Social Media, Civic Action and Urban Hygiene in India

South Asia: Journal of South Asian Studies

ISSN: 0085-6401 (Print) 1479-0270 (Online) Journal homepage: https://www.tandfonline.com/loi/csas20

Unclean, Unseen: Social Media, Civic Action and Urban Hygiene in India

Assa Doron

To cite this article: Assa Doron (2016) Unclean, Unseen: Social Media, Civic Action and Urban Hygiene in India, South Asia: Journal of South Asian Studies, 39:4, 715-739, DOI: 10.1080/00856401.2016.1218096 To link to this article: https://doi.org/10.1080/00856401.2016.1218096

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ARTICLE Unclean, Unseen: Social Media, Civic Action and Urban Hygiene in India

Assa Doron Department of Anthropology, ANU College of Asia & the Paciﬁc, The Australian National University, Canberra, Australia

ABSTRACT KEYWORDS Successive Indian governments have attempted to tackle the Activism; class; media; formidable task of creating a clean India, with varied results. With memes; preﬁgurative politics; the country’s rapidly growing middle class eager to participate in a public space; rubbish; visual sanitised global consumer capitalism, many Indians are becoming culture; waste; youth frustrated with the ‘unruly’ nature of their urban landscape, its dirty streets and public spaces. This is particularly discernible amongst India’s middle-class youth, who seem impatient with the state’s apparent inability to manage waste and disorder, and it is clear that several civil society campaigns designed to promote a clean India explicitly target Indian youth. In this paper, I explore what the ideological premise of cleansing initiatives reveals about the aspirations, needs and anxieties of India’s youth.

Post-Colonial Cleansing In 2014 Indian Prime Minister Narendra Modi chose Mahatma Gandhi’s birthday on 2 October to launch a ‘Clean India!’ or Swachh Bharat! campaign. He committed substantial funding towards the process of making India a ‘clean place’ within ﬁve years—in time for Gandhi’s 150th birthday in 2019.1 Modi’s ‘Clean India!’ goal is admirable. Public spaces in India can be ﬁlthy. Open defecation—the result of lack of options, but often in rural areas, a preference—is widespread. It is estimated that more than half of the population of India defecate outdoors.2 The spread of disease as a result of open defecation has been shown to increase child mortality and can lead to stunted growth.3 In addition to the problem of sanitation, household waste is thrown onto the streets in many towns and cities and left to sporadic collection and the forces of nature. Rapid

CONTACT Assa Doron [email protected]

1. See Robin Jeffrey, ‘Clean India! Symbols, Policies and Tensions’,inSouth Asia: Journal of South Asian Studies, Vol. 38, no. 4 (2015), pp. 807À19. It is difficult to gain a precise figure on the funding for this scheme, especially given recent cuts, and procedures put in place under the CSR scheme. For an estimate, see http://bit.ly/22ZrdlP [accessed 21 Jan. 2015]. 2. See Census of India 2011 [http://censusindia.gov.in/2011census/hlo/Data_sheet/India/Latrine.pdf, accessed 30 Mar. 2016]. 3. See Assa Doron and Robin Jeffrey, ‘Open Defecation in India’,inEconomic & Political Weekly, Vol. 49, no. 49 (2014), pp. 72À8; and Assa Doron and Ira Raja, ‘The Cultural Politics of Shit: Class, Gender and Public Space in India’,inThe Journal of Postcolonial Studies, Vol. 18, no. 2 (2015), pp. 189À207. © 2016 South Asian Studies Association of Australia 716 A. DORON urbanisation has produced vast amounts of construction and demolition debris. Fast- growing cities and the consuming middle class generate an estimated 65 million tonnes of garbage a year.4 My purpose in this paper is not simply to show where all this waste ends up, or to describe the process of disposal, but to interrogate the social and political implications of such clean-up campaigns, especially when these involve civic action amongst the youth. Modi’s media-savvy clean-up campaign has cleverly targeted a wide range of people and institutions—from traditional print media to an orchestrated social media campaign. Targeting the middle class and the elite, Modi and his team have also generated a buzz on Twitter around the Swachh Bharat! campaign with the hashtag: #MyCleanIndia. There are numerous such hashtags and Twitter handles sponsored by large corporations and multinationals, from the India Today Group to Dettol, whose Banega Swachh India ambassador is the film idol, Amitabh Bachchan. #MyCleanIndia features ongoing stories about waste and cleanliness, championing local initiatives alongside a vanguard of Modi- nominated Indian celebrities and tycoons who have taken up the cause.5 Modi has persistently focused on India’s young people—children and youth—as the energetic engine to drive the transformation of Indian public spaces and re-cast India as a clean country. The Indian Express reported: More than 2,500 students from close to 50 government schools in Delhi took the ‘Swachhta Shapath’ [Cleanliness Pledge] along with Modi as he inaugurated his ambitious ‘Swachh Bharat Abhiyan’. Around 2,700 students from 44 government schools read from the ‘pledge paper’ along with the Prime Minister at India Gate and are also taking part in a 3-km long ‘walkathon’ which is being held as part of the launch of the cleanliness mission.6

In the ﬁrst section of this paper, I consider the relationship between childhood, youth and hygiene in India. The conspicuous role of children in today’s campaigns is juxtaposed against the early years of post-Independence India when the image of the child ﬁgured prominently as the bearer of India’s shining future and the primary agent of its develop- mental agenda. The intimate connection between children, hygiene and the wider project of cleanliness that was so discernible in the post-Independence period drew on, and extended, colonial perceptions of hygiene. This is most evident in the educational charts that appeared across the country from the early 1950s. Several scholars have examined the corpus of the popular visual culture of the period, yielding rich insights into the social issues and processes of the colonial and post-colonial eras, including evolving concepts of the family, commu- nal identities, gender relations and the nation-state.7 Given the recurring trope of hygiene

4. Assa Doron and Robin Jeffrey, ‘Waste and the City’, in Tarun Khanna (ed.), The City and South Asia (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2014), pp. 56À9. 5. The Aam Aadmi Party deployed the broom as its recognisable party logo (officially approved by the Election Commis- sion in 2013), suggesting India needs to be cleaned of its material and moral filth. Modi’s successful appropriation of this discourse has been met with ambivalence, often creating political tensions in the capital [http://goo.gl/tCP8oO, accessed 22 Jan. 2016]. On Gandhi, Modi and the symbolism of Swachh Bharat, see Robin Jeffrey, ‘Clean India!’, pp. 807À19. 6. ‘More than 2,500 Govt School Students to take “Swachhta Shapath” with Modi’, The Indian Express (1 Oct. 2014) [http:// goo.gl/bYc4ac, accessed 9 Aug 2016]. 7. See Patricia Uberoi, Freedom and Destiny: Gender, Family, and Popular Culture in India (New Delhi: Oxford University Press, 2006); Kajri Jain, Gods in the Bazaar: The Economies of Indian Calendar Art (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2007); and Kama Maclean, A Revolutionary History of Interwar India: Violence, Image, Voice and Text (London: Hurst and Co., 2015). SOUTH ASIA: JOURNAL OF SOUTH ASIAN STUDIES 717 and cleanliness in these educational charts, it is surprising that this issue has received little critical attention. The second part of the paper is concerned with youth action in contemporary India, which has developed around a concern with ‘dirt’ and rubbish in urban spaces. I look at two cases of groups of mostly young men who have spearheaded efforts to clean up Indian cities. These ‘sanitation squads’ are an instance of what Jeffrey and Dyson term ‘prefigurative politics’: youthful activity channelled into mobilising ideas and people who have a particular vision of the future.8 Much of the prefigurative programme examined is aired on the Internet, and especially over social media platforms. The coupling of social media and youth-led civic action is a global phenomenon, not least because youth are considered to be at the forefront of social media engagement.9 Social media constitutes both a ‘cultural text’ worth investigation and a critical medium for understanding the development of youth activism, with its capacity for the creation, circulation and distribution of user- generated content. Jeffrey and Dyson suggest that some forms of prefigurative politics, such as the Occupy and Brazilian School movements, have sought to promote an egalitarian ethos and programme; by contrast, my own investigation highlights the exclusionary nature of these projects. This is especially true in the context of enduring (albeit changing) caste and class structures in contemporary India. The youth activism I examine here suggests a distinctly middle-class orientation in its moral critique of the dysfunctional nature of Indian society and cities today. In this respect, I also extend on recent literature about middle-class judi- cial activism and the politics of cleansing public spaces in India.10 Furthermore, I will suggest that the prefigurative projects circulating across social media networks ultimately become the latest instrument through which official and civic action on urban space continues to favour the better-off in India’s cities.11 In the case of public activism and the explicit programme of cleaning up India, it is middle-class youth who are most concerned and invested in these projects.12 Social media then becomes an important area of investigation, revealing a particularly motivated performance of the middle-class self that endorses a narrowly-defined view of citizenship

8. Craig Jeffrey and Jane Dyson, ‘Now: Prefigurative Politics Through a North Indian Lens’,inEconomy and Society, Vol. 45, no. 1 (2016), pp. 77À100. 9. For a comprehensive review, see Brian D. Loader, Ariadne Vromen and Michael A. Xenos, ‘The Net-Worked Young Citi- zen: Social Media, Political Participation and Civic Engagement’,inInformation, Communication & Society, Vol. 17, no. 2 (2014), pp. 143À50. 10. See Vinay Gidwani, ‘Value Struggles: Waste Work and Urban Ecology in Delhi’, in Anne Rademacher and K. Sivaramk- rishnan (eds), Ecologies of Urbanism in India: Metropolitan Civility and Sustainability (Hong Kong: Hong Kong University Press, 2013), pp. 184À9. 11. Often labelled as ‘beautification’ and ‘relocation’ projects, these were typically carried out by state agencies, environmental groups and resident welfare associations. See Amita Baviskar, ‘Cows, Cars and Cycle-Rickshaws: Bourgeois Envi- ronmentalism and the Battle for Delhi’s Streets’, in Amita Baviskar and Raka Ray (eds), Elite and Everyman: The Cultural Politics of the Indian Middle Classes (New Delhi: Routledge, 2011), pp. 391À418); Asher Ghertner, Rule by Aesthetics: World-Class City Making in Delhi (New York: Oxford University Press, 2015); and Sanjay Srivastava, Entangled Urbanism: Slum, Gated Community and Shopping Mall in Delhi and Gurgaon (New Delhi: Oxford University Press, 2015). 12. Along with the Modi campaign, numerous instances of youth clean-up drives have been reported across print and social media. See, for example, http://goo.gl/o3v0UR (accessed 1 Feb. 2016). In this paper I limit myself to only a few key instances. More ethnographic research is required to detail the nature of such youth clean-up programmes and the participation and organisational structures that underpin such civic engagement. 718 A. DORON that has an understanding of civility and public behaviour that is rarely afforded to the ‘unruly’ urban poor.13 In addition, I argue that despite the professed ‘apolitical’ stance so central to the prefigurative programme of youth activism, it has an inherent ideological bias implicitly oriented towards ‘social cleansing’. This is borne out in discourses enunci- ated in social media that foster a vision of the Indian city as one that seeks to encourage and mobilise ‘proper citizens’ to reclaim public spaces and thoroughfares.14 The ‘purification elements’ that drive this prefigurative project, I suggest, can be traced back to the vast project of public hygiene launched by the Indian state in the decades after Independence. Cultivation of the ‘proper citizen’ was captured in the widely-circulated ‘Ideal Boy’ posters placed prominently in schools across India that promoted personal and domestic hygiene, thereby endorsing the cultivation of the future model citizen. In the wake of economic liberalisation and globalisation, the Ideal Boy figure has experienced a surge in popularity across a range of platforms. In his current avatar, however, the Ideal Boy assumes multiple, often contradictory, personalities—a topic I turn to next.

Politics through Memes A ‘meme war’ has been launched in the Indian social media, carried on Facebook, Twitter and like platforms. It began with a series of posts parodying the well-known genre of educational charts that instructed children on everything from letters and numbers to an array of nationalist leaders, and that were common in classrooms across the country from the early decades post-Independence.15 The most famous of these was a poster titled ‘An Ideal Boy—Good Habits’ (Figure 1), which portrayed a boy whose exemplary personal hygiene was matched only by his willingness to contribute to the common good of society.16 The new satirical posters draw on similar terms and imagery, but mock the disso- nance between the innocence of the past that extolled good moral behaviour, family life and concern for collective redistribution, and the realities of a nation gripped by consumer capitalism and moral and material corruption. The ﬁrst set of satirical posters/ memes was simply called ‘Adarsh Balak’, literally ‘The Ideal Boy’ in Hindi. These origi- nally appeared online in 2013, then ‘went viral’ on Facebook and Twitter; physical prints of the Adarsh Balak poster series can now be purchased through a Facebook page.17 Unlike the original Ideal Boy who was notable for his docile subjectivity, Adarsh Balak is a socially-disenchanted middle-class boy who vandalises public spaces, distributes and smokes ganja (marijuana) and smashes the TV in the living room in an effort to save his parents who sit mesmerised and drooling in front of the ‘idiot box’ (Figure 2).

13. Chatterjee draws attention to a similar point when he examines the bourgeois nature of Indian cities. He makes a con- ceptual distinction between ‘proper citizens’ and the ‘population’ of urban poor, whose illegal (or paralegal) dwellings and livelihoods render them vulnerable. Partha Chatterjee, The Politics of the Governed: Reﬂections on Popular Politics in Most of the World (New York: Columbia University Press, 2004). 14. Ibid., p. 140. 15. The range of educational charts can be seen on the web at http://imgur.com/a/v95aq (accessed 19 Nov. 2015), and for an elaboration, see Sirish Rao, Gita Wolf and V. Geetha, An Ideal Boy: Charts from India (Stockport, UK: Dewi Lewis Pub- lishing and Tara Publishing, 2001). 16. The educational charts generally have English titles and captions. Some also feature local languages, mostly Hindi or Tamil. See Rao, Wolf and Geetha, An Ideal Boy. 17. See interview with Priyesh Trivedi, the creator of Adarsh Balak [http://nh7.in/indiecision/2014/09/09/how-adarsh- balak-changed-a-bored-artists-life/, accessed 1 April 2016]. SOUTH ASIA: JOURNAL OF SOUTH ASIAN STUDIES 719

Figure 1. An Ideal Boy—Good Habits (original poster, undated). Reproduced courtesy of India Book Depot, Delhi.

The parodying posters work so well because they draw on the imagery and terminology of the original. They critique the idealised, structured world of Nehruvian India, demonstrating how the production of an obedient citizenry has led to disenchantment with late global modernity. In the new posters, the Ideal Boy is still at the centre, maintaining his neat and tidy demeanour even as he engages in and leads disruptive behaviour. In the 720 A. DORON

Figure 2. Adarsh Balak (untitled/undated). Reproduced with kind permission of Priyesh Trivedi. new version, marijuana replaces the soap of the old; a boy ‘high on dope’ replaces the model student; and criticism and contempt for parents replace the dutiful and compliant son depicted in the original. Importantly, it is the boy—occasionally abetted by his class- mates—who is able to see through the facade¸ that his parents, school and society has been ‘sold’ by the media: ‘be afraid and keep consuming’. The original ‘Ideal Boy—Good Habits’ poster series was part of a larger ordering project driven by the state in an effort to foreground the child as the embodiment of a modern secular state. Women were largely absent from such renditions, at best portrayed only as subservient mothers or sisters.18 The cultivation of the model child-citizen was intimately connected to the performance of personal and domestic hygiene, which in turn was an attempt to constitute a ‘hygienic’ public sphere full of ‘appropriately’ domesticated bodies.19 The regimen of habits and hygiene also implies a technology of control and

18. See Uberoi, Freedom and Destiny. 19. Although contemporary meanings of hygiene have changed, the concept still carries traces of its earlier use. According to the Oxford English Dictionary, hygiene is ‘the practice of keeping oneself and one’s surroundings clean in order to prevent illness or disease’ (Oxford: Oxford English Dictionary, 2013), p. 447. This was not the case over half a century ago, where the definition of hygiene extended well beyond the personal body, or specific sources of disease and infec- tion. In the wide repertoire of hygiene, performance of personal and domestic hygiene was subordinated to an overall project of reform that included sleeping habits, washing and eating practices, dress codes and time management—all of which were viewed as conducive to both personal health and spiritual advancement. See Dafna Hirsch, ‘We Are Here to Bring the West’: Hygiene Education and Culture Building in the Jewish Society of Mandate Palestine (in Hebrew) (Sde Boqer: Ben-Gurion University Press, 2015), p. 18. The impetus for achieving this degree of cleanliness was itself politically charged because the colonial powers stressed time and again that cleanliness was not only next to godliness, but was required for achieving a ‘modern nation’: only when self-governance of the body was attained could political self-rule and responsible citizenship be achieved. See Warrick Anderson, Colonial Pathologies: American Tropical Medicine, Race and Hygiene in the Philippines (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2006). SOUTH ASIA: JOURNAL OF SOUTH ASIAN STUDIES 721 self-monitoring, designed to shape conduct within the embodied concept of the modern self, linked to that of the nation-state. In a Foucauldian sense, such habits constitute part of a larger bio-political project, with its calculated management of human populations aimed at achieving the subjugation of bodies and improving the quality of the citizen.20 Inspired by the images parodying the Ideal Boy, a group of college students from Ban- galore recently created the Bad Girl—a stinging critique of the enduring misogynous and patriarchal practices in Indian society that were illustrated by the original charts. Replicat- ing the predictable visual grid, and with accompanying captions, the poster features a young woman who ‘walks outside with hair open’, ‘smokes and drinks’ and ‘can’t make round rotis’. If, through a post-modern lens, the Ideal Boy’s moral foundations and political confidence are being questioned in a mischievous but harmless way by Adarsh Balak, then the endorsement of the Bad Girl certainly ‘ups the ante’. Into this meme war, ‘An Adarsh “Liberal”’ (‘An Ideal “Liberal”’) meme was introduced in early 2015, taking the ‘Ideal Boy—Good Habits’ idiom in a different direction alto- gether.21 The target was no longer the original innocent Ideal Boy educational charts; the ‘Adarsh Liberal’ is not mocking the original, but rather the people who parody it. The ‘Adarsh Liberal’ version seeks to expose as ‘liberals’ the patronising upper-middle class as unpatriotic and disingenuous. In it, the Ideal Boy ‘takes a bath’ after meeting Hindi- speaking people and ridicules the prime minister’s campaign to clean up India.22 This Hindutva-inspired series of posters featuring ‘An Adarsh “Liberal”’ made an explosive entry into the online world, going viral across social networking websites and the media. Ridiculing middle-class liberals, these posters emerge out of India’s new liberal Right, which is increasingly asserting itself in the public sphere, and takes aim at the ‘enlight- ened’, ‘sickular’ middle class, seeking to expose what the Right reads as its hypocrisy and prejudice (Figure 3).23 The nature of these pithy and amusing memes is suggestive, especially given that it is difficult to evaluate their reception by and interaction with their audience. Still, the very fact that they figure prominently on global news media outlets and in social media means they are being widely shared across these multiple platforms. As recent studies have shown, social networks operate as key sites for both co-ordinating strategic action and the expression, recognition and construction of collective identities.24 Such competing memes should not be viewed in simply instrumental terms, as is often the case with youth-led civic action and social media, which I consider in detail later in this article. Rather, these memes highlight the way in which ‘social media has become the key site where protest identities are created, channelled, and contested’.25

20. Michel Foucault, The Birth of Biopolitics: Lectures at the College de France, 1978À1979 (New York: Picador, 2010), p. 267. 21. There is of course much more that can be said about the ‘Bad Girl’ and ‘Adarsh Liberal’ posters, but in the interests of space, I have limited myself to commenting on questions pertaining to hygiene and public space. 22. For a succinct article that captures these ‘poster wars’, along with a more vivid selection of images than can be included here, see http://goo.gl/8TzpCp (accessed 1 April 2015). 23. See, for instance, the popular Facebook page ‘The Frustrated Indian’ which routinely mocks the ‘sickular’ liberal middle class, or the recent and much-publicised launch of the Swarajya website and magazine, with its explicit aim to serve as ‘a big tent for liberal right of centre discourse that reaches out, engages and caters to the new India’ [http://swarajya mag.com, accessed 29 Jan. 2016]. 24. See Paolo Gerbaudo and Emiliano Trere, ‘In Search of the “We” of Social Media Activism: Introduction to the Special Issue on Social Media and Protest Identities’,inInformation, Communication & Society, Vol. 18, no. 8 (2015), pp. 865À71. 25. Ibid., p. 866. 722 A. DORON

Figure 3. ‘An Adarsh “Liberal”’—II. Source: screenshot from Twitter.

Anonymity is key, and here I use the term in its broader sense to mean something which is simple, difficult to tag or identify, and bears a generic, recognisable and inclusive quality. This is very much the case with the traditional Indian educational charts whose generic quality and wide distribution rendered them simultaneously everywhere and nowhere, and therefore ‘anonymous’. In the case of the recent memes as well, unless these are signed (and saleable, as in the case of Priyesh Trivedi’s work), we can rarely tell where they come from. Moreover, the ‘anonymous’ nature of such memes is especially appealing SOUTH ASIA: JOURNAL OF SOUTH ASIAN STUDIES 723 to a wide audience because of their simplicity and inclusiveness, thus driving their viral diffusion and rapid adoption on social networks.26 The Ideal Boy (in its various avatars) functions similarly: it is a mimetic signifier. The satirical and protest avatars are everywhere, but apparently from nowhere. Anonymity is crucial; we are not told who created the Adarsh Balak or An Adarsh Liberal images, but we are expected to recognise them and endorse their politics on the basis of a collective, imagined identity and a presumed disillusionment with society. At the same time, although these meme wars comprise many discursive and ideological layers, they do not necessarily amount to a coherent message. Yet what is clear is the attempt to identify a pathology characterising contemporary India and its youth culture: a critique is mounted of the apathy of middle-class youth; of the persisting gender restric- tions applied to young unmarried women in public spaces; and of reactionary fears about the corruption of ‘Indian culture’.27 The memes are thus grounded in contemporary Indian anxieties about ‘degeneration’ which, if left untreated, will undermine the national body.28 The differences between the original Ideal Boy posters and the more recent slew of memes are revealing. The Ideal Boy of the early decades of Independence was a pedagogi- cal product of the paternalistic project of the post-colonial nation-state, and lacked humour, irony and awareness. Today’s meme wars are characterised by reflexivity and posturing that reveal a more contested terrain about what is morally ‘good’ and of value. Such contestations indicate a vibrant public sphere that is being played out on social network sites that have an ability to circulate and reflect a diverse range of discursive and ideological messages (on which, more later). Not only is this debate staged on social media, but it is now also being carried in the mainstream media, including the BBC and other outlets that have caught onto the ‘trending’ images.29 The Ideal Boy and his imitators are equally determined to promote certain values and ideologies. The meme wars illustrate the large number of claims made upon public space and reveal a contested understanding about the relationship between the body (both personal and social) and space in contemporary India. In the original Ideal Boy campaign, participation in the body politic was contingent upon the boy’s unquestioning adoption of personal and domestic hygiene. This was a public space cleansed of the ‘primitive’ influences of the past, idealised with certain modernising goods (cars), and with the aesthetics of a planned environment featuring wide, orderly roads and street signs. The recent posters all challenge such a causal connection between cleanliness and the model

26. Paolo Gerbaudo examines the nature of anonymity more specifically with relation to online protest symbols. See Paolo Gerbaudo, ‘Protest Avatars as Memetic Signifiers: Political Profile Pictures and the Construction of Collective Identity on Social Media in the 2011 Protest Wave’,inInformation, Communication & Society, Vol. 18, no. 8 (2015), pp. 916À29. 27. The most recent Ideal Boy type chart follows the arrests and debates around sedition and anti-nationalist accusations mounted against students at Jawaharlal Nehru University (JNU) in 2016. The chart featured in the popular liberal media outlet, The Quint. It too was designed to parody Hindutva forces bent on stifling freedom of speech, women’s rights, religious plurality and democratic debate. See ‘The JNU Sedition Row: Do You Have Symptoms of Anti- Nationalism? Find Out with This Chart’ [http://bit.ly/1KxE2iH, accessed 23 Mar. 2016]. For a broader view of the issues, see ‘The Angry Debate over Sedition in India’, The Atlantic (18 Feb. 2016) [http://www.theatlantic.com/international/ archive/2016/02/india-jnu-sedition/463131/, accessed 23 Mar. 2016]. 28. On contemporary anxieties about ‘degeneration’, often framed as the corruption of Hindu culture, see Assa Doron and Alex Broom, ‘Gender and Masculinities: New Perspectives’,inSouth Asian History and Culture, Vol. 4, no. 2 (2013), pp. 167À75. 29. See http://www.bbc.com/news/blogs-trending-31535455 and http://goo.gl/emcq0G, [both accessed 1 June 2015]. 724 A. DORON male citizen, suggesting instead a plurality of subjects, albeit in ‘normative’ terms. Yet even while canvassing a variety of political views (feminist, Hindu, post-colonial), they remain middle/upper-class-based positions. These ‘viral memes’ tend to be inward look- ing and continue to exclude from their images the diverse ‘pathological’ life and ‘unruly’ spaces inhabited by the ‘lower’ orders of society. While the meme wars operate at a rhetorical level, intolerance can appear when habits or practices conceived as ‘dirty’ or ‘bad’ confront normative ideas about how urban public spaces should be managed and disciplined. Increasing middle-class embarrassment and exasperation over the condition of the country’s public spaces, combined with growing public health awareness, have progressively led to the further marginalisation of the urban poor, most of whom are not able (for various reasons, poverty being perhaps the most obvious) to join the campaign for clean spaces. The world of modernity and progress that the original Ideal Boy inhabited—one of scrupulously clear footpaths and groomed gar- dens—was always a distant dream for the majority of Indians. But for a middle-class youth coming of age at a time of significant economic and cultural change, forging public spaces in the image of world-class cities has become tied up with identity politics, in turn driving their participation in such civic action as ‘The Ugly Indian’ movement, to which I turn next.

Filthy Pasts and Exemplary Futures Why is India so ﬁlthy? This was the title of a TEDx Bangalore talk given in October 2014 by an anonymous collective that dubs itself ‘The Ugly Indian’ (henceforth, TUI).30 The description given on the TEDx site captures the ideology and activities that drive TUI’s grass-roots movement:

The Ugly Indian is an anonymous collective that does not talk to media, wants no publicity and works with the motto—Only Work No Talk. However, they made an exception for TEDx Bangalore so that they could open up the question of why we as Indians are okay with filthy public spaces? The tragedy of the commons—can we change it to the victory of the commons? There’s a silent revolution brewing in India, and it’s called The Ugly Indian. It is anonymous, faceless and leaderless, and has seen thousands of citizens coming out to fix local civic problems following a simple motto: Kaam Chalu Mooh Bandh. Only Work No Talk. What started off as a series of social experiments in Bangalore in 2011, to see what it takes to change everyday ugly Indian behaviour in public spaces (littering, spitting paan, public uri- nation and more), has now transformed into a nation-wide movement that is spreading virally—both on social media, and on the ground. The centrepiece of TUI’s approach is the ‘spotfix’ where ugly spots are ‘fixed’ by citizens. There is no activism, no sloganeering, no lec- turing, no finger-pointing and no ideological debates—just a sincere attempt to solve problems by focusing on a spot—using one’s own time, hands and money.

One of the most striking features of the TEDx lecture was The Ugly Indian presenter who wore a white mask and ﬂoppy cricket sunhat that disguised his identity for the duration of the talk (Figure 4). He stepped onto the stage and said:

30. See https://www.youtube.com/watch?vDtf1VA5jqmRo [accessed 1 April 2015]. SOUTH ASIA: JOURNAL OF SOUTH ASIAN STUDIES 725

Figure 4. The Ugly Indian on TEDx Bangalore. Reproduced with kind permission of TEDx Bangalore and The Ugly Indian.

‘Don’t let my mask scare you, I am trying to stay anonymous. My name is anamik nagrik (anonymous citizen), I am a proud Indian, and I have a problem with my country. And the problem is: why is India so ﬁlthy?’

I will look at the question of anonymity shortly, but before that, I want to examine more closely the questions raised by the masked presenter: ‘In India we tolerate filth on our streets, but why?’ He went on to say: ‘We can send a rocket to Mars, but we can’t fix this problem’; and continued: ‘Why do we keep our houses clean and our streets dirty?’ The answer, claimed the TUI presenter, has to do with his compatriots’ indifference; after all, they feel they do enough—paying taxes, voting—and can therefore rationalise that it is not up to them to rectify the problem, but rather the responsibility of the authorities to clean up. TUI supported his claim that there is a common disregard for civic responsibility by using a cultural rationale: the defiling of public space is an inherent Indian quality. Projecting an image of the filth found in the Little India area in Singapore, he demonstrated that even in an ordered, affluent and corruption-free place such as Sin- gapore, Indians persist in defiling public space. In raising this problem, the TUI presenter is not alone, nor is he the first. Colonial authorities repeatedly complained about the unruliness of the Indian street. For India’s British rulers, urban public spaces were typically chaotic. Used for all sorts of domestic tasks, ‘like rituals of washing, changing, sleeping, urinating and cooking’, native streets and bazaars were frequently characterised as disordered, filthy and threatening.31 Such a brazen display of bodily functions in public spaces reinforced an Orientalist discourse about a failure to distinguish between public and private in India, in turn driving colonial attempts to ‘impose an alternative metropolitan spatial order wherein a network of

31. Tim Edensor, ‘The Culture of the Indian Street’, in Nicholas Fyfe (ed.), Images of the Street: Planning, Identity and Control of Public Space (London: Routledge, 1998), p. 204. 726 A. DORON manicured, broad avenues [were] marked against the imagined disorder of the “native” quarter’.32 Such disdain was not voiced by only colonial authorities; nationalist leaders like M.K. Gandhi were also known to express their distaste for Indians’ lack of civic consciousness.33 Indeed, Gandhi’s round-rimmed spectacles have been borrowed as the logo for the ‘Clean India!’ campaign, lending great moral force to the clean-up projects and sites.34 Gandhi’s spectacles telescope the past glory of his aura and present-day collective efforts to create a ‘clean’ nation. Gazing out over public space from posters and billboards, Gan- dhi’s spectacles inspire and survey action equally, so providing both message and medium (Figure 7). Following the ‘Gandhigiri’ movement that gained popularity in recent years (as a result of the film Lage Raho Munna Bhai), which promoted honest work carried out with integrity and care for the collective good, the recruitment of the Gandhian image for cleaning projects has ‘re-enchanted’ the population, especially children and youth, encouraging them to fulfil their destiny as cultivated model citizens of the future nation. The problem with TUI’s identification of a singular culprit is that it assigns blame to a particular cultural trait that overrides all others: the essential Indian disposition to inhabit and defile public spaces. Such a diagnosis glosses over other potential explanations—cultural or otherwise—which might yield alternative solutions to those proposed by TUI.

Cultural Meanings of Public Hygiene in India In an earlier paper Ira Raja and I explored in detail the shifting understandings of hygiene in India, and we demonstrated that scholars have argued that the culturist interpretation of India’s tendency to deﬁle public space needs to be understood as ‘culture at work’.35 In other words, the Hindu caste system operates with its own understanding of ‘hygiene’, which is based on a ritual hierarchy governed by rules of purity and pollution. The caste system, in turn, determines individual conduct, where the duties and privileges of each caste group are in line with its position in the ritual hierarchy. In the case of open defecation, for example, so long as the removal of faeces is carried out by members of an impure caste (the so-called ‘untouchables’), the practice of defecating in public spaces does noth- ing to undermine the purity of the upper castes.36 On the contrary, it reinforces their dominance, since by cleaning up the ‘dirt’, the sweepers ensure that such polluting sub- stances do not compromise the purity of the upper castes.37 It is clear then that the notion of hygiene canvassed in the Ideal Boy poster is at odds with culturally-constituted concepts of purity and pollution. In the secular citizenship model evident in the educational charts, hygiene is being deﬁned as that which contributes

32. Ibid. 33. See Dipesh Chakrabarty, ‘Of Garbage, Modernity and the Citizen’s Gaze’,inHabitations of Modernity: Essays in the Wake of Subaltern Studies (Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press, 2002); and Kama Maclean’s discussion of Gandhi’s experience of the Haridwar Kumbh Mela in 1915, in Kama Mclean, Pilgrimage and Power: The Kumbh Mela in Allahabad, 1765À1954 (New York: Oxford University Press, 2008), p. 164. 34. On the appropriation of Gandhi by the Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP), see Robin Jeffrey and Assa Doron, ‘Modi’s New Broom Aims to Sweep India Clean’, Asia Currents [http://asaa.asn.au/modis-new-broom-aims-to-sweep-india-clean/, accessed 25 Mar. 2016]. 35. Doron and Raja, ‘The Cultural Politics of Shit’, pp. 189À207. 36. Ibid., p. 193. 37. Mary Douglas, Purity and Danger (New York: Praeger, 1966), pp. 124À5. SOUTH ASIA: JOURNAL OF SOUTH ASIAN STUDIES 727 to the good of the body politic. The moral world of these educational charts repeatedly delineates the rules of appropriate conduct along gender, class and regional lines. The Ideal Boy featured in the original posters is thus a poignant reminder that hygiene has always been and continues to be a political project—as the meme wars also demonstrate. This is a politicised conceptualisation of the child and by extension of society as a field upon which onecanprojectagency.Itistheurbanmiddleclass that is charged with responsible citizenship and the task of civilising the masses by laying such aspirations on society at large. Yet, as Douglas and others have argued, in India there is another model of hygiene, one especially concerned with maintaining caste order and purity. That model is antithetical to the citizenship model because—as long as there are lower-caste people to deal with the filth—there is a sense that order and hygiene are maintained. The social body imagined in the caste/purity/pollution model presupposes a very different set of social relations and arrangements than the social body imagined in the citizen model, that of fostering civic responsibility and citizenship.38 This is the model championed by the Ideal Boy poster and, more recently, in a 2014 UNICEF-sponsored video clip called ‘Take the Poo to the Loo’ (Figures 5A and 5B). In this highly entertaining and musically innovative video (peppered with a range of toilet sounds), we again encounter the normatively middle-class child who is charged with leading the way to cleaning India’s cities of poo. Just like TUI’scampaign, the Poo2Loo message is directed at the youth and the message is clear: it is every citizen’s duty to deal with their own waste. Yet, the ‘every citizen’ implied in the video is none other than the middle-class boy—the personification and instrument of change.39 Similarly, the activities that TUI promotes betray an urban middle-class bias as to how ‘public space’ should look: it is driven by an ambition to transform India’s messy urban landscapes in line with world-class standards. TUI favours the planning and management of urban space over the ‘unruly’ streets and bazaars; it sees the construction of malls, parks and wide pavements as ‘environmentally’ clean projects that a world-class city should have, suitable for middle-class consumption.40 Such a spatial imaginary necessarily excludes the poor, not simply for ritual and economic reasons, instead constructing them as deficient citizens who are yet to embrace the pleasures of capitalism.41 From this per- spective, then, ‘unruly spaces’ such as the faeces-covered railway tracks and filthy streets need to be sanitised, disciplined or developed via various state-sponsored (and increasingly corporate-sponsored) projects euphemistically called ‘beautification’ programmes or ‘relocation’ of squatter settlement projects. Moreover, even the Gandhian vision whole- heartedly adopted by the clean-up movement—that municipal cleaning should be per- formed by all, not just by ‘untouchables’—is replaced in favour of TUI’s sanitation approach, driven by an ethical programme of middle-class self-making and spatial purification.42

38. I am grateful to Jenny Huberman for helping me clarify this point (email communication, 3 May 2015). 39. This is the point that Srivastava makes in his analysis of the hero of the Five-Year Plan. See Sanjay Srivastava, ‘“Sane Sex”, the Five-Year Plan Hero and Men on Footpaths and in Gated Communities. On the Cultures of Twentieth-Century Masculinity’, in Rohit K. Dasgupta and K. Moti Gokulsing (eds), Masculinity and Its Challenges in India: Essays on Chang- ing Perceptions (Jefferson, NC: McFarland and Company, 2014), pp. 27À53. 40. Cf. Ken Botnick and Ira Raja, ‘Subtle Technology: The Design Innovation of Indian Artisanship’,inDesign Issues, Vol. 27, no. 4 (2011), pp. 43À55. 41. Chakrabarty, Habitations, p. 277. 42. On Gandhi’s romantic vision of Hindu scavengers, and Narendra Modi’s recent endorsement of this vision, see S. Anand’s pithy essay, ‘An Honorable Occupation?’ [http://goo.gl/6fvkdT, accessed 24 Jan. 2016]. 728 A. DORON

Figure 5A. ‘Take the Poo to the Loo’ video. The middle-class boy is chased by animated poo. Source: https://youtu.be/_peUxE_BKcU. Reproduced courtesy of Sonia Sardar, UNICEF India.

Figure 5B. ‘Take the Poo to the Loo’ video. The boy and his friends are devising a plan to clean the street of poo. Source: https://youtu.be/_peUxE_BKcU. Reproduced courtesy of Sonia Sardar, UNICEF India. SOUTH ASIA: JOURNAL OF SOUTH ASIAN STUDIES 729

Many of these projects emerge from what Amita Baviskar has called ‘bourgeois envi- ronmentalism, the (mainly) middle-class pursuit of order, hygiene and safety, and ecologi- cal conservation, through the public sphere’.43 In her account of a city street project launched by middle-class communities in Delhi, Baviskar suggests that such anxieties about order betray the middle class’ view of the street as populated by ‘matter out of place’ (invoking Mary Douglas’ famous formulation), stray cows, migrants and cycle rickshaws. Through such projects, often deploying the mechanism of public interest litigation (PIL), she maintains that the middle class is seeking to impose its own ‘aspiration about living in a “world-class” city’.44 I would add that the disciplinary measures used to manage such ‘pathological spaces’ (for example, streets, bazaars, roadsides, railway tracks, etc.) are not simply expressed in spatial divisions that exclude the poor; they also articulate how the problem is deﬁned, the terms of the debate and the solutions devised. Asher Ghertner’s recent work on slum demolition in Delhi is an excellent example of how such middle-class environmental discourse gains prominence. Ghertner points out that the rise of this discourse is a combination of middle-class ambitions and a failure of governance, that is, the ongoing inability of the authorities to render the city and its inhabitants legible for enacting meaningful reform. In the absence of rigorous surveys obtained through a range of objective methods such as cartographic, statistical and enu- merative techniques, the ‘clean and green’ look, regardless of its conformity with environmental laws and standards, prevails.45 With its ‘green’ appeal, a normative aesthetic regime is established, becoming both a legitimising force and a mechanism for evaluating public spaces. The ‘rule by aesthetics’, a phrase coined by Ghertner to denote this mode of governing space, is thus shared by both state authorities and civil society groups bent on making Delhi a world-class city.46 I would argue that TUI and its largely English-language social networking campaigns are attracted equally by a ‘green washing’ aesthetic which, bolstered by the ‘just do it’ motto, has the capacity to instil a sense of civic pride. This is clearly evident on TUI’s social networking sites—Facebook and Twitter—where the common refrains ‘Delhi is Ris- ing’, ‘Chennai is Rising’, and so on, loom large, supported by numerous photographs showing youth engaged in clean-up activities.47 As I show below, despite its explicitly apolitical stance, TUI’s ideological tenets are clearly aligned with those of the authorities. Indeed, it deploys similar mechanisms to marshal evidence for the ‘dirty’ and unruly environmental conditions that characterise the Indian city, aggregating and displaying thousands of photographs on its social network sites. These photographs simplify the ground realities and favour an aesthetic approach that engages the urban youth demographic through social media campaigns.

43. Baviskar, ‘Cows, Cars and Cycle-Rickshaws’, p. 392. 44. Amita Baviskar and Raka Ray, ‘Introduction’, in Amita Baviskar and Raka Ray (eds), Elite and Everyman: The Cultural Poli- tics of the Indian Middle Classes (New Delhi: Routledge, 2011), p. 23. 45. Asher Ghertner, ‘Green Evictions: Environmental Discourses of a “Slum Free” Delhi’, in Richard Peet, Paul Robbins and Michael Watts (eds), Global Political Ecology (New York: Routledge, 2011), p. 148. 46. Ghertner, Rule by Aesthetics. 47. Nevertheless, there are certain continuities with ‘old’ media, as Sahana Udupa shows in a recent book on news media (print and TV) in Bangalore. Udupa argues that the media, supported by corporate interests, was actively engaged in promoting civic activism and a new aspirational India free of corruption and decrepit urban spaces, beﬁtting a neo-liberal vision of a global city. Sahana Udupa, Making News in Global India: News, Publics and Politics (Cambridge: Cam- bridge University Press, 2015). 730 A. DORON

Cleansing the ‘Public’ from Public Spaces Against this background, the position of The Ugly Indian portrayed under the banner of the ‘anonymous citizen’ can and should ring alarm bells. The TEDx presenter wears a white mask and talks about an ideology of neutrality and the common good. Yet I would argue that this is a particularly motivated performance of a collective self which is exclusionary in essence, in that it renders the poor unclean and unseen. It excludes certain groups of the highly-diverse urban poor such as migrants, slum dwellers and others. While sanitation and public hygiene are arguably a universal good, applying public hygiene solutions to the diverse populations of Indian cities could be potentially disastrous.48 The earnest and unreflexive dimension of this type of talk (and the movement) by someone who claims anonymity is disconcerting to say the least. It elides a process of interrogation and debate in favour of a ‘no-nonsense, strongman’ delivery (indeed, this is true of all TED talks, which allow no questioning of the speaker, only adulation). To implement any public policy, a process is required that takes into account stakeholder analysis, debate, consultation, impact assessment, and so on. Yet what TUI is essentially saying is ‘let’s just get out and clean’, or in its words, that TUI brings together citizens ‘coming out to fix local civic problems following a simple motto: Kaam Chalu Mooh Bandh. Only Work No Talk’. Jeffrey and Dyson have examined youth social movements that engage in ‘prefigurative politics’, a type of action they define as ‘embodying in the present one’s vision of the future’.49 ‘Prefigurative politics’ would seem applicable to the case of TUI: its main drivers are Indian youth (between the ages of eighteen and thirty) who feel alienated from formal politics and procedures. For instance, TUI asserts that it is against finger-pointing or ideological debates, instead positing itself as ‘just a sincere attempt to solve problems by focusing on a spot—using one’s own time, hands and money’. The TUI movement seeks to model a better future, deploying the vehicle of social media with the aim of providing a model for others.50 While Jeffrey and Dyson highlight the positive, at times playful, social action as part of the nature of prefigurative politics, they are equally conscious of the potential of such movements and actions to draw on an ‘authoritarian’ ideology, sometimes reinforcing inequality. Accordingly, they have identi- fied several characteristics generally associated with prefigurative politics and civic action in recent decades. These include its anti-hierarchical nature, aversion to formal party politics, and preoccupation with the present moment. Yet assuming such characteristics can also lead to what has been described as a rather na€ıve programme of civic action, ‘expressive’ rather than ‘instrumental’.51 I want to suggest, however, that terms such as ‘na€ıve’ and ‘expressive’ can presume a certain benign aspect that potentially masks a reality of exclusion and subordination. I also want to argue that an authoritarian and regressive

48. Deepa Joshi, Ben Fawcett and Fouzia Mannan, ‘Health, Hygiene and Appropriate Sanitation: Experience and Perception of the Urban Poor’,inEnvironment & Urbanization, Vol. 23, no. 1 (2011), pp. 91À111. 49. Jeffrey and Dyson, ‘Now: Prefigurative Politics Through a North Indian Lens’, p. 78. 50. It is difficult to establish the size and effectiveness of TUI, given that social media can distort figures. Its Facebook page has over 370,000 followers and the TEDx talk has been watched by over 1.3 million viewers, reaching the top hundred most-watched talks. TUI also has a lively Twitter page and most recently launched an independent website with numerous photos and further details about its overall programme in order to encourage people to engage in spot-fixing. 51. Jeffrey and Dyson, ‘Now: Prefigurative Politics Through a North Indian Lens’, p. 80. SOUTH ASIA: JOURNAL OF SOUTH ASIAN STUDIES 731 prefigurative programme can and does develop (perhaps even more effectively) under the auspices of a seemingly inclusive public sphere. My purpose here then is to emphasise privilege (class and status) and suggest that the commitment and progressive nature of prefigurative politics, such as TUI, masks extremely ‘regressive’ tendencies. The task of enjoining Indian youth to establish hygienic public spaces appears to rest upon a democratic, open and inclusive process, operating within the realm of rational discourse to which anyone is welcome, as stated on its Face- book page.52 This is very much in line with Habermas’ famous formulation of the public sphere in modern societies.53 But as Nancy Fraser has pointed out in her critical appraisal of the concept, the voices and claims of subordinated groups are often suppressed within the restrictive parameters of what qualifies as ‘rational’, ‘civil’ and ‘public sphere’.54 In other words, for prefigurative politics to initiate ‘change’,itmust rest on a series of exclu- sions rooted in the very claim of promoting the ‘public good’. The question then should be not so much about the effectiveness of such civic action, but rather who is calling for a clean India? What mechanisms are deployed, and to what end? TUI is a grass-roots movement with an explicit framework of egalitarian anonymity. Yet the nature of TUI activity implies a value hierarchy in which India’s future is modelled upon developed post-colonies such as Singapore, but also the normative, regulated urban spaces of an abstract, but ordered, West. TUI imposes a development path that is without nuance; indeed, it is reminiscent of the slum-clearing strains of the Emergency in 1975À77.55 It might seem innocuous, even initially productive, shaming politicians into action in order to create clean and pleasing public spaces. The risk is that TUI’s action-oriented agenda of cleaning streets, straightening path- ways and whitening cities, thereby claiming them for a ‘public’, might turn into more violent forms of controlling space by challenging who can inhabit public spaces. The urge to clean a space is often followed by a claim of ownership of it and an attempt to determine who can use it and how. Under such circumstances, certain everyday activities and socio- cultural practices of the urban poor may be frowned upon at best, and at worst, the pavement dwellers—‘the refuse of society’—may become subject to violent attacks for defiling these newly-remodelled ‘green washed’ public spaces.56 With its no-nonsense tagline and media ‘savvy’ character, it is not surprising that Prime Minister Narendra Modi was quick to endorse TUI on his Twitter account, which has an estimated 19 million followers (#MycleanIndia).57 Other corporations and celebrities expressed support too. Many seem to find the ‘no nonsense, strongman’ message appealing. For now, Modi’s expedient co-option of this movement for his own political needs may divert attention from the state’s inability to provide adequate infrastructure and sanitation. The government is of course receptive to TUI’s message—that Indians

52. The media in which such cumulative mobilisation takes place for cleaning up cities across India, such as Facebook and Twitter, are critical for reinforcing class distinctions. The majority of the poor have very limited access to such social media platforms, especially as English-language-based media remains the domain of college-going youth. 53. Jurgen€ Habermas, The Structural Transformation of the Public Sphere: An Inquiry into a Category of Bourgeois Society (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1991). 54. Nancy Fraser, ‘Rethinking the Public Sphere: A Contribution to the Critique of Actually Existing Democracy’,inSocial Text, Vol. 25/26 (1990), pp. 56À80. 55. See Emma Tarlo, Unsettling Memories: Narratives of the Emergency in Delhi (London: Hurst, 2003). 56. Cf. Ghertner, Rule by Aesthetics. 57. The tweet was posted on 21 Feb. 2015 on Narendra Modi’s Twitter account, @narendramodi. 732 A. DORON must change their ugly attitudes and that ‘we’ citizens can do it ourselves—because it is divested of its responsibility to its citizens. But something more complex is going on here: the almost spontaneous reproduction of state ideology through civic action. It is this that makes TUI so appealing to the state. The state apparatus, as Althusser has famously suggested, is not simply the monopoly of ideological and coercive modes of (repressive) violence, but covers a wide variety of social and cultural institutions including the family and church.58 We saw this in the figure of the Ideal Boy, conceived and circulated within the state education system. The boy was viewed as an effective vehicle for imparting ideas and practices about personal and domestic hygiene—essential for the cultivation of the future model citizen. The Ideal Boy was pro- jected as the ultimate specimen of health, of physical, social and moral perfection. At the present time, a youth-based grass-roots movement is driving a similar agenda; it declares no ideological position, yet is perfectly suited to the interests and apparatus of the state. The movement works in parallel with what we might call the ‘hygienic state apparatus’.59 By this, I mean sanitation workers, fleets of garbage trucks, laws and bylaws such as Maha- rashtra’s 2012 Prohibition of Employment as Manual Scavengers and their Rehabilitation Act, which mandated modern regimes of cleansing while depending on a colonial infrastructure that relies on human defilement.60 But if the proverbial ‘buck’ stops with the state in the management of public spaces, then it should be accountable for its misman- agement and failings. Still, there is an inherent tension characterising such discourse and practices because the middle classes are both the cause and victim of state failure. TUI is clear about the state’s inability to maintain urban public spaces at an acceptable standard. The path it promotes is a well-trodden one that ultimately leads to it bailing out of the system alto- gether, as Pratap Bhanu Mehta has shown with regard to the education and health sec- tors.61 In the case of TUI, one could imagine a similar scenario where it would be only a matter of time before the task of cleaning up public space becomes too labour- and time- intensive to accomplish physically, which would in turn lead to people paying out of their own pockets to get someone to do it, i.e. privatisation. The middle class and elites would then argue against paying taxes for services they are not receiving such as removing rubbish, fixing pavements and maintaining a functioning public sanitation system. Ulti- mately, this could lead to a demand for lower taxes. This scenario is already in train and is evident in housing societies and gated communities across India that I have visited. It effectively means that only those who can pay will live in clean environments and the rest of the population will be left to live in the filth and dirt—similar to the fate of publicly- funded schooling in India. The point to make here is that the ‘buck’ must stop with the state. If it does not, then only those who can command the resources necessary for cleaning up their own environs will have access to them; the rest will be left to languish in the rubbish.

58. Louis Althusser, ‘Ideology and Ideological State Apparatus (Notes Towards an Investigation)’, in Aradhana Sharma and Akhil Gupta (eds), The Anthropology of the State: A Reader (London: Blackwell, 2006), pp. 86À111. 59. I am indebted to Philip Taylor for illuminating this point. 60. See Shriya Mohan, ‘Bharat Ratnas: The Clean India Army Every Indian must Meet’, Catch News (13 July 2015) [http://bit. ly/1eWwCq3, accessed 24 Mar. 2016]. 61. Pratap Bhanu Mehta, ‘Breaking the Silence’, The Caravan (1 Oct. 2012) [http://www.caravanmagazine.in/essay/break ing-silence, accessed 2 Sept. 2015]. SOUTH ASIA: JOURNAL OF SOUTH ASIAN STUDIES 733

At the same time, many of TUI’s proposed solutions must rely on the state’s hygienic apparatus. For instance, as the TEDx talk showed, the solution to the rubbish problem is not simply a matter of installing rubbish bins that cannot be stolen. The issue is to make sure rubbish bins are emptied on a regular basis. Many of the garbage tipping points shown on the screen were overflowing with garbage because they are rarely emptied.62 The co-existence of rats, dogs, pigs and the poor sieving through the rubbish at such sites might drive youth to engage in civic action, but it is through local municipal corporations that the state’s hygienic apparatus ensures the collection, sorting and safe disposal of rubbish. This is where such prefigurative politics, with its unaffiliated agenda and declared egalitarian values, tends to reproduce a similar ideological field to the state. Support from youth movements such as TUI enhances the power and capacity of the state to use its full weight and coercive powers to enact its desired programme of making India clean. It is in the domain of meaning and representation that TUI’s social media activities demonstrate a certain naivety. Its Facebook site is replete with transformational images of spot-fixing initiatives implemented across the country. They are of the ‘before’ and ‘after’ genre (Figures 6 and 7), reminiscent of advertising campaigns for cleaning agents. In advertising it is the commodity, such as soap or laundry powder, which is invested with magical powers to transform a dirty item into a sparkling clean one. In the case of TUI, it is the ‘public’ or the ‘citizen’ (defined in a particular way) who is the agent of change, mag- ically transforming public space. While the process of transformation must rely on ideological constructions of spatial categories such as ‘domestic’ and ‘public’, social categories of class and status are absent. The image of ‘after’ is untainted by collateral damage such as displacement of the poor caused in the name of public hygiene. One way of reading the ‘before’ image is that it draws attention to processes of change and progress in an area, whereby as a developing city grows, it excretes debris. By contrast, the ‘after’ image might be interpreted as a conservative effort to beautify and preserve the existing cityscape and its inherent inequalities. The ‘after’ images are often cleaned of ‘life’, of the traces of habitation of a diverse urban population. Social context and the relationship of labour to the city are ignored in the name of a greater common good—‘the victory of the commons’. But some of the people squatting on the pavements in the ‘before’ images may be the migrant labourers upon whom the middle class relies to support its standard of living: hygiene workers, cleaners, barbers, sweepers, sewage cleaners, and so on. In India, caste, urban hygiene and sanitation are closely bound together; many of the people who populate the state’s hygienic apparatus and engage in waste-related work in the informal sector belong to Dalit and other low-caste groups.63 These people have only limited access to the sanitation facilities available to the middle class such as toilets, run- ning water, electricity and rubbish collection, yet they are the ones denigrated for their lack of cleanliness. They are vulnerable to being swept away in yet another ‘beautification’ campaign—along with stray cows and beggars. Moreover, urban space in India is often

62. Ira Raja, personal communication, 3 Nov. 2014. 63. For a detailed examination of the waste-work pyramid across the informal market, see, for example, Bharati Chatur- vedi, ‘Waste-Handlers and Recycling in Urban India: Policy, Perception and the Law’,inSocial Change, Vol. 33, nos. 2À3 (2003), pp. 41À50; and Vinay Gidwani, ‘Remaindered Things and Remaindered Lives: Travelling with Delhi’s Waste’, in Bharati Chaturvedi (ed.), Finding Delhi: Loss and Renewal in the Megacity (New Delhi: Penguin, 2010), pp. 37À54. On the seemingly ‘apolitical’ nature of sanitation infrastructure, see Lalit Batra, ‘Sewers and Sewerage Workers in India’, Antipode Foundation (2012) [http://antipodefoundation.org/2012/06/18/sewers-and-sewerage-workers-in- india/, accessed 31 Jan. 2016]. 734 A. DORON

Figure 6. ‘Before’ and ‘after’ photos, Kolkata, 6 April 2015. Source: The Ugly Indian Facebook page. Reproduced courtesy of The Ugly Indian. said to be safer due to the regular and predictable presence of such people.64 The superfi- cially admirable qualities of the ‘spot-fixing’ practices saturating social media posts betray yet another middle-class conceit. It is a form of aesthetic purification that addresses the dirt seen and smelt, but which has little regard for the wider structures of inequality underpinning public hygiene and waste-picking practices, let alone the question of waste generation, which is the product of capitalist consumption and production.65

64. Mehta, ‘Breaking the Silence’. 65. The recent vicious attacks on Dalit scavengers in Gujarat by anti-cow slaughter vigilante groups is a case in point, lest we forget that the skin of the cattle is used for making consumer goods such as leather bags, shoes and cricket balls. See ‘Lesson from Gujarat’, Scroll.in [http://goo.gl/dmvtFl, accessed 24 July 2016]. SOUTH ASIA: JOURNAL OF SOUTH ASIAN STUDIES 735

Figure 7. Bus stop in Nampally, Hyderabad, 9 April 2015. Note the surveillance offered by Gandhi’s spectacles, like the eyes of Dr. T.J. Ecklesburg in F. Scott Fitzgerald’s The Great Gatsby. Source: The Ugly Indian Facebook page. Reproduced courtesy of The Ugly Indian.

The ‘before’ and ‘after’ images remind us of the commodity fetish in the Marxian sense, of how space conceals the complex social relations of production and exploitation which are evident in the hygienic state apparatus. But there is an additional sense in which such tropes of ‘before’ and ‘after’ and the ‘just do it’ maxim function as a fetish. Drawing on 736 A. DORON the work of the philosopher Bernard William, Richard Sennett speaks of the ‘fetish of assertion’, an authoritarian, aggressive voice that essentially restricts conversation and debate. Its key feature, Sennett points out, is ‘the declarative voice’ that ‘privileges clarity of expression’ rather than a more open-ended conversation that allows for ambiguity and more productive co-operation amongst the diverse range of people inhabiting a city.66 Transferring this forceful ‘green washing’ discourse onto the concrete setting of public space, moreover, can have severe implications. In the ﬁnal section of the paper, I want to consider the conditions under which the commitment to such preﬁgurative politics among the youth might take an insidious turn.

Mobilising Youth as Agents of Clean ChildrenandyoutharefrontlinesoldiersinthebattletosanitisepublicspaceinIndia; impressionable and receptive, children bear the desirable qualities to make societies modern. This is not unique to India, of course; children and youth across the world have com- monly been summoned to act as models of cleanliness and deployed as a critical element of sanitation reform movements.67 Similarly, Prime Minister Modi has enlisted children andyouthintothegreatercauseofpublichygieneandbeautiﬁcation in India. Schools across India are reported in the media to be joining the Swachh Bharat Abhiyan,making posters, cleaning streets, painting public spaces, working to build an environment-friendly India by planting trees and implementing recycling programmes.68 Yet do wholesome images of school-children setting off to clean a park or pavement represent a self-evident public good? Or is it an indication of a particular motivational image of the ‘public good’ that has gained some kind of ascendency and currency amongst a particular class and state projects? If children are impressionable and easy to co-opt through institutional mechanisms, youth are far more circumspect about projections of idealised futures into the present. While the grass-roots solidarity of TUI is aimed at spreading civic empower- ment and bringing social change through a no-nonsense, apolitical and unafﬁliated framework, its activities betray a particular position on public hygiene that is well adapted to the state’s ideology too. But if TUI’s civic programme emerges out of class-based assumptions about the nature of public space, its promotion of public hygiene is not necessarily driven by disingenuous intentions. There is, however, a risk of youth over-investing in TUI’s programme of cleaning the streets and public urban spaces. For many unemployed youth in contemporary India, ‘waiting’ has been a formative aspect of their lives. As Craig Jeffrey notes, waiting is not necessarily a purposeless activity, devoid of

66. See Richard Sennett, ‘Dialogics’ [http://citiespapers.ssrc.org/dialogics/#fnref-61-1, accessed 29 Jan. 2015]; and Richard Sennett, Together: The Rituals, Pleasures and Politics of Cooperation (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2012), p. 23. 67. See, for example, Martin Melosi, The Sanitary City: Urban Infrastructure in America from Colonial Times to the Present (Baltimore, MD: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2000). 68. See for example, ‘Karnataka Education Department Flags off Swachh Bharat Drive’, The Hindu (3 Oct. 2014) [goo.gl/ iWvjs9]; 'Inspired by PM Modi, Youth Take up Clean India Challenge in Bangalore’,inOneIndia (9 Oct. 2014) [goo.gl/ GXooPz]; and ‘LPU Students Declared PM’s Swachh Bharat Abhiyan Ambassadors’, The Tribune (6 Feb. 2016) [goo.gl/ dVMQ4R, all accessed 8 Aug. 2016]. SOUTH ASIA: JOURNAL OF SOUTH ASIAN STUDIES 737 political investment.69 On the contrary, waiting can generate productive political activism mobilisedaroundissuesofeducation, corruption and, more recently, gender discrimination and public hygiene. The 2014 video clip ‘Pissing Tanker: You Stop, We Stop’—which achieved over three million hits in less than a month —is a case in point.70 As Ira Raja and I have argued elsewhere, the ‘Pissing Tanker’ clip exults in the violent victimisation of men urinating in public by activist, even militarised, youth wielding a water cannon.71 Even though many of the men caught urinating in the video appear to belong to the subaltern class who have little or no recourse to more ‘civilised’ lavatory spaces such as in shopping malls and res- taurants, it is not only the underclass that engages in such unsavoury acts; middle-class men are equally guilty. Public space in India is clearly marked by gender norms and expectations, just as it is by the dynamics of class, caste and religion. The ‘Pissing Tanker’ video clip is a powerful illustration of how middle-class youth are impatient with the pace of change in the country. Operating independently of the state, their style seems more akin to civic terrorism, even if their actions are being carried out for the purposes of sanitising the cities of India. This paramilitary operation takes the ‘just do it’ motto to its logical extreme—hence the slogan ‘You Stop, We Stop’. Their actions are conducted with cold precision and derive from a strong conviction about what public space should look like in a modern city. There is an important difference between the ‘wholesome’ school-children who are recruited to clean parks and these more menacing and agitated youth who are initiating their sanitary cleansing action with water cannon. Surely these youth cannot be regarded as ‘exemplary citizens’; rather, their vigilantism is arguably a testimony to the failure of the idea of what citizenship entails. Their call to arms occurs precisely because India has not been able to adequately produce civic-minded citizens who care about ‘the public good’. While The Ugly Indian movement’s methods and objectives are markedly different from the vigilante groups, they share a similar view insofar as they too lament the ‘lack of civic sense’ amongst Indians.

Conclusion In this paper I have tried to show how ideological constructions about hygiene and sanitary habits have been inscribed on the modern male subject who is touted as the exemplary citizen. New memes continue to emerge, playing on images and terms contained in earlier educational charts that endorsed the behaviour of the Ideal Boy. While the original series lacked irony, the current meme wars posture, parody and criticise, demonstrating, as memes do, reﬂexivity and innovation. They capture scenarios from Indian domestic and public spaces, advancing particular views and values. This is not just a poster war, but a hygiene war; the victor could declare other usages of public space and regimes of value over what is considered public space and what is seen as ‘dirt’ (for example, Un-Hindu,

69. Craig Jeffrey, Timepass: Youth, Class, and the Politics of Waiting in India (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 2010); and Morten Koch Andersen, ‘Time-Use, Activism and the Making of Future’,inSouth Asia: Journal of South Asian Stud- ies, Vol. 39, no. 2 (June 2016), pp. 415À29. 70. See https://www.youtube.com/watch?vDaaEqZQXmx5M [accessed 25 Mar. 2016]. 71. See Doron and Raja, ‘The Cultural Politics of Shit’, pp. 202À4. 738 A. DORON gendered or class-based), and then potentially follow through with a physical campaign of ‘cleansing’. Having said that, the ‘meme war’ is part of a deliberative process that is taking place over social media about how to regenerate the body politic (morally, socially and materially). Unlike TUI, the ‘meme war’ is quite explicit in its political stance, even if its organisational and strategic effects are not designed to be transformative. As such, meme wars illustrate contesting ideological claims that are currently being made in the media and across social network sites over public spaces in India. The anonymous nature of the Ideal Boy and its competing meme avatars is a critical element in the rapid diffusion of these memes across the media. These instantly- recognisable images are generic, simple and designed to be inclusive—derivative of a well- known national project. The meaning of the original Ideal Boy may ring hollow to many in contemporary India, but in effect, such ‘anonymity’ renders the visual representation as effective mimetic signiﬁers into which certain ideologies (for example, liberal, Hindu Right, gendered) can be easily channelled in order to promote a collective sense of self— an expression of one’s identity. Deploying social media in this mimetic genre has little to do with effecting change and co-ordinating action; rather, its power and appeal lie in ‘the symbolic nature of communicative action’.72 Conversely, co-ordination, participation and transformation are critical elements in the ‘Ugly Indian’ and ‘Pissing Tanker’ social media campaigns, which also deploy the anonymous trope. In the examples of TUI and ‘Pissing Tanker’, the masked men spearheading such youth civic action are effectively bolstering the current government’s agenda. In other words, what we are seeing to differing degrees is the ‘cult’ of the decisive Indian who is not paralysed by indecision, which is not dissimilar to the way Prime Minister Modi portrays himself in the media. One way to appreciate the competing views and practices of public hygiene in India is to recognise the need for order, co-operation and the efﬁciency inherent in economies of scale. This is especially the case in large cities, where hygiene and functional sanitation systems are critical. Yet by its very nature, the diverse population that inhabits a city attaches multiple uses and values to public space. Silencing discussion by allowing only one voice to talk in effect endorses a particular discourse and an authoritarian plan of action. In order to recognise the diverse needs of city dwellers and arrive at a common solution, the terms and parameters of the debate must inform the design of the system and produce a participatory approach. The alternative future of clean Indian cities, imagined and enacted in the present by the cumulative efforts of youth across India, is laud- able; still, as I have tried to argue throughout, unless we interrogate the people behind the masks and challenge what they consider ‘dirty’ or ‘unclean’, the implications for those tagged as departing from the norms of correct behaviour and acceptable conduct could be devastating.

Acknowledgements

Earlier versions of this paper were given as a keynote lecture at a conference on ‘Culture, Technol- ogy and Development’, Lund University, Sweden, June 2014, and at a workshop on youth in South Asia, University of Oxford, May 2015. I am grateful to participants for their stimulating feedback. I would like to thank the two anonymous reviewers for South Asia, and the editor of the journal,

72. Gerbaudo and Trere, ‘In Search of the “We” of Social Media Activism’, p. 867. SOUTH ASIA: JOURNAL OF SOUTH ASIAN STUDIES 739

Kama Maclean, for their excellent suggestions for revisions. I am also grateful to Robin Jeffrey, Craig Jeffrey, Jenny Huberman, Ira Raja and Philip Taylor for their constructive comments on this article. Special thanks to Priyesh Trivedi, the creative artist behind Adarsh Balak, who kindly granted me the right to reproduce his image.

Disclosure Statement No potential conﬂict of interest was reported by the author.