Brokers, NGOs, and the Varying Pattern of Clientelism in India’s Urban Slums

• In Event: Power and Politics in Urban Space

Abstract

How do urban slum communities engage with the state to make claims and receive services? This theory-building study attempts to unravel how state-citizen linkages change by combining process tracing with a small-n comparison of slums in two Indian cities - Delhi and Bengaluru - and exploring reasons for divergence in how the contours of slum politics is shaped. In many developing countries in the Global South, political systems are often characterized by clientelism and patronage politics. Citizen–state linkages are often mediated through patron-client networks, particularly so for urban poor. In India, famously described as a “patronage democracy”, clientelism is seen as a permanent feature of politics whereby political support is traded for targeted rewards [Chandra, 2007; Kitschelt & Wilkinson; Blomkvist, 2011; Bardhan and Mookherjee, 2012; Piliavsky, 2014]. Urban slum commuities occupy “extra-legal” space and cannot often make formal legitimate claims on the state. Thus evolves the realm of "political society", a negotiated space where political support is traded strategically to access the stat for a range of things - everyday services, election time rewards, contact political representatives and so on [CIT]. Pivotal to this process are intermediaries - informally chosen slum leaders, self-appointed brokers, and political operators with competing networks and rewards. Against this background, the surprise win of the newly launched Aam Aadmi Party (AAP) in the Delhi State legislative election in 2015 seems like an anomaly. A new entrant to politics, AAP’s decisive victory challenged the established wisdom about clientelism and vote bank politics, given its lack of entrenched patron-client networks as well anti-corruption messaging. More importantly, it garnered a lot of support among urban slum communities, counterintuitive to what is predicted about their predisposition towards clientelism. AAP in many ways is an indication of the broader changing contours of citizen–state engagement and claim-making in Delhi’s slums since it goes along with recent evidence of decline of slum leaders and the increasing role of NGOs informing slum dynamics , particularly with respect to everyday engagement around services. Focusing on how communities navigate everyday service delivery needs, this paper examines when and why urban slum communities choose to shift away from clientelistic slum leaders and act through NGOs and CBOs? When does citizen-state engagement shift from political to civil society? In contrast to simply treating the case of Delhi as a deviation from the normal, I contextualize the interesting trajectory of slum politics in Delhi by comparing it to patterns of claim-making in Bangalore, where citizen-state engagement takes place along traditional lines. Institutional explanations trace back the degree of clientelism to variations in service provision – when service provision improves, the need for clientelism is reduced. This is a compelling explanation but it is incomplete. The macro-policy context affects both the nature of service provision as well as how state-citizen linkages are mediated, and together these determine the role of leaders. My argument is that when everyday service provision is predictable and institutionalized, reliance on leaders decreases particularly since the urban slum populations discount the future. When service delivery is much more contentious, political, and negotiable, leaders come to occupy an important space in everyday transactions. Using a combination of process tracing and ethnography, I unravel the path-dependent trajectories of slum politics in the two cities. I argue that the inter-city variation in policies such as tenure security, resettlement, and improvements in service provision make it easier or harder for communities to receive services without political middlemen, thus producing different types of citizen-state linkages.

Author

• Soundarya Chidambaram, Bucknell University