The distributive politics of urban slums is a dynamic process, where a bottom-up mobilisation seeks to gain material benefits. This goes against the conventional understanding of Indian slums, that “these neighbourhoods are often understood to be governed by ruthless gangs, or rendered the playthings of politicians, who dangle handouts during elections to amass support from desperate residents.”
Against this understanding, the book titled Migrants and Machine Politics: How India’s Urban Poor Seek Representation and Responsiveness authored by Adam Michael Auerbach and Tariq Thachil formulates: “Against these narratives, we find slums communities engaging in sustained, bottom-up claim making to improve local conditions. They actively select their informal leaders through deliberate meetings, informal elections, and day-to-day decisions over whom to follow and whose door to knock on to ask for help.”
This book is the culmination of eight years of research in the slums of two cities, Jaipur and Bhopal.
Adam Michael Auerbach and Tariq Thachil
Migrants and Machine Politics: How India’s Urban Poor Seek Representation and Responsiveness
Princeton University Press (January 2023)
Before I proceed with the review, a caveat. Words used to describe people in the slums and their connections with the political parties and leaders is alien to the vocabulary that we normally find being used in India.
Take for example, client, broker, and patron are words used for a slum dweller, slum representative/leader, and political leader (ward councillor or higher up), respectively. Likewise, machine politics is the politics of slums, which sounds like a mechanical process built into the governance structure. For the sake of convenience, I will use the same words though I do not subscribe to this vocabulary.
Phenomenal exercise
This book is a phenomenal exercise based on research on primary data collected from these two cities. A total of 110 slums were surveyed; 663 party workers (brokers), who held distinct positions within a committee at one of the party organisational levels, were interviewed; 343 party patrons; and over 4,000 respondents/slum residents. The survey and research work was conducted from 2012 to 2020.
The book provokes an interesting discussion on slums. How is political authority crafted within the growing cities? How, if at all, do urban residents have a say in who leads their local community? Once local leaders have taken on this role, how do they decide whom to help in the neighbourhoods where resources are limited? What guides the flow of resources? What are the relations between the brokers and the patrons?
Let us try to explore some of these questions as generated through the research data.
How does the political authority of an individual emerge in a slum? Is it rooted in ethnicity, caste, region or something else? There is interesting data which reveals that the slum dwellers chose their first priority on the basis of the education of the leader and someone who can represent them and connect them to the bureaucracy. The findings exhibit that residents in slums will not simply assemble behind members of their own ethnic group, as is commonly assumed. Residents greatly value brokers whom they see as well-positioned to effectively solve their everyday problems.
Five key features emerge from the research work as laid out in the book. There is persistent underdevelopment in the slums that leads to low-income voters making claims; sending resident requests to local brokers rather than high-level politicians; prioritising effective problem solvers over solely ethnic considerations by residents; brokers privilege building inclusive reputations over monitoring and punishing voters; and the pervasive political competition across and within party organisational networks.
Also read: Book Review: Working Lives in the Shadows of the Global City
What does this mean?
First, based on the research, local brokerage network formation is crucial for bottom-up demands in the slums. These demands primarily concern the physical infrastructure, sewage management, paving of roads, etc. This sort of citizen agency is critically important to meet the persistent conditions of underdevelopment in the slums.
Second, the requests or demands compel the residents to seek assistance from local political actors, who then relay these demands to higher-level elites, mainly bureaucrats and politicians. This is an another interesting feature of this study. “Such mediated access to political elites is a key organisational feature of machine politics.” Instead of elite politicians, the citizens seek assistance from politically connected leaders. Only 1.5% of the residents said that they would approach MPs for assistance and just 8.3% would approach the MLAs, according to another study (APU-Lokniti), mentioned in the book.
Third, and this one is quite a revelation. The slum residents prioritise effective problem-solvers when seeking assistance, and they do not ‘reflexively’ support members of their own castes. “Education was in the top two responses in both the surveys (Jaipur and Bhopal), while shared ethnicity was not.”
Four, brokers privilege building inclusive reputations over monitoring and punishing voters. An interesting manifestation is the how brokers display indifference to ethnicity, in cultivating multi-ethnic clientele. One of the plausible reasons for this could be the tremendous social diversity observed in Indian slums.
Five, the book highlights how these processes of selection are ‘undergirded’ by considerable political competition at every level of machine politics. Voters often change which party they support. Brokers are willing to flip parties. Patrons are in search of upward mobility and even party elites switching partisan allegiances.
No wonder that a 2019 election survey of national elections found that over 60% of respondents did not report feeling close to any single party.
The major upshot of the study is that the urban poor are thus architects of the political networks that connect them to the state. Politicians have little choice but to engage with slum leaders chosen by residents. And, during the allocation of party positions, they need to prioritise those slum leaders with attributes that will ensure their continued popularity among residents.
The most important attribute is the one that boosts efficacy in problem-solving, i.e., a slum leader’s education.
Is that so simple?
I find the authors think of ‘slums’ as an ecosystem fully contained within themselves, with little connection with the outside world. But that is not true. The belief that slum residents are the driving force in today’s world of distributive politics would be naïve. The book does not explore the various aspects of the new form of urbanisation taking place since the 1990s. Though there are references to informality, how this informality links to peoples’ lives is hardly ventured into.
Further, the binary between slums and the patron elite is not as unambiguous as it appears to be. It is quite blurred. Take for example, a slum leader who becomes the mayor of the city! Likewise, the role of organised movements or unions is not taken into consideration, even if this is not always visible. Does it create any new architecture or is it meaningless for slum residents?
Threat of majoritarian politics in Indian cities
However, the epilogue in the book very correctly points out the transition of local politics into a centralising democracy. With the advent of Hindutva politics, the sheer diversity prevalent in slums is also getting marginalised. It rightly points out that “a constant drum beat of Hindutva politics might fundamentally alter realities of ethnic diversity in slums. It may become increasingly difficult for slum leaders and politicians to credibly commit to assisting those of a different faith. …..India’s cities already face systematic marginalisation in the distribution of public services. The breakdown of multi-religious segregation in political networks corrodes a buffer against communal conflict.”
For the Indian cities what is being witnessed is a) greater political and fiscal centralisation and b) unleashed Hindu majoritarianism and growing intolerance of dissent against the Modi government.
Contentious politics is being altered, which is a bedrock for distributive politics!
Tikender Singh Panwar was once directly elected deputy mayor of Shimla. He was linked with the Leh Vision document and has written vision documents for a dozen cities. Author of two books, he is an urban specialist working in the design of inclusive cities.
