagar residents might have obtained an official land lease and entered the District Collector’s Register as a cooperative housing society—alongside myriad other means by which tenure claims might be articulated—were occluded by a new policy discourse and framework that treats the neighborhood as a slum. This means that even though the neighborhood has never been “declared” a slum, which would render it officially governable according to the Slum Act, the contemporary political climate is such that the neighborhood is treated by municipal authorities, for policy purposes, as a slum; Daulat Nagar was even surveyed in conjunction with the Government of Maharashtra’s 1999 Slum Survey. When I asked at the office of the District Collector how the surveyors had decided which of Mumbai’s neighborhoods to include in the slum survey, an officer who had been involved with that survey recalled: “We surveyed illegal areas.” When I pointed out that Daulat Nagar (like many other surveyed areas) is not actually illegal, the officer nodded his agreement but shrugged helplessly: “But . . . it seems illegal.” He elaborated that of course they only surveyed illegal-seeming single-story structures, not (actually or seemingly) illegal multistory buildings. While it’s true that many (perhaps most) high-rise buildings in Mumbai are constructed without proper authorizations, he explained, multistory illegal buildings cannot be surveyed as “slums,” because, well, “how can you bring a building under a slum redevelopment scheme?” It is not formal or legal evaluation, but rather aesthetic judgments of a neighborhood—its suitability for demolition; the displaceability of its residents—that renders it legible as a “slum.”10

Treating Daulat Nagar as a slum effectively restricts the kinds of material investments that can be made in the neighborhood’s built environment—its structures and infrastructures—to wholesale demolition and redevelopment under a market-driven Slum Rehabilitation Scheme.11 Under this policy framework, the land in question would be handed over to a private developer, who would rehouse “eligible” residents (i.e., those able to marshal the requisite battery of documentary proofs of eligibility) in multistory tenement buildings; in exchange, the developer would be rewarded with generously increased development rights on land freed up by the verticalization of the neighborhood. A great many Daulat Nagar residents express no interest in such a scheme, not least because of the ongoing battle over their own rights to the land, but also because rehousing under a Slum Rehabilitation Scheme would shrink living spaces while rendering workshops and commercial enterprises unviable. In this reconfigured policy context, any material investment in the built space and infrastructures of the area—the homes, workshops, water taps, industries, and businesses of this industrious middle-class neighborhood—are rendered vulnerable to complaints of “illegality,” where the question of what is “legal or illegal” is a political rather than an empirical question.

In a transformed political-economic context in which the business of land, real estate, and construction are among the most lucrative in the city (as in the world more generally), the question of who can reside, build, produce goods, and do business in the city—where and how—is no small matter. The rumors of Seema’s “complaint natak” in Chikoowadi gesture toward the broader political and economic context and stakes of municipal elections in Mumbai’s lower-income neighborhoods, where the vast majority of the city’s electorate resides. The activities leading up to polling day in 2012 must therefore be understood in relation to the sociomaterialities and political economies that infuse everyday life in Mumbai beyond election season, that is, the sociopolitical and material-infrastructural contexts that regular elections punctuate.

Given the legal vagary and contradiction that characterizes everyday life in Mumbai’s popular neighborhoods, both production and maintenance of a neighborhood’s physical form and infrastructure, as well as all manner of business activity, generally involves some kind of mediation by someone who has access to various kinds of knowledge and resources that are necessary for navigating the physical, legal, and economic opacities of the city.12 For instance, brokers are particularly sought after when some required work requires residency proof: a new water connection, for example, or inclusion in a Slum Rehabilitation Scheme. This is especially true for the vast numbers of people living as renting tenants, for whom residency proof is exceedingly difficult to procure.13 In such cases, official applications are generally believed to have a better chance of being processed if they are accompanied by a letter from a politically connected person (e.g., a police officer or an elected official) verifying the address of the applicant. More important than the office or official position implied in the signature are the networks of power and authority that are implied in any particular signature. A powerful intermediary, for instance, has no need for a corporator’s signature, and conversely, an unknown corporator can accomplish very little without their army of brokers. A common popular and scholarly misconception is to assume that authority inheres in the post itself. But the direction of influence is the inverse, with the authority that an elected corporator is able to wield stemming from the fields of knowledge, authority, and influence from which they were elected.14 Self-proclaimed “social workers,” or karyakartas, will therefore often have working relations with an area’s elected corporator, even if a karyakarta is affiliated with—and had even campaigned for—a candidate from another political party.

A note on terminology: the mediating work described here is generally described simply as kam, a Hindi-Marathi-Urdu word that translates as “work,” with the person doing the work described as either a karyakarta—which translates as “doer” or “worker”—or else using the English-origin term social worker. While the work of karyakartas is at the heart of city politics, the term itself, significantly, is politically neutral; even when a person maintains a longtime affiliation with a particular party, he or she is often referred to either as a karyakarta or according to his or her trade or field of specialization: “plumber,” “building contractor,” “paniwalla” (water vendor), or, “social worker.”15 Although there are of course, longtime karyakartas who overtly claim party affiliation and hold party posts, in practice (as chapter 1 demonstrates) the partisanship even of self-proclaimed party loyalists is quite fluid at the local level. The number of young people self-identifying as “karyakartas” and “social workers” has dramatically expanded in recent years; as one young Daulat Nagar resident put it, “These days, everyone’s a social worker!”

The scope of activity locally described as “social work” is not limited to mundane, household-level issues. Ambitious social workers—particularly those with political aspirations of their own—set their sights on the resources of the municipal corporation, seeking to direct flows of investment (particularly infrastructural investment) toward their neighborhoods.16 Self-styled “plumbers,” for instance, have enormous amounts of influence in the municipal water department, where their knowledge of local infrastructural networks frequently exceeds that of municipal engineers. The official expertise of state officials often stems directly from the intimate material knowledge of local social workers. Since the authority that an elected corporator wields stems from the fields of knowledge and authority from which they were elected, the question of who among social workers is given a party ticket comes into focus—as does the question of how electoral victories are then accomplished (or sought to be accomplished) by producing, reconfiguring, performing, and displaying local-level relational networks and reservoirs of trust. It is to these questions—and to the role of cash in this election-season work—that chapter 1 turns.