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rj

Rishi Jha

Doctoral student

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Civilizing the political society? Redevelopment regime and Urban Poor’s Rights in Mumbai

Author

  • Rishi Jha

Summary, in English

This article is concerned with informality-state relations, subaltern politics and citizenship in the context of the urban redevelopment regime. Based on an empirical study of an NGO (SPARC)-mediated resettlement of Project Affected Persons (PAPs) in Mumbai, it explicates the incomplete ‘civilizing of the political society’ which engenders asymmetrical material and leadership enablement and differential subjectivities at the community levels. The state co-opts SPARC’s institutional framework to mediate resettlement, engender limited traversal from ‘population’ to ‘citizen’, restrict democratic liberation and subject the PAPs to bifold governance against the antagonistic articulations of state-subaltern relations, viz. ‘political society’ and ‘deep democracy’. SPARC’s institutional claims of inclusion and community-centric resettlement, non-confrontational negotiations and politics of patience are materialized through institutional coercion, domesticated confrontations and inadequate compensation, and are augmented by the PAPs’ calculative rationalities, fear of homelessness and anticipation of urban citizenship. Against this backdrop and amid further post-resettlement marginalities that complicate housing-based ‘substantive citizenship’ and ‘political society’-based mediation, this article calls for a re-politicization of the redevelopment discourse to seek alternate possibilities of urban citizenship for the urban subaltern.

Department/s

  • School of Social Work

Publishing year

2020

Language

English

Pages

199-217

Publication/Series

Community Development Journal

Volume

55

Issue

2

Document type

Journal article

Publisher

Oxford University Press

Topic

  • Social Work

Keywords

  • Urban redevelopment
  • Political society
  • Deep democracy
  • Urban citizenship
  • Urban subaltern

Status

Published

ISBN/ISSN/Other

  • ISSN: 0010-3802