Asia Shorts. Ann Arbor, MI: Association for Asian Studies, 2020. xxi, 152 pp. (B&W photos.) US$16.00, paper. ISBN 9780924304934.
Lisa Björkman’s Waiting Town: Life in Transit and Mumbai’s Other World-Class Histories is an immersive reading that details everyday politics of claimmaking through years of ethnographic enquiry in “Pratiksha Nagar” (Waiting Town) of India’s metropolitan city of Mumbai. The book attempts to “challenge and destabilize the epistemological presumptions upon which the globally empowered principles [of developmantilist thinking] are premised” (4). The paradigm of developmentalist thinking as advocated by the World Bank calls for the participation of community organizations in adjudicating the matters of right to resettlement and rehabilitation (R&R) for project-affected persons (PAPs). Björkman chooses to talk about this aspect of global developmentalist thinking and how a neoliberal vision that attempts to displace the role of state institutions is in itself utterly chaotic. This story of the failure of community participation is told from the sites in and around Pratiksha Nagar that are in a constant state of flux in terms of the circulation of identities of its residents.
Pratiksha Nagar is a low-income temporary settlement in Mumbai where PAPs waiting to be resettled into public housing live. The project is the Mumbai Urban Transport Project (MUTP) for which the World Bank is one of the significant funding agencies. In accordance with the World Bank conditionalities, the resettlement of PAPs should be done through “community managed, ‘participatory displacement’” (4). One of the core arguments of the book is that while this seemingly inclusive approach that includes the participation of community organizations is globally heralded as a best practice, the reality narrates a much more complex story. It is the politics around questions of displacement and rehabilitation and the attendant claim-making and counter-claiming process of the PAPS along with the role of the local political organizations, community organizations, state institutions, and international development institutions (such as the World Bank) that this book details. On the other hand, this detailing accompanies the knowledge and material basis upon which these claims and counterclaims rest.
Björkman’s interest with Pratiksha Nagar emanates from the question of water access and infrastructure in the neighbourhood. However, it becomes clearer with time that access to material resources in Pratiksha Nagar depends on the circulation of identities and its political manifestations which in themselves are dependent on the larger question of what exactly determines who is a PAP. The book explains that the determination of PAPs status under the World Bank conditionalities is a process that is intertwined with the techniques of governmentality from below, which “were themselves an imitation of the state’s own governmentalizing gaze” (33).
The narratives in the book are written in a non-linear fashion spanning nearly two decades. In the early chapters of the book, the author discusses the circulation of identities and the myriad of divisions in Pratiksha Nagar and questions these manifestations by attending to their underlying and layered political praxis. Joona and Navin, two of the prominent identities of residents in this neighbourhood, determine access to resources and claim-making prospects. Joona refers to old residents of the settlement and Navin to new. Joona people are PAPs who were eligible to be shifted to temporary settlements but were found ineligible for resettlement into permanent housing. It is in the attempt to solve this puzzle—how PAPs that were found to be eligible for resettlement into temporary housing are found to be ineligible in the aftermath process that was followed for permanent housing—that the author discovers how this process is fraught with spatial, economic, political, and temporal tensions. The author narrates these details, uncovers these tensions, and thereby delineates the processes of different scales of claim-making—from local to global—and concludes by arguing the near impossibility of ascertaining the authenticity of the claims under this globally renowned resettlement framework and its epistemological basis.
In the book, the community organization that became a partner in this resettlement process is the Scheme for Promotion of Academic and Research Collaboration (SPARC), a federation of community organizations that are locally active. An important basis upon which the eligibility for resettlement is established is the baseline survey conducted by this federation of locally active community organizations which Björkman compares to Appadurai’s “governmentality from the below” (23–43). However, this baseline survey itself becomes a bone of contention for its incapacity to accommodate temporal contingences alongside the everyday local political contestations and practices. As a result, R&R becomes an on-going process with people’s lives ever in transit with its own attendant logics.
One of the interesting aspects that the book also highlights is the mutual production/co-production of economic liberalization and the urbanization projects in India. The neoliberal market approach that guided the new economic policy of India during the early 1990s also dubbed much of the policy discourse of India’s urbanization story. The market-based approach with its real estate vision of India’s metropolitan cities and determination of local political contestations and claim making is an important insight in the book. However, what the book misses is a little more analytical detailing of the scale of transgressions between the local and the global and their political economic implications of space-making.
Omkar Nadh Pattela
Indian Institute for Human Settlements, Bangalore