Political Leadership

Political Leadership and the Urban Poor Local Histories
Author(s): Veena Das and Michael Walton

Source: Current Anthropology, Vol. 56, No. S11, Politics of the Urban Poor: Aesthetics,
Ethics, Volatility, Precarity ( October 2015), pp. S44-S54
Published by: The University of Chicago Press on behalf of Wenner-Gren Foundation for
Anthropological Research
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S44
Current Anthropology
Volume 56, Supplement 11, October 2015
Political Leadership and the Urban Poor

Local Histories
by Veena Das and Michael Walton
CA1 Online-Only Material: Supplements A and B
Based on survey research and ethnographic interviews, we analyze struggles over housing and access to infrastructure in two low-income unplanned settlements in the National Capital Region of Delhi, India. We argue that
political leadership in these two different areas cannot be regarded as a simple extension of traditional forms of
authority from the village to the city. Rather, the local leaders emerge in the process of learning how to engage institutional processes of law and bureaucracy in an urban context to secure housing and infrastructure. The enfolding of structures of governance with democratic politics in these neighborhoods reveals the overlapping movements
of law, bureaucracy, markets, and democratic mobilization through which social life is made durable for the urban
poor. Instead of asking what democracy has done for the poor in India, we shift the focus to ask, How does the work
that the poor perform through and with these institutions give form and substance to democracy in India?
The summary description of the course Foucault gave titled

The Birth of Biopolitics at the Collge de France in 1979
stated, What should be studied now is the way in which the
specic problems of life have been posed within a technology of government which has always been haunted, since
the end of the 18th century by the question of liberalism
(Foucault 2004:329; cited in Fassin 2009:37). One place to locate the technology of government is in the practices followed by bureaucrats, as in the excellent work of Gupta (2012)
and Hull (2012). Such technologies, however, also have a life
outside the ofces of the bureaucrats because they are negotiated in other places, such as in the low-income neighborhoods we describe in this paper. This shift of perspective
seems crucial if the poor are not to be seen as passive populations managed by different agents of the state, assigning
them a place outside the realm of politics almost by denition. We do not imply that the neighborhood can be treated
as a self-closed entity. Instead, our analytical task demands
that we incorporate different scales of social life in our
analysisthose of law, bureaucracy, electoral democracy,
forms of patronage, and the minutiae of power relations at
the level of neighborhoods we describe. We do not concep-
Veena Das is Krieger-Eisenhower Professor in the Department of

Anthropology of Johns Hopkins University (404 Macaulay Hall,
3400 North Charles Street, Baltimore, Maryland 21218, U.S.A.
[[email protected]]). Michael Walton is Senior Lecturer in Public
Policy at the John F. Kennedy School of Government at Harvard
University (79 Kennedy Street, Cambridge, Massachusetts 02138,
U.S.A.). This paper was submitted 4 VIII 14, accepted 15 V 15, and
electronically published 29 IX 15.
tualize the state or law as larger entities that contain the

smaller scale; rather, we are interested in seeing how phenomena at different scales intersect in the life of the neighborhood (Han 2013). Instead of regarding law, bureaucracy,
and the state as overarching institutions that regulate life
from above, we ask how these institutions are folded into the
life of the neighborhood (see Das 2011). While for Foucault,
technologies of governance have been haunted by questions
of liberalism, for us, the work that the poor perform in their
everyday lives interrogates the basic assumptions on which
liberal notions of the sovereign subject are based (see Englund 2012 for an elegant formulation of this issue).
We rst give a brief account of the legal and bureaucratic
structures within which various kinds of unplanned settlementssuch as recognized slums, unrecognized slums, unauthorized colonies, and resettlement coloniesare placed.
We then take up one particular casethat of housingand
offer a comparison between two different low-income settlements, each standing in a tense relation with law and bureaucracy (available in a PDF as CA1 online supplement B).
We then argue that the nature of political leadership that
has emerged in these two different areas does not result from
the simple extension of traditional forms of authority to the
city; rather, the local leaders emerge in the process of struggles for securing infrastructural necessities for sustaining everyday life. We do not wish to suggest that this makes the
leaders altruistic people working for the public good. Instead,
the rough and tumble of politicsits forms of patronage,
corruption, violence, as well as the possibilities of democratic
mobilizationbecome evident as we track the nature of political life through the efforts made for securing housing,
electricity, or water.
q 2015 by The Wenner-Gren Foundation for Anthropological Research. All rights reserved. 0011-3204/2015/56S11-0006$10.00. DOI:10.1086/682420
Das and Walton
Slums and Other Unplanned Settlements

According to the 2021 Master Plan of Delhi, the unplanned
settlements in Delhi can be divided into the following types:
resettlement sites, designated slums, urban villages, regularized unauthorized settlements, unauthorized settlements,
and squatter settlements, also known as JJ ( jhuggi jhopdi)
colonies. Different kinds of settlements enjoy different degrees
of security of tenure, so, for instance, designated slums have
rights against eviction under the Delhi Slum Act of 1956, and
resettlement sites that came up under the governments own
initiative, most notoriously during the beautication-cumsterilization drive under the National Emergency in 1976
(Tarlo 2003), gave permanent lease to holders over the land
allotted to them. Some squatter settlements might have obtained stay orders against eviction from courts, but the
possibility always looms over their lives. According to different estimates, about 50%70% of the population of Delhi
lives in these unplanned settlementsthus, these people
are not marginal to the life of the city but constitute its very
fabric.
Punjabi Basti: What Does It Mean

to Have an Address?
Punjabi Basti, located in West Delhi, is an area of 34 acres
with a built-up section of 21.59 acres. It has 2,318 plots
(combined houses and shops), though multiple households
may live within the same house. Let us take a deceptively
simple question: from where do these gures come? How did
a house or a shop acquire something as simple and taken for
granted as an address?1 Punjabi Basti did not gure as a separate colony in ofcial records till 1995 because it was assimilated in the larger area of Baljit Nagar. Even now, many
documents, such as ration cards or voter ID cards, record the
locality as Punjabi Basti, Baljit Nagar.
Until a few years ago, streets in Punjabi Basti did not have
numbers or names. Certain landmarks were used to orient
oneself to the placethus, crossroads were named after small
temples that had come up through local effort (e.g., Gayatri
Chowk is named after the goddess Gayatri). Certain sites were
marked after important events, such as the hosting of the national ag on independence day (Jhanda Chowk, literally
Flagstaff Crossing). Boundaries between neighborhoods were
uid. The geography of the area thus reected an order that
emerged from an evolving collective life rather than from ofcial planning or control.
Families of the earliest settlers in Punjabi Basti had moved
here from different parts of Delhi soon after 1976 because
1. Veena Das presented a more detailed analysis of the address interviews in this locality in the second M. N. Srinivas Memorial Lecture
at the Kings India Institute, London, in March 2013. Veena would like
to express her gratitude to Sunil Khilnani and Kapila Kriti for their
kind invitation and to members of the audience for their perceptive
comments.
S45
these settlers saw the opportunity to claim empty land. The

local term for this process is jagah gherna, which literally
means enclosure of a place, and it can be used in a neutral
way when people are making a reference to the amount of
labor that went to enclose a piece of unoccupied land and
convert it into a house. Alternately, the term has the connotation of illegality when one voices the perspective of law,
seeing the world through the eyes of government ofcials.
Residents of Punjabi Basti could take both perspectives, claiming simultaneously that it was their labor that had made the
area inhabitable and at the same time conceding that the land
had been taken without going through the legal mechanisms
that bestow ownership within the formal regime of property
relations.
Three of the older residents who gave detailed accounts of
their experiencesDhanno Devi, B. D. Joshi, and Hargovind
Ramgarhiawere among the rst settlers who moved to this
area in the seventies.2 All three migrated from other areas
of Delhi, where they were engaged as unskilled laborers hired
in construction work. The initial settlement was of about
40 households who had enclosed (encroached on) and demarcated certain areas and then worked this land to make it
inhabitable. These early settlers in time sold off parts of the
land they had occupied to othersJoshi claims, and others
agree, that at one time the whole street on which Joshi lives
was an enclosure created by him through the act of jagah
gherna and that he settled that part of Punjabi Basti.3 Such
transactions of land and shanties or houses have a very ambiguous place in law, although there are well-worked-out
procedures by which selling, buying, and renting houses takes
place within the local world in which such settlements are
made. While documents of these transactions are not registered in the Municipal Corporation, they are nevertheless
recognized through mutual witnessing (see Das 2011; Rao
2013).
According to Joshi, it was some time in the 1980s that a
major setback occurred. Ramjas Foundation, a large charitable foundation, claimed that it was the legal owner of the
land that these families had occupied and started to levy a
license fee on them. Ramjas Foundation also began to assign addresses to houses, which they used in licensee agreements with the residents and in receipts issued to them. These
addresses were assigned haphazardlyP124 could well be
nestling against D28and sometimes the same address was
2. In all, there were 40 interviews with residents from different parts
of the neighborhood on the address history of the house and the history
of street names.
3. The whole expression jagah ghernaenclosing a place from the
local perspective and encroaching on the land from the strict legal
perspectiverefers to the act of taking a piece of land and making it
ones own through ones labor. In other areas the term kabza is widely
used by residents in both India and Pakistan to refer to land or houses
or even mosques that are occupied and for which there are no legal
entitlements (patta). The difference between patta and kabza occurs in
various bureaucratic records and sale deeds.
S46
found on several different houses in different parts of the

colony. Because there were no street names, addresses were
indicated by landmarks, for example, 1128 near the Gayatri temple (see g. A1; gs. A1A4 available in CA1 online
supplement A).
Ramjas Foundation enforced its license fee by threats of
legal action and by the use of physical force. As an act of
deance, some residents started using different self-assigned
addresses. They also formed a registered society titled Punjabi Basti Sudhar Samiti (literally, Society for the Improvement of Punjabi Basti) in the same period. Thus, the initial
impetus to form themselves into a formal organization came
from the friction created by the threat posed by the Ramjas
Foundationaccording to Joshi, the ofce holders as well as
other members who were registered were local members of
the Congress Party.
The Legal Battle over Land Rights

The following summary of the legal issues is from Ramjas
Foundation v. Union of India, civil appeal no. 6662, led in
2004 and settled in 2010. Earlier cases by the Ramjas Foundation pertaining to the same land go back to 1959, 1968,
1971, and 1992. We focus on the points at which the Punjabi Basti residents claim over housing came to rub against
the claims of Ramjas Foundations ght with the Government of India over ownership of this land. The facts of the
case as they emerged in the process of adjudication were as
follows.
Rai Sahib Kedar Nath,4 who retired as district judge from
the Punjab Judicial Service, started three schools in parts of
old Delhi between 1912 and 1916 to honor the memory of
his father, Lala Ramjas Mal. Kedar Nath had bought 1,800
bighas of land from his own resources as well as through
donations in what were then the villages of Chowkri Mubarikabad and Sadhra Khurd. In a public function held on
December 25, 1916, Kedar Nath had announced that he had
formed a waq f (an inalienable religious endowment under
Islamic law) and donated all his movable and immovable
properties for charitable purposes to provide aid for the education of the poor.5 In 1917 he formed the Ramjas College
Society and had it duly registered under the Societies Registration Act, 1860. Later, he transferred all his property to
this society, which was renamed the Ramjas Foundation in
1967.
The legal conict with the Government of India has its
genesis in a notication issued in 1959, under the Land
4. Rai Sahib is a title bestowed by the British.
5. The term waq f refers to an inalienable religious endowment in
Islamic law typically denoting a piece of land or a building to be used for
charitable or Islamic religious purposes. However, because Persian words
were used freely in the Punjab by both Hindus and Muslims in this period, it is possible that the word denoted dedication of property for
charitable purposes independent of religious afliation.
Acquisition Act (sec. 4), by the Chief Commissioner of

Delhi, which proposed the acquisition of 34,070 acres of land
for planned development in Delhi of which a portion (870
bighas and 17 biswas)6 was claimed by the appellant. However, exemption from acquisition was granted to several categories of property, including waq f property. Ramjas Foundation claimed that the land it held was waq f property and
hence exempt from acquisition by the government. After hearing the arguments on whether a Hindu could create waq f
property, the court held that though Hindus could create waq f
property, it could only be used for furthering the cause of
Muslims or Islamic institutions. It is clear that while in 1916
words such as waqf were used in the general sense of an institution for charitable purposes, in independent India waq f
had become an exclusively Islamic category.
While this battle on the larger issues was being waged
in the courts, Ramjas Foundation led cases in lower courts
against several residents of Punjabi Basti and of adjoining
unauthorized colonies for nonrecovery of license fee. We
have documents that detail one such case, but we understand
that several residents faced police and legal action as well as
harassment by what are described in local narratives as hired
goons. The case we describe pertains to a lawsuit for recovery of possession and damages that was led in the Tis
Hazari Court in Delhi against one Daya Ram Yadav of Jhuggi
number D-204, Punjabi Basti, Baljit Nagar. It was claimed by
the plaintiff that the defendant was the licensee of the plaintiff in respect of land under Jhuggi number D-204 (though
now the locality is Punjabi Basti, Anand Parbat), which in the
revenue records appears as khasra number (i.e., plot number) 367 of the original village, Chowkri Mubarakabad, and
the license deed executed in 1986 was attached. The plaintiff
further demanded possession of this plot as well as damages
of Indian Rs 5,472 (ca. US$300 in 1990) for nonpayment of
the license fee.
The defendant (the jhuggi dweller) claimed that the plaintiff was neither owner nor in possession of said property and
that the land in dispute was owned and possessed by the
Government of India. He also claimed that the land in dispute did not even fall under the khasra (plot) number given
by the plaintiff but was registered under another number
and that the plaintiff had got some blank paper signed from
the defendant by taking advantage of his being illiterate.
In her judgment the presiding judge noted that the Ramjas
Foundation had known all along that its claims over the land
were in dispute. Having gone into the subtleties of lease versus license, the judgment nally stated that The notication (of land acquisition) was issued on 13.11.1959 and license was granted on 21.06.1986. Thus the plaintiff was
very well assured that the acquisition proceedings in respect
of the land (i.e., by the Government of India) of which the
suit property forms a part had been initiated. Thus the plain6. Bighas and biswas are local measures. A biswa is 125 m2, and 20
biswas make a bigha.
Das and Walton
tiff had no authority to create any licenses qua the land in

question.
People living in the area were not entirely clear about legal
and constitutional issues involved in the characterization of
waq f property. There was, nevertheless, a clear understanding that the legal strategy of the foundation was a continuation of the intimidation and coercion it had pursued. It is
worth emphasizing here that this particular conict was not
fought with the help of any activist organizations or legal
help cells outside the locality; rather, it was the Punjabi Basti
Sudhar Samiti led by Joshi that gathered the necessary expertise from various sources to ght for the residents because they understood that the rights over housing for all
residents were under threat if the Ramjas Foundation won
the case.
This conict with Ramjas Foundation looms over the
discussions with local leaders and other residents about the
nature of politics in the locality. Joshi claimed that they had
sought the help of various ofcials from the lower-level Patwari to the keeper of revenue records in the Delhi administration using various networks of lower-level workers in
these ofces to get access to higher-level ofcials. It is with
the help of the sympathetic ofcials that his organization had
extracted the khasra numbers that covered the area that the
Ramjas foundation was claiming as its own.7 In the process
of these legal battles, the residents had come to acknowledge
that although they had won the battle against the powerful
foundation, ownership of their land vested not with them but
with the Government of India. Here we want to point out that
there is an implicit acknowledgment of the fact that rights
over their dwellings are split between the government and
themselves in the contractual languages that have evolved for
transactions of buying and selling houses in the area.
A typical agreement of sale mentions the buyer and the
seller as well as the location of the property. It concludes,
however, with the statement that the money that is being
charged for the house is for malba and mehnat. Malba literally means debris, and, in the normal course of a construction, it is the material that must be removed after the
construction is complete. In the slums and JJ colonies, however, the word malba is used to refer to building materials
an acknowledgement of the provisional nature of the house
that is built. The word mehnat refers to labor or effort. It is
then fascinating to see that what is being sold is the cost of
materials and effortit is implicitly assumed that the land is
not theirs to sell. Yet there is a general sense of agreement in
the locality that rst, there are some rights over their dwellings
that have already accrued to the residents, and second, that
7. These are not vague references. Joshi named at least two ofcials of the
Delhi Development Authority who had been singularly helpful in teaching
their organization how to petition their department and the Department of
Revenue to get access to records. He also showed me several letters that he
had written to various ofcials on behalf of his organization in connection
with the harassment faced from the Ramjas Foundation.
S47
even if the particular plots of land on which they built their

houses are encroachments, the locality as a whole must engage with state agencies in order to improve their conditions
of living.
The Struggle for Electricity

The 138th Report of the Law Commission of India that was
given the mandate to report on how law could be marshaled
in aid of the poor had commented on civic provisions in
slum areas in the following terms:
The slum dwellers in occupation of their units situated
within the municipal limits are so often refused essential
facilities such as civic amenities, sanitary services, water
supply, street lighting, electricity supply, approach road etc.
Two grounds are mentioned for supporting such upholding or denying, viz. (1) that they are unauthorized occupation of land and/or (2) that they do not make any contribution by way of municipal taxes etc. (GOI 1990)
Elsewhere, Das (2014) has analyzed in some detail how the

locality managed to get electricity and the efforts made by
one of the local leaders, Sanjeev Gupta, a Congress Party
worker and ofce bearer of the Punjabi Basti Sudhar Samiti.
Gupta had formed another registered society with different
ofce bearers because he felt that different civic issues require different organizations to be at the forefront of the
struggle. Here we briey recapitulate some of the important
points through which the project for getting electricity legally was waged.8
The story of the electrication of this neighborhood begins with the privatization of electricity in Delhi in the years
between 2000 and 2002. When power reforms began in 2002
in Delhi in light of the heavy losses incurred by the stateowned Delhi Vidyut Board, the latter was unbundled into
three privately owned companies. Sanjeev Gupta and many
others told us about the terrible harassments that residents
faced when electricity ofcials of the private company lodged
complaints with the police about theft of electricity. As in
8. It is of course true that the material character of different resources (houses, land, electricity, water, garbage, sewage) leads to organizational differences in how services might be prioritized, but it
would be hasty to assume that, say, electricity is less important than
water because one can always do without electricity but one cannot do
without water. First, many households run small karkhanas (workshops) in the house or engage in other forms of domestic production
that require electricity, so that frequent cuts in the supply of electricity
or increasing the rates can jeopardize the economic resources available
to a household (see Das 2014). It is also the case that once people begin
to make a distinction between water that is t for drinking and cooking
vs. water for other kinds of domestic or industrial use, there are concomitant changes in how a household organizes itself for getting water. In Punjabi Basti, all households surveyed used more than one source
for accessing water. We have not analyzed the survey data from other
localities.
S48
most such neighborhoods, people had earlier drawn electricity illegally from street poles to draw lines to their homes,
shops, or karkhanas (workshops) to power domestic or commercial appliances (see g. A2). The networks of private contractors and low-level ofcials of the Municipal Corporation
who were routinely bribed had assured that the residents did
not face criminal charges for theft of electricity. Now with
privatization they were nding that the game plans had completely changed. Sanjeev Gupta used his position as the president of the zonal congress committee to arrange a meeting
(sometime in 2005) between the representatives of the locality and the ofcer in charge from the zonal division of the
company Bombay Suburban Electric Supply (BSES) to discuss
the issue of electricity theft and harassment. Here is the description of what transpired (we juxtapose fragments of the
account given by Sanjeev Gupta [in Hindi] to Veena over several informal discussions with an account of the issues involved in electrication as given by one of the ofcers [Vidyut
Sir]9 of the private company who granted an interview to
Veena [mostly in English]) by Sanjeev Gupta.
After electricity was privatized, there was this big move to
install metersnow, as you know, in colonies like ours
there were no regular metersthere were local contractors
who used to supply electricity for payment by drawing
lines from the high tension wiresor else, many people
drew the lines themselves, and there were regular payments
extracted by the local linesmen and the policemen. We said
to Vidyut Sir, Sir, we have been demanding regular supply of electricity, but you do not sanction meters for us. On
top of it you le complaints, and the police treat us like
criminals. They come and catch hold of the person by the
neck as if he has committed a major crime, as if he is a
murderer. What kind of justice is this? Vidyut Sir replied
that their records showed how much electricity had been
consumed in this locality and what was the recovery of
money against it. He said vehemently, I say on that basis, I
say that I have proof, I say, that people are stealingthey
are thieves. We said, Sir ji, how can you call us thieves? If
you dont give us electricity on the grounds that we are not
an authorized colonyand people naturally need electricitya man wants to run a fan, his little children are
burning in the heathe will get electricity with whatever
meansthen why call him a thief ?10
In his interview with Das, Vidyut Sir related how his boss
and he were both struck by the force of Sanjeev Guptas
argumentwas it ethical of them to deny electricity to people when the government was itself tolerating these unauthorized colonies? But they were also concerned as to how
9. All personal names in the paper except that of Sanjeev Gupta (on
his own request) are pseudonyms. The sufx Sir simply follows local
practice to denote respect.
10. Politicians are sometimes honored by the addition of the Hindi
particle ji, which is also used in contexts of kinship.
they would be able to recover costs, because the addresses

were all haphazard, and there were no numbers or names of
streets. As he said, It was a maze.
Sanjeev Gupta for his part was truly stung by the accusation of theft and vowed that they would remove this stigma
of theft from their locality. As he related, Vidyut Sir guided
usso did another ofcer. The big issue was that houses did
not have addresses in sequential order, streets did not have
names or numberssometimes if a linesman was expected
to deliver a bill, the client would simply rip apart his meter
and say, my house is not C4that house is in another street.
Through interactions with the ofcers in BSES, Gupta came
to understand the importance of getting an authorized map
of the area with house numbers, for without a list of houses
and their correct addresses, the electricity company could not
install meters.
Sanjeev Gupta and some other leaders then organized
meetings in the area and persuaded most households to
contribute Rs 200 per household for a map of the area. After
many difculties due to the topography of the area, a private
rm of architects nally made a map. After an exchange of
many letters, petitions, and pressure from the chief ministers ofce, the town planner of the municipal corporation
nally approved the map (see g. A3). This enabled the BSES
to prepare a list of consumers and to install meters in the
houses after augmenting electricity supply by installing seven
transformers in the area. In the process, each house was
assigned a new number, but Sanjeev Gupta managed to get
the electricity company to agree to write both the old numbers and the new number on the bills so that now, in all
ofcial correspondence, the address appears to be a composite of the two numbers. In that way, electricity bills can
be used for purposes of establishing residence for any new
scheme, but residents do not have to apply again for change
of address for such purposes as bank accounts.
We do not want to give the impression that all thisthe
map making, the assigning of new numbers, the installation
of the transformerswas achieved by agreements arrived
through rational deliberative discourse. Accusations have been
made in the locality that all the money that was collected
was not properly accounted for. There were ghts over the
exact location of the transformersfor instance, the leader
of the local dalits complained about a transformer being
placed in the Ambedkar Park that adjoins the streets where
most dalits live, saying it amounted to an insult to Ambedkars memory.
The gravest threats to Sanjeev Gupta came not openly but
in many covert ways from the network of entrepreneurs
who were earlier supplying electricity illegally and whose
business was adversely affected.11 One day when Sanjeev
11. It was not possible to locate the persons who constituted this
network, but some employees of the earlier Delhi Vidyut Board were
implicated.
Das and Walton
Gupta was relating the efforts they had to make to complete

the project, he suddenly choked, and his eyes were tearing.
He said, I was even attacked one night when I was coming
home. What happened? Did you get hurt? No but they
showed me a revolver and told me to stop these activities.
Who were they? Oh, the ones who do this dukandari
[literally, market transactions, but carrying a tone of illicit transactions here]whose dhandha [illicit work] would
have stopped. Did you report to the police? No, the local
police are always on their side. So what did you do? How
do you know you are safe? I told you I was not a die-hard
Congress man. I am in the party because I cannot do without
it. So those above were informed, and they must have talked
to themafter all, the ones who were intimidating me are
also part of the same set up.
It was characteristic of Sanjeev Guptas mode of relating a
story that he refused to name those who had intimidated or
threatened him. Clearly, he lived and worked in a context in
which people were involved in what he thought of as corruption. For instance, when describing an ongoing case of demolition of shanties in an adjoining neighborhood in which
many poor people lost their abodes, he predicted that they
would be back and would reoccupy the land but that they
would have to pay again to the very people who had rst encouraged them to occupy the vacant land. It is the same people who had rst allowed them to occupy this land by giving an extortion fee to them and then had the demolition
squads out and will now again extract money from them. He
would only name the people as the local bhu maa (land
maa)you think that land maas all come from outside
with the big building lobbies, but there is a local bhu maa,
too, that operates right from within. Gupta said, people are
60% good and 40% bad. The general sense was that relations
of proximity required that one saw in everyone some good and
some bad.
We reserve the commentary on these struggles for housing
and electricity for the conclusion, but we do wish to underscore that an authorized map became a major resource for
an application that was moved on behalf of the locality to
Delhi Development Authority to convert the neighborhood
into an authorized colony, which was given provisional approval. We now move on to the second neighborhood, the
shanty settlements in Sector 5 and Sector 8 of Naveen Okhla
Industrial Development Authority (NOIDA).
NOIDA: The Politics of Surveys

NOIDA was set up as part of the National Capital Region
during the National Emergency (19751976) to absorb increasing migration to the city. The administration was later
taken over by the Uttar Pradesh government as migration
increased. According to the 2011 census, the current population of NOIDA is 642,381, and it is primarily composed
of migrants from other cities as well as rural migrants. The
ofcial descriptions of the township boast of a high literacy
S49
rate (89%) as well as major educational institutions and a

hospital in every residential sector. Yet nestling in between
these afuent zones are the clusters of shanty settlements,
some of whose residents have been living there for more
than 40 years. What started as settlements of mud and straw
shanties have now become crowded settlements with most
houses made of bricks and cement, though they are still tiny,
often windowless, and with no proper drainage. The narrow
spidery mud lanes are dotted with garbage dumps, open
drains, and stagnant water pools, and very few houses have
proper toilet facilities.
An interesting feature of the political landscape among the
poor of both Punjabi Basti and NOIDA is the proliferation of
local leaders, but whereas in Punjabi Basti, a leader will
speak of himself in terms of specic achievementsthis one
for getting electricity meters, that one for arranging water
tankers or for getting a tube wellin NOIDA the picture has
become much more confusing, with considerable rancor
over who has achieved what.12 It was rare to nd any local
leaders who did not trade accusations of siphoning off benets for their own relatives or party members. In much of
the literature on urban slums in Delhi, it is assumed that the
term Pradhan refers to those who wield traditional authority
on the basis of caste.13 However, we found that the authority
claimed by Pradhans (a term used much more frequently in
NOIDA than in Punjabi Basti) is based on their associations
with particular political parties or with politicians at the
district or state level rather than on the basis of caste.
The Struggle over Housing

People attribute some of the changes in the structure of
leadership, which they say has descended to a state of anarchy, to the fact that NOIDA has a dual administrative
structure because it is part of the National Capital Region
and also a part of the District of Buddhanagar in Uttar Pradesh. They also see the shift in the nature of leadership as
part of a generational shift that has taken place in the structure of sensibilities as new migrants have come into the neighborhoodab har ghar mein Pradhan hainhar koi apne
12. This is not to say that there are no counter claims or accusations
of corruption but that we usually found that a leader could back his
claim by showing documents that he had amassed on his role in securing a particular resource for the neighborhood.
13. Thus, e.g., Jha, Rao, and Woolcock (2007) state at one point in
their paper on the theme of governance in slums in Delhi that the
governance structure depends much on traditional gram and caste panchayat, but they also acknowledge that in their interviews they found
that the authority of the Pradhan has waned in matters of property
transactions (see also Harris 2005). The only locality in which we found a
semblance of caste Pradhans was in Kathputli Colony in which street
artists had been settled through the intervention of a famous advocate
for street arts but the governance structure had been put in place more
through the authority of the bureaucrats than being organic to the
communities.
S50
ko Pradhan manta hai (now every house has a Pradhaneveryone thinks of himself as Pradhan). However, in 1998, when
Das initiated an exploratory project on the urban poor in Sector 5, there was only one recognized Pradhan, Nathu Ram,
whom she interviewed a number of times in 1998.
Nathu Ram rose to a position of power in the locality
some time in the midseventies because of his ability, he said,
to deal with outsiders, especially the agents of the state, such
as policemen. In this aspect he was somewhat like the big
men rst made famous by Godelier and Strathern (1991),
because he did not represent traditional authority. Although
not the traditional caste Pradhan, Nathu Ram used his dense
kinship connections in the area to build support. He counted
eight families of close relatives who lived within the same
cluster of jhuggis, while other, more distant relatives had
been encouraged by him to come and settle in an adjacent
park on kabza land. We should note that there were no
formal mechanisms for the selection of Pradhans (as is the
case in rural areas), but people sought Nathu Rams mediation in personal disputes or to deal with the police (Harris
2005). His authority was evident in different projects he
initiated for the settlement (see Das 2011).
Let us fast forward to the nineteen eighties, when the
residents of the area were embroiled in a conict with the
neighboring Gujjar community, the original residents of
the area before it was claimed for industrial development.14
For the Gujjars, whose fortunes over the years had changed
radically as they too had taken advantage of the growth of
industry in this area, the presence of a lower-caste cluster of
jhuggis in the neighborhood was seen as threatening to their
economic dominance and would, they feared, corrupt their
young people. Nathu Ram explained to me that most men
in the jhuggis were performing the tasks of sweepers or working as load carriers for the local factories that were coming up
since the late seventies. These were not jobs that the Gujjars
were willing to take on because of their higher status, but as
longtime settlers in the villages in this area they did not want
new settlements to come up. The Gujjars had clout with the
police, so the police were all set to demolish their jhuggis.
In Nathu Rams words, the bulldozers were literally on our
threshold.
Someone advised Nathu Ram that he should try to get a
court order to stall the demolitions. The lack of specicity
in Nathu Rams account of who that someone was or how
he came to know him was a common feature of narratives
among the urban poor that Das encountered in the early
years of her research here. This particular feature indexed
the diffused forms of knowledge over which no one ever had
full control but that one could follow, and, like a gamblers
move, it could pay dividends. (A new generation of leaders,
14. Though classied as a backward community now belonging

to the administrative category of Other Backward Castes, historians
identify several past kingdoms as Gujjar or Gurjara in origin.
though still unclear about how to make the legal or bureaucratic system work, are much more savvy about the nature of
party politics at the state level.) Having gathered this bit of
advice, Nathu Ram decided to go to the High Court in the
city of Allahabad, though he did not seem to know anyone
there. From his own account, it appeared that he would go to
the High Court with a bag of chickpeas and sit on the stairs
hoping that someone would take notice of him. We should
note that such a strategy for getting attention of state ofcials, of doctors, of teachers, though not routine, is not uncommon. As luck would have it, an activist lawyer saw him
sitting there everyday and asked him what he wanted. Nathu
Ram explained his predicament, and the lawyer agreed to le
a petition for a stay order on the ground that the residents
belonged to the scheduled caste category, were economically
downtrodden, and hence should not be deprived of their
homes and their means of livelihood. The lawyer, however,
insisted that the jhuggi dwellers legally register themselves as
a society under the Uttar Pradesh Registration of Societies
Act, 1860. The jhuggi residents thus acquired the legal status
of a Registered Society under the title of Harijan Mazdur
Sangharsh Sabha.15 They were successful in obtaining a stay
order from the court and used it in bargaining with the police. Simultaneously, they tried to pursue the demand for
alternative accommodations with various political parties,
especially during elections, organizing public meetings, holding demonstrations, and submitting petitions to various political leaders. Despite promises made every 5 years during
elections that alternative housing would be provided to them,
nothing concrete has resulted from these endeavors.
The registered society formed by Nathu Ram had become
defunct in 2001, having failed to meet certain procedural
requirements. Nathu Rams nephew had helped in registering it under another nameJhuggi Jhopdi Welfare Associationbut this nephew absconded soon after to escape
arrest because of a criminal case in which he was involved.
The society was again registered in 2006, this time with the
nephews son (Vinod) who had now risen to a position of
some power as the executive head. Under the auspices of this
society, there was a writ petition led in court submitting
the names of 1,140 jhuggis as eligible for allotment of alternate housing. The High Court found merit in the petition
and ordered the NOIDA administration to provide alternate accommodations to these households on the payment
of 62,000, to be paid in monthly installments of Rs 120 per
household. The lawyers of the society contested this decision
on the grounds that as a welfare state, India could not charge
such exorbitant sums from the poor. The listing of these
15. The name of the society bears trace of the intervention of the
upper caste lawyer who might have suggested the name. Harijan was the
term Gandhi used for untouchables, but later dalit leaders rejected this
appellation. Of the 23 or so registered societies that are now active in the
local politics of the area, none uses caste terms, preferring such titles as
Jhuggi-Jhopdi Welfare Association, Society for Workers Struggle, etc.
Das and Walton
1,140 jhuggis, however, led to other petitions led on behalf

of other registered societies claiming that their members had
been left out of the list of those entitled to receive alternate
housing. Thus far, any agreement on who are the legitimate
beneciaries of the original petition has eluded the locality
as bitter ghts have broken out over who is to be included
or excluded from the list of recipients entitled to alternate
accommodations.
Thus, for example, two new registered societies led writ
petitions in the Allahabad High Court against the attempts
to evict them from their hutments even as late as 2010. The
Allahabad High Court in 2010, in a case led by a coalition
of local NGOs (Jhuggi Jhopri Nagrik Kalyan Mahasabha)16
versus the NOIDA Authority, gave specic instructions regarding rehabilitation of the jhuggi dwellers and passed a
new interim order based on the existing order of 1998. There
were other writ petitions led accusing the NOIDA authority of contempt of court for not acting expeditiously on the
orders of the court. In response, NOIDA Authority ofcials
assured the court that a new scheme for rehabilitation of
jhuggi dwellers had now been nalized and that a fresh
survey would be conducted in 2010 to identify all legitimate
jhuggi dwellers. The results of this survey were posted on
the NOIDA Authority website, but the number of jhuggis
identied were far fewer than the actual existing jhuggis at
that time. For instance, the website mentioned 525 jhuggis
in Sector 5 whereas our census showed 830 jhuggis in one
cluster alone in this sector. Thus, individual petitions as well
as collective appeals to political parties continued against the
NOIDA authority.
It would be evident from the above description that the
matter of securing rights over their residence did not end for
the jhuggi dwellers with obtaining the various interim orders against eviction. It is true that this protected them from
demolition of their homes, but it did not ensure that they
were provided alternative plots of land or apartments with
permanent rights, which is their goal.17 Rather, the jhuggi
dwellers continued to nd a variety of ways in which they
could deepen their claims over housing.
At the individual level, the strategy for deepening the
claims over the jhuggis built on occupied land is to gather as
many documents as possible to establish long-term residency. The most important of these documents are ration
16. Despite many efforts, we were not able to trace on whose initiative this coalition formed, but it is clear that despite its name, it does
not represent the different NGOs in the area.
17. In this regard the trajectory of the politics of compensation in
Mumbai has taken a very different turn, showing the importance of the
specicity of local histories rather than appealing to some generic
notions such as neoliberal reform (see Anand 2011 and Roy 2009 for an
incisive analysis of the issues raised by the coexistence of repressive land
policies in Mumbai represented by the bulldozer and the spaces for
negotiation with builders that opened up as the milieu changed; see also
n. 21).
S51
cards and voter identity cards. The new impetus by the government to cover the entire population of India through
unique identity cards had not yet had an effect on household
strategies of building incremental rights over their dwellings, although this was already emerging as a major issue
in 2013. The strategies used by leaders for security of tenure
has since come to focus on two alternative goalseither to
secure alternate accommodations or to get permanent rights
over the land that they have occupied. At the collective level,
different political leaders at the local level who are afliated
with different political parties continue to petition powerful
politicians, form new registered societies, and use the media,
especially during elections. Yet the bureaucratic plans for rehabilitation are following their own logic. We visited Sector 125, where in 2012 an area was earmarked for multistory
buildings for rehabilitation of all jhuggi dwellers. There were
tenders oated by NOIDA authority to invite builders to
submit building plans, but it was equally clear to the inhabitants that the issue was not going to be resolved in any
hurry. An articles in the Hindi newspaper Amar Ujjala, for
instance, had reported on March 13, 2011, that the 2010
survey yielded a total of 11,500 jhuggi dwellers in ve sectors
of NOIDA and that a tender for 3,472 ats was oated. Although application forms for allotment of ats were made
available and advertised, there were few takers, as considerable controversy broke out over the authenticity of names
included in the survey in the localities as well as the conditions of allotment. The very discrepancy between the number
of jhuggi dwellers identied in the survey and the number
for which a tender was oated was evidence for people that
the bureaucracy was making empty gestures to satisfy the
courts.
Thus, a stalemate continued on the plans for alternative
accommodations (Chatterji 2005 and Chatterji and Mehta
2007 for similar conicts in Mumbai at the time of their eldwork in 2001 and 2002 in Dharavi). Meanwhile, with parliamentary elections scheduled in 2014, many local inhabitants
who were politically connected started converting their jhuggis into two-storied pucca houses in both Sector 5 and sector 8 because they were convinced that no demolitions would
be risked in an election year. In this case, at least, their gambles paid off.
Unlike the case of Punjabi Basti in which, despite the
presence of different political parties and the electoral contests, the local leaders had been able to unite over the issue
of getting an authorized map or electricity meters, in the case
of NOIDA, the surveys to determine who were the original
inhabitants and who were the newcomers generated intense
open conict so that no nal survey could be taken as the
authorized document for recognizing rights for claiming
compensation in the event of resettlement. Thus, the form
that local politics took in these two areas shows the importance of local ecologies: rather than a generic category of
the poor, what we nd is that local histories of settlements
are vital for understanding how governmentality and dem-
S52
ocratic politics inect each other to produce different outcomes.18

As the paper by Amarasuriya and Spencer (2015) shows,
the ethnographic present poses especially important challenges for analysis as changes at the level of state politics
can translate rapidly into the rise and fall of particular local
leaders and particular projects. In the years since the bulk of
data collection was done in the two areas described here,
Delhi saw the changing fortunes of political parties that included the near decimation of the Congress Party in 2015
after it had ruled Delhi from 1998 to 2013, the national rise
of the Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP), and its subsequent defeat
at the hands of Aam Admi Party (AAP) in the assembly
elections in 2015. But part of the burden of our argument is
precisely to show the fragility and volatility of the housing
and infrastructure projects in these areas and the waxing
and waning of aspirational politics that emerges within this
milieu of uncertainty. What can the struggle for housing and
for better infrastructure then tell us about the politics of the
urban poor even as we argue in this volume that any generic
category of the urban poor is not helpful except as a placeholder (see Das and Randeria 2015)?
Do the Poor Have Politics?

Some political philosophers have argued that because the
poor are driven by the immediacy of need, they are not
capable of the kind of collective action that constitutes the
realm of politics. In Hannah Arendts (1963) view, for instance, the raison dtre of politics is freedom, and its eld of
expression is action. Action, however, is distinguished from
both labor and workthe rst related to necessity, wants,
and urges and the second to self-expression, as evidenced
in the work produced by the artisan. Neither of the two
constitutes the realm of freedom and collective action that
Arendt considers as attributes of politics. A full development
of the critique of Arendt is not possible here, but even if we
were to grant that the kind of struggles over needs (for
housing, electricity) we describe here fall more on the side of
work than labor because there is an aspiration for infrastructural projects that would be lasting, these forms of collective action would still constitute only the conditions of
possibility for politics to arise in Arendts framework, not
evidence of politics itself.19
18. We invite the reader to pursue the tables provided in CA1

supplement B to see the differences in the access to housing and infrastructure in Punjabi Basti and NOIDA. We also want to stress that
interpersonal enmities, land grabbing, and forceful occupation of empty
plots were not entirely absent in Punjabi Basti and point to our sense
that new congurations of power relations might arise. What effect
these congurations will have on the ongoing projects for access to
water and sewage disposal must be left as an open question for now.
19. We thank Michael Degani for pushing us to think further on
these issues, though we must leave a fuller examination of the impli-
From our perspective, such theories as advanced by

Arendt often bypass the question of what it is that the poor
actually do. While subaltern studies in India did much to
analyze the subaltern groups as political actors, their exclusive emphasis on resistance does not help in analyzing the
way in which the poor participate in political activities as
part of their everyday lives. Chatterjees (2004) concept of
political society, though more sensitive to everyday life, creates a teleological story in which the efforts of the poor are
seen as converting a population into a moral community
by engaging politicians over such issues as housing and electricity, but the notion of moral community manages to erase
any signs of the power struggles within the community.
In the case of both neighborhoods discussed here, the
trigger to organize themselves for collective action came in
the form of a crisis over housing. The turn to the courts of
law in both cases was initiated to avert a crisis, though the
nature of this crisis was somewhat different. In the case
of Punjabi Basti, it was the ght with a powerful private
foundation, which led to the formation of the Punjabi Basti
Sudhar Samiti. Although the cases the foundation had led
were against individuals, it is very important to underscore
that residents were able to see this as a collective threat that
required action on behalf of the whole community. In the
case of NOIDA, it was the ght between migrants and the
local settled population that led to recourse to law, which
was intended in the rst place to ward off police action
against them. The trajectories that these ghts took became
quite different. In the case of Punjabi Basti, the local leaders
were able to forge sufcient unity among themselves to establish an authorized map of the colony. They took the initiative to organize their own surveys and, despite conicts of
various kinds in the locality, they were able to get a nal
agreement on the list of homeowners as well as establish a
boundary of the locality.20 In the case of NOIDA, the conduct of surveys was left to the administrative authority.
While surveys to x titles were periodically conducted and
a number was produced each time, an agreement on a nal
list of homeowners eluded the residents. Instead, the number itself led to further escalation of conicts within the
neighborhood along lines of party politics or along different
spheres of inuence.
cations of our ndings for the tripartite arrangement of labor, work, and
action in Arendt for another occasion. However, see Pitkin (1998) for a
sympathetic but rigorous critique of Arendts insistence that labor and
work do not belong to the domain of politics.
20. We do not wish to suggest that people regularly participate in the
activities of the NGOs and of registered societies or even regard themselves as members of these organizations in any formal sense. In the case
of Punjabi Basti, the agreement to be represented by the relevant NGO
for taking the claims of the locality to the ofcials for getting it regularized was an important step. In the case of NOIDA, the proliferation
of registered societies, each with its own claim of representing the residents, reected an escalation of conict.
Das and Walton
We also saw that in both cases local leaders were connected with political leaders from outside the locality. They
were also able to petition bureaucrats or ofcials who helped
them to negotiate the complex terrain of rules and regulations. Local leaders in Punjabi Basti stressed the importance of learning about the system, inserting the English
word, though they are not English speakers. In the case of
NOIDA, the connections with politicians were used most
often to increase ones own sphere of inuencethe leaders
in this locality saw these as personal ties. For instance, they
emphasized the importance of having such connections for
negotiating with the police in cases where someone was accused of petty crimes or got caught in local disputes. Thus,
elements of patronage were present in both cases, but in one
case the local leaders were able to establish a measure of
autonomy while in the second case the local leaders saw
themselves primarily as mediators who delivered goods
such as votes or people for political rallies in exchange for
the inuence yielded by the politician-patrons in negotiations with police or with local government ofcials.
We also want to underscore that the poor participate actively in electoral politics, but they do not see elections as the
only political activity they engage in. In a random sample of
1,200 households drawn from four localities (including these
two clusters in NOIDA), it was found that 86% respondents
had voting cards and 75% reported voting in elections.21 However, when in detailed ethnographic interviews with 40 households chosen from the sample we asked the reasons why
people voted, it turned out that one prominent reason was
that they thought that their names would be struck off the
voters list if they did not vote and that in the absence of a
voter card they would not be able to have proof of residence.
They feared that this would lead to their being excluded
from different government schemes, including rights to alternate accommodations. Thus, far from wishing to evade
the eyes of the state, in these matters, at least, they were
demanding to be counted as citizens with entitlements that
they could claim without being seen as recipients of charity.
It is not that other considerations for voting for one or
other candidate were not offered. In Punjabi Basti, people
spoke of MLAs (Members of the Legislative Assembly), MPs
(Members of Parliament), or ward councilors in terms of
who had done what for the constituency. In NOIDA, too, the
Uttar Pradesh state-level politics were watched closely for
any shift in policy regarding the right to alternate accommodations (see g. A4). What was striking, though, was the
sense that they were entitled to live in the city and that it was
their votes that had brought the politicians into positions of
power. These kinds of considerations and calculations might
21. The source of these gures is a CPR-ISERDD survey of 1,200

households in four localitiestwo in Delhi and two in NOIDA funded
by the ESRC-funded study referred to in the acknowledgments.
S53
not constitute politics in the purest form as Arendt envisaged it, but we claim that it is in the process of engaging the
legal, administrative, and democratic resources that are available to themin courts, in ofces of the bureaucrats, and in
the party ofcesthat the poor learn to become political actors and not simply recipients of the states benets.22
Perhaps the most important point we want to underscore
is that we should be considering not simply how well democracy has served the poor but how democratic politics
have been deepened by the participation of the poor. After
all, it is because they have put political labor into going to
courts, insisting that the law take into account what the
constitutional provision of the right to life actually means, or
their active participation in asking how city life is to be made
viable that democracy has taken shape, for all its benets and
its shortcomings. We can do no better than cite Sanjeev
Gupta, who, with some assistance from Veena Das, was able
to write an op-ed piece in the national newspaper, the Indian
Express, articulating his criticisms against the policies of
AAP, who won the Delhi elections in 2014 (Gupta 2014) and
who has now emerged again as the ruling party with a
thumping majority. Gupta then wrote, For us, democracy is
measured by the spaces for action that are opened up for us
and not by the free gifts we might be given as charity. We
have worked to shift the perspective of our fellow residents
from that of expecting charity to that of demanding rights.
This aspiration might not be an accomplished fact, nor
might the position of Gupta be assured within the neighborhood as old enmities reemerge with the change of
fortunes at the level of state politics, but the articulation of
such an aspiration is not to be dismissed either. Neither the
talk of the lure of elections as expressions of the sacred
(Banerjee 2007) nor the assumption that it is the ubiquity of
relations of patronage that provide durability to politics in
India (Piliavasky 2014) provides us with the framework of
understanding how to conceptualize the kind of aspirations
we described here or the work done by those who inhabit the
poorly served areas in Delhi as a sign of the thickening and
deepening democracy in India.
22. Nikhil Anand (2011) makes the important point that large-scale
mobilization for housing rights, political representation, and what he
calls the moral economy of petitions and favors may have been able to
secure infrastructural services in the slum areas in Mumbai, but they
also serve to create further claims to resettlement. Thus, the politics of
compensation that has led to negotiated settlements between developers and settlers in many areas in Mumbai cannot be simply treated as
a compromised form of insurgent citizenship (see also Roy 2009 for a
nuanced argument on how rights to resettlement and accumulation by
dispossession coexist in Mumbai). None of this is to deny that bulldozers are still used to dismantle whole settlements, but it complicates
the issue of why a differential geography emerges in the city with regard
to the possible forms of political action against eviction.
S54
Acknowledgments
We are grateful to Charu Nanda, Rajan Singh, Geeta, Purshottam, Simi Chaturvedi, and Syyed Zargham Mian at the
Institute for Socio-economic Research on Development and
Democracy (ISERDD) for excellent support in the eld. The
larger study is Citizens and the State in Urban India, funded
by the Economic and Social Research Council as project
RES-167-25-0520 and located at the Center for Policy Research and ISERDD, Delhi. An earlier version of this paper
was presented at Universidad Nacional de Saint Martin at
Buenos Aires in 2014 by Veena Das. She would like to thank
Juan Obarrio for his excellent support in helping her nd
connections between this work and the concerns of scholars
in Buenos Aires; she would also like to thank members of the
faculty and graduate students at the university for their engagement and critical comments.
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Political Leadership and the Urban Poor Local Histories

Author(s): Veena Das and Michael Walton

Wenner-Gren Foundation for Anthropological Research, The University of Chicago

Volume 56, Supplement 11, October 2015