H S Verma: Bombay to Mumbai to Mumbai Metropolitan City Region: Changing Character and Logic of Transformational Process (Sixth Installment) Vision 2013: Building Mumbai to rival Shanghai Shahana Chattaraj (2012) have examined the ground reality of the dream of the state government and the city’s corporate elites of emulating Shanghai by the year 2013 through growth-oriented strategic planning, infrastructure building, urban renewal, governance and policy reforms, and the reasons why it has remained a pipe dream. Shahana argues that that the sub-national state is central to the project of “globalizing” cities like Mumbai and Shanghai. Globally-oriented urban restructuring is a complex and multi-dimensional process in which the sub-national state is the central actor. The role of the state is critical in emerging cities seeking to “leap-frog” their position in global networks, to put in place the infrastructural and policy elements required to make cities key nodes in the architecture of globalization. The sub-national state plays an extensive role in urban planning and coordination, land acquisition, infrastructure investment, conflict management, displacement and rehabilitation. Consequently, state capacity is critical to the success of urban restructuring projects.Shahana indicates the ways in which Mumbai’s global integration has tried to reshape state policy and transform urban governance. Contrary to accounts that suggest that the forces of globalization weaken states, Shahana states that the city’s corporate elite seek to re-direct and re-shape state intervention rather than dismantle it, in order to make Mumbai a globally-competitive destination for capital and talent. She then relates the state capacity with the shifting dynamics of the state’s relationship to social forces to Mumbai’s development outcomes. Mumbai is organizationally fragmented and its relationship with corporate business is tenuous. She uses the concept of “jugaad state” to describe the state in Mumbai. The “jugaad state” is shaped by the need to govern a city in which a substantive share of economic activity occurs on the margins of state’s legal and regulatory frameworks. Its modes of governance, of necessity, are decentralized, negotiated and improvised, although its legal and regulatory frameworks are that of a centralized, high-modernist bureaucracy. Mumbai’s hybrid and internally-fragmented sub-national state is ill-equipped to carry out a complex, multi-dimensional program of urban restructuring, unlike the centralized, cohesive and downward-reaching municipal state in Shanghai. “Jugaad” forms of governance enable Mumbai’s informal poor to participate in the urban economy as well as enable the state to govern a largely informal city like Mumbai. She illustrates the workings of the “jugaad” state through an analysis of two-contrasting modes of market-based slum redevelopment that differ in the scale and extent of state intervention and coordination. Finally, she shows that urban governance in Mumbai is an arena for contestation between elite civil society, which includes the city’s corporate lobbies and middle-class residents associations, and “political society”, which is the space of the city’s informal poor. While civil society has allies within the state’s upper-bureaucracy, the state’s lower rungs are deeply embedded in political society, forming an informal governance structure in Mumbai’s slums and informal spaces. As a result of Mumbai’s fragmented and hybrid state structure, what obtains in globalizing Mumbai is not a whole-scale planned transformation into a “world-class” city, like its model Shanghai, but a piecemeal, protracted, unplanned and contested process of redevelopment. Therefore, it comes as no surprise that Mumbai has failed to emulate Shanghai. Development and Restructuring of Mumbai and Environmental Problems Referring to development and restructuring of Mumbai during its globalizing phase, Owe Kale (2013) puts it very dramatically. He says that one minor part of her is decisively pulling her towards the path marked destruction through development while a major part of her wants to take the path of Sustainable Development but cannot do so since it is chained to bureaucracy and politics. According to Kale, pollution, population and lack of space have always been traditionally described as the ultimate problems of Mumbai while relegating the acute problem of environmental degradation into oblivion. However, this slowly-ticking time bomb burst into the face of Mumbai in the form of the deluge on July 26, 2005. Unlike what half the city would like to believe, 26/7 was not a sudden indicator of the environmental mess the city has got itself into. Leopard attacks in a bustling city, landslides, abnormally high temperatures in summers, and erratic rainfall have long since warned the city of the impending doom. The powers that be have chosen to ignore it all because it is more convenient to do so.In the aftermath of 26/7, several committees were set up to enquire into the exact causes of the deluge. They have come up with alarming results and equally alarming future prospects for certain sections of Mumbai, in particular the lucrative construction industry. It remains to be seen whether their recommendations would be acted upon. It requires no expertise to reach the inevitable conclusion that the environmental problems of Mumbai have emerged due to the very process of creation of the city itself. In fact, it is a sad fact that almost 90 per cent of the city is sitting on the reclaimed land. Kale argues that redevelopment of the city during the globalization phase has depleted the areas of dissipation for water, which is very important factor for an island city like Mumbai. Modern experts and politicians would like to blame the British for destroying the natural environment of Mumbai. However, sanctions of hazardous policies and projects like Bandra-Worli Sea Link, and Adarsh Society during the past two decades have caused more harm to Mumbai than the more than 150 years of the British rule. The principal problem is that the GoM, the BMC, and the MMRDA have together failed to foresee the consequences of tempering with the environment. They have consistently ignored the warnings and reasoned pleas of the environmentalists. Infrastructure projects are being routinely sanctioned in the name of development of the city hardly ever emphasizing on the environmental impact assessment. The local BMC, the regional MMRDA, the state government of Maharashtra and agencies of the Union government are giving clearances to projects like the 20 storeyed skyscrapers on the fragile Cumballa Hills. Mumbai’s heart and lungs --mangroves, the sea coast, the green cover, parks and open spaces—--, and the vacant sites of the closed textile and other mills are falling to the greed and designs of the builder-bureaucrat-politician combine much to the detriment of Mumbai’s environment. Of course, there are some signs of sanity seen in environmental activism resulting in creation of mangrove parks, reservation of two-thirds of vacant mill lands for open spaces and public housing, seeking and accepting alternatives to projects like BWSL through mass rapid transport projects. Only serious concern to environmental protection can save Mumbai from environmental disasters. Localizing a Globalized Mumbai: The Ideology and Rationale of Localization and Marathi Sub-nationalism Critics had argued that the name Bombay contained a unique experience of colonial and post-colonial modernity--dynamic, intensely commercial, heterogeneous, chaotic, and yet spontaneously tolerant and open-minded. This was the Bombay of ethnic and religious mixing, of opportunities, of rags-to-riches success stories, of class solidarity, of artistic modernism and hybridized energies. The celebration of the citys mythical cosmopolitanism had already been questioned years before the renaming actually took place. Among notable researchers who have probed the subsequent paradigm shift, Hansen (2001) stands out for his penetrative insight. He argues that the critical events were, of course, the devastating riots that rocked Bombay in December 1992 and January 1993--the most protracted and serious urban conflagration in post-Independence India. These events marked the demise of one type of dream, or imagination of the city and the emergence of another much uglier, far more violent side of the city. Bombay had experienced a swift and sharp polarization between religious communities and ethnic groups on a hitherto unprecedented scale. Something had changed in Bombay beyond recognition. The city had seen riots and communal enmity before but never on that gigantic scale. Most people in the city will agree today that it is no longer the same city as it used to be, and certainly that Mumbai is not like Bombay. And why they began to crumble in the 1980s? Was Bombay always fundamentally divided by class, caste and religion? Is it not a fact of history that urban violence, state repression, and corruption were always a part of the citys life? Hansen (2001) argues that a wedge between Bombay and its hinterland has always existed. There was an older notion of Bombay controlled by all that made average Hindus of the hinterland feel insecure: a sophisticated elite, an immoral and excessively Westernized intelligentsia, the working classes, the slum dwellers, the Muslims, and a future Mumbai that was marked by the familiar and non-threatening, a Bombay with all its money, glitz, and power tamed and familiarized with all its threatening cultural and social difference effaced and thus transformed into our Mumbai, into our place in the world. In November 1995 the city of Bombay was officially renamed Mumbai. The renaming had its logic and rationale, and it is best summed up by Hansen (2001).The renaming exercise, according to him, was meant to highlight the local origins of the citys name derived from Mumbadevi, a local goddess of Koli fishermen who originally lived on the islands and marshland that eventually became the city of Bombay. The renaming was a minor, entirely justifiable, and long overdue act of redress on behalf of the vernacular world. It was not merely changing a proper noun. The change of the name was a rather straightforward assertion of the nativist agenda of claiming Bombay and all its symbols of modernity and power to be the natural property of local Marathi speakers, which SS had been pursuing since its inception in 1966. Within this agenda, built on the discourse of the linguistic movement of the 1940s and 1950s, the Samyukta Maharashtra Samiti (SMS), the name Mumbai would amount to a fixation of the city in the regional space of Maharashtra, as well as in the history, culture, and language of the Marathi--speakers of western India. This nativist discourse tried to efface the fact that most Marathi speakers were as alien in the city as everybody else by defining itself against outsiders constructed as enemies of Marathi speakers--Gujaratis, Hindi-speaking migrants from northern states, the south Indians, Muslims, the central government, the established and cosmopolitan elite in the city, and so on.Hansen argues that the renaming also resonated with broader and nationalist concerns with decolonization of the mind, the discomfort shared by conservatives as well as leftist forces with the continuing dominance of English as a medium for education, cultural products, and the business world. The renaming of Mumbai appeared as a much needed mark of distinction vis-à-vis a colonial past as well as a globalizing present. Bearing the official and authorized name of Mumbai, the city could be re-inscribed in a national territory as a proper Indian city, within a national history and an emerging national modernity that recognized its indigenous cultural and linguistic roots, and its name could be properly enunciated in the vernacular. Hansen argues that if we are to understand the transformation of Bombay into Mumbai, and the nature of the Mumbai dreams growing out of a violent movement like SS, we need to see the importance of social imaginaries, of desires of recognition, and the attraction of the public spectacles of violence and assertion that the SS has employed so successfully over the years. It cannot be denied that the pattern of migration to Bombay created an imbalanced configuration of ethnicity, class, and status that prompted the growth of regional nativism and ethnic chauvinism. Hansen argues that Hindu nationalism and the politics of xenophobia should not be understood as anomalies inflicted by dark forces or structures of peripheral capitalism, but rather as possibilities always folded into Indias unique experience of modernity and democracy. The SS has enthusiastically embraced modern city life and technological progress, and has provided young men especially with an ideal of an assertive, often violent, mode of being urban. Herein lies a key to much of its success. The rise of SS and the transformations of Bombay were made possible by the decline of an older political culture that espoused paternalist social and cultural incorporation of the large majority of the population into a highly unequal system of political clientalism. The SS developed the longstanding traditions of plebeian insubordination and assertion in public spaces in Mumbai into a highly violent strategy of political performances that openly defied and challenged the idea of legality and changed popular perceptions of governance and the state. Hansen states that the boundaries of caste and community have been both dislocated and hardened in the last decades in Mumbai. This process produced anger and anxieties, reconfigured social imaginaries, and made it imperative for many people to carve out a new sense of our place in the world. Renaming has broader lessons on the fragmentation of governance and public authority and the logics of majoritarian democratic politics in Mumbai may teach us about the relationship between state, community, and politics in contemporary India.
Posted on: Fri, 28 Mar 2014 03:39:14 +0000
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