Opinion In India today, the urban is the new political — as an idea, beyond the city
It is not only its substantial size that gives the urban population an increasing influence in the national scenario. It is the adoption of the urban as an ideal that gives the city its surging power
From 1990 when it comprised 25 per cent of India’s population, the urban population has risen to a third and is expected to rise to 40 per cent by the end of the decade. Last month marked 20 years since the launch of the Jawaharlal Nehru National Urban Renewal Mission (JNNURM). The anniversary of one of the earliest in a slew of 21st-century Indian urban regeneration programmes passed by unnoticed, in contrast to the extensive coverage of the recent municipal corporation elections in Mumbai. While Indians have always been fascinated by elections, the predictable hoopla around them has turned Indian politics into a roll call of adversarial encounters.
This article is an attempt to break out of the stranglehold of current politics and the news cycle to stretch the framework of what we understand as political. I am referring to the important phenomenon of urbanisation.
Since 1980, the world has been on an unprecedented drive towards urbanisation with 55 per cent of the world’s population now inhabiting urban spaces. Prodded by the International Monetary Fund and the World Bank, post-liberalisation India, too, initiated a series of urban upgradation policies. The 1993 Megacities scheme, JNNURM (2005), the 2015 Atal Mission for Rejuvenation and Urban Transformation (AMRUT) and the Smart Cities Mission (SCM) were landmarks in the process.
From 1990 when it comprised 25 per cent of India’s population, the urban population has risen to a third and is expected to rise to 40 per cent by the end of the decade.
This is a dramatic reorientation for a primarily agrarian society and a country famously said by Gandhi to live “in her villages”. How has this shift affected the national consciousness? What has been the impact on our social mores, on our youth? On our aspirations? On phenomena such as, for instance, communal violence which is associated with urban spaces?
These are just a few of the many significant questions thrown up by the urban shift that need attention.
But the shift has even more significant political implications.
Over 500 million Indians live in towns and cities today. But it is not only its substantial size that gives the urban population an increasing influence in the national scenario. It is the adoption of the urban as an ideal that gives the city its surging power. I am not talking about numbers and election outcomes but about the power of the conceptual.
To understand this better, one needs to first understand how the city has evolved. Once perceived as simultaneously a site of economic opportunity and a space of progressive possibilities, working-class empowerment and bourgeois refinement, the city has acquired a more singular purpose today. The primary impulse shaping the contemporary city according to urban scholars is the goal of attracting global capital, either as investment or as circulating capital from mobile populations. This has given rise to a model adopted by cities, regardless of size, featuring gentrified colonies, privileged business enclaves, extravagant urban beautification projects, new highways for cars, elite cultural festivals and so on. The purchase of rural land by non-residents has further spread the reach of the urbanite.
This top-down approach, favouring the wealthy, the cosmopolitan and the entrepreneurial at the cost of other parts of the citizenry is accompanied by a brutal urgency and normalised as an essential feature of the prevailing economic model.
The Nehruvian vision of dams and heavy industry, which displaced communities of tribals and farmers, has been succeeded by the glass tower-and-highway, corporate-friendly path taken by post-liberalisation India. The latter has a greater reach and a more sweeping mandate that is opening up new fault lines closer to home.
In the last few weeks alone, we have seen agitations against the commercial exploitation of the Aravalli hills, concern over the Great Nicobar Island Development Project and complaints of poor pay and endangerment by gig workers against service aggregators.
The project of urbanising India is not about a material transformation alone but about a new political consensus privileging market-led development that in turn reshuffles existing priorities and redefines the relationship of the citizen to the state, perpetuating a new understanding of democracy. The urban is the new political and needs to be reckoned with.
The writer researched global urbanisation at the Institute for Public Knowledge, New York University. She is also the author of Ahmedabad: A City in the World
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