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The production of community in Dharavi, Mumbai / 197

Plans, habitation and slumredevelopment: The production

of community in Dharavi, Mumbai

Roma Chatterji

This article describes the process by which governmental technologies such as mappingand enumeration constitute new types of community by looking at housing practices ina slum, Dharavi, in Mumbai. The article is divided into three sections. In the first sectionI present a review of the slum development policies, focusing specifically on the shiftingrelations between the government and the slum population. It is through this interfacethat the first attempts at forming collective identities take place in Dharavi. I discussthis in the second section, with special reference to a people�s organisation (PROUD)and its constitution of a public voice. The third section returns to the theme of govern-mental policy from the perspective of politics and I show the relation between differentkinds of community through which citizenship may be understood in the volatile aftermathof the riots in Dharavi in 1992�93.

In this article I look at �housing practices�, that is, practices associatedwith acquiring and sustaining rights to habitation in Dharavi, a Mumbaisettlement, with a view to exploring questions of agency and voice insituations of instability and civil violence. In his recent book, Formationsof the secular (2003), Talal Asad has complicated our understanding ofagency by relating it to forms of social classification and the conditions

Contributions to Indian sociology (n.s.) 39, 2 (2005)SAGE Publications New Delhi/Thousand Oaks/LondonDOI: 10.1177/006996670503900201

Roma Chatterji is at the Department of Sociology, Delhi School of Economics,University of Delhi, Delhi 110 007. Email: [email protected]

Acknowledgements: I am grateful to Veena Das and Deepak Mehta not only for theconversations that have led to the formulation of the ideas expressed here, but also forgoing through innumerable drafts of this article.

2016 at PENNSYLVANIA STATE UNIV on May 18,cis.sagepub.comDownloaded from

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198 / ROMA CHATTERJI

under which one succumbs to or overcomes them.1 I write against thebackdrop of the �riots� that took place in Mumbai in 1992�93 in theaftermath of the demolition of the Babri masjid. According to popularperception this event has brought about a fundamental change in thefabric of everyday life in Mumbai, polarising identities along sectarianlines and resulting in the increasing homogenisation of all spheres ofpublic life (Appadurai 2000; Hansen 2001). I hope to show that the slumdevelopment schemes involve alternative modes of classification thatprovide opportunities for agency which are not tied to the expression ofreligious identity.

My perspective is shaped by Foucault�s work on �governmentality�.Foucault shows that the articulation of power and knowledge in the prac-tices of governance leads to the development of the technologies of map-ping and enumeration by which the state makes society legible to itself.In the process, however, official practices also constitute new types ofsocial collectivities. Populations generated by these practices of enumer-ation often begin to see themselves as communities with a capability toresist the very technologies of power�knowledge that helped bring theminto existence. Foucault�s argument is posed in the context of the develop-ment of the liberal democratic state wherein issues such as welfare andthe rights of citizenship configure state�society relationships. Practicesof governance assume as a corollary citizens who are free and capable ofself-reflexivity. Citizenship is thus constituted in the very practicesof governance, as concrete rights and duties that involve both publicaction and the expression of a particular kind of subjectivity (see alsoProcacci 2001).

Is it possible to apply this argument to democracies like India, rivenas they are by divisions that severely test the notion of nation-state as apolitical community of consent? It is assumed that conditions of extremesocial inequality make the articulation of citizenship impossible in anymeaningful sense (Chatterjee 1999). Others, however, espouse a some-what different viewpoint by exploring the domains in which claims tocitizenship are expressed (Appadurai 2002; Gupta 1995). In this essay,I argue that slum housing is one such domain for, as Appadurai (2002)reminds us, housing is the single most critical site for articulating thepolitics of citizenship in Mumbai. Documented claims to housing suchas rent receipts, ration cards and electricity bills are crucial for securing

1 As Mauss (1972) showed, forms of classification that underpin social order often acquirethe force of nature.




rights that accrue from citizenship, such as access to municipal healthand educational facilities, subsidised food and so on. But over and abovethis, such documentary claims are also ways by which slum dwellers canmake themselves visible to the state. Thus, claims to citizenship involveparticular modes of bureaucratic inscription through which people claimrights to public presence. This has consequences for the way in whichstate�citizen relationships are articulated. Citizens cannot be thought ofas unitary and autonomous subjects. Rather, for slum dwellers, whoselives are lived on the margins of the state, claims to citizenship involvethe constitution of new types of collectivities and even the shared experi-ence of community. But before I discuss this in greater detail, a briefaccount of Dharavi and of the emergence of some attempts at collectiv-isation for the articulation of citizenship rights is in order. I do this bydiscussing the formation of a people�s organisation�The People�s Res-ponsible Organisation for a United Dharavi (PROUD).

IDharavi and the formation of PROUD

Labelled as the �largest slum in Asia�, Dharavi is spread over approximately550 acres of land. According to several estimates, the number of residentsranges between 700,000 and 1.2 million depending on how one draws itsboundaries.2 Built on reclaimed land, Dharavi�s boundaries and topographyare extremely difficult to map. Different parts of Dharavi have differenttemporal trajectories�they have literally come into existence at differentpoints in time so that what is known as �Dharavi� will vary depending onspecific domains of practice and discourse. It does not form a single ad-ministrative or electoral unit. A complete survey of Dharavi has neverbeen possible due to complexities of land ownership. For the purpose ofthis article I have chosen to focus on one area in Dharavi�a couple ofadjacent chawls in Mukund Nagar�where the official owner of the landon which the settlement has emerged is the Brihanmumbai MunicipalCorporation (BMC). Much of what I have to say concerning politicalcitizenship is grounded in this fact. Slum dwellers occupying privately-owned land or even land owned by the Central Government would havevery different experiences with governmentality.

2 According to Fuchs et al. (2002), a comprehensive survey of Dharavi does notexist. Different NGOs have conducted surveys, and this approximation has been derivedfrom discussions with their representatives.




Another feature crucial to the understanding of state�citizen relation-ship in the context of housing practices is the role of people�s organisationsthat are active in forging links of solidarity within Dharavi by turningcivic problems into social causes. PROUD3 has been active in this partof Dharavi since 1979. It has an office here and has helped to organiseand sustain the chawl committees. Supported by the Christian Institutefor the Study of Religion and Society (CISRS), PROUD has membersfrom twenty-three chawl committees from all the different segmentsof Dharavi. Its success in establishing itself is largely due to its abilityto take up common problems and turn them into social causes. PROUDdefines itself in terms of an �action-based approach�. Each of its pro-grammes, routed through a specific �issue-based� committee, is definedas an �action� and the successful implementation of its goals is called a�victory�. Committees are often formed as a direct response to particulargovernment directives. Thus in February 1980, when the BMC issued averbal notice to evict approximately 800 families from Dharavi, PROUDformed its Land and Housing Committee on the very day on which thisnotice was issued. The Committee was put in charge of organising theprotest against the eviction, in the form of protest marches, signaturecampaigns and delegations to meet the concerned authorities. Accordingto PROUD, the campaign was responsible for stopping evictions (PROUDReport 1989). Such action programmes serve not only immediate prag-matic interests but are also supposed to foster long-term goals such asdemocratic accountability and secularism. PROUD�s annual reports stressthe fact that it functions like �the parliamentary body of a democraticcountry�. It conducts regular elections, and the general body in its periodicmeetings approves all its policies and programmes before they are actuallyimplemented.

In a later section I will discuss how efforts both by PROUD and bygovernmental slum policy-makers to foreground �community problems�also constitute �the community� in particular ways. Communities thatare formed through an interface with governmental practice sometimestend to mimic the style of functioning and the rhetoric of the state. Thus,

3 Unlike the Society for the Protection of Area Resource Centres or SPARC, formedby social work professionals to deal with issues of urban poverty that Appadurai (2002)has written about, PROUD�s membership is restricted to residents of Dharavi itself,most of whom are self-employed or work in the unorganised sector. Members of PROUDmake a distinction between �people�s� organisations, which is how they characterisethemselves, and �non-governmental organisations� like SPARC.




in terms of self-identification, organisations such as PROUD think ofthemselves as communities that stand in opposition to the state, whilethe practices on the ground reveal a complex imbrication between them.

IISlum policy as a mirror of the government�s self-image

To understand the relationship between state and community, specificallythe process of community formation in Dharavi, I begin by examiningsome of the important policies and schemes for slum redevelopment inMumbai. Each of the three schemes that I discuss marks a significantmoment in the process by which the inhabitants of Dharavi are constitutedas a population, which is then transformed into a community attributedwith agentive capacity. The transformation of a population�a passive,enumerative object�into a public that can achieve agentive capacity byacquiring a voice is a fascinating subject to explore. While I cannot detailthe trajectory from one to the other in this article, one may note in passingthat this trajectory traverses the gap created by the concurrent and conflict-ing rules and policies that reflect the indeterminate nature of governmentalpractice and the fact the state uses indeterminacy as a strategic resourcefor control (Foucault 1991).

I begin this section with a review of a public housing policy documenttaken from the �Draft report of the Brihan Mumbai Regional DevelopmentAuthority (BMRDA), 1991�2011�. This review document is interestingprimarily because of the way in which the government is presented inthe discussion of each policy�acknowledging major shifts in its self-presentation while trying to rationalise these shifts within a single frameof reference. The report categorises slum legislation into three types,which are supposed to reflect the three successive types of roles that thegovernment has taken vis-à-vis the slum population of Mumbai. The rolesare as follows: controller, provider and facilitator. This formulation isinteresting because it recognises both that government legislation is con-stituted from a specific point of view, and that this can change over time.It seeks to rationalise this by articulating the three roles within an evolu-tionary perspective.

Despite claims of chronological development, however, all three typesof legislation co-exist in Mumbai, making a rigid chronology problematic.To take just one example, the controller phase of the government is usedto describe the various health and safety measures that date back to the




British period; the rent control legislation of 1948; the municipal regu-lations stipulating use-zones, tenement densities, floor space indices (seefootnote 10 below) and so on, that date back to the 1960s; the UrbanLand Ceiling Act of 1976; and the Coastal Regulations Act of 1991.

The Slum Act and the Slum Census

According to the BMRDA Report, the Maharashtra Slum Areas Im-provement, Clearance and Redevelopment Act of 1971 marks a radicalchange in the government�s attitude to its slum population. With this Actwe see the government recognising for the first time that slums could bean answer to Mumbai�s chronic housing shortage, rather than being aproblem that had to be resolved. Thus, the government moves from therole of controller to that of facilitator, providing facilities to slum co-lonies. It is claimed that this change of role is not only accompanied bya radical change in viewpoint, but also makes legitimate what was pre-viously thought to be illegitimate.

Gautam Chatterji, Chief Executive Officer, Slum Rehabilitation,Maharashtra Housing and Area Development Authority (MHADA), spoketo me of the �unintended consequences� (to use his own words) of urbanland ceiling and rent control laws. He explained that the official restrictionson legitimate land use by private owners helped to create an illegalnexus between landowners and slum lords, so that rental housing cameto be taken over by the �informal sector�. Similarly the Slum ClearanceAct of the 1960s reinforced the power of slum lords by creating an un-official nexus between them and government officials doing the clearing.The latter Act, as Chatterji said, did not specify that the rubble producedwhen illegal structures were demolished had to be cleared, with the resultthat the rubble could be used to reconstruct houses on the same location;government agents sometimes demolished the same structure over andover again, reporting each instance as a new demolition.

It would be obvious that the articulation of new domains of legitimacyis accompanied by procedures that must make them legible. Cultures ofbureaucracy often use procedures of enumeration to accomplish this (Blau1963). The Slum Improvement Programme (SIP) of 1972 that followedthe Maharashtra Slum Areas Improvement, Clearance and Redevelop-ment Act of 1971 was supposed to provide basic civic amenities like water,electricity, latrines and sewage disposal to slum areas, but it could not beproperly implemented since no comprehensive census of the slum areas




of Mumbai existed. Such a census was carried out in 1976, but since itwas restricted to slums on state government land it was thought to beincomplete.4 The SIP is still being implemented in Dharavi, on land thatis owned by the municipal corporation. But it has not been very successfulbecause no provisions were made for the day-to-day maintenance of theamenities that were provided under it. Also, as will be seen, the lack of acomprehensive and centralised plan for the whole of Dharavi, indeedfor the total slum population of Mumbai, means that all slum developmentschemes are implemented in a piecemeal fashion. The inability of anystate government to formulate such a plan is thought to be a consequenceof the segmented nature of land-ownership in Mumbai (see footnote 4).However, the SIP was an important step for the reason that it recognised,for the first time, that the slum dweller had a legitimate status and, asChatterji put it, a right to acquire land in slum areas.

There is some ambivalence around the term �legitimate status�, however.After 1976 residents of the surveyed slums were issued photo identitypasses and were required to pay a licence fee of twenty rupees, of whichone rupee was taken as �land rent�. For most residents of Dharavi, how-ever, it is not clear whether this amount of one rupee is a fine for occupyinggovernment land �illegally�, or a kind of �ground tax� (bhumi tax). Theterm �rent� circumvents the question of legal status articulated in termsof ownership. Instead, acquisition is thought to refer to right of use, andto the state government�s responsibility in providing alternate residenceif it has to displace the population residing on its land.

This ambivalence is built into the Slum Act itself, which empowersthe government to declare particular slum colonies as unfit for humanhabitation while simultaneously affirming its objective of slum redevelop-ment for those colonies that are declared safe. Here we see both roles ofthe government co-existing simultaneously�its role as controller, hiddenbehind the fiction of facilitator (Desai 1995).

4 The land on which slums have come up can be classified into three types dependingon whether it belongs to the state government, central government or a private owner.Slum colonies on state government land are called �surveyed slums� as opposed to �notifiedslums� on private land. There is virtually no official data on the status of populations thatcomprise the slum colonies on central government land as they have never been officiallysurveyed. (Source: Gautam Chatterji, private conversation [12 March 2001]; IndianExpress, Mumbai, 11 May 1996.) The land on which Dharavi is situated is partly ownedby the municipal corporation, partly privately owned, and partly �collector� (centralgovernment) land.




IIIThe SUP and the formation of housing cooperatives

In this section I discuss the Slum Upgradation Programme (SUP) of 1980,along with the SIP and the 1976 Slum Survey, to demonstrate how sitesof legitimacy are constantly shifting as each new governmental actionseeks to redress the unintended consequences of previous schemes, re-vealed only in the stage of implementation.

The SIP was instituted as part of the government�s new initiative asfacilitator after the Slum Act passed in 1971. However, it became effectiveonly after the registration of slum pockets with the 1976 census. The se-curity of land tenure given to slum dwellers with registration enabledthe implementation of concrete developmental schemes that require stablepopulations if they are to be effective. With the World Bank�aided SUP,we find that the focus of government intervention shifts from the categoryof population to that of community. The SUP required that slum dwellersorganise themselves into housing cooperatives which could then be givensecure tenural rights in land at the rate of one rupee a month.

For the purpose of this essay, the importance of the SUP is that tenureis given to a cooperative formed by a group of contiguous huts, ratherthan to individuals, in order to enable the housing societies to undertake�upgradation� work in their respective colonies. This proposal, it wasfelt, would take care of the problems of maintenance of amenities thathad not been catered for in the SIP of 1972. The SUP makes a distinctionbetween �upgradation� and �rebuilding�. Houses could not be rebuilt asregular apartments or as reinforced concrete (RCC) structures, but couldinstead be reconstructed with materials such as plaster and brick insteadof tin, mat and plastic sheeting. Also, provision was made to extend thehabitable area of these residential units to allow for the construction oflofts by raising the permissible height of the roofs. Water and electricitywere also provided. However, this scheme was wound up in 1991 on thegrounds that it was underutilised.5 The poor response to the scheme onthe part of slum dwellers was attributed to administrative difficulties�especially the complex procedures involved in forming and registeringhousing societies�and also to the fragmented nature of land-ownership.

5 According to a Times of India (Bombay) report of 19 May 1996, only 200 housingsocieties came forward, while World Bank expectations were that at least 1,000 housingsocieties would participate in the programme.




It was thought that developmental activity could not be undertaken onprivate land under the de facto control of slum lords, who would interpretthis as an encroachment of their power base, and that it was easier to im-plement this programme on state government land that came under thedirect control of the municipal corporation.

IVFrom periphery to centre: The Prime Minister�s

grant project

The next landmark as far as Dharavi is concerned was the Prime Minister�sGrant Project (PMGP), started in 1985 with a grant-in-aid of Rs. 1 billionsanctioned by the then Prime Minister, Rajiv Gandhi, of which Rs. 300million was reserved for Dharavi alone. The PMGP, like the slum projectsthat came before it, tried to address the perceived lacunae in the way thatslums had been conceptualised. All projects that have become effectiveafter the 1976 Slum Census conceded that security of tenure for slumdwellers is an essential prerequisite for the amelioration of their livingconditions, but their concrete proposals belie this. According to KalpanaSharma (2000), slum development is conceptualised in a piecemeal fash-ion not merely because of inadequate information regarding slum popu-lations, noted above, but because slums are thought to be inherently unstabledwelling sites. Recollect, for example, the SUP of 1980 that permittedimproved material for the construction of dwellings but insisted on theirimpermanent status. The PMGP was the first scheme that actually con-sidered slum redevelopment in a systematic fashion and planned for theconstruction of new residential structures for slum dwellers on the samesite where they had squatted.

It was also acknowledged in this scheme that slum communities werecapable of taking initiative when it concerned issues such as housing.This scheme allowed housing societies in Dharavi to appoint their ownarchitects who would be accountable to them, with the proviso that thegovernment would appoint the building contractors even though theywould be working under the supervision of the architects. It was alsorecognised, for the first time, that slums in Mumbai were often centresof commercial activity and slum dwellers needed to live near their placesof work. Huts were not just dwellings but also commercial resources�places from which people could generate income. Dharavi was no longerconsidered to be peripheral to Mumbai. Its location near a new business




district�the Bandra�Kurla complex�gave it a new significance. Thus,there were attempts to broaden roads within Dharavi, to make it moreaccessible for vehicular traffic and so on.

However, the PMGP, like all the schemes that preceded it, was not ableto implement its plans in the way they had been conceived. The reasonwas simple�it had failed to consider the fact of spatial density and thedevelopment work that it was able to undertake was largely confined tothe area along the two main roads that skirt Dharavi.

In 1986, the state government commissioned the architect CharlesCorrea to head a committee to prepare a proposal for Dharavi�s redevelop-ment. Since there was no comprehensive survey of structures and settle-ment patterns in Dharavi, the Correa Committee ordered an aerial surveyof the area. Given the layout of Dharavi and the fact that boundaries be-tween settlements and sometimes even between tenements are blurred,it is not surprising that the survey came up with a population estimatethat was far less than that provided by later and more detailed surveys.On the basis of this estimate, the Correa report proposed that 43,000households be accommodated in Dharavi, while the rest out of an esti-mated total of 55,000 households be moved to sites nearby so as to providefor open spaces for parks, civic amenities and other recreational facilities(Sharma 2000). Even though this recommendation was never imple-mented, it is important to the extent that it was one of the more significantgovernmental actions around which a public voice was constituted.PROUD claims that its initiative in organising a public protest led to thewithdrawal of the proposal made by the Correa Committee. Community-based organisations like PROUD became important players in the fieldof housing in slums like Dharavi in the early 1980s especially after theimplementation of the SUP and the PMGP schemes that required slumdwellers to organise themselves into cooperative housing societies.

I do not mean to imply that the development of organisations such asPROUD follows a blueprint already drawn up in governmental policy-making. As noted, government rules and development plans and policiesare open-ended. They do not form a seamless whole but are interwovenloosely, with gaps that allow for new connections and relationships.Organisations like PROUD emerge in these gaps and, in turn, becomepart of the process by which new rules and policies are generated.

In this section I have tried to map the process by which slum dwellersare constituted as a specific population, which is then transformed into acommunity through strategic governmental practices. However, there isa vast gap between the exercise of mapping a population and the formation




of concrete neighbourhood communities to negotiate for housing rights.We need a mediating term to help us understand the sudden emergenceof community in Dharavi. I suggest that the term �public��its diffusionwithin the political discourse and its adoption as a term for collectiveself-reference serves as such a mediating device. For the people of Dharavi,the voice that speaks for the abstract �public� articulates generalised socialinterest. Anchored in a public space, the public voice is constituted bycontractual relations freely entered into by persons who form associationsbased on common interest, mediating between the idea of communityand that of government.6

VVoice and the constitution of place

To understand how the public voice is constituted we must now turn topopular memory, to narratives about the first attempts at association.The tradition of forming neighbourhood committees to tackle socialproblems goes back to the early 1970s, when Dharavi still had a reputationfor being a centre of criminal activity. Neighbours organised themselvesinto chawl committees7 and worked with the police to close down illicitdistilleries and liquor dens. (Though popular memory tends to create amyth around Dharavi�s �pacification�, what appears as a spontaneousemergence of neighbourhood communities was in fact facilitated by thereorientation of government slum policy, as noted in the previous section.)However, �issue-based� committees that could negotiate with governmentdepartments emerged only in the 1980s mediated by organisations suchas PROUD. A perusal of PROUD�s first report, published on its tenth

6 I counterpose �private voice� to �public voice�. The former refers to the expressionof individual self-interest and has the connotation of corruption in that it seeks to bypassthe collective. In our joint work on violence, Deepak Mehta and I have used the conceptof �voice� in several different, though related, contexts. Thus we speak of rumours as thevoice of violence (Mehta and Chatterji 2001). We use �voice� to problematise the relation-ship between subjects and community as well as to critique the taken-for-granted qualitythat the notion of shared community often has in anthropological literature (Raheja andGold 1996). By juxtaposing �voice� with �community�, we hope to foreground the fragilityof the �consent� on which the notion of �community� is based.

7 A chawl is like a neighbourhood�a segment of a larger residential area. Thus SanjayChawl is part of Mukund Nagar. Many chawls have organised themselves into housingcooperatives. See Section I.




anniversary (PROUD 1989), shows how it was able to transform paperentitlements into oppositional spaces for the articulation of a collectivevoice. I quote from the section on the land and housing committee:

At the beginning PROUD was concerned about issues like water, drain-age, garbage, pollution, etc. but in the first week of February 1980,when the Municipal Authorities served a verbal notice to some eightyfamilies that their houses would be demolished within a week, on thesame night �Temporary Planning Committee Members� of PROUDmet together and formed the PROUD Land & Housing Committee.This was the starting point of PROUD�s Land & Housing Committee.On 7 February 1980, along with 35 members they went to the localMunicipal office and submitted a Memorandum starting with theslogan DESH HAMARA, DHARTI HAMARI, DHARAVI HAMARIHAI8 and demanded:

i) No demolition of any hut/house in Dharavi

a. Land & Housing Committee will not accept the validity ofphoto pass if not issued as per State of Maharashtra Govt. Actissued in February 1980.

b. PROUD will not allow any outsiders for any kind of Reliefand Development Programme without prior negotiation withPROUD.

That was the first confrontation with the Govt. officials on land issue.PROUD was able to stop demolitions, and since then there is no demoli-tion in Dharavi. Earlier the BMC authorities were providing [a] fewbasic amenities only [to] those [covered] under the 1976 census, butPROUD demanded to provide the basic amenities toward all slumdwellers.

On 20 April 1980, in their meeting the Land and Housing committeedecided to make a survey of open spaces in Dharavi and make use ofthem according to the people�s own choice. Particularly in MukundNagar in front of Subhas Chandra Bose chawl which was reserved bythe BMC for a fire station, but the surrounding people wanted to usethe place for a public latrine. When the people asked the Ward Officer

8 �This country is ours. This land is ours. Dharavi is ours.�




and Executive Engineer, they got a negative reply, due to the BMC�splan for a fire station. (The people were mobilised a number of timeson the same issue including blocking the traffic on 11 August 1980.)For 1,000 families there was no latrine, and thus men, women andchildren were forced to use vacant land across the main road. But stillthe issue continued until people threatened the Municipal Commis-sioner, Traffic Manager and Government authorities to block the roadin a regular basis between 7 and 9 in the morning and evening. Finallythe Municipal Commissioner arranged a joint meeting with PROUDleaders and Municipal officers and the Fire Brigade on 10 December1981, at his chamber. Lastly they were forced to change their plansfor Fire station and they released the land for the construction of latrines(PROUD 1989: 12).

As noted, the 1976 census marks a watershed in the history of slumredevelopment as for the first time slums were officially recognised asviable social entities. For the slum dweller this implied that s/he wasacknowledged as a social being with an official identity as a �resident� ofa �notified slum�. However, as with other processes that have to do withconstituting social identity, the census or survey is part of ongoingactivity. As the excerpt from the PROUD report shows, the survey is amode of intervention whereby public statistics both describe and help todefine social reality (cf. Porter 1995). In this case, too, �survey karna�(lit. to do a survey) becomes a mode of self-reproduction for people inDharavi, creating an identity that transcends the existing divisions ofreligion and caste, even if only for a limited purpose (cf. Herzfeld 1992).The conducting of a survey to create an administrative category such asa �notified slum�, or the use of the ration card to give a person a legal statusas a slum dweller, carries the trace of bureaucratic intentionality, for thecollection of information is tied to concrete government schemes forslum development, mapping residents into categorical and quantifiablepopulations based on certain criteria like �occupation�, �size of pitch onwhich hut is built�, ration card number and so on.

This is clearly understood by residents of slums such as Dharavi, whouse the survey in much the same way as the government does�to trans-form themselves into a quantifiable population. However, the intentionbehind their endeavour is somewhat different, to the extent that the popu-lation produced by means of the survey becomes the documentary proofof the existence of a collective that can speak back to the bureaucracy in




its own language. Thus, organisations like PROUD think of the surveyas an ongoing activity. As one of their �community organisers� put it:

We have to know our public, it is changing all the time. But also wehave to keep reminding people that they are the public that we areworking for. By conducting surveys from time to time we remindpeople that they must stand with us and we must work together tofight for our rights.9

Numbers also become strategic resources in the production of newpublics, sometimes by questionable means. Thus I was told by a �socialworker� in Dharavi that a politician/slum lord in Rajiv Gandhi Nagar, arelatively new slum that has come up near Dharavi, had registered thenames of migrant labourers who were working on the main Dharaviroad on the voters� list at the time of the assembly elections. He thenclaimed that the land was inhabited, and encouraged people to settlethere. He has formed a housing society, which his rivals claim has nolegal status because it is not officially registered, and is negotiating withvarious government bodies to have this land declared an official slumcolony. Members of a rival housing society in Rajiv Gandhi Nagar toldme that he had been issuing �fake� membership cards to the members ofhis society after conducting a survey of the area. The status of the cardswas said to be dubious, because the names of some members and theirnumbers on the voters� list did not tally with the copy of the voters� listthat he had in his possession. The social worker had a collection of photo-copies of cards that he claimed to be false. However, as one of the mem-bers of PROUD told me, his claims could not be taken at face value becausehe, too, was trying to establish his credibility with his own public by dis-crediting his rival.

In a recent article on an activist movement involving housing issuesin Mumbai, Appadurai remarks that �self surveys are a powerful tool forthe practice of democracy internally�, a kind of �counter-governmentality,animated by social relations of shared poverty� (2002: 36). What Appaduraiignores, however, is that such forms of counter-governmentality are(as my example from Rajiv Gandhi Nagar shows) embroiled in the localpolitics of inclusion and exclusion and sometimes come to be tainted,

9 Interview (6 March 2001) with one of the founding members of PROUD andresidents of Sanjay Chawl.




like other governmental practices. I was repeatedly told that surveys arealways directed by specific political interests and hence are not neutralinstruments. That is, surveys also help to inflect social relations in theprocess of describing them. They are part of the process by which theline between legality and illegality is continually renegotiated, both atthe level of government and at the level of communities such as those ofDharavi. However, given the fact that slum dwellers mostly live underconditions of extreme uncertainty, the use of such technologies to createnew publics and new forms of agency that can articulate their own inter-ests and represent them to governmental bureaucracies should not beunderestimated.

VIPolitical utterances and governmental function:

The �Free Scheme�

In the narrative of Mumbai�s slum development, the motif of plan failurepunctuates the discussion of each redevelopment scheme. It also providesthe connecting thread between the different episodes in the story�thefailure of one scheme leading to the emergence of the next. The causesfor failure are the same each time: spatial density and inadequate mapping.It is assumed that inadequate surveying is a result of the government�sfailure to rationalise its practices and to exercise a more centralised con-trol. Newspaper reports, as well as more scholarly accounts of slum re-development policies, often attribute this to a lack of political will (seeVerma 2002). However, an analysis of the role of the political processitself in the formulation of housing policy is rarely undertaken. This issurprising because slum housing is probably one of the most emotivepolitical issues in Mumbai. In this section I will discuss this with refer-ence to the �Free Scheme�, a new housing scheme that became an electionissue in 1995.

Each successive government in Maharashtra has drawn up its own plansfor slum redevelopment and low-cost housing. The Shiv Sena came topower in 1995 on the promise of a �people�s government�. Symbolic ges-tures like performing the oath-taking ceremony in Shivaji Park, the �heart-land� of Shiv Sena support, instead of in the Raj Bhavan, were supposedto reinforce this (see Purandare 1999). The declaration of the free housingscheme by Balasaheb Thackeray also seems to partake of this symbolism.Thackeray, the Shiv Sena supremo, made an election promise to house




4 million slum dwellers at the government�s expense. However, within ayear of forming the government, the Shiv Sena�BJP government had toclimb down and modify that number to 50,000. Let me elaborate.

In 1995, soon after it had come to power, the Shiv Sena�BJP govern-ment proposed a new slum rehabilitation scheme to implement its electionpromise. It proposed that the cost of building these free tenements shouldbe met by private builders, who would be compensated with extra FSIand TDR.10 However, due to the sudden collapse of the real estate market,very few private builders took up this offer. The government then decidedto float its own company�Shivshahi Punarvasan Prakalp Limited(SPPL)�through which the Free Scheme was to be implemented. TheMaharashtra Housing and Area Development Authority (MHADA) andthe Mumbai Metropolitan Regional Development Authority (MMRDA)were each asked to transfer Rs. 3 billion to SPPL as seed money. In Janu-ary 1999, SPPL finalised a plan to construct 10,550 houses in seven dif-ferent locations in the city. However, by the time of the next elections,which were held at the end of 1999, only 78 apartment blocks had beencompleted, one of which was the Milind Nagar Cooperative HousingSociety in Dharavi (Indian Express, Mumbai, 25 August 1999). The nextgovernment, formed by the Nationalist Congress Party, decided that theFree Scheme was not viable and that no further housing projects wouldbe initiated under this scheme.

Newspaper accounts of this period give dramatic reports of ministerialsquabbles and bureaucratic wrangling. Ministers blamed bureaucrats,the law courts and each other in public, via the print media, for the failureof the Free Scheme. The newspapers also describe the almost desperatesearch for land that could be used for the Free Scheme. To give a fewexamples, Suresh Jain, the housing minister, accused Narayan Rane, therevenue minister, of deliberately delaying the signing of documents per-taining to the scheme, and the administration of creating �unnecessary�

10 The Floor Space Index or FSI refers to the ratio of the total permissible built-uparea to the total available land area on a particular plot of land. There was a tentativeproposal that private builders would be offered an increased FSI as incentive to participatein the �Free Scheme�. They would be permitted to construct apartments for sale on landthat was left over after they had constructed the required number of apartments for theslum dwellers (cf. Indian Express, Mumbai, 13 September 1998). Transferred DevelopmentRights or TDR are used in cases in which the FSI is transferable. Government land inpremium locations can be given to builders as cross-subsidies for their participation in thevarious slum development schemes, specifically for the building of houses for slum dwellers.




complications in its implementation (Indian Express, Mumbai, 20 Decem-ber 1998). At a public meeting, Balasaheb Thackeray accused the courtsof holding up his �dream project�.11

What I find most interesting about the Free Scheme is the gap betweenpolitical compulsion and the pragmatics of governance, and that thesecontradictions are articulated publicly in newspapers on a day-to-daybasis. Thus, the minister of housing accused the bureaucrats who workedunder him of insubordination and of �adopting an approach against thedemocratic system of government� (Indian Express, Mumbai, 20 February1999). Officials in the bureaucracy in turn accused the ministers of popu-lism, saying that the Free Scheme was not economically viable. Housingactivists, who were also interlocutors in this debate, accused the stateof having a hidden agenda. According to activists like Stephen Rego(Humanscape, Mumbai, September 1995), slum colonies like Dharavican become valuable properties once they are developed, leading to housespassing from slum dwellers to middle-class people. With an enhancedtransferable FSI, a large proportion of the built-up slum area will rise invalue, and slum dwellers will be unable to afford the maintenance costsof apartment buildings. Thus, the hidden agenda, Rego and other activistssuspect, is to clear the area of slum dwellings, thereby accomplishingwhat government-organised demolitions could not.

In contrast to the representation of the state as a homogeneous andsingular entity in the discourse of activists, newspaper reports presenta far more fragmented picture in which political intentionality is articu-lated in a variety of discrete spheres, such as parliamentary elections,public administration and the media. Thus the Free Scheme is renderedin terms of a juxtaposition of these different spheres, each with its ownlogic and temporality. If one views the Free Scheme from the perspective

11 He was referring to the Mumbai High Court�s ruling, in January 1996, restrainingthe state government from building on land that fell under the Coastal Regulation Zone.Since much of the marshy land that falls under this zone has already been subject to illegalfilling and construction activity because of lack of supervision by the government�s en-vironment department, those in charge of implementing the �Free Scheme� were probablyunaware that the MHADA and MMRDA plots that had been earmarked for slum housingcould not be used for this purpose. Newspapers also reported proposals made by the urbandevelopment department to redraw the boundaries of central government plots alreadyencroached upon by slum dwellers so that land could be made free for slum development.There are also accounts of work started by SPPL that could not be completed because ofthe lack of approach roads, especially if this required building the roads on centralgovernment land. The juxtaposition of state government�owned land and central govern-ment land makes large-scale building extremely difficult.




of electoral politics, its purpose is to gain short-term advantage; thus, itoperates in a time frame much shorter than that required for the imple-mentation of the scheme.

The juxtaposition of different time-scales reveals its effects on Dharavi�slandscape. Unfinished housing projects, high-rise buildings and huts withplastered brick walls and asbestos roofs co-exist side by side. Residentsare able to specify the particular conditions under which each buildingproject comes to be implemented. Buildings are constantly being renewedas public space is continuously re-ordered. In spite of this, one mustremember that no governmental slum housing scheme has ever officiallyended. This is the reason why scholars like Gita Dewan Verma have saidthat all such practices are in bad faith (2002). Verma states that housingactivists, non-governmental organisations, international funding agenciesand well-intentioned but deluded social scientists are all in collusionwith the government to keep a large section of the population in a stateof permanent uncertainty. In Verma�s opinion, it is the lack of politicalwill and public accountability that prevents the government from resolv-ing India�s housing problem. If the master plans that lay out patterns ofland use were followed systematically and land that was demarcated forlow-cost housing was used for its stated purpose, slums of the presentscale and magnitude would not exist.

Undoubtedly, Verma has a point, but she may have underestimated thecomplexity of the issue. Maps, however comprehensive they may be,are forms of closure (Harvey 2000). I wonder to what extent town plannerscan account for the combination of factors like land scarcity, urban in-equality, population flow and speculation that characterise the housingsituation in Mumbai.12 However, Verma�s work forces us to pose an im-portant question. Without a notion of public accountability, is it possibleto say anything about state�citizen relationships? I offer below sometentative suggestions about where one might see the articulation of suchaccountability.

VIIBy way of conclusion

In a recent paper, Partha Chatterjee (2002) divides India�s people intotwo categories�those to whom the state relates as citizens, and those

12 Appadurai (2000) has coined the term �spectral housing� to describe the process ofuncertainty and risk associated with habitation in cities like Mumbai.




who are thought of merely as a population to be constituted as an objectof knowledge and bureaucratic intervention. Community, in this viewof state�society relations, becomes an oppositional category, defined interms of its resistance to the state.

I have taken a different position in this essay. Bureaucratic interventionby the state and new forms of generating knowledge not only carve outpopulations but also provide new ways by which communities becomeembedded in the state. Thus, while I agree with Chatterjee that there hasbeen an intensification of governmental intervention in everyday life inrecent years, this does not always take the form of a one-to-one relation-ship between the state and the individual citizen. By organising potentialcitizens into abstract categories, it also creates the conditions in whichnew kinds of communities can emerge. Such communities sometimescome to think of themselves as singular and substantive entities (Chatterjee1999), and the effects of such singularities in the context of communalviolence have, no doubt, been lethal. Thus, Deshpande (2000) and Hansen(2001) argue that, during riots, it is precisely the neighbourhood thatbecomes the space for the enactment of violence. Indeed, discussions ofthe Free Scheme and building activity after the 1992�93 riots do voiceanxiety about possible polarisation of localities along sectarian lines(see also Appadurai 2000; Mehta and Chatterji 2001). One of my ownrespondents Ayeshabi, who is a member of a chawl committee that hasdecided to construct high-rise apartments under the Free Scheme in theirlocality, expressed her reservations about living arrangements after thebuilding was complete.

Our chawl does not have enough space for a high rise building. So wehave had to make an agreement with our neighbouring chawl inMangwara and have decided to build one apartment block together.But we know what the Mangwara boys did during the danga (theriots of 1992�93). They have always been goondas. Even before thedanga they used to stand outside the Khamba Devi temple and snatchat the chains around the necks of our girls when they were passing by.We have told the builder that we [the residents of our chawl] willeither shift together or not at all and that we must all have flats on thesame side of the building. People from their chawl can live on theother side.13

13 Interview held on 23 April 2002 in Dharavi.




When I met Ayeshabi one year later she told me that the allocation ofapartments was being done by lottery and some people from her chawlhad already shifted to the new building. When I asked her if they weresafe living among the goondas from Mangwara, she said that the newform of interaction, around building committees and so on, had forcedthem to come together in a different way�as strangers with a commonconcern. For the present, at least they could think of themselves as mem-bers of a common public.

Ayeshabi�s narrative does not conform to the general pattern of post-riot narratives in Mumbai. It does not refer to communal polarisation,nor to restoration and healing (Appadurai 2000; Hansen 2001). Rather itpoints to a gap between communal polarisation of communities and theircoming together for some purposes. Restoration becomes a kind of nego-tiation around commonly perceived needs. In her new narrative there isan aporia about the experiences during the riots, for Ayeshabi had beeninvolved in the rehabilitation process after the 1992�93 riots in Dharaviand thus knew the extent of the violence. She was one of the few personsin Dharavi who patrolled the neighbourhood at the time of the violenceand organised convoys to take the dead and the injured to the hospitalnearby. Interestingly, some of the people who helped her were fromMangwara. They were leaders of local gangs of chain-snatchers and pick-pockets, who were also suspected of being participants in the violencein other localities (cf. Mehta and Chatterji 2001). Indeed, it is not surpris-ing to find that the same persons who were the goondas in one contextbecame the helpers in another.

Ayeshabi�s narrative reminds us that even spectacular violence is notcompletely independent of the processes of everyday life. While the vio-lence embodied in face-to-face relationships within local communitieslike the neighbourhood may be pervasive, it also partakes of the hetero-geneity that characterises everyday life itself. However, collective vio-lence such as was witnessed in the riots has the potential of defacingfamiliar forms of heterogeneity that are present in everyday life. In Dharavi,for instance, the sense of neighbourliness helped in deflecting the violencein some localities, but one also witnessed the emergence of new categoriesbased on religion alone (Mehta and Chatterji 2001). There is a growingfear among residents that, in future, religion will shape day-to-dayinteractions between people (Mehta 2002). However, Dharavi, unlikesome of the other slums in Mumbai, has always been considered to be amelting-pot, with communities from all over India living in close proxim-ity. Many of the old residents still cherish this image of Dharavi and




think of slum development as one of the spheres through which they canarticulate a sense of shared future, however precarious it might seemafter the onslaught against Muslim minorities in the riots in Mumbai andsubsequently in Gujarat. It is in these hopes that one traces the vitality ofDharavi.

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