Abstract
Projections for global population growth for the next three decades show an addition of roughly 2.5 billion people expected to occur exclusively in urban areas (United Nations, 2018). Between 1950 and 2050, the global population is projected to transform from being 70 per cent rural to 70 per cent urban. India alone is expected to add 416 million urban residents, which is the largest projected increase in the world (United Nations, 2018). Immanent within this projection is the changing nature of the livelihood of rural migrants, who largely become urbanites, toiling day and night in the informal sector without assured wages, contracts or adequate social protection, and forced to survive in adverse living conditions. Close to 8.8 million households live in the slums of India (National Sample Survey Office, 2013) and, as per the 2011 census, the slum population is close to 5.4 per cent of the total country’s population. Slums in India have emerged as an indomitable space in the twenty-first century and the politics and economics of slums govern the larger discourse of urban dwellings. Migrants and Machine Politics authored by Adam Michael Auerbach and Tariq Thachil hence comes at the right time as the authors showcase the new-age urban politics germinating from slums and their interaction with party machines, unbeknownst to the lay audience.
In a way, this is a text that documents and deconstructs a set of stereotyped notions of voice in urban spaces, through viewing migrants as active agents shaping urban politics. Contrary to the viewing of machine politics as comprising passive clients, low competition, exploitative brokers and distributive strategies mostly centred around ethnic favouritism, the study by Auerbach and Thachil shows the case of machine politics in the urban set-up in India as being otherwise. Through active clients, entrepreneurial brokers, high competition and the less central role of ethnic favouritism than commonly assumed, the authors show how much urban slum residents and the associated machine politics work hand in hand to position themselves as agents of a new kind of urban politics in India. While the general story being told in academia is that the urban poor do not have or require any agency (Fattah & Walters, 2023; Satterthwaite et al., 2011), this study interestingly shows otherwise.
Taking two cities, Bhopal and Jaipur (p. 29), the authors unpack a new-age urban politics. The first chapter, ‘Migrants and Machine Politics’, takes the case of Tulsi Nagar in Bhopal, which transformed from clusters of hurriedly constructed shanties into the epicentre of urban elections. The chapter particularly looks into the contribution of informal workers in party machines, particularly of the Indian National Congress (INC) and the Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP). The power of the two parties is intact across the 110 slums that the book surveyed, showing how the major ruling parties in India have started focusing on slums as a major vote bank, laying down a clear road towards a new urban politics. Among the slum residents, 663 party workers were surveyed who held distinctive positions within committees at various organisational levels (p. 29). The authors find that parties recruit slum leaders and make them holders of formal positions (padadhikari). The authors have conceptually unpacked the political networks in a brilliant manner through a framework that explicates how the four arenas of competitive selection in party machines function: (a) poor voters select local brokers, (b) local brokers selectively respond to poor voters, (c) patrons select local brokers for party positions and (d) patrons selectively respond to mediated claims. While it is generally true that slum residents are deprived due to a lack of agency, the authors show how they actively participate in major discourses associated with their livelihoods, be it politically or economically, at local as well as national levels. This also, in a way, re-enforces the fact that the urban poor are equal and active agents in the same spheres of urban life and no longer the ‘others’ of urban space. The remaining chapters involve an empirical unpacking of what can be called a ‘new economics’ (Varma, 2022) in urban spaces of the global South.
Pavan, a resident of one of the largest slums in North India in Jaipur, has risen through the ranks as a broker who is expected to favour those residents whose votes the party can trust upon. Chapter 2, ‘How Brokers Emerge’, shows a new pathway in which migrants in urban slums are neither passive recipients of election-time handouts nor cowering victims of local kingpins and residents who ensure a degree of quotidian, performance-based accountability within city politics in order to seal their presence within slum politics (p. 41). Migrants emerge as equal agents of political participation in slums despite residents continuing to perform their quotidian practices, wherein they move beyond the ranks of locally selected brokers to holding positions in citywide political parties. By identifying this, the authors, in a way, ‘brush history against the grain’ (Benjamin, 1940) as they underpin the precarity that haunts urban slums by showcasing the all-pervasive presence of brokers who perform various services such as helping residents meet politicians and officials, and helping residents with police services, to list a few (p. 52). This also makes urban slums a space for acquiring power positions and getting access to services at the same time.
Brokers cultivate an ambitious charisma and serve slum residents, thereby emerging as active agents of urban politics. In the third chapter, ‘How Brokers Cultivate Clients’, many respondents mentioned that any time, for any issue, it is the brokers who helped them. However, brokers like Kishore, a major broker from the slums of Jaipur, and Hari, from Bhopal, find it difficult to accommodate every request they get and are, at times, reduced to mere listeners and not brokers who can act and find solutions. This brings into question the accountability of brokers to their patrons, who select them, as the dynamics of power function differently across the different class levels of agents and patrons. In some cases, brokers help patrons get access to the public distribution system, electricity connection and so on, but the burden that brokers bear in terms of prioritising and lending is beyond the context of power and governmentality, as slums remain as the epicentres of inequality. The inclusion and exclusion criteria of slum politics—who is provided their services and who is not—is unpacked well in this chapter.
‘How Patrons Select Brokers’ is the fourth chapter of the book, which throws light on how patrons decide which brokers to bestow with positions. The study finds that despite the overshadowing of migrants in slum politics, today slum leaders have emerged and actively represent deprived urban spaces, often finding themselves in important positions within the organisational structures of mainstream political parties. In other words, if earlier the political integration of slums was seen to be poor, this chapter shows the readers how tightly integrated the new urban poor communities are. Foucault (2014) finds that power is always already there, and this is true of the dynamics of patrons and brokers as explicated by the authors. There are examples in the book of student leaders in national political parties ending up being eligible for councillor positions, which shows how machine politics as well as political parties in India have transitioned over the course of time and space. A factor in this transaction is also good charisma, as machine politics usually favours charismatic leaders who are positioned at the apex of party hierarchies.
Continuing the examination of how patrons select brokers, the fifth chapter analyses ‘How Patrons Respond to Brokered Requests’. Many patrons prioritise those petitions that lend themselves to personal credit-claiming for politicians. The authors argue that many politicians’ degree of responsiveness is dependent on credit-claiming possibilities, as providing public benefits can lead to promotions and improvements in their political careers. Few of them become candidates in elections. Since there are few studies that document ward-level urban politics in India, this text comes as a major eye-opener to the ground realities of urban politics. This chapter serves as fundamental to the understanding of distributive justice in India, both at micro and macro levels.
The book concludes with a reminder that slums are on the rise and are well integrated into the political network of the present. While the urban poor who reside in slums have long been considered as excluded voices, today, they are asserting their voices, which political parties cannot afford to leave unheard. How the politics of India is deeply integrated with the slums is well unpacked with this illuminous text. Nonetheless, the book could have documented the historical ramifications of class and caste in the study sites in Bhopal and Jaipur. This would have made the stories and analysis richer. Such an exercise would have also helped demonstrate the political dynamics and its undercurrents among brokers as well as political leaders inside or outside the slums.
While power networks function within and outside slums, one is still unsure how sustainable the slums themselves are. While politically they are powerful spaces, economically they are deprived. The major point of contestation is whether slums should exist in an economy/polity. This book provides the answer to the question to an extent by showing that the slum residents’ need for access to services are met by brokers who emerge as agents for political parties. In a way, slum dwellings contribute to the understanding of power positions in urban India that are acquired through economically rewiring the politics. However, this book does not really identify the slow emergence of soft Hindutva or hard Hindutva in different pockets within the slums. Had this been exposed by the authors, the slow emergence of the communal and fascist tensions that haunt the state could have been brought out. With the emergence of the urban politics that the authors have unpacked, there is a tendency for local-level conflicts and communal polarisation, which in a way could have been foreseen by the authors through the instances already narrativised in the book.
However, this is a book that provides a crucial contribution to the ways of seeing the urban poor, revealing an alternative standpoint that views migrants in urban slums as active agents shaping a new urban politics and asserting their voices.