The “Right” Kind of Welfare in South India's Urban Slums

Asian Survey, Vol. 52, Number 2, pp. 298–320. ISSN 0004-4687, electronic ISSN 1533-838X. © 2012 by the Regents of the University of California. All rights reserved. Please direct all requests for permis-sion to photocopy or reproduce article content through the University of California Press’s Rights and Permissions website, http://www.ucpressjournals.com/reprintInfo.asp. DOI: AS.2012.52.2.298.

298

SOUNDARYA CHIDAMBARAM

The “Right” Kind of Welfare in South India’s Urban Slums

Seva vs. Patronage and the Success of Hindu Nationalist Organizations

ABSTRACT

This article examines the appeal of Hindu right-wing social service organizations, which try to use welfare provisions to entrench themselves in urban slums across India. However, in South India, their welfare provision is not as successful in Tamil Nadu as in Karnataka. I explain this spatial variation by arguing that these communal organizations fail to entrench themselves in those slums where preexisting civic asso-ciations closely linked to party officials and local administrators function as efficient patronage networks, providing welfare needs to the urban poor and reducing the need for non-state actors such as right-wing groups.

KEYWORDS: Hindu nationalism, welfare politics, patronage, civil society, India

INTRODUCTION

There is no doubt that Hindu nationalist ideology has transformed itself from its pariah status in Indian politics, seizing mainstream political space in the past two decades. Increasingly, since the 1990s, Hindu nationalist organizations involved in social services and outside the electoral arena have captured civil society and associational space, establishing themselves firmly in poor urban neighborhoods through welfare provision initiatives. The number of welfare projects implemented has nearly quadrupled, going from 15,063 in 1997 and

Soundarya Chidambaram is a Visiting Assistant Professor in Political Science at the University of Arkansas, Fayetteville, Arkansas, U.S.A. She received her Ph.D. in Political Science from Ohio State University, Columbus, Ohio, U.S.A., in March 2012. An earlier version of this paper was presented at the Modern South Asia Workshop, Yale University, April 2011. Fieldwork in India in 2009 was funded by the Mershon Center for International Security Studies and the Office of International Affairs at Ohio State University. The author is indebted to Irfan Nooruddin for his invaluable guidance and insightful comments. Many thanks to Sarah Brooks, Marcus Kurtz, Miryam Farrar Chandler, Tahseen Kazi, Danielle Langfield, Jenny Nowlin, and an anonymous reviewer for helpful comments and advice. Email: <[email protected]>.

CHIDAMBARAM / WELFARE AND POLITICS IN SOUTH INDIA • 299

25,131 in 2004 to 59,076 projects in 2009 (see Figure 1). The most surprising aspect of this transformation has been the successful penetration of southern India, where traditionally the Hindu nationalist organizations have tended to be much weaker in terms of visibility, organizational presence, and electoral success. Even within South Indian states, entrenchment of the Hindu right-wing organizations has met with variable success. They have been extremely successful in Karnataka as compared to their impact on society and politics in Tamil Nadu. Politically, the Bharatiya Janata Party (Indian People’s Party, BJP), the Hindu nationalist party, has had unparalleled electoral success in Karnataka although it remains a marginal force in Tamil Nadu.1 More important, looking beyond political achievements at the movement’s broader presence, the Hindu Right’s social service affiliates have not succeeded in establishing a firm presence in urban spaces in Tamil Nadu as compared to Karnataka through their welfare provision initiatives (see Figures 2 and 3).

Most scholarly studies attribute the success of the Hindu nationalist or-ganizations since the 1990s to provocative mobilization around cultural/reli-gious wedge issues in a fragmented party system.2 But none of these studies analyzes why their provision of welfare services has gained so much accep-tance in a number of poor urban neighborhoods since the implementation of economic liberalization in 1991. More important, there is no explanation for why these social service affiliates have not succeeded in establishing their presence equally in all cities.

To comprehend the mass appeal of the Hindu nationalist movement, I argue that we need to widen our focus beyond the electoral arena and study the capture of civil society space in urban India by the Hindu Right. We also need to understand the puzzle of sub-national variation in the success of Hindu social service organizations across Indian states since the 1990s. I pro-pose that these organizations fail to entrench themselves in those urban slums

1. The BJP has noticeably improved its performance in southern India since 1990. Its successes here can be accounted for largely by its performance in Karnataka. It has consistently increased its seat shares in Karnataka state legislature elections since the 1990s, leading up to its victory in 2008. In contrast, it won just one seat in 1996 and four seats in 2001 in its entire history of contestation in Tamil Nadu state polls. While the BJP’s vote shares are not entirely determined by the right wing’s welfare work, recent literature and journalistic accounts have demonstrated the link between welfare provision and increased vote shares for the BJP, thus making it possible to draw some inferences about the success of the Hindu nationalist organizations based on BJP performance at the local level. See also fn. 15.

2. David Ludden, ed., Making India Hindu: Religion, Community, and the Politics of Democracy in India (Delhi: Oxford University Press, 2005).

source: Seva Disha, Annual Report on the Sangh’s Sevakarya (New Delhi: Rashtriya Seva Bharati, various years).

figure 1. Seva Bharati’s Welfare Projects for the Years 1997, 2004, and 2009

Trends in Welfare Projects Implemented by the Seva Bharati

70,000

Self-Reliance

Social Organization

Healthcare

Education

1997 2004

Year

2009

60,000

50,000

40,000

30,000

20,000

10,000

0

Num

ber

of P

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figure 2. Comparing Seva Bharati’s Welfare Projects in Health Care in Karnataka and Tamil Nadu States

Healthcare Projects in Tamil Nadu vs. Karnataka

1995 1997 2004 2006 2007 2008 2009

Year

0150300450600750900

Num

ber

of P

roje

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KarnatakaTamil Nadu

source: Ibid. to Figure 1.

Karnataka

Education Projects in Tamil Nadu vs. Karnataka

0

1,000

2,000

3,000

4,000

Num

ber

of P

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1995 1997 2004 2006 2007 2008 2009

Tamil NaduYear

figure 3. Comparing Seva Bharati’s Welfare Projects in Education in Karnataka and Tamil Nadu

source: Ibid. to Figure 2.


where preexisting local associations function as efficient political patronage networks, inducing state political parties to meet welfare needs adequately. When strong neighborhood networks are also closely linked to local party officials, the urban poor are able to bargain collectively for better service provision from political parties, thus decreasing their dependence on all other non-state social service groups.

To test this hypothesis, I focus on an organization called the Seva3 Bharati (Welfare India), which works exclusively among urban slum neighborhoods to reach out to the poor working class Hindu population through welfare pro-vision. Seva Bharati is a key constituent of the Hindu nationalist movement led by the Rashtriya Swayamesevak Sangh (National Volunteers Association, RSS). Based on data from 75 interviews conducted with the Seva Bharati and other RSS organizations, non-governmental organizations (NGOs), bureau-crats, and politicians in the cities of Bangalore in Karnataka and Chennai in Tamil Nadu, I find that Chennai slums have several local associations mediat-ing between the urban poor and party representatives. Bangalore, on the other hand, is a case where patronage ties linking the parties and poor voters are on the decline. Thus, through this comparison we can see manifest the variation in the success of Hindu nationalist organizations in the two cities. This article thus provides a generalizable framework to understand the success of sectar-ian welfare organizations that use civil society space to expand their reach.

I begin with a description of the puzzle by comparing the welfare efforts of the RSS in Chennai (formerly called Madras) and Bangalore, providing a brief overview of the extant literature on the success of Hindu nationalism in India. The second section elaborates the theoretical framework, while the third section examines my hypotheses using empirical case studies of Chen-nai and Bangalore. Finally, I conclude with some general remarks about the broader implications of my findings for governance, democracy, and civil society in India.

HINDU NATIONALIST ORGANIZATIONS AND SEVA: AN OVERVIEW

The RSS, the parent body of most other prominent Hindu nationalist or-ganizations, is an all-male, highly disciplined, hierarchical organization that

3. Seva or sewa (lit., service) is the Hindi language term used by Hindu nationalist organizations to denote their service to the Hindu community in the form of social welfare. Sevakarya is the term for welfare projects undertaken by the organizations.

302 • ASIAN SURVEY 52:2

seeks to “organize” Hindu society by incorporating ever more Hindus into its ranks.4 Its primary strategy of operation has been to work at the grassroots level through shakhas (lit., branches).5 Over the years, the RSS has diversified organizationally by creating and supporting various affiliate organizations aimed at specific audiences. The BJP has been the political face of Hindu nationalism since the 1980s, with close ties to the RSS. Other affiliates include a student wing, a religious wing, workers’ and farmers’ unions, and a women’s wing. There is also a welfare service provision wing consisting of organizations working in tribal areas and urban slums through initiatives such as formal and non-formal education and health care. The RSS and its affiliates are referred to collectively as the Sangh Parivar (the Sangh Family, a term that is used to collectively refer to all the organizations affiliated with the RSS).

Seva Bharati, the welfare service affiliate, reaches out to urban slum com-munities through health and education services and economic development/self-reliance projects (see Figure 1 above). Education projects comprise a ma-jor portion of the Seva projects in general, as well as in Tamil Nadu and Karnataka, especially in the form of informal tutoring centers that conduct free evening classes in slum neighborhoods to help impoverished students with schoolwork. These centers are an excellent means of establishing roots in local neighborhoods. Young men and women are recruited from within the neighborhoods to teach classes. The Seva Bharati officers supervising these centers place a lot of emphasis on frequent face to face meetings with parents, who are invited to participate in neighborhood cultural events, community celebrations of major Hindu festivals, and weekly/monthly religious ritu-als particularly involving the Hindu women in the community. Field trips, lectures, and retreats are organized to facilitate interactions with senior RSS cadres to stress themes such as nationalism and patriotism. These tutoring centers are a subtle mechanism for introducing the community to exclusion-ary Hindu ideology in small doses, rather than through the usual rigorous

4. Prominent works analyzing the origin and history of the RSS include Christophe Jaffrelot, The Hindu Nationalist Movement in India (New York: Columbia University Press, 1996); Tapan Basu et al., Khaki Shorts and Saffron Flags (New Delhi: Orient Longman, 1993); Walter Andersen and Shridhar Damle, The Brotherhood in Saffron: The Rashtriya Swayamsevak Sangh and Hindu Revivalism (Boulder, Colo.: Westview Press, 1987); Jean Alonzo Curran, Militant Hinduism in Indian Politics––a Study of the RSS (n.p. : Institute of Pacific Relations, 1951).

5. Shakha is the basic organizational unit of the RSS. It is a term used to denote the daily gather-ing of all members in a particular neighborhood. The daily programs consist of physical exercises, patriotic songs, and group discussions on various subjects, particularly related to politics and Hindu nationalism.


enforcement of daily shakha attendance, which many youth find too strict and tedious. Although RSS forays into social services were initiated long before 1990, prominent expansion in this sphere of activity has occurred only in the 1990s and beyond.

However, there is substantial spatial variation in the reach and spread of Seva Bharati’s welfare work. It has more projects running successfully in Karnataka than in Tamil Nadu (see Figures 2 and 3 above). The RSS admits that it has struggled more to build mass appeal and organizational support for its welfare activities in Tamil Nadu. Extensive interviews conducted in Chennai and Bangalore provide evidence supporting this claim. RSS and Seva Bharati members in Chennai conceded that their welfare initiatives had not garnered much support among local communities. The Bangalore interviews yielded the exact opposite view: volunteers and senior members overseeing the education projects emphasized their success in reaching out to local communities.6

Why has welfare provision by the Sangh Parivar been more successful in some states and not others, in terms of reach, spread, and visibility? The extant literature does not have a satisfactory answer. Most scholars who trace the rise of Hindu nationalism in India tend to focus on the political success of the BJP alone. Many attribute it to the breakdown of the “Congress system.”7 As Congress’s catch-all party status declined in the 1990s, the BJP emerged as the most viable party to replace it nationally, particularly by using religious appeals to reach out to Hindu voters.8 Some argue that the BJP’s success resulted from its ability to tailor its ideology to appeal to regional audiences,9 while others observe that the party’s greatest gains outside its traditional upper caste/class

6. Interviews were conducted at the RSS office in Chennai on August 22, 2009. Interviews were conducted in Bangalore on August 14 and December 1, 2009 (hereafter Bangalore interviews).

7. This term was used to describe the pre-1990s party system in India characterized by one-party dominance. The Congress Party, which absorbed and internalized all political competition, effectively operated as an amalgamation of factions or a coalition of state parties by assimilating multiple, diverse group interests in its fold.

8. Atul Kohli, Democracy and Discontent: India’s Growing Crisis of Governability (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1990); Yogendra Yadav, “Reconfiguration in Indian Politics: State As-sembly Elections, 1993–1995,” Economic and Political Weekly 31:2/3 (January 13–20, 1996), pp. 95–104; Robert Hardgrave and Stanley Kochanek, India: Government and Politics in a Developing Nation (Boston: Thomson/Wadsworth, 2008); Ludden, Making India Hindu.

9. Thomas Blom Hansen and Christophe Jaffrelot, “Introduction: The BJP after the 1996 elec-tions,” in The BJP and Compulsions of Politics in India, eds. Hansen and Jaffrelot (New Delhi: Oxford University Press, 1998), pp. 15–19.


base have derived from the support its allies have received.10 Others attribute the popularity of Hindutva11 politics to a change in mass ideology. They argue that the party has used longstanding Hindu/Muslim antagonisms to advance its sectarian agenda. Neither of these explains the expansion of the Hindu nationalist movement through welfare provision. The RSS and its affiliates constitute an exceptionally strong organizational network in India, which is otherwise characterized as having a weak associational life.12 This aspect of the Sangh Parivar’s work, although highlighted in journalistic works, has not been studied in the academic literature. For instance, Panikkar argues the following:13

There is hardly any area of social and cultural life in which the Sangh Pari-var has not made its presence felt. . . . Over the past 70 years, the Rashtriya Swayamsewak Sangh has set up thousands of schools. . . . The importance of the work of these institutions is that they function as conduits for the recruit-ment of young children to the communal fold. The influence thus gained enables communal organizations to expand their activities even in the absence of political power. That is why during the past five years, when the political influence of the communal forces declined, as evident from the reverses of the BJP in elections, the social and cultural fronts, such as the VHP [Vishwa Hindu Parishad, World Hindu Council] and the RSS, not only held their fort, but actually expanded their sphere of influence. . . .

The focus on BJP’s electoral fortunes and its recent defeats fails to take into account the quiet yet unrelenting grassroots social welfare work among urban communities since the 1990s.14

Most studies also fail to address the spatial variation in the spread of the Hindu Right. Some studies note that these groups have been generally more

10. Oliver Heath, “Anatomy of BJP’s Rise to Power: Social, Regional, and Political Expansion in the 1990s,” Economic and Political Weekly 34:34/35 (August 21-September 3, 1999), pp. 21–27.

11. Hindutva (lit., Hinduness) is the term used by Hindu nationalist organizations to signify a nationalist political ideology deriving from Hindu values and culture, especially the notion of India as a Hindu state. It is perceived by critics as an exclusivist and chauvinistic interpretation of Hinduism.

12. Pradeep K. Chhibber, Democracy without Associations: Transformation of the Party System and Social Cleavages in India (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 1999).

13. K. N. Panikkar, “Ways of Hindutva,” Frontline 26:7 (March 28, 2009). 14. Some works do provide a description of how welfare projects are executed, but they are not com-

parative and do not explain spatial variation in success: Gwilym Beckerlegge, “The Rashtriya Swayam-sevak Sangh’s ‘Tradition of Selfless Service’,” in The Politics of Cultural Mobilization in India, eds. John Zavos, Andrew Wyatt, and Vernon Hewitt (New Delhi: Oxford University Press, 2004); Christophe Jaffrelot, “Hindu Nationalism and the Social Welfare Strategy: Seva Bharati as an Education Agency,” in The Sangh Parivar: A Reader, ed. Christophe Jaffrelot (Delhi: Oxford University Press, 2005).


successful in the north than the south. Hansen and Jaffrelot talk about the inability of the RSS and the BJP to successfully “vernacularize” Hindutva in southern and eastern India. However, this broad generalization about the southern states does not explain the post-1990s variation in the southern re-gion between Karnataka and Tamil Nadu.15 One recent exception is Thachil’s research, which focuses on the RSS’s welfare activity among tribal populations and posits a link between the Sangh’s social service activities and increasing political support for the BJP among this segment.16 He demonstrates this in the state of Chattisgarh, which has become a BJP stronghold in recent years. My own work extends Thachil’s research by specifying a generalizable frame-work for the variable success of welfare provision by the RSS.

Both Chandra’s and Subramanian’s work provides useful starting points to understand this sub-national variation.17 In the context of Tamil Nadu politics, both scholars essentially argue that inclusive parties that politically incorporate marginalized citizens can preempt the space being used for narrow sectarian mobilization. But how do parties do this? I compare party-citizen transactions in Chennai and Bangalore to answer this question. I examine the key role of lo-cal neighborhood networks in making political parties responsive to the urban poor. My explanatory framework builds upon Varshney’s conceptualization of associational networks and his analysis of the critical role of pre-existing local networks of civic engagement in preventing ethnic violence in urban neigh-borhoods.18 Varshney demonstrates how inter-ethnic associational networks act as peace committees to contain communal polarization and constrain politi-cal elites. I argue that such local networks are also instrumental in providing much-needed access to relevant local political channels. By becoming politically integrated, these networks become crucial to local electoral success. Thus, they are able to pressure politicians for better welfare provision, eliminating the need for non-state providers such as the Hindu social service groups.

15. Christophe Jaffrelot, India’s Silent Revolution: The Rise of the Lower Castes in North India (Del-hi: Cambridge University Press, 2003); Thomas Blom Hansen, “The Vernacularisation of Hindutva: The BJP and Shiv Sena in Rural Maharashtra,” Contributions to Indian Sociology 30:2 (November 1996), pp. 177–214.

16. Tariq Thachil, “The Saffron Wave Meets the Silent Revolution: Why the Poor Vote for Hindu Nationalism in India” (Ph.D. diss., Cornell University, 2009).

17. Kanchan Chandra, Why Ethnic Parties Succeed: Patronage and Ethnic Head Counts in India (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2004); Narendra Subramanian, Ethnicity and Populist Mobi-lization: Political Parties, Citizens, and Democracy in South India (Delhi: Oxford University Press, 1999).

18. Ashutosh Varshney, Ethnic Conflict and Civic Life: Hindus and Muslims in India (New Delhi: Oxford University Press, 2002).


THEORETICAL FRAMEWORK

Neoliberal Economic Reforms, Associational Networks, and the Politics of Welfare

Economic liberalization tends to increase the economic vulnerability of certain sections of the population. What the glowing reports and statistics about India’s phenomenal growth rates do not explicitly reveal is the sys-tematic informalization of labor, promoted by the government’s stand on labor legislation. Regular employment in the formal organized sector has fallen substantially, but there has been a notable increase in casual informal labor.19 Ahsan et al. report that the use of such contract labor has increased significantly, climbing from 12% of the manufacturing force in 1985 to 25% in 2002.20 Papola and Sharma corroborate this trend:

A comprehensive survey of about 1,300 firms, scattered over 10 states and nine important organized manufacturing industry groups (consisting of both public and private sectors), undertaken by the Institute for Human Development (sponsored by the Ministry of Statistics, Government of India), shows that between 1991 and 1998 although . . . total employment increased by over 2%, most of the increase was accounted for by temporary, casual, contract, and other flexible categories of workers.21

This sector is characterized by extremely tenuous job tenure, poor imple-mentation of protections such as minimum wage or work hours, and lack of access to welfare services.

The rationale behind promoting informalization and flexibility is that a highly regulated labor market will hamper private investment in the manufacturing

19. Recent literature on neoliberal reforms leading to marginalization of the poor, particularly through making labor laws flexible and the rise of the informal labor sector, includes Jan Breman, “Communal Upheaval as Resurgence of Social Darwinism,” Economic and Political Weekly 37:16 (April 20–26, 2002), pp. 1485–88; Marcus Kurtz, “The Dilemmas of Democracy in the Open Economy: Lessons from Latin America,” World Politics 56:2 (January 2004), pp. 262–302; Rina Agarwala, “From Work to Welfare: A New Class Movement in India,” Critical Asian Studies 38:4 (December 2006), pp. 419–44; Claudio Holzner, “The Poverty of Democracy: Neoliberal Reforms, and Political Participation of the Poor in Mexico,” Latin American Politics and Society 49:2 (Summer 2007), pp. 87–122.

20. Ahmad Ahsan, Carmen Pages, and Tirthankar Roy, “Legislation, Enforcement, and Adjudi-cation in Indian Labor Markets: Origins, Consequences, and the Way Forward,” in Globalization, Labor Markets, and Inequality in India, eds. Dipak Mazumdar and Sandip Sarkar (International Development Research Center, Ottawa: Routledge, 2008).

21. T. S. Papola and A. N. Sharma, “Labour: Down and Out?” Seminar, no. 537 (May 2004), <http://www.india-seminar.com/2004/537/537%20t.s.%20papola%20and%20alakh%20n.%20sharma.htm>, accessed May 20, 2011.


sector. However, labor market flexibility when not accompanied by adequate implementation of a safety net has an adverse impact on urban labor. Alongside decreasing access to social protection and welfare provision is the inability of the urban poor to respond to this problem. Informality implies lack of a permanent workplace as well as a community of fellow workers, and less time and resources to organize. Combined with the lack of organized representation, informality forces the impoverished urban work force to depend on alternative networks to meet their welfare needs, thus opening up the space for exclusivist groups and ideologies. It is much easier to mobilize informal, casual, self-employed workers on a neighborhood basis in the absence of a permanent workplace. This is quite convenient for the RSS, which has always organized its shakha activities around neighborhoods and thus already has a structure in place to mobilize this new group. In fact, Seva Bharati often operates in tandem with the local RSS shakha within neighborhoods. This is one of the major reasons why welfarist initiatives have been particularly successful in penetrating poor urban communities since the 1990s. With informalization of the economy but decline of formal organizations representing the huge informal sector labor force, the RSS finds it easier to target this sector at the neighborhood level and offer them much needed welfare services such as education and health care in order to gain credibility and legitimacy.

Although increased welfare provision by the RSS was not a planned strate-gic response to the implications of market reforms for urban slums, in the past couple of decades the organization has recognized the acute need for service provision there. Hence, welfare provision activities have received a boost and are considered to be a means to segue into the local neighborhood dynamics and reach out to previously unreceptive communities. The Organiser, a weekly newspaper known for its close affiliation with the Sangh Parivar, reports:

Since the Sangh work has registered its presence in various spheres of social life, the nature of workers’ training has also witnessed a slight change during the last few years. Earlier, the main focus used to be on the Sangh shakha. But now other activities like training for service activities, prachar [publicity], sampark [contact], and yoga have also been included in the Officer Training Camp [OTC] curriculum. The participants also visit a nearby sewa basti (a term used to refer to urban slums where the Sangh organizations have set up welfare projects) for establishing contact and also to become familiar with the problems of the people living in such colonies. . . .22

22. Mohan Bhagwat, “Sangh Grows Attracting Youth—Youth Participation Increases in Sangh Shiksha Varga,” The Organiser (New Delhi), July 25, 2006.


What then explains the variable degrees of local urban spread by Hindu welfarist groups? I argue that where community-based civic engagement is strong at the grassroots/neighborhood level, it can engender inclusive col-lective action. When such networks are also rooted in local politics and have strong linkages to local administrators and party power structures, they are able to collectively bargain for better services and amenities, reducing the need for alternative non-state actors such as co-ethnic/co-religionist groups.

Even inclusive community-level networks by themselves are not sufficient to keep out the sectarian organizations. Without links to local political officials who provide mediation between the poor and the government, welfare needs are likely to remain unaddressed, creating the space for right-wing organizations to intervene. However, political brokerage through local officials in the absence of a concerted neighborhood effort is also riddled with problems. Such ties can become asymmetric and exploitive, thus defeating their purpose. It is only the combination of the two, strong intra-neighborhood ties (formal or informal) plus the linkages to local elites that helps deter the entry of welfarist Hindu organizations. Acting as long-term reciprocal networks connecting people from the community to political parties, these neighborhood level clientelistic net-works tend to become strongly entrenched over time.

Political Linkages

The key is political linkages. Urban poor communities rely on vertical pa-tronage channels to gain access to political institutions to solve their daily problems. They have a much greater need for the state than do middle class people, who can simply opt for private services. For urban slum communities, political contact is crucial to gain access to public amenities such as water, sanitation, and education as well as legal status, land tenure, or voter identity cards.23 Civic networks and/or community-based organizations can guaran-tee such political access systematically through linkages to higher political levels such as state-level representatives (member of the Legislative Assem-bly, or MLAs) or national-level representatives (members of Parliament, or MPs). This can create channels for upward political mobility of community

23. Brent Edelman and Arup Mitra, “Slum Dwellers’ Access to Basic Amenities: The Role of Political Contact, Its Determinants, and Adverse Effects,” Review of Urban & Regional Development Studies 18:1 (March 2006), pp. 25–40; John Harriss, “Political Participation, Representation, and the Urban Poor: Findings from Research in Delhi,” Economic and Political Weekly 40:11 (March 12–18, 2005), pp. 1041–54.


members and delivery of the services they want; therefore, there is less need to turn to non-state service providers. Urban slums often turn to alterna-tive service providers or NGOs only when there is an absence of structured political access facilitated through politically linked associational networks.

Depending on the nature and intensity of party competition in an Indian state, such local community networks can bargain from positions of power. As clients delivering the votes that parties need in a system characterized by high competition, the networks encourage and reinforce patronage ties and can pressure parties for increased social expenditure in return for electoral support. Where such entrenched networks are absent, the government may not be vested in paying attention to the needs of the lower class/caste sector. This is where the RSS is able to enter much more easily and is able to establish its credibility through its own seva activities.

CIVIC NETWORKS AS A BULWARK AGAINST HINDU NATIONALISM:

BANGALORE AND CHENNAI COMPARED

Uneven and inequitable growth has severely affected urban areas in India since liberalization. Estimates show that around 28% of India’s population was urban in 2001. Karnataka ranks fourth among states in the degree of urbanization, after Tamil Nadu, Maharashtra, and Gujarat.24 Despite the fact that Tamil Nadu has a greater number of slums and a greater proportion of population living in slums, the RSS and its welfare affiliates have had much less impact here than in Karnataka. I show that this stems from the different nature of urban associational life in the two places. First, I track the spread of Hindu welfarist organizations in the cities of Bangalore and Chennai since the 1990s, follow-ing economic liberalization. This is followed by an empirical illustration of the nature of associational life in slum communities in the two cities.

The problems faced by the informal labor force have been exacerbated because of the movement of retrenched labor from the formal to the infor-mal sector. Interestingly, the Bharatiya Mazdoor Sangh (the Indian Workers’ Union, BMS), the right-wing labor union affiliated with the RSS, has been one of the few unions to not just expand its membership base since the 1990s

24. “Urban Development Policy for Karnataka,” Urban Development Department, Bangalore, government of Karnataka, 2009, p. 3, <http://www.kuidfc.com/website/webpage.nsf/15a7d0221a9f927265256e7f003a66f6/b3c59beb2f8be88265257671003855a9/$FILE/Urban%20Development%20Policy.pdf>, accessed May 7, 2011.


but also to target the informal sector. Jaffrelot calls this the “trade union’s stra-tegic reorientation towards welfarist work directed in the informal sector.”25 Notably, the union has had considerably greater success in Karnataka than in Tamil Nadu. According to Jaffrelot’s estimates, in Karnataka in 1987 the BMS covered 20 districts, with 90,030 members and 108 affiliated unions. For Tamil Nadu, the corresponding figures were one district, 16 affiliated unions, and 31,335 members.26 This reinforces the more successful entrenchment of the RSS and its affiliates among the poor urban working class in Karnataka.

In Bangalore, and the rest of Karnataka, the Rashtrotthana Parishat (the Council for National Development, RP) executes many of the welfare projects associated with the Seva Bharati. RP is a service organization started in 1965 with the objectives of “nation-building along indigenous lines, socio-economic-cultural uplift of deprived brethren[, and] harmony through intra-community dialogue.”27 It coordinates activities, including tutoring centers, vocational training centers for women, blood banks, hospitals, and reading rooms in over 300 slums in Bangalore and Gulbarga. It has more than 150 non-formal edu-cation centers in 109 Bangalore slums within the city limits. Volunteers and senior members of the RP overseeing the education projects emphasized their success in reaching out to local communities, particularly since the mid-1990s.28

Two tutoring centers in two slums in Bangalore, listed among the 109 slums there covered by the RP, were observed.29 The initiative is very stream-lined and professionally managed. Interviews with instructors from the two centers indicated that there were about 200 teachers volunteering, with ap-proximately 20 students assigned to each teacher.30 Twenty supervisors were appointed to oversee these teachers, and they checked attendance rosters twice a week. Every fourth Sunday of the month, a training session was

25. Christophe Jaffrelot, “Work and Workers in the Ideology and Strategies of the BMS,” p. 366, in idem, ed., The Sangh Parivar: A Reader.

26. Ibid., p. 367.27. “Rashtrotthana Parishat: A Bird’s Eye View of Our Activities,” an information booklet about

the RP, was provided to me by RP personnel during an interview in Bangalore, conducted on August 14, 2009. My interviews revealed that the RP executes most of the welfare projects in Bangalore, and Seva Bharati operates more as a part of the RP there. The RP booklet states that any donations to Seva Bharati may be made through checks drawn in favor of RP. Documents also reveal the same person as the key contact for both organizations.

28. Bangalore interviews. 29. This figure was confirmed by another NGO that has tracked the activities of the RP in Ban-

galore. Interview conducted with an NGO coordinator, Bangalore, December 1, 2009.30. Interviews were conducted during visits to the two tutoring centers, Bangalore, December

1 and 5, 2009 (hereafter, interviews with two tutoring centers).


conducted for the teachers, emphasizing not just pedagogy but also ways of recruiting more children. A camping trip to a nearby village organized in December 2009 for the teachers, employees, and other personnel of the Parishat garnered a head count of 700 people. All the interviewees, including elected representatives, journalists, academics, and social activists from other NGOs, concurred that the RSS had entrenched itself firmly within various slum communities in Bangalore and more broadly in Karnataka.

In stark contrast, the corresponding educational efforts by the Seva Bharati in Chennai are neither as extensive nor as well-organized. The organization did not provide me with statistics about the exact number of tutoring centers in the city or the number of slums covered. Only two centers were mentioned repeatedly in the interviews, indicative of the limited coverage and success of this initiative. The tutoring center that I observed was located in a neighbor-hood situated near a major Christian place of worship.31 The students were mostly Hindu. The Christian students who do attend were allowed only on the condition that they complied with Hindu religious rituals and dress code in class. Monthly religious gatherings were organized for Hindu women in the temples located in the neighborhood. The stated objective was one of Hindu unity and caste harmony, but often underlying these were implicit (and sometimes overt) negative ideas about other religions. The local com-munity members who attend the Hindu gatherings have, however, persisted with their interfaith worship practices and inclusive inter-religious ties.

The next section demonstrates how the different patterns of associational life in the two cities contribute to the variable success of the Hindu national-ist welfare efforts.

Bangalore

Associational life in Bangalore has a unique character. On the one hand, urban poor associations fail to create long-term linkages between communi-ties and party officials.32 On the other, upper middle class activism often

31. The visits were made in Chennai October 23 and November 18, 2009. Semi-structured in-terviews with the residents, parents of children attending the center, and people overseeing it were also conducted (hereafter Chennai visits and interviews).

32. Politics in Karnataka, since its creation in 1956 up until 1983, was dominated by the Congress Party. With the Janata Party’s victory in 1983, the politics in the state evolved into a two-party system. The Janata Party, however, began disintegrating by the late 1980s, and factions within the party began forming state-centric independent parties. In Karnataka, too, the Janata Party gave way to the Janata Dal (Secular) (JDS) that began to gain ground since the 1989 election. The BJP meanwhile slowly


remains unresponsive to the needs of the urban poor and oblivious to the rise of Hindu nationalism across Bangalore. The problem is the impact this situation has had on local patron-client channels.

Survey data and reports from Bangalore from 2002–04 provide fascinating insights on associational life there.33 While there has been a proliferation in the number of NGOs working in Bangalore in recent years, Narayanan de-scribes the stark stratification of associational activity in the city. 34 The large professional NGOs are dominated by upper middle class professionals and corporate businesses in the IT (information technology) sector, whose idea of community participation does not necessarily incorporate the preferences of the urban poor. They use buzzwords such as governance or decentralization that do not resonate with poor residents, and they try to implement top-down development schemes without being moored in local dynamics.35 At the same time, mass movements of the urban poor, where they do exist, have tended to avoid any interaction or partnership with the government. They are not well-linked with local or state-level politicians and parties, and thus fail to serve as channels of political representation for the poor. Moreover, they are often cash-strapped and lack organizational strength.

My interview with an NGO volunteer working primarily among the urban slums supported the above observations.36 She said their organization had tried to oppose RP’s tutoring centers when they started cropping up in several Bangalore slums a few years ago by setting up their own inclusive centers, but their efforts had failed because they could not raise enough money to sustain the campaign. Nor did they coordinate with local councilors or party cadres in this endeavor. Most of their centers simply shut down because they had run out of money and had been unable to establish enough connections within the community to become self-sustaining.

started becoming an important third actor, with improving electoral performances from the 1990s onward, starting with the 1994 assembly election.

33. “Rights, Representation, and the Poor: Comparing Large Developing Democracies––India, Brazil, and Mexico,” a study by the Institute of Development Studies, <http://www.ids.ac.uk/go/idsproject/rights-representation-and-the-poor>, accessed April 17, 2011.

34. Sudha Narayanan, “A Certain Bangalore: Associational Activity in a Globalizing Indian City,” unpublished manuscript, July 2005.

35. This view has been substantiated by studies such as Elizabeth Clay, “Community-led Par-ticipatory Budgeting in Bangalore: Learning from Successful Cases” (M.A. thesis, Massachusetts Institute of Technology, 2007); and Solomon Benjamin, “Governance, Economic Settings, and Poverty in Bangalore,” Environment and Urbanization 12:1 (April 2000), pp. 35–56.

36. An interview with an NGO volunteer, Bangalore, December 4, 2009.


In Bangalore, as in most other cities, being linked through strong associa-tions to local municipal councilors, who in turn are linked to higher levels of power, is how patronage is delivered to many communities—both through particularistic targeted public goods as well as publicly provided amenities. These networks are often party-neutral or inclusive of all party leaders, in order to bargain effectively with whichever party is in power at the time. If power is removed from local urban bodies and officials, such patronage net-works can collapse. This is precisely what has happened in Bangalore. Succes-sive state governments in Karnataka over the past decade have implemented policies that render local-level governance structures irrelevant. For instance, they have increasingly transferred development and welfare responsibilities in urban areas to private non-state actors through Public-Private Partnerships (PPPs). New agencies created in the past decade to oversee development, infrastructure, and service delivery have included few, if any, elected officials, and none from local municipal bodies or urban poor communities. Staffed by top bureaucrats, corporate elites, and answerable only to state-level leaders, these agencies have encroached on the functions assigned to local municipal bodies and committees. Shifting political power away from these local urban bodies eliminates political competition at the local level, thus destroying in-centives for local leaders to mediate on behalf of the urban poor. As DeWit points out, the elitist NGOs tend to perform well at advocacy but fail in service provision, while long-term reciprocal patronage has been increasingly replaced by instrumental brokerage, the latter denoting commercialized and fragmentary transactions devoid of sustained and long-term reciprocity.37

A good example is the Jawaharlal Nehru National Urban Renewal Mission (JNNURM), an ambitious initiative of the central government envisaged to improve urban infrastructure and services targeted at the urban poor across India. The program is jointly funded with the central government contribut-ing 35% of the budget, the respective state governments contributing 15%, and the rest to be raised by the Urban Local Bodies (ULBs) or parastatal agencies.38 Evaluating the program’s success in 20 slums across Bangalore,

37. Joop DeWit, “Urban Poverty Alleviation in Bangalore: Institutional and Community-level Dilemmas,” Economic and Political Weekly 37:38 (September 21–27, 2002), pp. 3939.

38. Parastatal agencies are semi-government organizations owned or controlled wholly or partly by the government. Their governing boards are staffed by technocrats and corporate groups that are supposed to provide technical data, expertise, and support to elected representatives to en-able them to take suitable policy decisions. However, with several crucial planning and resource allocation activities assigned to such agencies, it is argued that such agencies have encroached on


a report argued that there had been deviations in implementing the Basic Services for Urban Poor (BSUP)39 as laid down by the central government in the JNNURM guidelines,40 with priority being given instead to Urban Infrastructure and Governance (UIG).41 A report by Daksh, an NGO, echoes this, finding that “[s]kewed funding allocations between BSUP and UIG con-tinues. In Bangalore, BSUP spending only accounted for 12%, as compared to 88% for UIG projects.”42 Most of the budgeting allocation and implementa-tion of such projects is carried out by specially created agencies dominated by the organizations representing the corporate lobby or the upper middle class.

Interviews with senior bureaucrats revealed this as well. “As far as educa-tion and other services are concerned,” noted an education official, “there is no effort to transfer any jurisdiction to the urban local bodies.”43 In a severe indictment of the state’s attitude towards partnerships with private and cor-porate actors, the bureaucrat stated, “There are many organizations such as ISKCON [International Society for Krishna Consciousness] and Azim Prem-ji Foundation currently involved in different aspects of education through PPPs. However, there is no clear policy or criteria in selecting them. These are political-level decisions. Inviting these NGOs and PPPs is a means to avoid transferring power to the people.”44

the decision-making powers of elected representatives and councils, thus creating a democratic ac-countability deficit.

39. BSUP involves improving living conditions in urban slums by improving the quality of housing, sanitation, water supply, and other civic amenities.

40. Special Correspondent, “Urban Poor Short-changed Says Bangalore JNNURM Study,” The Hindu, September 5, 2010.

41. UIG projects tend to be directed at upper middle class neighborhoods for things such as better parks, roads, street lighting, etc., thus diverting crucial resources away from urban poor neighbor-hoods lacking even basic facilities such as houses, faucets, and toilets.

42. Daksh, “People. Perceptions. Politics. Master Report on Review of Democracy and Per-formance of the Government of Karnataka,” December 2009, p. 22, <http://www.dakshindia.org/Dec2009/Daksh%202009%20Master%20Report%20Dec%2022%202009.pdf>, accessed March 23, 2011.

43. Interview with a senior bureaucrat in Karnataka Department of Education, Bangalore, August 7, 2009.

44. ISKCON is a religious institution that has become part of the government school mid-day meal program through a PPP. This decision has been at the center of a host of controversies. The Azim Premji Foundation is a non-profit organization involved in education, founded by Azim Premji, chairman of Wipro Company, a $5.7 billion-revenue IT services firm with a presence in over 50 countries. The Foundation has become deeply involved in Karnataka education, taking over many public schools to improve their operation, developing testing, and syllabus modules. These responsibilities have been taken away from designated governmental bodies, also removing public accountability in many ways.


The increasing centralization of planning and decision making by the state government, and the decline of the power and role of local political structures, not only causes serious inefficiencies in service provision for the poor but also removes the redress mechanisms that once existed to correct such imbalances. In the absence of genuine community-based organizations and amid the breakdown of patronage networks, the urban slums have no option but to turn to alternative welfare organizations that work to provide welfare for them. Sangh Parivar organizations have increasingly occupied precisely this urban poor space in Bangalore, one overlooked both by civil society and political parties. The RP’s tutoring centers are based directly in the slums and draw most volunteers and instructors from the local community. They immerse themselves in local social dynamics. They replace the old local patronage networks by becoming part of the community, recruiting workers and volunteers from within, and providing channels for participation and even political leadership, thus establishing themselves as credible community organizations in the slums.

This assessment was echoed in interviews with the two instructors from RP as well.45 Both viewed their positions as a long-term opportunity, in the absence of other channels of mobility and employment and amid the lack of linkages with patrons or brokers who might help them secure better positions. The tutoring center was the only source of employment they had, as well as the best means to move ahead in the future. One of the instructors said she had been promised a permanent teaching position either at the Parishat center or at one of the full-time formal schools it runs. Asked if there had been any local political resistance to the tutoring center, the other teacher mentioned the apathy of the neighborhood councilor, indicating how local channels have ceased to be responsive.

There is an interesting pattern to the concentration of RP tutoring centers. All of the 109 slums listed by the RP are in the southern part of Bangalore (Shankarapura, Banashankari, and Jayanagar constituencies). This is unsur-prising, considering that north and south Bangalore vary significantly in the nature of associational networks. Benjamin characterizes the northern zone as

largely municipalized and shaped by local demands. . . . [T]he wide spectrum of local society has empowered a local political process across party lines. Some local politicians have moved up the political ladder to help reinforce the claims

45. Interviews with two tutoring centers.


of these neighborhoods in the larger political system. . . . In direct contrast, a large part of south Bangalore has been formed via top-down processes of master planning, possible because of the relative disempowerment and political divisions between local groups.46

The poor have been edged out of planning decisions about welfare issues in this area of Bangalore. This has allowed the bureaucratic agencies to ignore the demands of the poor, facilitating the entry of the Sangh Parivar.

Chennai

In Chennai, the situation is the exact reverse. The Seva Bharati projects are failing because of low membership and low interest.47 Very few youths are willing to volunteer on a long-term basis or become dedicated cadres. I inter-viewed two instructors in the Chennai center, one male and one female, both of whom clearly saw this as a temporary position to earn some extra money.48 Both had plans to take up graduate study as soon as they finished college in order to get “real” jobs. I talked to a former RSS volunteer, also from the same neighborhood, who quit the organization a few years back along with several of his friends. He stated that the attrition in youth membership was because everyone knew that there were much better opportunities both for employment and for political mobility outside of the RSS, through linkages with the regional political parties.49

In the late 1990s, there was much talk of Hindu religious processions organized by the Hindu nationalist groups in urban slums, and attempts to mobilize lower-caste youth in the slums against the Muslim minorities.50 All my interviewees agreed that these have decreased drastically.

The only reason the Dalit [this term, meaning “oppressed,” refers to the erst-while “untouchable” Hindu castes] youth cooperated and enthusiastically participated in these programs was because they thought it would empower them and provide them better channels to negotiate with the state. When a

46. Benjamin, “Governance, Economic Settings, and Poverty in Bangalore,” p. 50.47. Interview with RSS official, Chennai, October 22, 2009.48. Interviews with the instructors, Chennai, October 23, 2009. 49. Interview with former RSS volunteer, Chennai, November 3, 2009.50. Christopher John Fuller, “The Vinayaka Chaturthi Festival and Hindutva in Tamil Nadu,”

Economic and Political Weekly 36:19 (May 12–18, 2001), pp. 1607–16; S. Anandhi, Contending Identi-ties: Dalits and Secular Politics in Madras Slums (New Delhi: Indian Social Institute, 1995).


riot occurred, only then did they realize that the mobilization was supposed to be against the Muslims and not for their welfare. They decided to break ties with the Hindu nationalist groups and go back to working closely with the Muslims. So ultimately, these groups weren’t able to stick around and continue their activities here because of rejection by the communities themselves.51

This not only indicates how local ties and political linkages are valued by the slum residents in Chennai but also how Hindu groups are perceived in terms of their motives for local engagement. The interviewee also emphasized that slum life in Chennai was extremely heterogeneous and secular, particu-larly in the type of associations that operate there. For instance, movie stars’ fan clubs are an important part of associational life in Chennai slums.52 They are indispensable both to neighborhood residents and party officials. They provide social services to local residents, mediate with local party officials on their behalf, and canvass for parties at election time while providing channels for political advancement for aspiring residents. The youths are mobilized through inclusive organizations, political parties, and trade unions. Nowhere is there an RSS monopoly, even though the group has organizations operat-ing in some of the slums. In a recent mapping of associational life in Chen-nai, Coelho and Venkat found a wide array of associations such as youth groups and Resident Welfare Associations (RWAs) operating in slums and low income neighborhoods. This differed starkly from Bangalore, which is dominated by upper middle class organizations:53

Many of them were at least two decades old. Along with Self Help Groups (SHGs) and local party wings, these associations addressed problems of roads, electricity, water, and drainage, but much more commonly issues of land and housing rights. These associations offer a landscape of collective action sharing many features of the civil society usually associated with middle class activism, but differing in the major respect of being more overtly and closely tied in with the sphere of party politics.54

51. Interview with Prof. S. Anandhi, Chennai, November 3, 2009. 52. Martyn Rogers, “Between Fantasy and Reality: Tamil Film Star Fan Club Networks and the

Political Economy of Film Fandom,” South Asia 32:1 (April 2009), pp. 63–85; Sara Dickey, “The Politics of Adulation: Cinema and the Production of Politicians in South India,” Journal of Asian Studies 52:2 (May 1993), pp. 340–72.

53. Karen Coelho and T. Venkat, “The Politics of Civil Society: Neighborhood Associationism in Chennai,” Economic and Political Weekly 44:26, 27 (June 2009), pp. 358–67.

54. Ibid., p. 362.


I argue that it is precisely these long-term reciprocal relationships that deliver services efficiently and block the entry of other organizations such as the Sangh Parivar.

These views were echoed by neighborhood parents, who stated that al-though they appreciated the free tutoring provided for their children by the Seva Bharati, they were not particularly dissatisfied with the public schools that their children were already attending. Quizzed about their strategy of approaching the government for services such as water, housing, or electricity, the neighborhood women in particular identified their local SHG as having close communication channels with the local councilor and the local party workers of the prominent regional parties.55 These were always their first choice if they wanted local issues addressed. The patronage machine is well-oiled, with both parties competing to provide selective incentives in return for votes.56 Local party representatives also closely monitor possible political competitors and their activities in slums and, if need be, police them. For instance, when a Seva Bharati official tried to expand his religious gatherings by making public speeches about Hindu unity, the local councilor sprang into action, warning him about disrupting the public order and asking him to limit his message to the tutoring center. This move was supported by the secular women’s SHG, which had close ties to the councilor.57

In general, successive Tamil Nadu governments have not been very sup-portive of PPPs with NGOs working in areas related to service delivery. This is strikingly different from the Karnataka government’s enthusiasm and

55. In Tamil Nadu, the Congress Party lost power to the Dravida Munnetra Kazhagam (Dravid-ian Progress Federation, DMK), a regional party, in the 1967 state legislative elections and has never been able to regain control of the government since then. The DMK controlled the government for a decade until a split in the party gave rise to the All India Anna Dravida Munnetra Kazhagam (All India Dravidian Progress Federation, AIADMK), led by M. G. Ramachandran (MGR), the Tamil film idol. AIADMK dominated state politics until MGR’s death in 1987 left the party in disarray. The DMK returned to power in 1989, but since then every election has seen an anti-incumbent result, and the DMK and AIADMK have alternated in power right up to the most recent state level elections held in May 2011.

56. Chennai visits and interviews conducted with various residents, October 23 and November 18, 2009, indicated that several of them had recently received cash transfers of Rs 2,000 (US$45) per family following the victory of the incumbent party in the general elections. Several had a color TV and gas stove delivered to their homes as promised by the party during election time. The rest were awaiting their turn. The system is quite meticulous, with the residents being informed well in advance about when the goods will be delivered so that they can be available to receive them. The women of the neighborhood, who predominantly work as housemaids, requested a day off from their employers in anticipation of the delivery.

57. Interview with the local councilor, Chennai, October 23, 2009.


official sanctioning of several PPPs.58 Thus, the RSS and its welfarist affiliates have not made much headway in Chennai because of the presence of strong entrenched networks tying urban slum communities to local political actors and supported by both regional parties in the face of political competition. These community-level networks ensure that the political channels remain responsive to the demands of the community, while also seeing that new entrants do not rock the boat. The space available for the Sangh Parivar to insert itself into local dynamics is thus reduced.

CONCLUSION

This article set out to explain why the Hindu nationalist movement’s pro-vision of welfare services has gained such great acceptance in many urban areas since the 1990s. I have explored why the period following economic liberalization provided an ideal setting for this initiative to prosper and why it has succeeded only in some cities. It is evident that the acute need for ser-vices and welfare provision among the urban poor following the economic reforms, as well as the changing labor market, enabled the Sangh Parivar’s welfare initiatives to gain a foothold among poor urban neighborhoods. The case studies of Chennai and Bangalore reveal important variations in the nature of associational life in these two places, particularly the way they are linked to the larger political system. The differential modes of operation of civic associations in the two cities explain the uneven spatial success of the Hindu welfarist project.

I have argued that informal community-based neighborhood associations (such as fan clubs, youth groups, resident welfare associations, and women’s SHGs), which exist and operate in poor urban neighborhoods, engender col-lective bargaining among the poor residents. Where these organizations are able to form linkages with political parties through slum leaders, councilors, or local political party workers (as they do in Chennai), they are able to trade their votes for better provision of goods and services. This clientelistic relationship not only provides much needed welfare services but also simulta-neously narrows the opportunity space available for the Hindu Right groups to gain a foothold in these places. This explains why the Hindu nationalist organizations tend to fail in Tamil Nadu as compared to Karnataka.

58. This point was emphasized in an interview with a senior NGO official working in the educa-tion sector, Chennai, October 27, 2009.


This article contributes to the literature critically analyzing concepts such as civil society and social capital. It illustrates the problematic nature of civil society, whereby extremist organizations can be legitimated and enabled through democratic means. Yet, on the other hand, this research demonstrates that we need to look within civil society to explain the varying influence and spread of sectarian organizations between different locales. The paper yields a counterintuitive finding pertaining to the literature on clientelism, which typically describes patronage networks as exploitive and detrimental to democracy. Under certain circumstances, however, patronage networks not only enhance representation and welfare provision but also deter sectarian organizations.

This article also uncovers interesting findings about how the urban poor engage with politics and how their choice of collective action can have im-portant implications for participation and representation in politics, and redistribution of welfare benefits. Poor and socioeconomically disadvantaged groups such as informal sector workers and urban slum dwellers cannot au-tomatically exercise influence over policy merely by becoming participants in civil society organizations. To understand the politics of representation in India, it is important to understand the socioeconomic and political condi-tions under which community-based organizations become effective. This analysis gives us a starting point to examine why essential services tend to be under-provided among marginalized sectors of the population, and what civil society needs to do to facilitate better governance. Thus, it illustrates the continuing relevance of patronage institutions and party politics in the developing world, including India.

The “Right” Kind of Welfare in South India's Urban Slums

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