‘Politics in slums highly active and competitive’
A new book by political scientists Adam Auerbach and Tariq Thachil, Migrants and Machine Politics, informs much of what we think we know is based on myth.
In most popular portrayals, Indian slums are cast as dens of inequity and deprivation in which citizens are trapped in a vortex of poverty, bad governance, and corruption. In these narratives, politicians and their henchmen appear to have the last laugh, extracting whatever they can from citizens who have few exit options.
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A new book by political scientists Adam Auerbach and Tariq Thachil, Migrants and Machine Politics, informs us that much of what we think we know is based on myth, not fact.
Auerbach and Thachil spoke about their findings – based on a decade of fieldwork in urban squatter settlements in Bhopal and Jaipur – on last week’s “Grand Tamasha” podcast, a co-production of HT and the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace.
“Far from being chaotic or lawless spaces, politics in slums we found to be highly active, highly organised, and highly competitive,” noted Thachil, who is Director of the Center for the Advanced Study of India (CASI) and Madan Lal Sobti Professor for the Study of Contemporary India at the University of Pennsylvania. “So, if you think of ordinary residents… not only do they vote at very incredibly high rates, but between the vote, they are regularly organising to make claims, to try and secure goods or services for their settlement, or to fight eviction efforts.”
Thachil remarked that the leaders who organise communities in urban slum settlements tend to come from within these very same communities. These leaders, in turn, are often connected to mainstream political parties who then must decide whether and how to respond to the demands of ordinary residents. Rather than being mere pawns in a rigged political game, Thachil noted, “these residents are actively wielding the forces of political competition.”
Indeed, the myth of “machine politics” in urban cities is somewhat at odds with the bottom-up reality, Auerbach explained. Informal leaders in these areas emerge organically through one of two pathways. “The first is through informal elections in the community as well as deliberative community meetings where people from the community will come together and decide who they want to be their informal leader,” said Auerbach, who is associate professor in the School of International Service at American University in Washington, D.C.
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“But, there are also these everyday moments where individual residents and their families have to decide – we are faced with this barrage of problems: we don’t have a water connection, we don’t have an electricity connect, the monsoon rains came and washed away a part of the road – who are we going to turn to and seek help from in this neighborhood? These everyday decisions aggregate into a distribution of support for an informal leader.”
One of the duo’s most counterintuitive findings is the muted role played by identity politics. Because settlements are so diverse, leaders cannot rely on caste and religion alone to target voters. Instead, they must learn how to build cross-ethnic appeals. Auerbach said, “(These settlements) are incredibly ethnically diverse – in terms of jati (subcaste), in terms of their religion, and in terms of their region of origin that people have moved from. If you randomly picked two people from the community, there’s an 80% chance that they will be from a different caste.”