Among the ways in which we could read it as revealing something about relations between genders cross-cutting relations amongst classes, I felt that we could read it as the autowallah’s lament/resentment/sense of exclusion at being counted out of the sexual zone of a middle/upper class woman automatically by the epithet bhayya. He probably sees it as an indication from the woman saying “please keep off, don’t try any hanky-panky”. Of course, women devise these defence mechanisms in response to their everyday battles with men in the public space, which is where Manash’s illustrations are so vividly fitting.

But notwithstanding, I want to leave here the possibility of an autowallah sighing in that warning - to the tune of “What if”…

“But with that comment” - I meant “that” to be the statement written in the auto.

I really liked the article on Hafta bazaars by Sohail. I was really inquisitive about finding out the lesser known history of Delhi.

However, I would like to know more about it so would request Sohail if he could assisst me with the sources of such data.

saravanan

But recently when a Christian body representing Dalits or the socially underprivileged questioned the church leadership for demanding special treatment for them and accused it of exploiting their economic and social backwardness, it appeared that their dream of liberation from the rigid caste system was far from coming true.

Stating that Dalit Christians accounted for 70 percent of India’s Christian population, the Poor Christian Liberation Movement (PCLM), a Christian organization based in Delhi, accused high caste Christians of exploiting them.

The church leadership wanted to exploit the poverty and unemployment among the Dalit Christians to demand reservation of government jobs for them by getting them classified as scheduled castes, PCLM president R.L. Francis said in a press statement.

People belonging to the scheduled castes benefit from reservations in educational institutions and government jobs.

“It is worth mentioning here that when they (Dalit Christians) were in Hindu society, they were the victims of the caste system. The foremost reason for their coming to the fold of Christianity was that there would be no discrimination and they would be treated as equals,” the PCLM president continued.

“But despite a wide network of (Christian) missionary schools and colleges, most children of Dalit Christians have not been able to rise above the literacy level because these convent schools are busy catering to the educational needs of upper and high caste people. The neglect of Dalit Christian children by these institutions is at the root of the problem,” he lamented.

“Same is the case with job opportunities and entrepreneurship development. Dalit Christians are being denied all these facilities while the church leadership continues to flourish by usurping vast foreign funding and real estate resources,” Francis charged.

Demanding a Dalit Christian Development Board, he said that in the coming parliamentary elections, members of the community would only vote for parties which supported this.

iam realy wondered you comparing india to israel thats not make any sense,not a logical,see did you aware u.s not supplying uraneum to israel or otherwise israel doesn’t have nuke bombs,( israle is the third country having more nuke weapons next to u.s and russia).israel never join IAEA,thats what u.s also want.

for your knowledge international court unanimously announced wall in Gaza is illegal,in that time which country backs Israel.

i have a few questions to ask .

1,why the u.s very keen to push this nuke agreement?

2,what really u.s looking from india ?

3,u.s can be a reliable partner to india?

4, can you think u.s can treat india as a equal partner?

5, why the indian media lobbying for this deal?

6,why the indian corparate society desparately looking this deal?

iam eagerly looking your response .

thank you

with regards
saravanan

I see this as another reason to keep the autos in OUR banner.

Hindol Bhattacharjee

In the political turmoil and in the manipulative condition of Indian political scenario, it is again an obvious situation that excluding the issue around which people raised their voice against the power structure in 2007, i.e., the voice against imperialist economy, namely SEZ, is going to disappear. Though, the manifestation of this economic policy is still going on in different places of India. Not being a political person, I am not at all interested about who is going to rule West Bengal; I just want to ask everybody who is our enemy? If we go on thinking and following the statistics of India, BJP has manifested and taken proper steps to manifest SEZ and Chemical Hub in different corners of Gujarat and they are not at all against the SEZ. As per the central is concerned, the ruling administration of India, captained by Manmohon Singh and Congress leadership, is not at all against the imperialist invasion of economy over India and they have accepted the globalise economy. The movement, steered actually by the farmers of Nandigram and Khammam, is their struggles for survival, to keep their lands for agriculture and they have not at all lost their battle but created some fundamental question which incorporates the thought that whether we have our democracy or not and what is the real development. It is to be noted that development is defined not only by CPM but also by the central and Indian political hierarchy, not giving any importance to some alternative thoughts and not giving any importance to the people’s struggle and their consents whether they need this type of development or not. It is not only the hierarchical and urbanised culture to nullify the consents of more than 70% of people living by agriculture , possessing lands but also being practised by each and every political party in India.

CPM is not the enemy and it is equally true to congress or TMC or BJP. They all are puppets of the world wide power structure and they have no such power or intention to stand against this economy. This is also true that after the massacre happened twice at Nandigram and the administrative corruption led by the cadres of CPM in different districts of West Bengal have reached its pinnacle from where we should take our democratic weapon to defeat them here. But this is not the solution of the vast economic invasion over the people of India and the third world countries because we are not at all thinking about a different economic model by which we can fight against this invasion without any banner of so called parliamentarian political parties and system. Congress, BJP and TMC are not at all the solution against CPM and if an alliance is organised among the opponent parties, then it would be just a different driver whose characteristic is the same as CPM as throughout India we have a lot of instances where these parties have done and doing the same thing.

The Civil Society should think about this matter to spread a vast struggle against that economy irrespective of the narrow political changes and alliances, elections etc. It is to be noted that now the problem regarding the SEZ is not a focussing point, whereas the focussing point has been shifted towards the game of political dominance and capture over the steering role of the power through election. Nobody is thinking about the probable hazards that are coming. If this system goes on operating the environment is going to be more polluted, the global warming is aggravating. India is going to face the scarce of lands for agriculture like China, we are going to face food crisis. The inflation along with the treaties concerning Gatt and Dunkle will be the cause of rise in values of medicines etc. No change of existing political system will do anything to change the situation. We all have reacted against the brutality of the massacres, against the autocracy of CPM and it is really a right situation to uphold an alternative economic theory and concept of politics. Economists and environmentalists, scientists and artists—everybody should encourage and participate to build up this otherwise we will be unable to change anything. The democracy for which we are fighting is linked directly with this fight, conceptually and without any political banner. I think in this perspective, Noam Chomsky. Michel Foucault and early Marx can show us the way. But it is only my interpretation. I need your opinion, too.

Hindol Bhattacharjee

9830751535

Why does the Kashmiri government cancel land alloted to Amarnath Shrine, just because it is related to Hindus?

Hypocrite govenment and pseudo secular dumb idiots have got no right to exist in this country !!

now the only question is: where is this fabled half-full-glass world?

Reversing the effects of primitive accumulation - I am not sure it is “mercy politics” really. This whole microfinance business that Partha refers to is a state strategy to produce market oriented citizens.
It hinges on a representation of poor people as entreprenuerial. So, effectively, the responsibility for one’s wellbeing is shifted away from the state to the individual who must be self regulating, self disciplined and so on. So non corporate capital is mainly going to form out of that upper segment of the poor who will make the grade through these kinds of programs and become entreprenurial.
Microfinance initiatives acknowledge this structural problem. But they systematically underestimate it. In their calculations only five per cent of the total number of poor belong in that section who simply will have to be provided for by social safety nets. The rest can look after themselves through the markets. Hence the ever expanding microfinance - niche marketing of financial services for the poor. And web campaigns like “End of poverty is just one click away”.
How should we understand this segment of petty traders and small producers that are sought to be consolidated as the pliable populations of cities of tomorrow ? What role are they going to play visavis the other social groups ? How are they going to be emplaced ? How will the state deal with the contradictory pulls of having to create clean and neat cities that can attract investments and at the same time not be so violent as to lead to a legitimacy crisis?

I hold no brief for Chatterjee. I think we should exhaust the possibilities and move on. Yes, my intention inter alia is to suggest that bringing those networks out of hiding should be high on transformative agendas.

No social formation can become a historic bloc by making slight adjustments. The question rather was …where exactly is the potential agency for change located ? I think Chatterjee looks at the altered conditions as something ‘out’ there and thereby misses the most important lesson of Nandigram. What Nandigram challenges us to do is to confront very terms on which that question can be asked.

Neoliberal globalization after all is neither an interloper nor an external threat. It came to India in a fairly mature form and met with an accomplice to remake possibilities of politics. It is everywhere. So yes, we have to ask a lot of questions quite afresh.

The pleasure was mine.

A nice exposition indeed. Many thanks. I must point out that I have deep misgivings about supplicating to a politics of pure relationality, hence my emphasis on matter and political innovation. I was making a simple point: that Chatterjee is not a classical enough thinker when it comes to imagining democracy, and that comes out most vividly in this particular essay. Someone who takes anonymity of the marginals for granted can only do as much rear guard modernism; and a particular brand of modernism at that. Chatterjee is one of our interesting analysts owing to his limpid prose, handling of data, taking locational risks and so forth. But political imagination is not his forte.

I also remain deeply sceptical of a particular reading of Gramsci and in fact, of The 18th Brumaire, by Sudipta K, a path which Chatterjee used to trudge. His shift in this essay is stark even by his earlier standards. The very idea of his nation, which did challange Ben Anderson’s thesis, has now given way to state’s negotiation with various networks. So, if you are saying unconcealing these networks and building up afresh is democratic, I am with you. I seriously doubt though that is Chatterjee’s intention. If you are saying non-corporate capital will form a historic block by making slight adjustments, we amicably part ways.

It was a pleasure talking to you.

I.

I will begin by making a claim on behalf of PC - affect and relationality are not incompatible with his understanding of political society. In fact, affect via a host of social formations (e.g. caste); and mutualities as a special instance of relational space, are both constitutive of political society.

PC does not elaborate on these in this essay, but there is enough material in his own earlier essay on political society and in a number of studies on political society in other parts of the world - anthropological studies on the politics of the subaltern (e.g. John Gledhill) in Mexico and sociological studies on urban poor in the Middle East (Say someone like Asef Bayat) and Africa (someone like AbdouMaliq Simone).

I am making this claim because I want to quickly state my take on the critical assessments made by you and Aditya of PC ’s essay. Aditya is broadly accepting the framework but he feels that the category - ‘capital’ itself is saturated with historicism and Eurocentrism – capitalocentrism if you will - and so to recover the critical edge he follows Gibson-Graham line of thinking - get out of the discursive realm of capital by visualizing a non capitalist outside. You do not sound particularly impressed by PC’s framework itself - so you look to Ranciere and Balibar post-Althusser for inspiration. I will hold off on my understanding of these two lines of thinking Gibson-Graham and Ranciere – Balibar etc., for now. For the moment it is sufficient to say that in what the two of you are saying, I see neither a major break with nor a major addition. Instead, you are critiquing him from your own prior commitments. This is fine – but it leaves me wondering whether your criticism is motivated more by political disagreement especially in the wake of Nandigram than by intellectual engagement. Honestly I think there is reason to continue as co travellers with PC for some more distance.

II.

I will not speculate on why PC leaves affect and relationality unelaborated, but just note that the main motivation for these essays is to explore and specify the prospects for equity and dignity for the majority of the population in the former colonies. Implicit in that effort is how to theorize - what categories, and what resources should we draw on to enable radical political action.

It seems to me in this essay, he is reasserting some of his own prior commitments - for example - passive revolution - Gramsci. He is saying that what we are seeing is still passive revolution in the sense that the elites - the bourgeoisie simply are not in control. That is, they cannot either use coercion or expect to produce self regulating subjects overnight. So, they work through coopting key centers of power and push for a sort of cellular change. That the coalition that came together to execute this passive revolution - in India began to unravel by the beginning of the third five year plan - was one of the key points of Sudipta Kaviraj’s 1988 essay. Regardless of the political arrangements among the elites since then, the strategy more or less continued. But now under altered conditions.

PC is noting several shifts. Some of which he states explicitly and leaves the others understated.

First, the state now has extensive reach into the households of the poor.

Second, agrarian relations have changed substantively with large landowning classes no longer holding villages to ransom.

Third, the state is no longer as autonomous from big capital and big farmers as it used to be. That is, the modernizing elites are now highly enamoured of neoliberal capitalism.

Fourth, at the same time, clearly, there are now forces outside the state that are able to push for institutionalization of some of the claims emanating from the political society - claims that would otherwise remain provisional and insecure.

Fifth, he is noting is that there is now a larger population (not merely the urban middle classes but others as well) that is able to make claims in the name of the citizen.

The point he is driving at is that while the spatial reach of a variety of technologies of rule is now far more widespread than say 25 years ago, and much of the economic activity is now in the ambit of corporate calculations and the social regimes that regulate it - there remains a zone of operation that is not entirely determined by these regimes.

So far so good. After all, it is at the point when governmentality fails (as it inevitably does) that state resorts to coercion. And it is at the point where liberal citizenship rights are unaffordable that political society comes into operation. It is at this cusp that we have to judge what kinds of politics to pursue. never argued that political society is a good thing in itself. Nor does he claim that its denizens are happy to be accommodated.

In fact, in this essay, he emphasises a point in that was not adequately asserted previously - the claims of the political society always result in establishment of provisional, insecure entitlements. That is what the illegal, the alien, the pirate, the men and women who circulate between the labour markets of the city and the homesteads in the village depend on. As the efforts to produce world class cities progresses rapidly, this process of producing an urban subaltern will only accelerate.

Surely not the prototypical proletariat, nor even the lumpen proletariat. But something much more sophisticated - in some instances much worse off and in others much better off and in yet others — middling to good. The question really is, whether or not this subaltern can form a historic bloc in the Gramscian sense. It is in groping towards that historical agency that is trying to delineate the non corporate capital. I think any assessment of this essay should figure out for itself whether or not it shares this political project that motivates the inquiry. Speaking for myself - I can say that I share that project. Hence my interest in .

III

Now, my promise that I will try to expand/deepen the sociospatial ambit of this enquiry. Rather than using disciplinary jargon, I will do this through an illustration.

The 1980 industrial policy statement of India marks the beginning of India’s reorientation. This statement promised to promote domestic competition and export oriented production and technology import in some sectors. It is not that we can read the dynamics of a polity from a policy pronouncement. But this policy was part of a variety of other instruments wielded by the state - Planning Commission under Pranab Mukherjee gave prime importance to the urban - ministries of commerce and finance together made it possible for commodities to move freely across India.

All these changes were fought over- each and every detail was negotiated through intense contestation. Overall this new configuration represented the aspirations of new social classes - the rich peasants who were looking to the city for more opportunities for investments, the government employees who were beginning to feel confident about their claims on urban space. The ‘global’ Indian - looking to invest his remittances in productive ventures in the city. All these social classes had one foot still in agrarian economies and they were straining at the leash. This new dynamism and its violence have been documented fairly extensively in the media and in cultural productions of various kinds. But in social sciences it has only been documented somewhat patchily- in studies of rich peasant movements, rural urban migrations and so on. Urban studies was completely innocent of insights into what was going on.

So in 1988, when Sudipta was writing a ‘critique of passive revolution’ the need to take this altered situation had long been present. Basu in Calcutta, NTR in Hyderabad, Lalu and Sharad Yadav in Bihar and UP- the jats in Rajasthan who ensured that there were always a bunch of independent MLAs in the assembly — It was, however not social sciences but organizations like PUCL, PUDR, ALC that produced extensive critical literature on these processes. The trouble however is that both social scientists and these activists were working with a spatial imagination that was circumscribed by the nation state. And largely focused on growing agrarian violence and state violence in the context of militant movements.

The spatial horizons of the lived experience of people were however different. Just as the mobility of agrarian surplus and the encashment of social privileges by government officials and professionals and their own transnational mobilities constantly reshaped the urban landscape —

1)think of the tutorial colleges, small and medium industries, the boom in electronics manufacturing, etc. in the cities; the changes in the symbolic production and reproduction of urban space – the Asian games, the common wealth heads meetings…

2) And think of how switching of speculative capital from films to liquor to civil contracts to acquaculture etc. reshaped the rural and reconstructed the connectivities between the rural and the urban through communication technologies and roads and so on.

These physical, material contexts are of course shaped by people, but the altered contexts also reshaped the options available to people.

Let me illustrate through further examples:

1) The mobilization around Rameeza Bee rape case in Hyderabad in 1978. The Peoples War was not yet fully formed although trouble was in the air. The incident in which a Muslim woman returning from a late night show with her man was picked up by the police and raped — was like a spark in dry hay. There is no other way to describe it. There were what seemed to be spontaneous protests at many places in the city as soon as the news broke. Police stations were attacked. Railway stations were attacked. The police was completely bewildered. Five days later, one senior officer speculated that a lot of organizational work must have gone into building networks that would be ready to take the opportunity as soon as it presented.

Although it acquired communal colours after the first few days, the protests when they started were forceful and were an expression of pent up anger against what people saw as an unjust city.

That kind of mobilizations is not possible in the city anymore. At least, not in the same form - because the city itself has become highly fragmented. In 1978, irani restaurants, street corner addas, college canteens were all very important nodes of public culture. It is not that such places have now disappeared. But the restructuring of the urban economy has now pushed them into nooks and crannies from where they cannot easily maintain communications. This has consequences for the prospects not only of equity and dignity but to the operation of the political society itself. How does the political society operate in a city that is increasingly becoming a space of anonymity? A city where a sort of spectatorship and mall kind of people watching spaces replace the older places which fostered mutual witnessing in diverse neighbourhoods?

E.g. think how relationships between occupational groups such as dhobis and midwives and upper caste middle class families have changed drastically because of the changes in residential patterns, and housing styles.

2) The state itself has restructured in significant ways. 25 years ago, the mobility of an IAS officer was something like - district/municipality to state secretariat to central government and back to the state. Now IAS officers go to the World Bank, to the ADB etc., as consultants, they become directors of a variety of special purpose vehicles, they interact a lot more with foreign and domestic consultants. These charismatic hyper mobile officials have a tough time with the more static local government staff who have to deal with flesh and blood situations. It is no longer possible to think of these things in simple nested hierarchies - local-regional-national-global. Nor is the enormous data that must be handled within the power of the local government officials. Under the changed circumstance, poor people who were earlier able to negotiate through local leaders and lower level government staff now need the mediation by NGOs!

3) The region and the city (usually the state capital) within it - are the targets of international reformers, aid agencies - especially overseas development agencies have much more power over politicians and bureaucracies now than the World Bank or even the national government. Power is now quite impossible to understand in a simple hierarchy of nation, state, and city or even in terms of a federal arrangement. Power flows through a variety of complex networks which are concealed by the very language of transparency that pervades our social space. It is not that the government of West Bengal is lying to us. It is that there are now technologies and regulation mechanisms in place which effectively conceal the processes by which something becomes a truth.

These historical geographical dynamics do not come through effectively in PC’s essay. So, if I have to answer the question - what is enabling and disabling about PC’s latest essay, I would say it raises the right questions and points in the right direction. But lack of consideration of the spatial is a serious drawback. Space as the realm of contestation, space as active agent, space as political. And in many ways, I think that is where the answer to the apparent historicism and eurocentrism in PC’s essay lies. PC’s historicism and eurocentrism cannot be interrupted by affect, mutualties and such like. He has already considered those. What he has not considered is how spatial interactions, place specificities, mobilization of regional and local historical narratives, production of mobile subjects that belong neither in the city nor in the village but are who they are precisely because they are constantly making and remaking and holding on to places that they take with them - like snails (think of the ragpickers in cities). It is these considerations that introduce the element of the unpredictable and interrupt the smooth flow of historicism.

Thanks for a very well argued article. Would have loved to be on the march too, except that I am far away from Delhi at the moment

salaam

Shuddha

In Peru at a certain point of time, in a certain place - some areas of Lima city to be specific, de soto’s arguments were all important and represented greater degree of freedom for actors in the informal sector. Think about it - if you were in a joint family and your bank asks for collateral to give you a loan so that you can start your own enterprise, you would consider dividing up the family holding into parts on which each one will have exclusive ownership.

It is when he moves from this to theorizing it that desoto starts talking poppycock. Theoretically, the answer to the question you are raising - what happens when boundaries are fixed is simple. The piece of land whose boundaries are fixed but encoded in a title deed that is recognized by law - begins to live a double life. One as a piece of land on which you live, or work of play - ‘use value’ and the other as something that can be exchanged for something equivalent through the common currency of money - ‘exchange value’.

The point here is not that people without clear titles do not exchange land for money. Close studies of urban slums in different cities have documented dozens of ways in which these exchanges are done. If you look for it you will find notarized documents for sale of lands worth hundreds of thousands. No registration fee, no question of getting a no encumbrance certificates, no nothing. You could mortgage, you could give it in dowry. You could get it for free or for doing small favors like eves dropping on trouble makers and reporting to the slum leaders…or a widow could get it for free because the local pehelwan was told by his ustad that he should always look out for women who are vulnerable. And the woman’s right to use that land and even mortgage it to a neighbor remains unchallenged so long as the pehelwan’s influence remains intact.

These local, complicated, ethicomoral frameworks some times work for some people and at other times they can be quite oppressive for some - imagine a young unemployed male who wants to buy an autorickshaw but cannot get credit because while he has a house to live in, the monetary value of that house is entangled in local transactions (which some times may even involve governmental sanctions - such as family books and pattas and so on). No bank will accept it as a collateral and the local neighborhood simply cannot raise the kind of finance that he needs. But on the whole, one could argue that it should remain that way. I am using the pronoun ‘he’ deliberately here - although there is a complex and contentious gender dynamic to this.

The flip side of this though is that when there is a legally recognizable title, land in its life as exchange value can symbolically travel through space. It becomes possible to speculate on it and thus it travels through time too. (Land is a peculiar creature right ? It does not do anything by itself. But it accrues rent by virtue of its location amidst other things. A sewer filled ditch that nobody but the poorest had any use for may suddenly become worth crores because a new multiplex cinema has come up in its vicinity.)

De soto’s argument is simply that titling, legally enforceable rights and entitlements such as registration of businesses (for vendors or for transport operators) etc., unleashes forces that can generate wealth through better access to credit and expanded possibilities for the entreprenuership of the poor.

This entrepreneuership of the poor is not a new discovery by de soto.
John Turner, the British architect best known as the advocate of aided self help housing solution worked in Lima in the early 60s- the same city in Peru where Desoto is based. In simple terms, he argued that the poor are very creative in solving their problems. Governments should not attempt what they are not good at. Let the poor build their own homes. Just give them an enabling environment - critical inputs such as loans and technical and administrative assistance at different stages of housebuilding and providing public infrastructures- …

This recipe was picked up by international development agencies and also many national governments (you will see evidence of it in many slums in India). These governments took this advice for their own reasons. Aided self help is not necessarily a panacea for the housing problem. But while it lasted it was talked about as one by everyone. It is the same with this titling business. There is much talk about it.

On the ground, I dont believe that this is going to be so simple. Not only do we now have evidence from many Latin American countries that the story is much more complex. Clear titling leads an explosion of transactions that are not easy to even track. And of course there is the issue that Gaurav pointed out - titling is no guarantee that there will be no contestation. Gaurav seems to think that this is only because our courts are not effective.

The truth is that titles by themselves do not protect physical boundaries. If that were so there would be no need for guard dogs, watchmen and electric fences. Boundaries of property must always be policed. But that is not what De soto is claiming. What he is saying is that the title simply provides a set of rules that do not depend on local moral, economic political sensibilities and hence it becomes possible for it to become collateral for loans from formal financial institutions.

And on that last point - we dont need to exercise ourselves. Here is an IMF economist doing it for us. :)
http://www.imf.org/external/np/speeches/2003/102403.htm

Sorry, I was referring from (perhaps erroneously) De Soto’s book called “The Other Path” where the clear titling “solution” was suggested with reference to 3 trades/occupations in Lima - “informal” street vending, “informal” private transport” and “informal” housing.

I think it would be pretty one dimensional and also somewhat short sighted to suggest that because the hawkers are not electorally important/they don’t have a critical mass/are not a significant vote bank and therefore they are being moved. I met someone the other day who mentioned to me that of the 7,000 hawkers in ‘A’ ward in Mumbai, only 2,000 are remaining now.

Why is it that the hawkers are being evicted? John Cross’s work on the street vendors in Mexico is very insightful because Cross highlights across a time span of how hawkers were able to retain their space in certain regimes and in certain other times, they were forcibly moved out. Thus, when Mexico signed the NAFTA agreement, it was found that the street vendors in Mexico City were systematically targetted and were attempted to be removed. Further, when the mayoral regime changed and there was a change in the local municipal system, the street vendors were evicted in that time and when the mayor was moved out, they were able to reclaim their vending spaces.

Currently in Bombay, the entire municipal administration is under the control of the state government which makes it difficult for those hawkers who may not have a strong enough lobby to reach out to and influence the state government. It is also likely that the hawkers are moving out of the A ward under pressure and going elsewhere. I have no idea of this movement pattern so far, so can’t say anything substantially.

The other day, someone who was talking to me also mentioned how hawkers are a floating population and especially the women, who you may not even notice because they come at some odd hours in the morning and go away after 3-4 hours of vending.

What I am intrigued by is the ways by which different groups of hawkers, big/small, based on sectarian/regional/ethnic lines, etc. organize themselves and on many occasions, there are splits and divides even within this organization. Thus, the other day, I was chatting with a woman hawker who now has an established stall in a posh market area in the main city area and she was genuinely working for the welfare of other women hawkers in other parts of the city. But when a man came and sat close to her stall and began selling samosas on the street, she got hold of some of the main guys in the area and said how they should move this samosa selling street vendor because it affects her food stall. Property ownership, ways by which people access land for various purposes and access the same piece of land at different times in the day and claim it on various grounds, I find all this critical to understand before one comes up with any one solution/conclusion. Currently, the advocacy of hawker stalls and plazas is equally problematic because it means that only certain hawkers will have access to the space in the plazas and perhaps the ones to lose out most will be the women hawkers who vend for only a few hours in the day.

This brings me to the second comment/thought which I have been struggling to articulate properly is whether the practice of clearing out a piece of land off all its claimants and then enabling individuals to buy shares in them by means of land titles/deeds/ownership documents - does this practice of ownership make that piece of land forever inaccessible to anyone other than the owner? While we may think that the legal document is some safeguard against the law, the state can tomorrow come and take away the land under the eminent domain principle and the land acquisition laws. How then does the legal document protect you forever?

Right now, across Mumbai, all I notice is the construction of large residential projects and malls and all of these are parcels of land which have been attained through various forms of politics and graft. Do those people who had claims over the land and had to move out/chose to move out, do those people give up their claims over that material piece of land forever? And does that land now become locked via ownership? Can that land ever be reclaimed tomorrow?

Aditya,
can you tell us if there is some structure to this debate/forum ? What is to be expected in terms of formal critiques…(such as those posted by you and Prasanta) when and from whom ? And what is to be regarded as a useful outcome of this debate ?
I guess I am asking for some sort of a framework or plan so as to make this a really useful exercise.
If it is to be a freewheeling sort of thing, thats okay too but it will be good to know.

So is this argument only as good as the assumption that India will never achieve the strategic depth (not sure what this is) to pursue a war with China ?

A bit puzzled about the comment about dark days. Perhaps there are dark days ahead. So ?

1.Affect and Relationality: I believe the moment you create a direction in which affect flows—from individual to another/community and so forth, you lose a vital aspect of relational politics: reciprocity. You become communicative and continue to function within a self/other paradigm.. One would then fail to appreciate the kind of examples that you have so eloquently cited happening across India. On the other hand, if you practice humility seriously, be self effusive and rather highlight your interlocutor/antagonist constanly, (say, as political theorists who take Emmanual Levinas seriously do), you also do away with a robust domain of carrying out relational politics. It may in fact