Colonising the Slum: Changing Trajectories of State–Market Violence in Mumbai 241

Colonising the Slum: Changing Trajectories of State–Market Violence in Mumbai 241 Colonising the Slum: changing trajectories of state–market violence in Mumbai Amita Bhide Significant This paper views the impact of these shifts and the violence/s continuities and embedded therein along the state–market axis. Intense, everyday critical shifts violence enhances insecurity among residents, women and young in the forms, girls, in particular, in highly complex ways. However, far from intensity, sources being passive victims of this violence/s they are engaged in highly and instruments creative struggles to confront the multi-institutional injustices of violence have experienced by them. This paper chronicles the story of the slum in relation to the taken place since city of Mumbai. The story of slums represents the ups and downs the 1990s when in an ongoing struggle of the poor to assert their right to the a number of city. It is a struggle characterised by violence in many forms: as changes were development strategy by the state, as claim-making strategy by brought about in the poor and as both outcome and means of household coping, land markets of and all of these set in a context of larger structural violence that Mumbai. enhances the inequality among regions, the rural and the urban and among people. There are both significant continuities and critical shifts in the forms, intensity, sources and instruments of violence since the 1990s, when a number of changes were brought about in land markets in the city. The article views the impact of these shifts and the violence embedded therein along the state–market axis. People in slums are engaged in the business of survival and consolidation of their REPRINTED FROM The Economic and Political lives in the city and often deploy violence as a strategy. Intense Weekly vol 52, issue no. 7, WITH DUE PERMISSION FROM everyday violence enhances insecurity among residents, women aMITA bHIDE .PUBLISHED on 18th February 2017. and young girls, in particular, in highly complex ways. However, IMAGE CREDIT: SAI DEHERKAR far from being passive victims of this violence they are engaged Book-24.04.2018.indb 241 30-04-2018 14:06:14 242 Mumbai Reader 18 The continuities in highly creative struggles to confront the multi-institutional and shifts in injustices experienced by them. “ The continuities and shifts in forms of violence are a subset forms of violence are a subset of of a more generic neo-liberal, communal and urban shift around a more generic the globe. Gandy (2006) understands the bio-political as ‘the neo-liberal, gradual colonisation’ of ‘bare life’ by an increasingly elaborate communal and skein of institutional structures and relationships which find their axiomatic expression in various forms of sovereign power. urban shift In this framework, the ‘slum’, initially constituted by people at the around the margins, would appear as a highly vulnerable and fragile space globe. against the grain of the state and market which is treated as a ” ‘space of exception’ by the state – market alliance. In Mumbai, the ‘slum’ is now experienced as a deliberate strategy, a site of application of power by which the state generates opportunities for the real estate market in the name of ‘rehabilitation of the urban poor’ and creates formal-looking settlements with little consideration for conditions of life in them. The site of this case study is Vashi Naka, a settlement or rather, a complex of several slum settlements along the hill slopes, located in the north-eastern suburb of M (East) ward. The settlement has been socio-spatially transformed through the advent of a freeway that connects the eastern suburbs to South Mumbai and a spate of resettlement projects linked to city infrastructure projects in the span of 10 years. Bio-power, bio-politics and the slum Foucault (2002: 137) uses the term biopower to describe an emergent form of power that was distinct from the sovereign power based on ‘the sovereign’s power to discipline based on anatomo-politics.’ Biopower, on the other hand, is the ability to control and regulate subjects or the collective social body through optimisation of their productivity, that is, life itself. Book-24.04.2018.indb 242 30-04-2018 14:06:14 Colonising the Slum: changing trajectories of state–market violence in Mumbai 243 Biopower takes, as its object, the ‘entire domain of human life’ working in a capillary, preventive mode with a multiplicity of aleatory and often unpredictable phenomena such as ‘problems of reproductive life,’ ‘problems of morbidity,’ ‘public hygiene’ and ‘old age’ (Rabinow and Nikolas 2006). It does not only work to discipline but also to create an overall equilibrium. It identifies ‘risk groups’ ’abnormalities‘ in order to prevent, contain and manage them. Thus, unlike sovereignty’s right (take life or let live), biopower aims to preserve a healthy society through multiple technologies of power. Yet, biopower interplays with sovereignty as demonstrated by Agamben (1998). Agamben takes the Foucaldian power analysis which is seen to largely operate at the level of discourse to a material realm. He introduced the concept of ‘camp’ to describe spaces that open up when formal legal rights and protections are suspended and the state of exception as defined by the sovereign starts to become the rule. Camp is a space where, ultimately. life is exposed to conditions of death. While slums are not necessarily generated through a suspension of the rule of the sovereign and represent a form of agency by the poor; they are certainly “spaces of exception” where the rights of urban citizens are not seen to apply and the state denies the residents the agency to determine their well-being. The more conventional views of slum such as those propounded in Planet of Slums (Davis 2006) understand slums as problems of urban development that need to be tackled through a mix of short-term and long-term policies so that cities can first reduce existing slums and then ultimately be slum-free. Camp is a They thus perpetuate the view that ultimately, slums do not “ space where belong in an urban landscape and create legitimacy for the state ultimately life to intervene in these spaces at all times. is exposed to As Di Muzio (2008: 307) argues, “the true biopolitical model of conditions of modernity needs to be seen in these proliferating spaces where death.” Book-24.04.2018.indb 243 30-04-2018 14:06:14 244 Mumbai Reader 18 The nature humanity is largely concentrated and its vitality threatened on of these a daily basis.” Unlike the camp, where life is ultimately exposed “ to death, the contemporary state interventions in the slums in interventions is such that they Mumbai are with a stated intent of “rehabilitation” that rescues embed direct people from the insecure tenure and inadequacies of slum and indirect life. The nature of these interventions is such that they embed violence/s by direct and indirect violence/s by state–market agents and also enhance the everyday violence and insecurity in the lives of the state–market inhabitants. There is thus a mix of coercion and co-option through agents and also which the tenuous claims of slum-dwellers to space in the city are enhance the being marginalised and the spaces themselves colonised. everyday violence and insecurity Settlement in Vashi Naka in the lives of the The story of the settlement in Vashi Naka began at the time when inhabitants. the Trombay Island was treated as a periphery where hazardous ” industries and uses could be located. Thus, the Burma Shell factory was set up here in the 1930s; a garbage dumping ground was set up at one end close to the marshy areas. Due to the hill that provided strategic security, a naval base was set up during the period of the World War II. It also became home to institutions (like the Bhabha Atomic Research Centre) and institutional populations (beggars’ home, women’s reception1 home, etc). Informal divisions of land and construction were initiated around the industries and in the gaothans2. The state has played a very active role in developing the M-ward as primarily a slum ward. The first Development Plan of the city, prepared in 1964, envisages the ward as a low human activity Ward, primarily to be used for locating hazardous industries and institutional populations for which large tracts of lands were acquired. The “fit” for institutional populations was extended to those considered “unfit” for habitation in the city. Thus, the then chief minister took a decision to clear several Book-24.04.2018.indb 244 30-04-2018 14:06:15 Colonising the Slum: changing trajectories of state–market violence in Mumbai 245 pavement settlements in the city areas. Thus, houses of roughly 3,000 inhabitants from the island city were cleared and were given pitches in Janata Colony, an area that was close to the Trombay Hill, uninhabited and had a dense jungle. A similar drive in 1970 by the municipal corporation produced Shivaji Nagar, Lotus Colony and Baiganwadi, a huge resettlement colony that gave more planned layouts for the pitches. These resettlements were also followed by resettlement of the abattoir and the dumping ground to the ward. The shift of these people (primarily Muslims and Dalits), and activities to the Ward gave a foundational character to the Ward. It is these relocations which became the nuclei for further settlement in the areas. Interestingly, these relocations in the imagery of the state were merely a geographical shift of settlements from the inner city and thus have also been imagined as slums. Vashi Naka is a settlement that grew along the hill slopes and the interstices of the industrial complex of high risk, polluting petrochemical and power industries in Chembur.

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