The Politics of Forgetting: Class Politics, State Power and the Restructuring of Urban Space in...

Urban Studies, Vol. 41, No. 12, 2415-2430, November 2004 0^ Carfax PublishingWf//^^ Taylor & Francis Croup

The Politics of Forgetting: Class Politics, StatePower and the Restructuring of Urban Space inIndia

Leela Femandes

[Paper first received, July 2003: in final form, April 2004]

Summary. Policies of economic liberalisation have been accompanied by discourses on the riseof the new middle class in India. The newness of this Indian middle class is marked hy changingconsumption practices and lifestyles. The visibility of the urhan middle classes sets into motiona politics of forgetting with regard to social groups that are marginalised by India's policies ofliberalisation. The politics of forgetting refers to a political-discursive process in which specificmarginalised social groups are rendered invisible within the dominant national political culture.Such dynamics unfold through the spatial reconfiguration of class inequalities. Both middle-classgroups and the state engage in a politics of forgetting that displaces the poor and working classesfrom such spaces. The result is the production of an exclusionary form of cultural citizenshipwhich is, in turn, contested hy these marginalised socioeconomic groups. The article draws onoriginal qualitative field research conducted in Mumhai (Bomhay).

Policies of economic liberalisation initiated such as India. This middle class is the visualin India since the early 1990s have been urban embodiment of globalisation that ap-accompanied by an array of images centred pears to dispel fears that places in late-indus-around consumption practices and wealth trialising nations like India will remaingenerated by the 'new' liberalising middle forgotten on the routes of capital movements,class. The 'newness' of this Indian middle The growing cultural visibility of the newclass is a cultural characteristic that is Indian middle class marks the emergence ofmarked by attitudes, lifestyles and consump- a wider national political culture in liberalis-tion practices associated with commodities ing India. This visibility represents a shiftmade available in India's liberalising econ- from older ideologies of state socialism to aomy. This production of the new Indian mid- political culture that is centred on a middle-die class parallels comparative trends in the class-based culture of consumption. Middle-construction of the 'new rich' (Beng-Huat, class consumers represent the cultural2000; Robison and Goodman, 1996) as a symbols of a nation that has opened its bor-social group that is the prime beneficiary of ders to consumer goods that were unavail-globalisation in contemporary Asia. The con- able during earlier decades ofstruction of such a category, in effect, marks state-controlled markets. This political cul-the potential benefits of globalisation for ture entails a shift from earlier ideologies thatemerging market-oriented contexts in nations idealised poverty alleviation and asceticism

Leela Femandes is in the Department of Political Science, Rutgers University, 89 George Street, New Brunswick, NJ 08901, USA.Fax: 732 932 7170. E-mail: [email protected]. Research for this article was supported by an American Council forLeamed Societies/Social Science Research Council International fellowship. The author is grateful to Itty Abraham, MustaphaPasha and Douglass Haynes for comments on an earlier version of this article presented at the Association for Asian Studiesannual conference. The article benefited from comments and discussions with Sharit Bhowmick, Tim Bunnell, Ruthie Gilmore,Yong-Sook Lee and Peter Reeves.

0042-0980 Print/1360-063X On-line/04/122415-16 © 2004 The Editors of Urban StudiesDOI: 10.1080/00420980412331297609

2416 LEELA FERNANDES

to a set of national discourses that highlightthe visibility of emerging elites such as thenew middle classes. While state socialist ide-ologies tended to depict workers or ruralvillagers as the archetypical citizens and ob-jects of development (Gupta, 1998) in theearly decades in post-colonial India, main-stream national political discourses increas-ingly depict the middle classes as therepresentative citizens of liberalising India.

The growing visibility of the new Indianmiddle class has resulted in what Indianscholar Rajni Kothari (1993) has referred toas a 'growing amnesia' towards poverty andthe poor in liberalising India. The visibilityof the urban middle classes sets into motiona politics of forgetting with regard to socialgroups that are marginalised by India's in-creased integration into the global economy.The politics of forgetting in this case doesnot refer to processes in which particularplaces or nations are left out of economicglobalisation. Rather, it refers to a political-discursive process in which specific mar-ginalised social groups are renderedinvisible and forgotten within the dominantnational political culture. The politics offorgetting, in this sense, is not merely aninadvertent process of particular locationsbeing left out of economic globalisation. Itis a political project that seeks to produce asanitised vision of the economic benefits ofglobalisation. This is not an uncontestedprocess. In practice, the hegemonic role ofthe liberalising middle class co-exists withand is challenged by numerous forms ofpolitical mobilisation of marginalised casteand class groups in contemporary India. Thepolitics of forgetting thus continually restson more active processes of exclusion thatare in turn contested by these marginalisedgroups. The process of forgetting is a politi-cal-discursive process in which dominantsocial groups and political actors attempt tonaturalise these processes of exclusion byproducing a middle-class-based definition ofcitizenship.

The dynamics of this politics of forgettingin contemporary India unfold through thespatial reconfiguration of class inequalities

and distinctions at the local level. AsDoreen Massey has noted "phenomena suchas globalisation" can be understood as"changing forms of the spatial organisationof social relations. Social relations alwayshave a spatial form and spatial content"(Massey, 1994, p. 168). Drawing on thisapproach, I focus on the ways in which thelinkages between middle-class identity,economic restructuring and the politics offorgetting can be understood through localforms of spatial politics and contestationsunfolding in urban India. These spatial prac-tices are technologies for the production of avision of a liberalising India that centres onthe visibility of the new Indian middle class.I begin by analysing the spatial politics ofmiddle-class identity. I examine the ways inwhich cultural practices of consumption andlifestyle are linked to broader processes ofthe restructuring of urban space in citiessuch as Mumbai.

The production of middle-class identity islinked to a politics of 'spatial purification'(Sibley, 1995), which centres on middle-class claims over public spaces and a corre-sponding movement to cleanse such spacesof the poor and working classes. It is theactive nature of this politics of purificationthat underlies the political project of 'forget-ting' subordinated social groups such assquatters and street vendors. This processrepresents an emerging dimension in Indianpolitics, one in which middle-class individu-als and social groups now consciously claimthat the Indian middle class is a distinctivesocial group with its own set of social, politi-cal and economic interests that must beactively represented. This assertive middle-class identity is articulated both in publicdiscourses as well as in a range of culturaland social forms such as the development ofnew urban aesthetics and assertive claims onpublic urban space as well as the emergenceof new civil and community organisations.'

I argue that such forms of local spatialpohtics point to the production of an exclu-sionary form of cultural citizenship in whichthe urban Indian middle classes are con-

THE POLITICS OF FORGETTING IN INDIA 2417

structed as consumer-citizens in liberalisingIndia. A central aspect of my argument isthat the production of this new form of cul-tural citizenship is linked to the changingrelationship between state and capital in thecontext of economic restructuring. In con-trast to approaches that assume that policiesof economic liberalisation are associatedwith a retreat of the state, I point instead toan approach that focuses on the restructuringof the state. Thus, while India's policies ofeconomic liberalisation have led to the re-treat of the state in some areas of the econ-omy, the state continues to play an importantrole in the management of liberalisation. Inparticular, I will examine the ways in whichstate practices participate in the productionof the middle-class-based model of culturalcitizenship.

My analysis builds on recent research thathas questioned the presumption of distinctboundaries between state and civil society(Migdal, 2001; Mitchell, 1991). As JoelMigdal has argued, the state can be thoughtof both in terms of an image of a unified,distinctive entity and in terms of

the practices of a heap of loosely connec-ted parts or fragments, frequently with ill-defined boundaries between them andother groupings inside and outside theofficial state borders (Migdal, 2001, p. 22).

As I will argue, state practices are engaged inpolitical processes of spatial purification andthe production of a new middle-class-basedvision of the Indian nation. This analysis willcontribute to recent research, which has fo-cused on the centrality of the state in shapingurban politics and development strategies incomparative contexts (Evans, 2002). Thestate is, as I will demonstrate, an integral partof the politics of visibility and forgetting thatare unfolding in liberalising India.

The article draws on field research, whichI have conducted in Mumbai (Bombay) in1996 and 1998-99. Mumbai, one of India'smajor metropolitan cities and an aspiring'global city' (Evans, 2002; Sassen, 1991), isa central locus for the politics of visibilityand forgetting. Mumbai brings together a

number of important and often contradictorysocial, economic and political trends. Histori-cally, it has been a central area of destinationfor rural migration producing significant ur-ban pressures typical of large cities in devel-oping countries. It was a centre of the textileindustry, one of India's oldest manufacturingindustries and a site of significant organisedlabour activity. It has witnessed a significantrise in religious nationalist activity mainlythrough the Shiv Sena party. Finally, it haslong been associated with a form of urbanmiddle-class cosmopolitanism that has beenintensified and become representative ofwider national trends. As Darryl D'Montehas noted, city planners, corporations andstate agencies have continually expressed thedesire to transform Mumbai into a global citysuch as Singapore or Hong Kong (D'Monte,2002, p. 31). Mumbai thus provides an im-portant case for analysis of spatialised poli-tics in India.

The research involved approximately 50qualitative interviews, together with ethno-graphic observations, archival and newspaperresearch. Qualitative interviews were con-ducted with three primary groups of people.First, interviews were conducted with adver-tising executives at leading Indian and multi-national firms and journalists of newpublications such as consumer-orientedmagazines. Secondly, interviews were con-ducted with recruitment agencies thatspecifically target urban middle-class em-ployment and union officials in the bankingand insurance sectors. Finally, a series ofinterviews was conducted with a cross-sec-tion of graduates of an educational traininginstitute. These sets of interviews both pro-vided insights into patterns of consumer be-haviour, employment and income, as well asin-depth qualitative understanding of individ-ual attitudes and perceptions. This articledraws primarily on archival and newspaper-based research as well as on an interpretiveanalysis of spatial conflicts that occurred dur-ing the course of my field research. While Ihave analysed the discursive and labour-mar-ket (employment-related) dimensions of thisresearch elsewhere (Femandes, 2000a and


2000b), I draw out some of the broaderpatterns of these dimensions in my analysis.In addition, I draw on examples from rel-evant interviews and conversations, whichcapture broader trends that my research hasuncovered.

The Boundaries of the New Indian MiddleClass

The new Indian middle class represents aspecific social category that has emerged inthe context of economic policies of liberali-sation that were initiated in India in the1990s. This social group refers to a culturallyconstructed category. The boundaries of thismiddle class are defined by practices of con-sumption associated with newly availableconsumer goods in liberalising India. Adver-tising and media images have contributed tothe creation of this image of the liberalisingmiddle class as a social group that has tran-scended the limits of state protection andausterity associated with Nehruvian andGandhian visions of the Indian nation. Thenew middle class is a social group that em-bodies a cultural standard associated with theglobalising Indian nation. The consumptionof commodities such as cell-phones, colourtelevisions, washing machines and carsforms some of the status markers that dis-tinguish this social group.

This middle class is not new in a structuralsense. It refers to particular segments of theprofessional middle classes, particularlythose associated with new economy jobssuch as the services sector and informationtechnology. However, the social basis ofthese segments is not new as they draw fromsegments of the traditional urban middleclasses. For instance, while in the pre-liberal-isation period public-sector banks may havebeen considered prime jobs, foreign banks ormultinational companies would now bechoice jobs for urban professionals enteringthe job market. The 'new middle class' thusdoes not refer to upwardly mobile segmentsof the population who are attempting to enterthe middle class. Its 'newness' refers to adiscursive process of production of an image

of the Indian middle class rather than theentry of a new social group to this class. Thepolitical significance of this category can beseen in the form of national public discoursesthat have debated the impact of the culture ofconsumption associated with this class. Thenew middle class has—for example, becomean important symbolic arena for national de-bates on the impact of globalisation (Varma,1998). Critics of liberalisation have con-demned the emergence of a Westernised con-sumerist culture that is visibly associatedwith this class. Meanwhile, proponents ofliberalisation have sought to deploy the newmiddle class as an idealised standard thatother social groups can aspire to.

The new middle class is primarily charac-terised by such discursive processes. Thissocial group is marked by the political andshifting nature of the boundaries that defineit. At one level, the idealised representationof this group in media images and publicdiscourses draws on English-speaking urbanprofessional segments of the middle classeswho are benefiting from new employmentopportunities and rising salaries in private-sector companies. However, the heart of theconstruction of this social group rests on theassumption that other segments of the middleclasses and upwardly mobile working classescan aspire to this idealised representation(Mankekar, 1999).

The actual nature and size of the Indianmiddle classes vary greatly. For example,income-based definitions include both the ru-ral and urban middle classes and includegroups such as fanners, shopkeepers andsmall traders. In the face of such diversity,the identity of the new Indian middle classprovides a kind of normative standard, whichthis larger group can aspire to. Thus, theboundaries of the new middle class are fiuidprecisely because they hold the promise ofaccess. In other words, the underlying claimis that other social groups can acquire thesocial capital that can provide them withaccess to membership in this distinctive mid-dle class. The result is that the emergingpolitics of the new middle class has broaderpolitical significance for the identity-forma-


tion of Indian middle classes. Such transfor-mations in the cultural identity of the middleclasses, in turn, have specific material andpolitical consequences that set into motionthe politics of forgetting of those socialgroups that are marginalised by economicliberalisation.

Restructuring Urban Space: Class Politicsand the Materiality of Middle-classLifestyle

A cornerstone of discourses on the new In-dian middle class has been constituted by thechanging status markers of this social group.Indeed, the public cultural representations ofthis social class appear to be borne out bynew social and cultural practices. Considerfor instance, the sphere of leisure, a criticalsocial space for the production of such socialdistinctions. The leisure and entertainmentindustry witnessed significant growth in the1990s. Indeed, if large dams and steel plantswere the icons of Nehruvian India, it mightappear that entertainment enterprises—rang-ing from bowling alleys, ice-skating rinks,and video parlours to restaurants, malls andamusement parks—are being promoted asthe icons of the new India of the liberalisingmiddle class. The proliferation of leisure andother service-sector-related industries hascontributed to a growing public and socialfocus on questions of lifestyle. Thesignificance of this construction of 'lifestyle'as an autonomous socio-cultural sphere ofactivity must be understood in terms of thebroader processes of socioeconomic restruc-turing. Let us consider this process in thecontext of contemporary Mumbai.

There is perhaps no better instance of anIndian metropolitan city that appears to fitimages of the new middle class than the cityof Mumbai. The expansion of the servicessector and the leisure industry has included agrowing bar and restaurant culture. In con-trast to smaller restaurants and Irani shops,which have catered to working-class andlower-middle-class individuals, the city nowboasts a wide range of upmarket bars andrestaurants. Dining out, in this context, has

become a status marker of the new middleclasses. Consider the following example ofthe transformation of a local restaurant,which an advertising executive described tome as an instance of the ways in which theproduction of this lifestyle shift is encoded inwider processes of urban restructuring..

It's a little seafood restaurant. It's a Man-glorian restaurant. In 1991-1992 Maheshwas this crumby little place with thedownstairs where they served food withthalis and upstairs was air-con-ditioned ... but I liked the place. Whenyou're eating and drinking you don't carewhat's around you. What happened wasMahesh got discovered by the yuppies.You had bankers coming in and lawyers. Ihaven't been to Mahesh in 3 years becausethe Mahesh that is there now is quitedifferent. There's the guy who takes theorder he wears a bloody suit... that's notthe mahesh I know. What happened toMahesh? It was a reasonably good placebut discovered by the yuppies ... if youlook at Mahesh as a brand with a very hipyuppie crowd they made the place an 'in'place (advertising executive).

This anecdote is part of a much broaderpattern involving the restructuring of urbanspace in contemporary Mumbai.

At a surface level, this process appears toembody a conventional pattern of gen-trification. Exorbitant real estate prices insouth Mumbai, the heart of the city, haveincreasingly pushed middle-class individualsinto suburban areas. The result has been theproduction of new and distinctive forms ofsuburban cultural and social communities. Inwhat are now considered upmarket suburbs,neighbourhoods in areas such as Bandra andother western suburbs^ have witnessed thegrowth of upmarket restaurants, shopping en-terprises and movie theatres. New trendymovie theatres in the suburbs, for instance,depart from the traditional fee structure ofregular theatres. While regular theatres pro-vide different scales from expensive 'bal-cony' seats to cheaper seats at the bottomlevel of the theatre, such theatres offer only a


flat higher price for all seating. The pricingsystem effectively keeps out poorer working-class or even lower-middle-class individualsfrom such theatres.

Meanwhile, these wealthy suburbs havealso witnessed the growth of a new clubculture of what are called 'upmarket' clubs.This club culture is of course not new to thecity and in fact stems back to colonial timeswhen private clubs were introduced by theBritish. In the post-independence period,these clubs became the preserve of upper-class and upper-middle-class Indians. In ad-dition, a number of older social clubs, suchas the Islam Gymkhana and the CatholicGymkhana, also represent middle- and up-per-class community-based social and cul-tural spaces. What is new then is not thepresence of exclusive membership-basedclubs for the reproduction of class distinc-tion, but the expansion of such social spacesas well as the stark increases in membershipfees.

The expansion of such socio-culturalspaces for the changing lifestyles of the mid-dle classes in liberalising India rests on thecreation of a new urban aesthetics of classpurity. Historically, in contrast to modemurban cities in the advanced industrialisedcountries, metropolitan cities in India did notdevelop into strict class-segregated spaces.While cities like Mumbai, Delhi and Calcuttahave certainly reproduced spatial distinctionsbetween wealthier, middle-class and poorer,working-class neighbourhoods, such distinc-tions have historically been disrupted by thepresence of squatters, pavement-dwellers andstreet entrepreneurs such as tailors, shoe re-pairmen and hawkers. These street en-trepreneurs and pavement-dwellers weregenerally located in the wealthier neighbour-hoods in order to provide services to theirmiddle- and upper-class residents. Given thehigh level of poverty and the dependence ofmiddle-class families on working-classlabour for household work (ranging for in-stance from dhobis (washerwomen and men)and sweepers, to cooks) the class-based man-agement of urban space in contemporary In-dia developed in patterns distinctive from the

advanced industrialised countries (Katznel-son, 1981; Kaviraj, 1997; Seabrook, 1996).Patterns of workplace-residence separationthat have historically characterised advancedindustrialised countries such as the US can-not, for instance, provide the conceptualmeans for analysing the experiences of pave-ment-dwellers who perform services for themiddle-class neighbourhood where they re-side.

The invention of the new middle-classlifestyle has been increasingly interwoveninto the creation of an urban aesthetics basedon the middle-class desire for the manage-ment of urban space based on strict class-based separations. This desire forsocio-spatial segregation cannot of course beviewed as an outcome causally produced bythe policies of liberalisation in the 1990s.Historical analysis has pointed to similar dy-namics in early 20th-century urban India(Gooptu, 2001). In more recent times, seedsof this shift in the management of urbanspace have been present in earlier eventssuch as the coercive demolitions of squattersettlements associated with Sanjay Gandhiand the Emergency period in the mid 1970s(Tarlo, 2003).

In addition, processes of spatialpurification have also involved state strate-gies designed to cleanse the Indian nation ofunwanted immigrants from Bangladesh. Insuch cases, constructions of class impurityhave converged with xenophobic construc-tions of 'illegal' Muslim immigrants in thediscourses of Hindu nationalist organisations.Consider for example 'Operation Pushback',a government campaign in Delhi in the 1990sdesigned to return forcibly alleged illegalimmigrants to Bangladesh. As Sujata Ra-machandran has argued, such immigrants liv-ing primarily as slum-dwellers in Delhi werecharacterised as threatening infiltrators in-vading the Indian nation-state (Ramachan-dran, 2002). Moreover, such spatial politicshave not been limited to states governed byconservative Hindu nationalist parties. Forexample, similar tactics have been deployedby West Bengal's long-standing Left Frontgovernment through its 'Operation Sunshine


Drive' which targeted hawkers' stalls in Cal-cutta. While this politics of spatial purity hasbeen contingent on broader historical pro-cesses, the imposition of such spatial class-based norms has been transformed by thediscourses of the new middle class. Let usconsider this transformation through anexamination of local neighbourhoodbeautification programmes.

The Politics of Beautifying Neighbour-hoods: State Power, Civic Culture and theNew Middle Class

A significant example of the transformationof local spatial practices is the case ofbeautification projects undertaken by residentassociations and civic organisations in vari-ous neighbourhoods in Mumbai. Suchprojects have begun to constitute a new civicculture for the middle classes in liberalisingIndia. This drive to 'clean up' the city hasbeen centrally constructed around class-based discourses; the drive to clean up thecity, in effect, becomes inextricably linkedwith an attempt to purge the city of the poor.As Jeremy Seabrook has noted

The former Sheriff of Bombay had a vi-sion of tree-lined boulevards, fountainsand playgrounds. There will be no slums.The streets will be clean with wide pave-ments unencumbered by hawkers. Peoplewill stroll through pedestrian plazas. Thenight will be brilliant with majestic build-ings and fountains (Seabrook, 1996,p. 48).

This vision in fact captures the aesthetic ofthe civic culture of the middle classes inliberalising India—one that attempts to mani-fest the image of the new Indian middle classby cleansing the urban city of any sign of thepoor or poverty. The boundaries of this civicculture rest on the attempt to produce a formof class-based socio-spatial segregation. Thisprocess of cultural-spatial purification repre-sents an important underlying foundation ofthe politics of forgetting.

The politics of forgetting, in this case, isnot simply an expression of the private de-

sires of middle-class individuals. It is a pol-itical project that centrally involves theexercise of state power. Let us examine therole of the state in the restructuring of urbanspace. The beautification drive in Mumbaihas not been limited to private civic organi-sations of the middle classes, but has alsorepresented official policy of the local stategovernment's Cultural Affairs ministry. Thisdrive has aimed at 'cleaning up' publicspaces and land such as beaches, prome-nades, maidans and other public areas. Forexample, in the affluent suburb of Bandra,one such project spearheaded by CulturalAffairs Minister Pramod Navalkar focusedon developing a jogging strip with plants andseats on the seaside promenade.^

While such projects appear to be part of abroader public drive for sanitation involvinga cross-section of local areas across the city{Bombay Times, 1998b), the boundaries ofthe 'public' constituted by suchbeautification drives have in fact been depen-dent on the politics of socioeconomic class.Consider the following description of thebeautification and clean-up drive of Chow-patty, one of Mumbai's most well-knownbeaches

Yes, its possible—to now take a relaxingwalk along the Mumbai coastline at Gir-gaum chowpatty. Finally, the sand looksand feels like sand. Years of neglect andunsuccessful cleanliness drives later, thecity's most famed beach is free of muck,debris, urchins, beggars, lepers and hut-ments, thanks to state culture MinisterPramod Navalkar. The entire 1km stretchof the beach has been bulldozed andcleaned, illegal slums removed, fishermenrelocated and dustbins installed (Sharma,1998).

In this discursive construction, which is aninstance of a broader set of public discourses,urchins, beggars and the residents of hut-ments are viewed as interchangeable with the"muck and debris" which must be "cleanedup".

What is particularly significant in suchclass-based discourses is the role of the state


in producing and defending the boundaries ofsuch middle-class claims to an unfetteredaccess to public space. Thus, as part of theChowpatty beautification drive, plans werealso developed to ensure that the relocatedpoor would not re-enter the beach. Theseplans included the construction of a 120-foot-high watchtower and a permanent pres-ence of two policemen (Sharma, 1998).Middle-class civic culture in this context be-comes the terrain for the expansion and exer-cise of state power.

An analysis of such local state practiceshas wider significance for debates on ques-tions of urban sustainable development. PeterEvans, for example, has argued that state-community collaboration provides a criticalmeans for moving towards a model of 'urbanlivability' (Evans, 2002). The case of Mum-bai demonstrates that local state practicescontribute to the creation of exclusionarymodels of community that can lead to narrowdefinitions of hvability that actively excludemarginalised social groups. This conver-gence between the exercise of state powerand the production of a middle-class civicculture through the management of publicspace has been most visibly evident in politi-cal conflicts between the state, middle-classcivic organisations and hawkers and theirunions. Increasing pressures on urban spacehave in recent years produced significantconflicts between hawkers, street en-trepreneurs who sell a range of wares(Bhowmick, 2002b) and middle-class civicorganisations demanding greater access topublic street space.

The state agency involved, the local mu-nicipal corporation, Brihanmumbai Munici-pal Corporation (BMC), has found itselfin a conflicted position. Unlike the hutment-dwellers and 'beggars' that were drivenaway from public spaces such beaches andmaidans, Mumbai's hawkers have beenformally organised into unions and havebeen able to wield more political influencein the contest over public space in streetsand neighbourhoods."* In addition, theBMC has also used an official system ofdaily charges as well as an unofficial system

of bribes for unlicensed hawking as afinancial source.

In an attempt to mediate between thehawkers' unions and civic organisations, theBMC has attempted to develop a plan thatwill manage claims to public space throughthe creation of legal hawking zones. How-ever, such plans have also producedsignificant political conflicts as both hawk-ers' unions and civic organisations contestedthe plan both in negotiations as well asthrough legal avenues. For instance, severalmiddle-class and residents' and citizens' as-sociations put forth legal challenges to theBMC's zoning plans in order to preventhawkers being relocated to their neighbour-hoods (Devidayal, 1998a). Meanwhile, a 'cit-izens' forum for protection of public spaces',representing 50 'citizen organisations', filedlegal petitions to prohibit hawkers from oper-ating in residential areas and near major pub-lic areas such as railway stations, hospitals,educational institutions and places of wor-ship.

Middle-class activity in the form of thesecitizens' groups and media representations ofthe issues largely produced a construction ofhawkers as a threat to the civic culture of themiddle classes (Bhowmick, 2002a). Suchdiscourses focused on the 'hawker menace'as a threat to a wide array of middle-classinterests, including inconvenience, sanitation,fears of social disorder and the threat ofdeclining real estate prices for residentialareas marked for relocating hawkers. In theprocess, discourses of citizenship and publicinterest have converged with the interests ofthe middle classes.

The Structural Dimensions of the Politicsof Forgetting

The social construction of middle-classlifestyle in this context is not constituted byprivate individual tastes and preferences, butas a political project of class formation thatrests on the production of socio-spatialboundaries that can effectively resist the en-croachment of the poor and working classes.In other words, the restructuring of urbanspace is not merely a result of changing


attitudes and preferences. Rather, suchchanges in fact embody wider processes ofglobal restructuring that have been unfoldingthrough policies of economic liberalisation.In his discussion of processes of gen-trification in the US, Neil Smith has cau-tioned against deploying a "consumerpreference model" (Smith, 1996, p. 108)which reduces explanations of wider pro-cesses of urban restructuring to an effect ofindividual choices and middle-class demand.As he argues

to explain gentrification according to thegentrifier's preferences alone, while ignor-ing the role of builders, developers, land-lords, mortgage lenders, governmentagencies, real estate agents—gentrifiers asproducers—is excessively narrow (Smith,1996, p. 57).^

Local spatial practices in Mumbai, in fact,reflect wider structural shifts in land usageand the real estate market. These shifts areoften embodied in stark visual and spatialforms. For example, Mumbai has witnessedthe construction of luxury apartment com-plexes often targeted at wealthy 'NRIs'—non-resident Indians residing outside India.Meanwhile, rising real estate prices have alsoaccelerated the shift from older decliningmanufacturing industries such as the Bombaytextile industry, one of India's oldest manu-facturing industries, to new economy indus-tries such as the services sector and mediaenterprises. The 1990s, the first decade ofIndia's new economic policies, producedsteep speculative rises in Mumbai's real es-tate. As Jan Nijman has argued

The partial opening up of Mumbai's mar-ket in the first half of the nineties meantthat the market had to find the 'right' priceof Mumbai real estate. The 'right' pricewas escalating upwards due to the muchtalked about scarcity of office space in thecity in combination with rapidly increasingdemand, an equally popular topic of con-versation. The search for a stable marketwas complicated by the entry of globalcapital, because now Mumbai was now not

only compared with places such as Delhior Pune, but also to New York or HongKong. Thus, when Nariman point becameas expensive as Manhattan and five timesas expensive as Bangalore, who was to saythat was not 'normal'? (Nijman, 2000,p. 580).

Mill owners have found it more financiallylucrative to sell land used for textile millsrather than to try and revive sick mills in theface of strong international competition(D'Monte, 2002). The transition was vividlyevident to me during my fieldwork as I wentto conduct a series of interviews with jour-nalists for a new consumer magazine target-ing the new middle classes. The offices werehoused in a textile mill converted into officespace. Meanwhile, as I made my way to theoffices, what was once a section of the millwas being used as a television studio.

Such shifts from manufacturing to serviceindustries have also served to skew thebenefits of India's new economy towards thenew middle classes and away from the work-ing classes. As one public commentator put it

The transition from a manufacturing to aservice sector economy is being hailed as asign that Bombay is maturing into an inter-national city. But it has left mill labourersand the rest of the working class bewil-dered. The service sector demands skillsthat they simply do not possess. 'All thesejobs have been created in this area, buthardly any of them have gone to millworkers or their children. Do you thinkthese people want to become copy writ-ers?' asks Meena Menon, an organiser ofGimi Kamgar Sangarsh Samiti (MillWorker's Struggle Committee) (Fer-nandes, 1996, p. 21).

According to one estimate, employment inthe textile industry has dropped from250 000 in 1980 to 57 000 in 2000 (Saran,2000). The structural contradiction in thisprocess is that unemployed mill workers areoften forced to turn to alternative forms ofemployment such as hawking in order tosupport themselves (Devidayal, 1998b).*


However, as we have seen, middle-class-based definitions of the service industry haveserved to construct hawking as a threat to thesocial order rather than as an integral conse-quence of processes of restructuring thathave been unfolding in liberalising India.The restructuring of public space in liberalis-ing India is thus not merely an effect ofmiddle-class desire, but is also an aspect ofnew strategies of state-led development inthe context of liberalisation.

Liberalisation, as I have been arguing, hasnot led to the decline of state intervention asis often assumed, but to a shift in the natureof the exercise of state power and the emerg-ence of new forms of collaboration betweenthe state and private sector. For instance, thestate-led beautification projects such as thechowpatty project were carried out withfinancial support from the corporate sector.Surveillance of such 'beautified' publicspaces has also been carried out by privatesecurity firms. Meanwhile, the local stategovernment has also attempted other projectsof privatisation, such as the attempts to pri-vatise public municipal gardens and a contro-versial attempt to demolish Mumbai'sAquarium and replace it with a new elaborateunderwater aquarium to be constructedthough a joint venture with a Singapore-based firm—a change that was estimated po-tentially to raise entrance fees from Rs(Rupees) 4 for adults to Rs 140 per person(Deshmukh, 1998a). Furthermore, in thestate's anti-hawker drive, the BMC em-ployed private guards to evict illegal hawkersfrom public places, a tactic that was used forthe first time in the BMC's history (AsianAge, 2001; Bunsha, 2002).

A clear pattern that runs through the statestrategies deployed in the management ofurban space is one that restructures the spacein ways that cater to the wealthier segmentsof Mumbai and to the lifestyles of the newIndian middle classes—for instance, bytransforming spaces to cater to joggers. Pro-posed plans to restructure parks and maidanshave involved the drawing of clear socialboundaries through the construction of gatesin order to control access to what were once

accessible public spaces. In one such plan,for instance, the BMC developed a Rs6 000 000 beautification project that wouldtransform one of Mumbai's most well-knownmaidans, Shivaji Park, by constructing sevengates, 'VIP' parking, tiled jogging tracks andelaborate fountains and pavilions (Karkaria,1997).

While such proposals have often been metby resistance and legal challenges from localresidents and from some organisations op-posed to such state-led projects of urbanrestructuring, they nevertheless reveal theways in which the lifestyle of the new Indianmiddle class is not merely a symptom ofprivate individuals responding to advertisingand media images but a broader politicalprocess that involves the interests of both thestate and capital. The exercise of state powerin this context does not take an external formthat is protecting or catering to a predefinedset of interests of the middle classes. Rather,it is inextricably engaged in the production ofthe new Indian middle class—a social cate-gory that is materially produced through therestructuring of urban space in contemporaryMumbai.

The politics of spatial restructuring beginto point to the ways in which the boundariesof the new middle class are contingent on thereproduction of older social inequalities suchas social class. The invention of the newIndian middle class, as I have been arguing,is part of a broad process of cultural andeconomic globalisation that has been set inmotion through the economic policies of lib-eralisation in the 1990s. These spatial prac-tices are technologies for the production of avision of a liberalising India that centres onthe visibility of the new Indian middle class.The management of liberalisation, in effect,occurs through the production of theboundaries of this category, boundaries thatare simultaneously constructed through apolitics of distinction from and a politics offorgetting of the poor and working classes.The state's policing of urban space repre-sents this political project of managing thedisjunctures and transitions of liberalisationthrough the production of a purified middle-


class culture that can represent the globalis-ing Indian nation.

Negotiating Liberalisation: India's Mid-dle-class Consumer-citizen and the Politicsof Forgetting

The politics of lifestyle and spatial restruc-turing, which I have been analysing, point tothe ways in which the cultural production ofthe new Indian middle class producesspecific forms of material-spatial exclusionof segments of the working classes and urbanpoor. Such processes signify and begin tointersect with and shape broader patterns ofmiddle-class politics that attempt to natu-ralise such exclusions into a politics of for-getting. This politics of forgetting isembodied in the emergence of a normativecivic culture that is based on the constructionof a form of consumer-citizenship. In effect,the consuming-liberalising middle class istransformed into a generalised form of cul-tural citizenship, one that is marked by a shiftfrom workers' rights to the rights of theconsumer. Let us examine the political dy-namics of such a shift.

Consider the following instance of publicpolitical discourses on workers' activity thatoccurred during my fieldwork in Mumbai.On 6 October 1998, the Brihanmumbai Elec-tric Supply and Transport (BEST) workers,led by well-known labour leader Sharad Raowent on a three-day strike in order to pressfor various demands including a higherbonus and better medical facilities for work-ers. In the context of economic liberalisa-tion—which has been accompanied by agrowing defensiveness of labour unions, par-ticularly in public-sector industries such asthe banking and insurance industries—thestrike represented a visible counter-exampleof the political strength of labour. The strikewhich mobilised workers of the BEST buses,a central mode of transport for both middle-class and working-class individuals, crippledbus services across Mumbai. According toone estimate, out of a total of 3201 buses,only 3 were on the road on the first day of thestrike {Bombay Times, 1998e) and media re-

ports concurred that the strike was near-total.In a measure of the political power of labourleader Sharad Rao, one report noted that"Only one other person has been able tobring the city to a halt in the last twodecades—Sena chief Bal Thackeray"(Barucha and Singh, 1998), referring to thenotorious leader of the Shiv Sena party.While the BEST Corporation attempted touse legal means to subvert the strike bygetting the industrial court to stay it anddeclare it illegal, the success of the strike wasevident with the Shiv Sena mayor agreeing toan increased bonus after only two days.

In this series of events, public discoursesin the mainstream media are significant foran understanding of middle-class politics.Such public discourses were predominantlycentred on the consumer-oriented implica-tions of the strike. With headlines such as"Mumbaiites are Held to Ransom" and"Strikes—We've Had Enough!", the En-glish-language print media catering to thenew middle class presented a vivid construc-tion of the strike as an anti-middle-class,anti-consumer event. Consider the followingnarrative

The 'strike' appears to be a recurringphenomenon in Mumbai. As strikers jus-tify their grievances and authorities refuseto bow down to pressure, the commonman bears the brunt of the impasse.

He finds himself torn between two warringsides, one that displays lack of public con-science and the other, which gives incom-petence and indecisive administration anew name. The list of public woes ispredictable: if the motormen strike thecommon man will stand in serpentinequeues to reach office, if BEST goes offthe road, he will travel in crowded trainsor shell out extra cab and auto fare. If autorickshaws agitate he prefers to walk, ifbanks are closed, he'll borrow... Hisamazing capacity to be patient is com-mendable even in the face of unscrupulouspeople who want to make a fast buck outof this desperation.


The public apathy has made the tradeunion, which has no conscience, evenstronger. "The threat has grown", saysleading consumer activist, M. R. Pai(Deshmukh, 1998b).

The narrative presents an example of thetransformation of the middle classes into thefigure of the Indian consumer-citizen, thenew 'common man'. This figure representsan innocent victim of an ineffective govern-ment on the one hand and greedy, lawlessunions on the other. Both unions and thegovernment in this representation embodythe corruption and incompetence of the pol-itical system.

The representation points to a wider pat-tern of middle-class anger at what ThomasHansen has described as middle-class per-ceptions of a "plebianization of the politicalfield" where, as he notes

From the 1960s onward, the public con-struction of politics has increasingly beentransformed towards that of an "immoralvocation," a site of unprincipled pragma-tism, corruption, nepotism and greed—inbrief, as the profane antithesis to the sub-lime qualities of the cultural realm. Thistransformation reflects the changes in so-cial backgrounds and cultural habitus ofelected representatives and party activists.Middle-class politicians have increasinglybeen replaced by those drawn from peas-ant communities and lower-caste groups,and their style, language and social prac-tices are decidedly more "rustic" and"plebian" than those of the preceding gen-eration (Hansen, 1999, p. 56).

This frustration of the middle classes at whatthey perceive as a political field that caters tothe poor and working classes at the expenseof middle-class interests lies at the heart ofthe production of the consumer-citizen in thecontext of liberalisation.

Discourses of social disorder and politicalcorruption echoed through all of my inter-views and informal interactions during myfieldwork and were targeted at both the poorand lower-caste communities as well as per-

ceived cultural and political elites. AsHansen has suggested, middle-class individu-als would produce a construction of the de-cline of public and civic standards because ofthe social disorder produced by the poor andworking classes. As one middle-class public-sector employee put it "These people [pave-ment-dwellers] will never change. Even ifyou give them a free house they will sell itand go back to the footpath". Such construc-tions of the poor centred around two mainelements. The first dimension of the narrativerests on a notion that the poor choose theirpoverty and are essentially unwilling to workin order to gain social mobility.

A second dimension in this narrative restson a frustration with middle-class percep-tions of excessive state support for the poorand working classes. The reference to freehousing refers to attempted local governmentschemes to build low-income housing forpavement-dwellers being displaced by theprocesses of spatial restructuring. Middle-class individuals whom I interviewed, rang-ing from white-collar professionals to smallbusiness owners would consistently insistthat taxi drivers and domestic workers earnedmore than they did and simply chose to livein slums. Such attitudes are not isolated ex-amples, but are manifested in middle-classcommunity-based activism. As Das hasnoted

Outfits of 'citizen' groups (representingsmall and exclusive groups of middle andupper classes) are now intervening in thehousing sector. Their strategy is to opposethose policies of the government relatingto the campaign to the right to housing,upgradation of slums and protectionagainst eviction. These groups and theleadership infiuence the media too; theycampaign in the press against the interestsof the slumdwellers. In the recent past,many such groups have organized cam-paigns in the press to oppose governmentpolicy to recognize the residential rights ofslum-dwellers and the right to rehabili-tation of those who are evicted by the


development programmes of the state(Das, 2003, p. 208).

These examples of political activity point tothe ways in which segments of the urbanmiddle classes are organising against whatthey perceive as a state that caters exces-sively to the poor and working classes.

Middle-class frustration and anger cannotonly be understood as a question of socio-cultural anxiety, but must also be contextu-alised in relation to the articulation ofmiddle-class interests. Consider the follow-ing response of a journalist from a consumer-oriented magazine, as I discussed my interestin interviewing members of his staff for abook on the Indian middle classes

Anger. The major feeling is anger. Youcan call one chapter 'anger'. The middleclasses are two per cent of the populationand they are not being represented. Thereis no representation. The interests of themiddle classes are not being representedby politicians.

As another staff member added inclarification, the "politicians may be frommiddle-class backgrounds but middle-classinterests don't shape their policies and agen-das". Such anecdotes are not isolated exam-ples. They underlie the attitude of emergingmiddle-class organisations. Consider for in-stance the comments of the general secretaryof one middle-class citizens' group, theChembur Citizens' Forum

In fact, it is a matter of shame that theadministration is more concerned aboutillegal hawkers than about tax-paying citi-zens. People, especially those belonging tothe middle-class have put up with this kindof high-handedness far too long. But notanymore (Balakrishnan, 2001).

It is this middle-class anger and the corre-sponding question of the representation ofmiddle-class interests that lie at the foun-dation of the emerging consumer-citizen inliberalising India.

The middle-class consumer-citizen is ineffect the new 'common man', victimised

both by a corrupt and ineffective politicalsystem on the one hand and the supposedlyprivileged and protected poor and workingclasses on the other. The production of theconsumer-citizen as the new 'common man'in the national public discourses of the newmiddle classes points to the ways in whichthe production of consumer-based identitiesin the context of liberalisation has rested ona politics of distinction between the middleclasses on the one hand and the poor andworking classes on the other. This politics ofdistinction between the middle and workingclasses is of course a historical phenomenonthat is not causally produced by liberalisa-tion. However, the creation of the new mid-dle-class identity which I have beenanalysing has intensified these processes. Forexample, in earlier decades in post-colonialIndia, strong levels of unionisation amongstmiddle-class employees often produced anormative political culture focused on work-ers' rights.

Critics of the Indian trade union move-ment have argued that the focus of a greatdeal of unionism on the more privilegedwhite-collar and middle-class public-sectorunions weakened the public legitimacy ofIndian trade and diverted energy away fromless privileged particularly informal-sectorunions (Chatterji, 1980; Rudolph andRudolph, 1987). Writing in the late 1980s,Lloyd and Susanne Rudolph described the"islands of privilege" among organised-sec-tor workers and argued that "disproportionateorganization and mobilization of white-collarprofessional and skilled labor reveals thatorganized labour has elected to follow thepath of least resistance" (Rudolph andRudolph, 1987, p. 266). Such criticisms havebeen important as they have pointed to thehistorical blindness of unions to the struc-tural inequalities and hierarchies betweenworkers (Femandes, 1997).

However, what critics of unionised mid-dle-class and white-collar workers have oftenleft unanalysed is the wider socio-politicalmeaning of the production of the identity ofthe middle classes as workers rather thanconsumers. The production of such an ident-


ity, I suggest, represents an important factorin the production of a national political cul-ture, which maintained a pubhc normativeinterest in questions of poverty and workers'rights. The proposed restructuring of the pub-lic sector can be viewed not merely as aprocess with significant effects for the Indianeconomy, but also as a process that shapeswider political trends. To point to thissignificance is not to engage in an antiquateddefence of overstaffed, inefficient public-sec-tor units, which serve as vivid figures in thecurrent Indian public imagination. The politi-cal significance of the restructuring of pub-lic-sector, middle-class workforces is easilycaricatured in terms of irresponsible unionsstruggling to uphold the privileges they havegained from outdated economic policies.What I am suggesting instead is that thesignificance of this restructuring must also beunderstood in terms of the resulting reconsti-tution of democratic civic life—that is,through the production of a normative civicculture based on notions of the rights ofconsumer citizens rather than the rights ofworkers. It is this shift from the identity ofthe middle classes as workers to that ofconsumers which captures the politics of for-getting in liberalising India.

Conclusion

I have argued that the politics of forgetting incontemporary urban India unfold through acomplex set of processes which centre on theinvention of a new sociocultural category ofthe new Indian middle class. The productionof this social group points to a central para-dox in understanding the ways in which apolitics of forgetting operates in urban India.On the one hand, the new Indian middle classrepresents a visible embodiment of the po-tential benefits of globalisation, a visibilitythat disrupts the possibility that late industri-alising nations such as India might be forgot-ten in contemporary processes ofglobalisation. On the other hand, the politicaldynamics of the new Indian middle class reston a political project of forgetting the urbanpoor and working classes. The result is that

the conception of a politics of forgettingcannot be viewed merely as a process whereparticular localities are excluded fromglobalisation, but as an active political pro-cess that involves processes of exclusion andpurification. In particular, this political pro-cess is embodied in a series of spatial prac-tices at the local level in cities such asMumbai. Such processes of spatialpurification are an integral part of the mid-dle-class-based political culture in liberalis-ing India in which marginalised communitiescan be overlooked.

The exercise of state power is an importantpolitical force in this political project. At onelevel, the state is often fragmented andconflicted as it oscillates between respondingto the organised demands of middle-classcommunities on the one hand and workers'organisations such as hawkers' unions on theother. At another level, the state activelyparticipates in attempting to produce a mid-dle-class-based vision of a beautified, global-ising city in which signs of poverty can beforgotten in both spatial and political terms.Such an analysis holds broader insights asrecent research has pointed to the importanceof state-community co-ordination in at-tempts to promote 'urban livability' and sus-tainable development in comparativecontexts (Evans, 2002).

My analysis of the politics of forgetting incontemporary Mumbai suggests that bothstate practices and exclusionary definitions ofcommunity and citizenship produce visionsof urban development that exclude poor andworking-class communities. Such questionsof livability and development are fundamen-tally shaped by the emergence of a model ofconsumer-citizenship that seeks to displacethe political claims of marginalised socialgroups to resources such as jobs and housing.However, as we have seen, such processesremain contested by the groups that are for-gotten within the political culture of liberali-sation. This contestation continually disruptsthe naturalised sense of the project of forget-ting and highlights the more coercive aspectsof exclusion and purification of this process.The politics of forgetting is thus bound to


remain a partial and contradictory processthat interrupts the claims of the new Indianmiddle class to idealised visions of a global-ising Indian nation.

Notes

1. Such dynamics can also be seen in advancedindustrialised countries (for historical exam-ples, see Coheen, 2003; and Ryan, 1997).

2. The western side of the suburbs (for in-stance, Andheri west or Santa Cruz east)tend to be considered the upmarket side,while the eastern side tends to house work-ing-class and lower-middle-class neighbour-hoods (for instance, Andheri east or SantaCruz east).

3. For further details, see Bombay Times,1998a, 1998c, 1998d; and Times of India,1998b. In this context, the spatial manifesta-tion of cultural purity is not simply a class-based project aimed at cleansing the publicof its poor and homeless, but also one thatreproduces strict gendered ideologies withthe objective of purging the public sphere ofstate-defined elements of 'sexual deviance'.Due to confines of space, I limit myself inthis article to a discussion of class poUtics. Idiscuss such gendered processes in Fer-nandes (2001).

4. The Bombay Hawkers Union is estimated torepresent 120 000 hawkers (see Dixit, 1998).Shiv Sena leader Bal Thackeray opposed theBMCs' plan and some Shiv Sena leaderswere said to have been concerned that theanti-hawker drive would produce Sena lossesin local assembly elections (Times of India,1998a).

5. For instance, local state policies designed toaddress problems of squatters (for instance,by building housing to replace squatter set-tlements) have generally benefited buildersrather than the squatters themselves. For adiscussion of such dynamics see Das (2003).

6. Note that textile production has been reor-ganised and shifted to informal-sector pro-duction units outside Mumbai in rural areasin Maharashtra and neighbouring areas. For ahistorical analysis of the powerloom industryin western India, see Haynes (2001). For adiscussion of the survival strategies of re-trenched textile mill workers, see Bhowmick(2001).

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