Princeton Studies in Political Behavior. Princeton and Oxford: Princeton University Press, 2023. xi, 275 pp. (Tables, graphs, figures, B&W photos.) US$35.00, paper. ISBN 9780691236094.
The book under review is a significant addition to the growing literature on the politics of the urban poor. While many influential works, such as Partha Chatterjee’s Politics of the Governed (2004) have argued that urban poor’s politics flows in distinct registers typified as ‘political society’ from that of civil society inhabited by the middle classes, they have focused on how the urban poor use their networks to put pressure on public representatives and leverage democratic processes. In contrast, Migrants and Machine Politics focuses on how networks are made in the first place. The urban poor need to forge a collective before they can exert pressure on their public representatives. The authors seek to answer how a motley collection of individuals from diverse linguistic, regional, ethnic, caste, and religious backgrounds can become a collective to pursue their interests around civic amenities in urban slums.
The book has an introductory chapter that introduces the machine politics in urban slums, followed by four chapters whose titles amply clarify the focus of the book. The second chapter addresses how brokers emerge; the third chapter looks at how brokers cultivate clients; the fourth chapter is about how patrons select brokers; and the fifth chapter delves into how patrons respond to brokered requests. In essence, the book is an attempt to capture a detailed account of the emergent relations between the clients, brokers, and patrons, i.e., the slum dwellers, the leaders in the slums, and the leaders in political parties or elected public representatives. The authors provide an in-depth analysis with graphic details on how politics take shape in informal settings where there are no ground rules or institutional procedures.
In order to conceptualize the analytical component of urban politics in informal settings, the book is structured around a series of descriptive topics such as mapping the demographic characteristics of slum brokers and party patrons, and measuring how competitive brokerage in migrant settlements is and assessing how much agency slum residents have in choosing which local broker to follow. The book’s more procedural analysis includes tracing how political authority takes shape within slums, how party patrons and slum leaders come into contact with one another, and the trajectory of brokers’ careers within party organizations (37).
The authors adopt a methodologically diverse approach. They combine ethnographic fieldwork to understand basic demographic details about the “daily social and political life of poor migrants” (37). They also combine qualitative methods with quantitative data-collection and with experiments on contending issues, such as loyalty as against efficacy. The authors observe that “our strongest findings are those for which we find repeated evidence across the various empirical strategies deployed in the book” (39). The book presents a study of slums in two Indian cities: Bhopal in Madhya Pradesh and Jaipur in Rajasthan.
Countering the conventional understanding and popular accounts of slum residents being passive, exhausted, and weak, this book is an attempt to restore an agentive role within the machine politics that are “principally understood as expedient conduits for politicians looking to cheaply amass votes” (5). It is about how the urban poor exert ‘influence’ over public representatives and manage to get routine and essential benefits such as water and electricity rather than episodic handouts such as cash and liquor. The residents find and design various strategies of political participation to generate “unexpected forms of accountability and representation,” rather than get manipulated as “docile bodies.” The agentive role of the urban poor is deeply connected to how machine politics are “marked by high competition, active clients, entrepreneurial brokers, and a less central role for ethnic favoritism than commonly assumed” (20). Clients actively choose brokers and are not imposed upon by political elites. Brokers are chosen based on educational qualifications and political connections rather than ethnicity and caste, though the role of caste cannot be ruled out completely. It is, in fact, the contentious relation between these factors that makes the study of urban politics challenging. There is no fixed frame or set of rules within which they operate. The slum residents face secular, problem-solving considerations in choosing/electing their brokers, which is also the consideration for party patrons to extend their patronage to brokers, who independently gain popularity based on their work helping residents with quotidian problems. Slum leaders are not born out of coercive violence and criminality, as is often depicted in popular Bollywood movies. The residents always retain the choice of shifting allegiance to another broker or slum leader and therefore cannot be forced to extend loyalty through threats and violence. The book makes a clear case that politics in urban slums cannot be captured as a paradigmatic case of patronage politics; rather it is based on a progressive weakening of patron-client relations through the underlying democratic competition.
The study of urban politics, however, has to be contextualized through the limitations of such “contextual negotiations” (to use Chatterjee’s phrase) that the book emphasizes. The authors argue that such “piecemeal politics ensures persistent forms of dependency, inhibits coordinated claim-making across settlements, and fails to deliver systematic policy-based improvements. Yet we caution readers against assuming that the removal of these networks would necessarily yield pro-poor programmatic politics. Even with all their limitations, these structures can equally be seen to provide a bulwark against an even more exclusionary, elitist and repressive posture towards the urban poor” (17). The question really seems to be the paradox of how greater democratic participation is only further entrenching the urban poor in exploitative power structures. The attempt to validate the non-sovereign agency of the urban poor carries with it the burden of legitimizing representation without redistribution. Democratic politics are creating greater forms of dependency that belie a political language for articulating it. Participation has become a template for tacit consent to exploitative structures. The question of how does one not lose sight of the larger and relatively abstract structures without denying the agentive character of the urban poor will continue to engage scholars of urban politics.
Ajay Gudavarthy
Jawaharlal Nehru University, New Delhi