Neoliberalism has had a profound impact on societies in the global South. India has been no exception. It has led to deepening inequalities, giving rise to new forms of accumulation by dispossessions such as the privatisation of the commons and the increase in power of finance capital at both the national and international levels. This book titled Neoliberalism, Urbanisation and Aspirations in Contemporary India edited by Sujata Patel, and published by Oxford University Press in 2022 is a valuable contribution to the academic literature on the changing political economy and social structure in India.
The book details the processes associated with the different socio-economic aspects of neoliberalism as well as the changes in the new political regime. As the title suggests, the twelve chapters in this book take the readers into the debate around three main and interrelated processes of structural changes-. neoliberalism, urbanisation and aspiration. It explores various consequences of neoliberalism leading to ‘new contemporary sociabilities’ associated with politics, demography, employment and policy.
The first section of the book tries to provide the readers with a ‘snapshot’ of neoliberalism on democracy, demography and policy dynamics. In this context, Maitrayee Chaudhuri highlights the curious way that the proliferation of internet use and the abundance of information in the era of the ‘Google Baba search engine’ and various social media platforms impacts ideas of democracy and creates a conducive atmosphere for populism. Emphasising that ‘the internet is global, but its use is not’, she argues that new technologies and the logic of algorithms mean that we are all aught in echo chambers- receiving ‘information’ we already believe in. The imperatives of a media to customize news, to shift from broadcasting to narrowcasting have hollowed out the idea of media as the fourth pillar of democracy. Instant access to unverified information or fake news has flourished. And the fundamental difference between knowledge by acquaintance and knowledge that we acquire through established procedures that can be cross-checked has collapsed. The story of WhatsApp in India is illustrative of this.
The next two chapters in this section explore the consequences of changed policy regimes from socialist to market-driven policies and their failure to bring the promised growth and justice. Ravi Srivastava and Sujata Patel highlight the changing policy discourse in the neoliberal context that shapes the development directions in the country and widens the pre-existing inequalities. In the following essay, K. James also highlights the failure of market-driven policies resulting in jobless growth and their inability to capitalise on its gender dividend. Instead, it reproduces patriarchal hegemony.
The second section of the book delves into exploring a specific issue, i.e., the changing urbanisation processes and their impact on the reproduction of inequalities. This section takes the readers around two different aspects of urbanisation, viz. 1) the development of new towns or peri-urban with changing land dynamics and real-estate growth and 2) environmental consequence of rapid transformation of physical space. The first three chapters in this section explore the role of capital accumulation in changing physical forms of the peri-urban landscapes, especially through privatised real-estate activities. Carol Upadhyaya called this ’empty urbanisation’.
Sanjay Srivastava, in his essay, highlights the changing citizenship dynamics as a result of the politics of land as a form of accumulation by dispossession, especially in the periphery. He further explained this new type of contested citizenship as the process of ‘post-nationalism’. Contrary to the first three essays of this section, which hovers around the issue of politics of the land market, D. Parthasarathy highlighted the ecological impact of fast-paced spatial transformation. He termed this as ‘risk urbanism’ and explained how ill-planning of Indian cities results in the destruction of resource commons, which is a common ‘bad’ but affects the urban poor in a much more brutal way and reproduces spatial inequalities.
The third section emphasises the changing social structure from caste-based to class-based society as a result of changing aspirations in the backdrop of market-driven changes in livelihood opportunities and the rise of the middle-class. In this regard, Badri Narayan and Sudha Pai highlighted the changing caste dynamics in Uttar Pradesh. Narayan looks at the impact of neoliberalism on traditionally skilled marginalised castes, whose skills have become obsolete due to a new market-driven scenario, which pushed them further into a cycle of deprivation. Sudha Pai addresses the role played by marginalised political parties in the upward mobility of the marginalised groups in Uttar Pradesh and complements the findings of the Narayan.
The two chapters by Aseem Prakash and Tanweer Fazal have tried to understand the changing facets of the aspirations of the middle class in post-liberal India. Aseem Prakash has emphasised the role played by the social structures in upward mobility. Both highlighted how the marginalised groups find upward mobility difficult because of the lack of vertical networks.
Overall, the book contains twelve essays that give its readers a comprehensive and vivid picture of neoliberal India. It also highlights the shortcomings of the current political regime and emphasised the role of market-driven moralities and the universal reach of ICT technologies in shaping contemporary aspirations and sociabilities. However, a concluding chapter would have completed the book in every sense.
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Tania Debnath is working as a Post Doctoral Fellow in the National Institute of Urban Affairs in an international consortium funded by the Global Challenges Research Fund, UK.