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Demolition and Dispossession: Toward an Understanding of State Violence in Millennial Mumbai

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Abstract

Slum clearance campaigns and demolition drives have been understood as an integral part of the governance of the Indian city, but little effort has been made to analyze why the Indian state periodically invokes its monopoly on the legitimate use of physical force in this manner. To answer this question, this article analyzes three periods of heightened demolitions in post-independence Mumbai: the mid-1950s, amidst independent state formation; the mid-1970s, during the period of authoritarian rule referred to as the Emergency; and the mid-2000s, when Maharashtra’s Chief Minister initiated a campaign to “transform Mumbai into a world class city.” In each of these periods—as well as during the smaller-scale demolitions that are a consistent feature of life in the city—this article argues that slum evictions cannot be explained solely by what David Harvey and others have referred to as “accumulation by dispossession,” whereby the urban poor is dispossessed to initiate potentially lucrative urban development. Rather, it demonstrates that demolitions are embedded in contestations over authority and sovereignty in the governance of the Indian city. Furthermore, it demonstrates that despite a heightened awareness about this type of state violence, the explanations for demolition drives remain fairly consistent in the current globalizing or neoliberal era.

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Notes

  1. This article refers to the city as both Mumbai and as its former name, Bombay. When discussing the city pre-1995, when its name was changed to Mumbai, this article uses the former name.

  2. Quoted in Mahadevia and Narayanan (2008).

  3. Quoted in Sainath (2005).

  4. The collaborative relations between Mumbai's "big men" and the state are analogous to collaborative relations between states and the local armed actors that appear in the contributions to this special issue by Arias (2013) and LeBas (2013).

  5. Although I am employing a longitudinal analysis of clearance campaigns, the particular state actors (essentially the independent variables) examined in each case are distinct. In the 1950s, for example, the level of the state carrying out the demolitions was the municipality; in the 1970s, it was the national government, with support from the state-level political party; and in the early 2000s, it was the state-level government. Although the finding of relatively consistent actions carried out by varied state actors may be difficult generalize to other contexts, it is central to the core argument that the fragmented nature of sovereignty leads the state (in its various incarnations and scales) to employ violence in this manner.

  6. For example, see Emma Tarlo (2003).

  7. Thanks to Jennifer Earl for making me aware of this literature.

  8. Author interview November 18, 2005.

  9. Moncada (2013) examines how measures designed by the private sector can become adopted as public policy within the context of the politics of urban violence.

  10. Quoted in Srivastava (2005).

  11. Despite the manner in which his plan linked slum clearance with development, none of these new infrastructure projects were specifically slated for sites of cleared hutments.

  12. It should be noted that the author is presently working with a research team to collect these data over a longer historical period and in a number of major Indian cities.

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Acknowledgments

Thanks to Eduardo Moncada, Diane E. Davis, Smitha Radhakrishnan, Ashutosh Varshney, Sam Cohen, Jennifer Earl, and the participants in the Brown University conference, "Violent Cities: Challenges of Democracy, Development, and Governance in the Urban Global South," for their helpful comments on earlier drafts of this article.

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  1. Department of Sociology and Anthropology, Northeastern University, Boston, MA, 02115, USA

    Liza Weinstein

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Weinstein, L. Demolition and Dispossession: Toward an Understanding of State Violence in Millennial Mumbai. St Comp Int Dev 48, 285–307 (2013). https://doi.org/10.1007/s12116-013-9136-9

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