In the Public's Interest by unknow

Author:unknow
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: Nonfiction, Social & Cultural Studies, Political Science, Politics, City Planning & Urban Development, Social Science, Human Geography, History, Asian, India
ISBN: 9780820350080
Publisher: University of Georgia Press
Published: 2016-11-15T05:00:00+00:00

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Thus far, I have shown how the courts justified evictions in the name of public interest in part by reframing the latter as the failure of ‘planned development’. Within case law on evictions, this failure was most visibly marked by the distance between the city and its master plan—what the courts termed as ‘encroachment’. Evictions, rather than being acts of exclusion and violence, corrected encroachment. They became acts of a return to order, to planning and to ‘good governance’. In this chapter, I return to the case law on evictions with a different inquiry—to ask what evictions tell us about the possibilities of urban citizenship in Indian cities.

Why citizenship? Recent writing suggests that cities of the global South could be sites of a more egalitarian politics, be it through Arjun Appadurai’s (2002) notion of a ‘deep democracy’ that represents efforts to ‘reconstitute citizenship in cities’, or James Holston’s writing on the possibility of insurgence that he describes as ‘a counter-politics that destabilizes the dominant regime of citizenship and renders it vulnerable’ (2009: 245). Urban citizens, Holston argues, see the city rather than the nation as the ‘primary community of reference’ (2008: 23) for claims to rights and belonging. This claim is particularly important, argue Holston and Appadurai, in post-colonial societies where a ‘new generation has arisen to create urban cultures severed from both colonial memories and nationalist fictions’ (1999: 3).

Has Lefebvre’s oft-quoted ‘right to the city’ indeed ‘moved South, so to speak’ (Holston 2009: 245)? There is no doubt that the urban has emerged both as a site and context in an India that was long meant to have lived in its villages, as Gandhi once put it. Yet the ‘urban turn’ that Gyan Prakash (2002) heralded over a decade ago remains immensely debated. Many scholars have argued that the dominant discourses of citizenship in urban India reflect, in fact, the rise of a new growth coalition that sees cities as the ‘engines of national development’ (HPEC 2011: xxi). In the speech that launched the ambitious JNNURM in 2005, then Prime Minister Manmohan Singh said: ‘We must plan big, think big and have a new vision for the future of urban India,’ realising that ‘our urban economy has become an important driver of economic growth’ that is a ‘bridge between the domestic and global economy.’4 The JNNURM, argues Om Mathur (2009), marks ‘one of the most extraordinary shifts in thinking in India about cities and urbanization’ that realigns ‘urban sector policies to the emerging macro-economic context in the post-1991 period.’

Others describe this moment as a ‘post-development social formation’ within which even the ‘nominal ethical relationship’ between the ‘state, elite and the poor of a previous developmentalism stands fractured’(Gidwani and Reddy 2011: 1640). As a self-fashioned ‘middle class citizen’ becomes the object of what Deshpande (1993) once eloquently called the ‘imagined economy’ at the heart of any developmental imagination, Drèze and Sen (2013) argue that this citizen becomes the new aam aadmi in our cities—not necessarily elite but certainly not poor given the demographic realities of both poverty and destitution in Indian cities.

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