1 Chapter 2. Citizen Power Or State Weakness? the Enduring History of Collective

Chapter 2. Citizen Power or State Weakness? The Enduring History of Collective Action in a Hyderabadi Bazaar Shylashri Shankar Introduction As I was leaving the town planner’s office in Hyderabad, a uniformed guard at the main door held out his palm and smiled. ‘Baksheesh’, he said. ‘For what?’ I asked. ‘Madam, you met the town planner,’ he responded. I still did not understand why he was demanding money since he had little to do with the appointment. A few days later, I read the autobiography of a courtier who was the sixth Nizam’s [the ruler] tutor and later his advisor in late 19th century Hyderabad, which was the capital of the princely state of the Deccan. The behaviour of the guard in the town planner’s office was similar to that of a Chobdar (doorman) and of a Vaghera (headman) of the previous century. When Sarwar Jang first arrived in the city with a letter of introduction, he found it almost impossible to get an appointment with the Premier Minister of the Deccan. Every morning, he would come to the premier minister’s residence and wait. But each day, he returned home disappointed. He writes in his memoirs: My friend the Cavalryman approached me, and said in a friendly manner that I had better retire, or the ‘Chobdars’ [doormen] would turn me out by ‘force’ or he added, promise them some Bakshish [a tip] to allow you to remain…For an interview, he added, the strongest possible influence [wielded by a Headman] was required. I met this man [the Headman] and showed him the letter, but he replied in a harsh tone, ‘You have lost your senses. We are not the post office to carry letters. You had better find one of the durbaries for this purpose.’ I replied that if he took my letter, I would serve him gladly i.e. I would remunerate him for his trouble and on hearing this, he became somewhat reasonable, and enquired what I would give him. I mentioned the figure Rs. 50; and then taking the letter and rising, he said, ‘Remain sitting I will soon return.’ He disappeared upstairs, and I remained expectant till about nine or ten o'clock. At last I enquired of the same Chobdar, as to where his Vagera (headman) had gone, and requesting him to get me some information, promised him ten rupees for his trouble. Having heard this he followed the Vagera upstairs, and brought him back, and the latter said, ‘The Nawab Sahib read your letter, and has ordered your presence at one o'clock.’ He then asked me for his remuneration. A second vignette demonstrates another trait that locals continue to exhibit in their interaction with the state. During one of my visits in July 2012, there was a lot of excitement among the municipality officials, heritage conservationists, political party leaders, and town planner about the possibility of the city becoming a member of UNESCO’s world heritage cities. ‘Hyderabad, Varanasi and Udaipur are the three being considered by the UNESCO team,’ a town planner in the Greater Hyderabad Municipal Corporation (GHMC) told me with great pride. The experts from the International Council of Monuments and Sites (ICOMOS) were due to inspect the sixteenth century monuments – Golconda Fort, Charminar and the Qutb Shahi Tombs – for inclusion in UNESCO’s World Heritage list for 2013. To make the cut, the officials were supposed to remove all encroachments around the 1 sites. ‘The congested nature of the Charminar area, lack of time and due to other practical problems, we could only do minor restoration work,’ said a senior official with the Archeological Survey of India (ASI) (quoted in Pisharody 2012). The four minarets of Charminar, the cardinal centre of the original city, house a dargah and a temple which have become rallying points for political parties in the state. Both have flags, hoardings, and syntax water tanks dispersed around their sites. The ASI’s ban on construction within 100 metres of Charminar was blithely ignored by the shopkeepers who constructed triple storeyed buildings (unlike the two storeyed structures envisaged by the city’s original architects and captured in the sepia photographs of the court photographer Raja Deen Dayal), and by officials who turned a blind eye. Conservation architect Nitin Sinha who was involved in restoration and conservation works of Lad Bazaar under Charminar Pedestrianisation Project during 2006 said that shopkeepers asked the municipality to allow them to construct 3-4 storey buildings. ‘We were very clear that height restrictions and the architectural character had to be maintained’, said Sinha in a newspaper interview. ‘However, the present scene clearly shows that shopkeepers went ahead with their plans, with the GHMC and ASI making no efforts to stop them’ (Times of India 10 April 2012). The irony was that in October 2012, a few days before the visit of the international team, the ASI erected a notice board (a strangely rusted one, according to the newspaper report) in the bazaar ‘prohibiting any construction activity within 100 metre radius of the protected monument.’ On being asked about the rusted signboard, an ASI official deployed at Charminar said that the notice board was lying in the sixteenth century monument for months because they had to take permission from the GHMC and the police to erect it and hence it got rusted. What the second vignette reveals is that much of day-to-day life within the old city is conducted on the basis of an implicit modus vivendi between those inhabiting the space and those policing it. A third vignette pertains to the public shaming of the city’s power elite (mayor, political party leaders, high officials) by angry baazari-citizens. This will be discussed in more detail later. Critics like Partha Chatterjee (2004, 2011) have argued that in India only the elites can exercise their rights, while the rest of society is doomed to be treated as ‘populations’ or ‘political society’ whose demands are rarely heard or only expressed through clientelistic relations with political parties. How do we characterize disregard for rules by ‘political society’ with the passive approval of the state? If the laws prohibit citizens, particularly the marginalized and poor ones, from claiming a stake in a city’s centre, how do citizens establish their claim to such spaces without inviting the wrath of the state? What forms of mediation do they use, what is the link between these forms and democracy, and how do the outcomes impact on their capacity to transform themselves from subjects into citizens? These are the questions addressed by the chapter. In the first vignette, the behaviour of the doorman resonated with a courtierly (clientelist) mode of mediation, while in the second vignette, the citizens (shopkeepers) colluded with state officials to bypass the laws and claim a stake to the city’s centre. The third vignette demonstrates the direct interaction and claim making by the citizen. The threats of unruly politics, of riots or sloganeering during the 2 visits of the high officials are deployed as tools only when the complicit arrangements are disturbed. Patrick Heller (2011) argues that the inadequate development in India of participatory authority – active citizenship where citizens are viewed as bearers of rights – is a result of an imbalance of political and civil society and a transactional nature of political representation. The case study in this chapter illuminates the need for further nuancing of these arguments. Based on the vignettes above, how do we characterize such relations between state and society? An empowered citizenry? A weak state? Or, as I argue in the chapter, the notions of empowerment and weakness do not capture the range of negotiations between these two sets of actors. The relationship of clientelist engagement – predicated on exchanges and loyalties, not rights (Heller, 2011) – with active citizenship needs to be reworked, particularly in the context of electoral democracy. I argue that the distribution of power between the state and the citizens is less unequal than what is generally presumed in the literature, and the forms of negotiation (use of slogan shouting, public shaming, disregard for laws, use of political party mediators, and traders associations) have deeper antecedents in history rather than being simply a response to weakness in democratic representation, as is often argued. While there is a distinction between the status of citizenship (a bundle of rights) and the practice of citizenship, the latter needs further unbundling. An analysis of the tussle over Hyderabad’s Charminar Pedestrianisation project helps us understand how citizens and state officials operate in what Yiftachel (2009) calls ‘the grey spaces’ to stake their claim on the core of the city. A Brief History of HyderaBad Most large cities today have grown from a core, which links the modern to the past, gives meaning to the cultural traditions that have developed and provide identity and meaning to the modern city. In Hyderabad, this core is well defined and enclosed within stone walls of the city first visualised by the first ruler in the sixteenth century, Muhammad Quli Qutb Shah. He visualised on the southern side of the Musi River a ‘bride’ of cities – bazaars, cardinal axes streets, smaller lanes devoted to one profession or object (cloth bazaar, silver bazaaar, flour bazaar, spice bazaar etc). His architects planned and constructed 14000 double storeyed shops lining the four main avenues emanating from Charminar, which would mark the city’s centre. A seventeenth century French traveller (Tavernier) recorded in his journal: ‘Lay a pencil at right angles across two parallel pencils and you have the skeleton. Put a dot at the centre, and you have Charminar.

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