Contemporary Urban Development and People’s Resistance1
Swapna Banerjee-Guha
On March 30, 2012, a state-initiated slum demolition drive took place at Nonadanga, located in the southeastern part of Kolkata near the Eastern Metropolitan Bypass. More than eight hundred slum houses were bulldozed by the police, with indiscriminate torching of huts in and around the area. A procession organized in protest on April 4 by slum dwellers, sympathizers, and democratic-rights organizations was brutally attacked by the police, leaving a large number injured. In protest, a sit-in was organized on April 8 at Nonadanga that was attended by a larger number. The police did not spare them either. Nearly seventy protestors were arrested. Among them seven members of various left and democratic-rights organizations were slapped with false charges and denied bail for several months. The following day, April 9, about 115 people were arrested at a protest meeting on College Street—the hub of Kolkata’s youth revolts.
The Nonadanga eviction and associated police atrocities once again brought to light the willingness of the state machinery in West Bengal to pursue a development path that not only does not recognize the right of the poor to the city but shows a thorough disregard for their right to rehabilitation in the event of development-induced displacements. The brutality of the eviction is the state’s way of affirming that the poor are absolutely nonessential in the current city development framework, no matter what the rehabilitation policy says. The country’s National Relief and Rehabilitation Policy of 2007 states that before any development projects are finalized the state needs to minimize displacement, promote nondisplacing or least-displacing alternatives (as far as possible), or offer adequate rehabilitation measures, especially to the weaker classes. This must be done prior to displacement, if displacement is unavoidable. The detention of the protesters of the Nonadanga eviction and their subsequent harassment indicate the manner in which the state government is going to deal with resistance to such development schemes. It is interesting to see how systemic the tyrannical stance of the state is in such cases.
Whether such development projects are being pursued by the present government of West Bengal, which justifies its intentions by appealing to maa (mother), maati (land), and manush (people), or by a group like the previous one, which used to invoke a specific political philosophy to articulate its concern for the poor, by now it is clear that the beneficiaries of these projects are not the masses of the common people or the poor. The purpose of these projects is to make the cities more attractive for the rich and induce more and more corporate groups to invest. The motive is to persuade them to buy more property, invest in land and real estate, and invest in the IT or IT-enabled services sectors that will further consolidate the power of affluent classes in the cities. Does this make the cities better and more livable for the large majority? No. Ready examples are Mumbai, Delhi, and several other cities where since the late 1990s several hundred thousand slum-dwelling families have been displaced in order to make way for development projects.
Actually, the victims of such development ventures are inevitably the poor and the underprivileged, who are always the first to be uprooted and dispossessed. They are forced to surrender their right to the city where they have been living or working for years, yielding the space to projects that will make the city more beautiful and expensive, so that one day they will have no other option but to move even farther away—out to distant peripheries with fewer and fewer prospects of survival. Sometimes their right to the city is taken away by the logic of the market, abetted by the state; sometimes by direct government action that expels them from their homes; and sometimes by illegal means like violence or arson. In Mumbai, slum fires in areas like Bandra and Andheri (where the land value is very high) are a recurrent affair. The Nonadanga atrocity and subsequent state repression have only served to reiterate the viewpoint of the state machinery in India with respect to the prevailing development path and its associated projects. Individuals, groups, and democratic-rights organizations questioning the justifiability of such projects, whether in the cities, in the villages, or in the forests, are branded as antinationals or terrorists.
Since its formation in 2011, the new West Bengal government began announcing its urban vision of converting Kolkata into a world-class city, with London as its model (for reasons known best to the government and its urban experts). Accordingly, it has been formulating a series of plans for beautification and upscaling through numerous projects. Several parts of the city are getting earmarked for smartening; a number of buildings are being given a facelift; the Ganga riverfront is being developed as an expanded space of leisure (modeled on that of the Thames in London); a number of entry gates are being planned in different locations in the city; unused tram compartments are getting converted into cafeterias or banquet halls, the latter obviously for corporate use; and vigorous drives have been launched to give a free hand to real estate for constructing gigantic commercial and residential complexes in discrete locations, often displacing the poor who have been living and working in these areas for decades. Kolkata now boasts of having the largest mall in eastern India.
Are these projects a novel idea of the current government of West Bengal? Are they unique to Kolkata? In both cases the answer is no. The previous West Bengal government, led by a coalition of the organized Left, had enthusiastically introduced similar urban development programs that were also associated with displacement and eviction, following the prescription of the Jawaharlal Nehru Urban Renewal Mission (JNNURM): the first and the largest postindependence urban planning initiative in the country. And again, Kolkata is not the only city where such beautification drives are seen. One city after another, in different parts of the country, has joined the bandwagon, under the diktat of the JNNURM, Mumbai, and Delhi leading the march. Restructuring in Kolkata is only a part of a larger program framed by the doctrines of a neoliberal ideology, the imperatives stemming from the nexus of big capital, international financial institutions, and the state machinery.
To understand, we have to go back to the 1980s. With the introduction of the new economic policy in 1991, Indian cities—like many other cities of the developing world—entered into a global framework and started getting reshaped according to the exigencies of global capital. But the beginning of the story goes further back, to when the groundwork was being planned. Externally assisted urban-sector projects in India have accounted for more than US$230 million since independence. In the Seventh National Plan (1985–90), for the first time a special emphasis was put on private investment in urban development. In support, the National Commission on Urbanisation in 1985 ushered in a major shift in the country’s urban policy—from decentralization to centralization—and advocated for private-sector entry into urban service provision. Accordingly, in 1991, the Mega City Programme of the central government was launched to revamp the infrastructure of large cities with more private-sector investment. The commission’s report was followed by the 74th Constitutional Amendment Act in 1992 (Banerjee-Guha 2009a), which drastically reduced state funding for municipalities and forced them to turn to capital in order to raise funds for development projects, obviously compromising on the pro-poor agenda. Subsequently, in 1996, the Expert Group on Commercialisation of Infrastructure estimated the required investment in urban infrastructure at around Rs 250,000 crore for the coming ten years.2 This made the entry of private capital into urban development an even more pressing necessity, as it had already been announced that the government lacked funds. A major overhauling of the administrative and legislative frameworks was suggested to smooth the way for involving international financial institutions like the World Bank, the Asian Development Bank, the United States Agency for International Development, and the United Kingdom’s Department for International Development in the drafting of India’s urban reforms mandate. Finally, in 2005, the JNNURM took official shape, its name invoking Jawaharlal Nehru, the first prime minister of independent India from the original Congress Party.
Detailed plans were chalked out to equip the cities to function as nodes of global finance acceptable to the credit-rating agencies. A mandatory decoration of the cityscape was prescribed, in the interest of making it more beautiful and therefore investment-friendly. It was initially in large cities that privatization of the service delivery system was introduced, but this subsequently expanded to medium and small cities, depending on their location. At the same time the concept of “private cities” was brought in, in total opposition to the concept of planned towns that was earlier developed by state planning organizations across the country as a way to provide housing to those in middle- and lower-income groups. The new private cities started being developed entirely by real-estate firms with only basic infrastructural support from the state. An aggressive—almost revanchist—urban development program was introduced all over the country in the form of gigantic infrastructure and real-estate projects targeting a small section of the elite as the chosen clientele. For all these projects, whether restructuring the existing cities or making new ones, vast tracts of land had to be handed over to the private developers, which made the poor in cities and the small- and medium-scale farmers in the peripheries extremely vulnerable. State-sponsored dispossession became a characteristic feature, with state governments turning into coercive land brokers for capital. People’s struggles to protect their right to land in cities thus got linked with a larger struggle coming out from the countryside: to protect agricultural land, a struggle that had already intensified due to the decision of the central and several state governments to build special economic zones (SEZs) across the country (Banerjee-Guha 2008). Land became a key component, in both city and countryside, of an interstate competition to attract private-sector investment that became fiercer day by day. The think tanks like McKinsey Global Institute that loomed behind the city-restructuring initiatives pointed to the urban poor as the biggest impediment to the materialization of megadevelopment projects and recommended drastically reducing the slum-dwelling population from 60% to 10% of the city’s inhabitants, which means displacement was not a byproduct but a fundamental component of such initiatives. Following the principles of neoliberalism, the state emerged as a key abettor to all these endeavors and framed new legalities to aid the process vociferously. Developmental governance became a catchword. Pitched heavily on the rationality of experts and professionals (Sanyal 2007), it made use of extra-coercive mechanisms, incorporating a wide range of institutional and social forces based on an alliance of state, capital, and civil society to facilitate a neoliberal development path. The tentacles of this alliance operated well beyond government mechanisms and earned multiscalar relational governance the faith of a large section of the affluent middle class in addition to the rich. As part of the new governance, several NGOs were co-opted (like Janaagraha in Bangalore) and even started conducting workshops to convince people of the efficacy of private-public partnership projects (Benjamin 2010). The backtracking of the state from active engagement in providing housing and basic infrastructures became an accepted reality. It is interesting to see how the Indian state mobilized all these forces to justify the scheme of modernizing cities and making them pivotal spaces for capital accumulation. Careful analysis shows that the timing of the introduction of JNNURM coincided with a number of other anti-people blueprints under the new economic policy.
It is therefore necessary to understand that this new urban order is intertwined with a larger restructuring of the economy characterized by increased commodification, shrinking of the organized sector, hyperexploitation of workers, downgrading of democratic rights earned through long struggles, and last but not least a tremendous economic uncertainty (Banerjee-Guha 2009b). The aggressive vision of redesigning Indian cities in the above manner rests in its central elements on the shift of capital from the primary circuit of production to the secondary circuit of built environment (Harvey 1985). The consequences can be seen in the increasing focus on hyperforms and megaconstruction activities trending toward sterility and sameness (Chatterton 2002); increased speculation and expanded investment in land, real estate, and the service sector; and signature projects, coupled with a reduced focus on employment-generating production processes, affordable housing, and collective sharing of urban space and resources.
Let us look at the operational framework of the JNNURM in order to contextualize the increasing vulnerability of the poor in Nonadanga and the other slums of Kolkata (and in the slums of several other cities as well). The Mission was classified into two parts. Sub-mission A, entitled Urban Infrastructure and Governance, accounted for 65% of the initial total funds of Rs 50,000 crore and was administered by the Ministry of Urban Development. All infrastructure and beautification projects came under this heading. Let me mention here that in the Eleventh National Plan, public-private partnership was accepted as the prime option to fund infrastructure projects, following which the infrastructure budget rose sharply from Rs 260 crore in 2007–08 to a whopping Rs 560 crore in 2011–12. A crucial fact in this respect is that with the introduction of JNNURM, real estate was given an incredible boost by allowing 100% foreign direct investment (FDI).
Sub-mission B, entitled Basic Services to the Urban Poor (BSUP), accounted for the remaining 35% of the funds and was administered by the Ministry of Urban Employment and Poverty Alleviation. Slum improvement and rehabilitation as well as access to basic services fell under its purview. All previous central government schemes for the urban poor thus got annulled and brought under the Mission. The involvement of two separate ministries with divergent foci, however, exposed a deep anomaly in the structure and purpose of the Mission. Proposals given priority were all from Sub-mission A, incorporating mega-infrastructure projects, gigantic commercial and residential complexes, shopping malls, cultural “signature” projects, and urban spectacles. Funds were regularly released for these projects, while Sub-mission B projects struggled to gain acceptance and funding allotment. Also, while the infrastructure budget steadily increased (Government of India 2008), BSUP funds never experienced any rise. A drastic shift from provision of basic services and low-cost housing to market-driven projects was under way, the latter taking the lion’s share of the JNNURM budget. Where was the space for the poor in this grandiose scheme? One must note that one of the official agendas of the Mission was to make cities “slum-free” over a period of time. The Mission efficiently worked toward intensifying social inequality through an imposing planning mechanism, helping cities gradually get rid of the poor from vital locations and thereby raise property values in all such areas.
The stated aim of the Mission was to bestow “world-class” status on—initially—sixty-three cities by building infrastructure: wide roads, overpasses, tunnels, sky-walks, large-scale commercial blocks, and gigantic residential, recreational, and entertainment complexes. The vision was the same for all cities, large and small, and all reforms were mandatory. To access funds, the state governments had to set up para-statal bodies that would evaluate project proposals and release (and even manage) funds. Infrastructure, commercial, and cultural projects funded and implemented by the private sector were given priority. In conjunction with this scheme, the central government’s National Common Minimum Programme made necessary arrangements to bring land and housing within the orbit of the market and paved the way for 100% FDI in urban infrastructure. To access Mission funds, municipalities were required to prepare a city development plan: a twenty-five-year vision document defining the direction they wanted to pursue. Most plans were ready within a month and got evaluated by hired private bodies. Within three months, Rs 86,482.95 crores for twenty-three projects was released. All former schemes, like the National Slum Development Programme, Swarna Jayanti Shahari Rozgar Yojana, Valmiki Ambedkar Awas Yojana (for housing the socially marginalized and urban poor), national transportation policy, and so forth were brought under the Mission.
A careful look at JNNURM shows that essentially it was a reform-linked urban investment program of private capital. Based on subtle forms of competition, place-marketing, and regulatory undercutting for attracting investment, it involved a range of conditionalities, the key items being privatization and commercialization of basic services; liberalization of land and real estate through repeal of the Urban Land Ceiling and Regulation Act (ULCR); changes in rent control legislation; development of a strong mortgage market with 100% FDI in housing and real estate; easier land use conversion norms; reforms in property tax; financial and administrative restructuring of municipalities; outsourcing of municipal services by cutting down organized jobs; introduction of e-governance; and valorization of the private sector and private credit-rating agencies over elected civic bodies (CASUMM 2006). The sweeping transformation of governance was meant to cripple municipal bodies and encroach upon the constitutionally devolved areas of state government jurisdictions, modalities often governed by the corporate sector. Take the case of repealing ULCR. The act was passed in 1976 to prevent the concentration of land in the hands of speculative capital. A ceiling was subsequently introduced on the ownership of vacant urban land to make more such lands available for the poor. In 1999, the central government abolished the act. Until 2005 it was still a vital piece of legislation at the state level for making surplus land available at affordable prices. JNNURM made the repeal of the act mandatory for accessing Mission funds and in the process brought huge quantities of land into the market that had earlier accommodated poor people’s housing. Since late 1990s more than 200,000 families have been evicted from such lands in Delhi; in Mumbai, in 2005 alone, more than 90,000 slum units were demolished (CASUMM 2006). National Building Organization data showed that among the 24.7 million people rendered homeless in 2006, more than 97% were the urban poor (Singh 2008). The reconstruction of urban space through displacement and dispossession had already been facilitated by measures of the new economic policy, creating tremendous economic uncertainty among the working class and the poor. Closures of factories and mills, restrictions on small-scale manufacturing and retail units, regulations against informal workers, and privatization of basic services like water, sanitation, housing, and health were a few such measures. With the apparent aim of regenerating declining industrial areas and creating jobs in the “dynamic” sectors of culture and leisure, in city after city the new projects started enclosing spaces long used by the people, particularly the poor. To preclude resistance, new zoning laws were enacted; surveillance stepped up, targeting hawkers, rag pickers, and vendors who were labeled encroachers on public land (Banerjee-Guha 2010).
Judging by its impact in several cities, a persistent fact that gets reiterated about the Mission is its systematic contribution to aggravating inequality: making the disadvantaged classes more vulnerable. That this constitutes the fundamental core of neoliberalism (Harvey 2005) and not its byproduct needs thorough exposure. When government’s very purpose is to facilitate neoliberal capitalist accumulation, it is obvious that the poor, who have been facing dispossession due to socioeconomic restructuring in various forms, will slide further down in the remade urban landscapes (Smith 2002). Interventions through laws and regulations by the state and collateral organizations have only strengthened this exclusionist mechanism. The exact mix of market, monopolistic control, and state intervention, however, has varied from city to city in service to the social reproduction patterns of each region, going on to make a series of subsystems separated from each other by regional competitive barriers but concurrently connected through a wider neoliberal ideology.
After a change in central government in 2014, JNNURM was initially extended until 2015. In April 2015 Prime Minister Modi renamed JNNURM as the Atal Mission for Rejuvenation and Urban Transformation (AMRUT), after Atal Bihari Vajpayee, a former prime minister from the Bharatiya Janata Party. For AMRUT, the allotted budget is Rs 50,000 crore to be spent over a period of five years on five hundred select cities. Until 2017, these funds will go to support JNNURM projects that are already 50% complete, along with projects in a few other cities judged to have touristic prospects and commercially and industrially advantageous locations. The previous government had done all the preparatory work for a JNNURM phase two, selecting five hundred cities for transformation and adding the new concept of the “Smart City”—selecting a few new private cities and some existing ones for smartening. AMRUT has become the new avatar of JNNURM, keeping its focus and the purpose the same. The cabinet meeting that cleared AMRUT sanctioned Modi’s dream project of Smart Cities too. With a budget of Rs 48,000 crore, Smart Cities will smarten a hundred select cities across the country to optimize efficiency in urban services by using technology. Having a “local-area-based approach,” it will also support the local distinctiveness of the existing settlements. The routine rhetoric is identical to that of JNNURM phase two. In reality the concept is intended to make cities more economically competitive, especially in relation to cities of the developed world (Burte 2014). Operational and economic efficiency are the factors that will enhance the capacity of the cities to attract business, making information and communication technologies the central aspect of smartness (Hollands 2008). But in this smart vision, where is the space for ordinary citizens and the poor, who have less technology access but whose contribution to the cities’ economic life is nevertheless undeniable?
The making of nearly four hundred SEZs across the country has already become a critical phenomenon in the development scenario of India. With the implementation of JNNURM followed by AMRUT and the Smart City Mission, land acquisition has taken a new turn, making people’s right to land more critical than ever before. Acquisition of peasant lands for the corporate sector to make SEZs and private cities in recent times has been identified as a new phase of primitive accumulation (Patnaik 2008) wherein lands are used more for corporate real estate and speculation than for economic activities that can generate more employment.
The colonial Land Acquisition Act of 1894 was the primary law of land acquisition in India until 2011 and gave power of eminent domain to the state to acquire any land for “public good.” The euphoria with which the Indian state constructed SEZs (the first in 2005) and private cities at the beginning of this century derived institutional support from the colonial act and displaced millions from their land and livelihood, leading to large-scale protests all over the country. Electoral compulsions finally forced the government to amend the act, and a new Land Acquisition Act was passed in 2013. Despite making considerable allowance for land acquisition for “public purpose” (to be solely defined by the government) and violating several safeguarding clauses for the poor (Banerjee-Guha forthcoming), the new act failed to satisfy the corporate groups that continued to press for further dilution of the clauses requiring consent (from the users of the land) and rehousing (of the affected families). A major step toward appeasing the corporate sector that the new government took after assuming office in 2014 was to pass an ordinance diluting the above clauses in the line of corporate demand. This ordinance has yet to be cleared by the parliament.
Against this backdrop, we go back to the Nonadanga residents. Nonadanga is an area chosen in 2007 as one of the BSUP resettlement sites for slum dwellers who had been evicted from different parts of the city to make way for implementing the Sub-mission A projects of the JNNURM and other, similar infrastructure schemes that were then being implemented in Kolkata and other areas. Many came in 2009 from the Sundarbans when the devastating hurricane Aila struck the entire deltaic region of South Bengal. Many others came from Singur and Nandigram when the previous state government decided to hand over their agricultural land to the Tatas and other corporate groups for industrial development. The resettlement project in Nonadanga has been officially and jointly run by the Kolkata Metropolitan Development Authority (KMDA) and the Kolkata Environmental Improvement Project, the latter being the owner of the land. The residents have been eking out a living by working informally in various organizations or as domestic workers, rickshaw pullers, construction workers, car drivers, vegetable sellers, security guards, and so on. While they live in abject poverty, their contribution to the city’s economy is unquestionable. No funds from Sub-mission B (BSUP) have been allocated to provide basic infrastructure, schools, or health facilities in the resettlement area. (Whether the funds were not released or were released but remained unutilized is a different question altogether, into which we cannot enter now.) Initially, in 2007, the KMDA built a few small, one-room apartments, but did not continue with the scheme.
As the settlement grew, many more displaced families from different parts of the city or from outside have come in, settled down in vacant spaces, made their own shanties, and developed a system of community living. They gave names to the different segments of their settlement, like “Shramik” (Worker) Colony or “Mazdur Palli” (Laborer Village), articulating their identity as workers (P. S. Roy, unpublished notes). Nonadanga residents have gone through cycles of displacements: first, when they came to Kolkata having been uprooted from their original homes; then again when their slum lands were taken away for development projects—often several times over. They have resettled multiple times and rebuilt their lives each time they got uprooted, only to lose them again. The final blow came in 2012. I have mentioned that the KMDA had stopped building apartments a long while back in Nonadanga. In 2012, it decided to enter into a public-private partnership housing project allowing the developer to use a large part of the land for commercial ventures. Before handing over the land to the private developer, KMDA wanted the area to be free of “encroachers,” which led to the eviction drive.
From late 2011 onward the entire area of Nonadanga started experiencing a commercial boom. With the real estate goons having their eye on Nonadanga and the surrounding neighborhood, all of a sudden the residents who had been officially allotted land under the BSUP provisions of the JNNURM were turned into illegal encroachers who, according to the state machinery, could only deserve expulsion, and that without any official notice. Goons of the ruling political party who had once allowed these people to build their hutments in lieu of “protection money” now joined the government to oust them. The urban development minister ordered expulsion of all illegal encroachers by March 30, 2012. The consequent eviction drive that I have discussed was especially ruthless as the residents demanded proper rehabilitation. The police and ununiformed goons brutally attacked the residents; women and children were not spared. KMDA men and the goons looted all their belongings, including their house-building materials (tarpaulin and bamboo) and even their voter identity cards and ration cards, to destroy the proof of their legal status. Naturally, no seizure list was made. The supporting protesters, too, were treated in an extremely high-handed manner. The arrested activists who were denied bail and taken into custody were slapped with false charges including sedition and links with “Maoists” (a standard statist practice in West Bengal since the 1970s, from the time of the Naxalbari uprising, and subsequently in several other states, used to suppress antistate protests by intellectuals, students, professionals, and the people at large).
The Nonadanga incident exposed the true intent of the present West Bengal government and, for that matter, of any regional government in India with respect to the urban poor. It could not have been otherwise, because any government practicing the formulae of JNNURM and AMRUT with dexterity can have no other approach. The very purpose of these Missions is the promotion of exclusionary urban development, to make cities more habitable for the rich. And this brings us to the issue of the basic right of the people to their cities. Who will decide this right? Who will define it, grant it, or deny it? Who will exercise it?
The resistance that the Nonadanga residents put up in 2009 has no doubt weakened due to internal dissensions, subsequent police repression and intimidation, and physical attacks by ruling party goons. But they have not surrendered or given up their struggle, and they still hold a challenge to the dominant class interests of the entire neighborhood. The land on which the settlement stands has been walled up by the KMDA to demonstrate its legal possession of the site, but no notice for eviction has yet been served (Roy, unpublished notes). Instead, notice boards have been put up by the Development Authority stating that the site is a BSUP project site meant for resettling the poor! It is important to mention that the Nonadanga residents did not seek any legal relief or ask for a stay order on the eviction. In the current situation, however, no one knows how long the residents will be able to resist the series of eviction drives that the government is obviously planning.
The time has come to decide whether the answer to this question will come from assertion at the institutional level or through social movements with support from a larger cross-section of society. The Nonadanga resistance of 2012 was supported by a large number of intellectuals, artists, writers, and professionals, in addition to several left and democratic-rights organizations that came forward to take part in the protest, assisted in bail formalities, and urged the government to discuss possibilities of resettlement for the residents. In the future, too, such support might be there. But it is important to understand that the right to the city is not just a right to urban space, it is also a right to work in the city. Fighting for the right to the city is thus part of a larger struggle that informal laborers and migrant workers are waging against neoliberal oppression that uses their cheap labor in all possible forms and simultaneously makes them more and more redundant in urban life and city planning. Actually, the entire community of Nonadanga belongs to this group and therefore participates in this dual struggle for which future support needs to be mobilized by concerned citizens. The struggle of Nonadanga and the other slum communities of Kolkata and elsewhere are all part of a larger struggle being waged against the neoliberal onslaught across the country. The question is whether it will be possible to link these struggles through collective effort based on an anticapitalist ideology and provide a wider arena of resistance at a macro level.
A proper understanding of the urban form of the transformative cities in India thus will remain superficial if it does not involve a discussion on the deepening polarization and disarticulation that the cities are experiencing and the people’s resistance that arises out of these. Cities under neoliberal imposition not only concentrate a disproportionate share of corporate capital to become key sites for accumulation but also concentrate an increasingly large share of the disadvantaged and dispossessed (Sassen 1999). I have discussed how at various levels the current state power in India is turning out to be increasingly repressive by instituting deregulation norms and initiating change in the use-values of reconstructed spaces for the benefit of a narrower citizenry. The current urban restructuring in India, like in many other countries, is leading to increasing legitimization of the dispossession of the poor and to segregation of the city space and regulatory access to resources, which in turn are getting directly linked to the basic question of the “right to the city” and the right to make a livelihood according to the choice of the individual concerned. With large-scale stagnation and economic decline in villages, towns, and smaller cities in several parts of the country, large cities have become destinations for millions of poor migrants from across the country. With a shrunken organized sector and nonexpandable employment base, these cities, on the other hand, are no longer the centers of organized jobs they once were, nor are they able to productively absorb the migrants. In the given scenario of restructuring they are instead emerging as spaces of conflict and contradiction. The right to the city, in Indian cities in the present day, is getting linked to the right to livelihood, lending the urban social movements a distinct class content even if the latter are organized around the “travails of social reproduction” (Harvey 2012, 129).
The important question that needs to be raised here is whether the cities will become pivotal spaces for a new politics embedded in the counterclaims of the poor. Even though the claims of the corporate sector and the rich pave the way for a repressive and revanchist urbanism (Smith 1996), as evident from the consequences of urban redevelopment projects, the counterclaims made by the dispossessed struggling for entitlement and alternatives are impacting city life ever more than before. Although the patterns of claims reflect an overvalorized, powerful, small corporate center occupying an ever-expanding terrain and a devalorized periphery with a large number of people evidently marginalized, it goes without saying that the new politics of counterclaims and related struggles of the dispossessed will form the most solid part of neoliberal urbanism in India in the coming days. A wider mobilization of unorganized and temporary workers, household workers, and self-employed groups of different order—a result of the changing urban economies—is also showing up, which is making these struggles more effective. Harvey (2010) argues that the right to the city is something more than access to the city’s resources; it is also the right to change the city according to the needs and desires of the larger section of the society. The above struggles are trying hard to be a part of that understanding with an aim to make cities socially just. But the fight needs to be carried out at two levels, as social justice is not always and only a product of militant movements (Fainstein 2003) and needs to be asserted in an aggressively contested institutional landscape too. To provide a wider arena in which subsequent struggles over cities will get articulated, struggles in each city need a backup of counterinstitutions to be developed by various other classes, capable of reframing issues in broad terms and mobilizing resources to fight for the aims of a larger section. In India, such multilevel struggles need to be organized in Kolkata, Mumbai, Delhi, Bangalore, Chennai, and many other large and small cities: by the urban poor, the Left, and democratic-rights organizations working together. Organizations like Lok Shakti Abhiyan, the Domestic Workers’ Union, and the Garment Workers’ Union, under the umbrella organization of the National Alliance of People’s Movements (NAPM), are organizing struggles in several places. During the Nonadanga struggle, Delhi Krantikari Naujawan Sabha, the People’s Union of Democratic Rights, Delhi Metro Kamgar Union, the Democratic Students’ Union, the Jamia Teachers’ Solidarity Forum, Posco Pratirodh Solidarity, and several other groups from Delhi, the Mumbai chapter of NAPM, and many other groups came out in support. The need of the hour is to coordinate these groups, to coordinate the dual struggles fought at institutional and noninstitutional levels in a number of locations.
This brings us to the final issue of the nature of urban social movements and movements launched at a wider level across the country, and the necessity to link them through an anticapitalist political ideology. Cases of land appropriation, displacement, and socioeconomic dispossession for the facilitation of globally oriented activities have not only become innumerable, they are uniformly affecting urban as well as rural areas, and with the same intensity. The magnitude and the form of displacement no doubt vary from place to place depending on the nature of the “activity,” but the vulnerability of the affected population, which constitutes a huge proportion of the total population of cities, villages, and forests, is everywhere on the rise (Action Aid 2008). Let us take a few recent cases. In the state of Chhattisgarh, the Kelu River has been forcibly handed over to industry; construction of a private dam on the Kurkut River in the same state has deprived the local community of its age-long access to the river; systematic evictions of slum dwellers are taking place in several areas of Mumbai (Agarwadi, Govandi, Bandra, and Santacruz), Delhi (Noida, Greater Noida), and Kolkata (Rajarhat, Nonadanga, Jadavpur), while resistance has been met with brutal police atrocity; the struggle for justice in several villages in Orissa against land appropriation for SEZs and corporate mining has been systematically suppressed by state violence; besides the cases of displacement of the above kind, in Chhattisgarh and Madhya Pradesh alone hundreds of villages have been relocated in order to make army camps, air force bases, and wildlife sanctuaries; in an ecologically and geologically fragile region of northeast India, on the Brahmaputra and Barak River basins, the central government is constructing 168 dams to supply electricity to large cities in southern and northern India, which will not only be of no use to the people of the region (Vagholikar and Das 2010) but will lead to tremendous ecological instability. All these actions are making each segment of space in the country political and contradictory. Resistance struggles of diverse forms erupting in different parts of the county (Banerjee-Guha 2013a) are consequences of the above.
Taking place at various scales, these movements are essentially questioning the current development path of the country. Many of these movements, except the Maoist-led armed resistance organized in the tribal areas of several states against corporate takeover, are nonviolent mass movements. Many, as well, are not organized on socialist ideals. But almost all, in one way or another, are challenging the anti-people policies of the state and exposing entrenched power relations at multiple levels. When led by groups other than those of the left, the movements do not have a focus on class; they remain embedded in the struggles of daily life, where they may prove significant in reconstructing the “everyday” space between the state and society. For the same reason, however, despite taking positions against the day-to-day exploitation they experience, they do not always go on to direct themselves against the political-economic nexus responsible for the exploitation. The political ideology behind these movements often remains fuzzy and the direction of their struggles unfocused. As the forces against which these struggles are aimed are partners on the neoliberal front, it becomes imperative to link them through a strong anticapitalist ideology in order to carve out an innovative path toward social transformation, failing which they may become vulnerable to the forces of exclusionary politics or the co-opting strategies of institutional power structures at various levels (Banerjee-Guha 2013b).
Neoliberal capitalist exploitation is a multifaceted phenomenon. Millions are being uprooted from villages, towns, and cities across the country to make space for gigantic projects like SEZs, private cities, urban infrastructures, upscale ports, corporate mining, or nuclear projects. At the same time, by the same process, these uprooted people are being converted into cheap labor in corporate units or in the same projects that uprooted them. This is not just happening in India: The scenario is the same in many other countries, like China, Bangladesh, Malaysia, and Australia. The uprooted people work for miserably low wages, much lower than government-specified minimum wage levels. They work overtime, often without extra pay, and most of the time their entire family works, including the children and the elderly, to make ends meet. The neoliberal-capitalist demand for time impinges on their personal and biological needs and makes sure that they do not have any space for themselves, any opportunity to spend time with other workers, or any chance to engage in discussion and mobilize for protest. It is therefore necessary that they develop a clear idea about the forces that make this globally structured exploitation possible, no matter where it takes place or in what form.
This is a formidable theoretical and practical task for the Left in India. The struggles that are being launched across the country are genuinely important, because they are bringing out the patterns of space-specific exploitations and thereby opening up possibilities for challenging the global-local nexus of capitalist power once they get interlinked with each other. And now that the nature of the working class has changed, the organized factories have been largely dismantled, and the dynamics of class exploitation have gone beyond the workplace, there is no reason why one should not consider the possibility of launching a class struggle and a struggle for citizenship rights together (Harvey 2012, 128–29). The movements launched all over the country against dispossession, marginalization, and denial of basic rights are symptoms of the total restructuring of the socioeconomic space on the basis of dispossession and predatory practices. Denial of the workers’ right to land and livelihood in villages and cities, denial of the indigenous people’s right to resources and community-oriented economic life in the forests of Orissa, Madhya Pradesh, Chhattisgarh, Bastar, and Jharkhand, and denial of the right to self-determination in Kashmir and Nagaland are all cases in point. The terrains of dispossession are complex, but they are seamless. And that makes it an urgent need to look again at the old ideas of class struggle and mass movements. As it would be both naive and dangerous to celebrate all forms of resistance (Banerjee 2012), it would also be wrong to ignore the possibility of many movements that, once coalesced, can emerge as a formidable platform for larger anticapitalist struggles. The task lies there: in analyzing the movements, humanizing the strategy and tactics, invigorating them with an anticapitalist ideological base, and facilitating their coming together. This will take the fight for the right to the city beyond its limits, to a wider level. Hope lies there too.
The author thanks Partho Sarathi Ray and other members of Sanhati, Kolkata, for sharing the day-to-day details of the movement in Nonadanga.
Above, a resident of Nonadanga sitting on the spot where her house used to stand before demolition; below, protest march organized by the Committee against Demolition.
Above, Nonadanga being bulldozed; below, post-demolition efforts to restart life. The struggle is led by the Committee against Demolition. Facing page: “State bulldozes Nonadanga Slum. Voice your protest. Support the just demand for rehabilitation.
—Committee against Demolition”
