The unpredictability of its economic transformations, the growth of its real estate markets, the competing jurisdictions of its governing systems, the polarization of its politics, and the unchecked spread of its slums makes Bombay a city that defies explanation. Patel, Parthasarathy and Jose argue that Bombay began to see significant changes in its population, economy, politics, and culture in the 1960s. The city’s economy and politics saw fundamental changes because of the valorization and promotion of informal employment and labour, the reclamation, deregulation, and reregulation of land to generate real estate and the privatization of social infrastructure. A neoliberal system that sought solutions in the interests of business associations and companies had acquired legitimacy by the middle of the 1990s. This model was originally employed by the Sharad Pawar-led administration in 1991, formally introduced by the Shiv Sena-BJP government in 1995, and then developed by coalitions in charge of Bombay politics in the years that followed.
The authors present a compelling lens for understanding how politics, governance, evolving social structures, and economic growth have historically interacted to build the city through their new analytic framework of “majoritarian neoliberalism.” This theoretical framework serves as the skeleton for a number of empirically-based case studies that examine subjects such as the specialisation of gendered employment, the politics of infrastructure development, the structuring of basic services, and the governance of the informal.
Mumbai/Bombay: Majoritarian Neoliberalism, Informality, Resistance and Wellbeing edited by Sujata Patel, D Parthasarathy and George Jose (and published by Routledge in 2022) is comprised of twelve chapters that are divided into three sections: i) work and labour, ii) infrastructure and politics, and iii) health, education and reproduction. They explore the effect of regulatory and deregulatory processes, corporatization and privatisation, and the negotiation and opposition of political institutions on the establishment of majoritarian neoliberalism in the metropolitan region. The chapters assess these tendencies within the broader historical framework of socio-cultural, demographic, geographical, political, and spatial developments in Bombay. The authors acknowledge that Bombay as a city has always been in a state of flux, with classes and class structures as well as social relationships of caste, gender, and ethnicity constantly altering and acquiring new meanings amidst continuing conflicts and contestations. To accomplish this, they investigate the changes in urban administration and power structures vis-à-vis the growth of Hindu majoritarianism due to neoliberal economic reforms during the previous three to four decades. The articles in the book examine the contemporary history of Mumbai from various perspectives.
In the introductory chapter, the authors talked about how ambivalence and contradiction have always been a part of Mumbai’s reforms. They highlight the turf wars between political elites and the power struggles within the government. Three key aspects that have affected the growth of the neoliberal project are described: First, they stress that most scholars have not engaged the past, present, and future of India’s cities holistically. Accordingly, a historical method is suggested to evaluate the uneven and contradictory effects of Mumbai’s urbanisation process, city development, and the state-society structures that were built during colonial and post-independence times. In addition, they argue that this evaluation needs to be done from the point of view of the people who stand on the margins of urban society.
Second, the rise of majoritarianism has helped coalitions of interests get short-term gains, and violence and vigilantism against minorities have shrunk the space for democracy. So, it has weakened and watered down the emerging multilingual public sphere, which has made it harder to have conversations, dialogues, and debates about comparing different ideas for rebuilding cities.
And third, these socio-economic practices are part of the system of patronage and rent-seeking that has been in place in the country since colonial times. Without understanding how this system works, it will be hard to understand the changes that have happened in Bombay and the rest of the country in the last 40 years.
This book is divided into three sections. The first section addresses labour and working conditions in the context of deregulatory measures. These conflicts and inconsistencies have evolved as a result of the different parties that have been mobilized for patronage. In addition, these policies have compelled several groups with varying social connections and identities. These groups have goals and compete on a national and regional scale for a place of their own, despite facing a range of injustices and exclusions made worse by official actions. Sameera Khan describes how the Muslim community confronted the problem of discriminatory, majoritarian, and neoliberal educational systems.
Neeraj Hatekar argues in his chapter that it is more productive to view these in the context of social relationships that are produced and reproduced to keep economic value circulating in this structure, given the specific production relationships that emerge from the informality of work and employment. Different institutional systems, such as the Shiv Sena evolved to support this. It contends that political solutions for Mumbai cannot be understood apart from the city’s economic structure.
Ritu Dewan in her chapter analyses the mechanics of the gendered work continuum and how it functions in the real setting of Mumbai city. She uses the term ‘time-based feminisation’ to describe the tremendous time demands placed on women in all aspects of life.
Raghav and Maansi examine the everyday unfolding of precarious employment and living in an industrial zone in Bombay, concentrating on small producers who have traditionally confronted the intersectional vulnerabilities of being Muslims and migrants while running informal micro-manufacturing operations. Marginal producers are driven to continually discover methods to operate within structural fault lines and to create their means of incorporating credibility and recognition, which they refer to as pehchaan into their work.
In this chapter, Shireen Mirza argues that cow-slaughter laws, cow politics, and street violence by cow vigilante organisations are integral to the economic realization of neoliberalism. The state seeks to demolish and reconstruct local informal economies by appealing to national, religious, community, and domestic feelings to facilitate the corporatization of local informal markets within the agriculture sector and the meat industry.
The second segment examines the politics of infrastructure and urban space transformation that is embedded in a neoliberal agenda involving a transition from a shift from government to market dependence; the rescaling of government from central to local levels while transferring the responsibility of the implementation to civil society/local agencies.
The chapter by George Jose positions the periphery as an analytical vantage point from which to see and comprehend the heterogeneous and discordant processes that drive urban growth in Vasai Virar. In describing the formation of the periphery, he emphasizes the political component and the central role of the state’s planning power. He asserts that legislative acts and urban politics have intricately shaped it.
Tobias Kuttler explores the influence of the platform economy on Mumbai, with a particular emphasis on digital mobility platforms. This article examines the advent of digital mobility platforms and the restructuring of the taxi industry in Mumbai from the taxi drivers’ perspective.
D. Parthasarathy examines how infrastructure projects displace the informal sector, self-employed, and small-scale retailers. It then shifts to local politicians’ civic efforts and new solidarity to deal with evictions. Local neighbourhoods and community groups supported people who lost their structures and livelihoods owing to these developments. This chapter highlights the complex and paradoxical motives and effects of solidarity networks, micro-level alliances, and the temporary adaptability of small-scale shopkeepers and street vendors to neoliberal shocks to their lives and livelihoods.
The final and third section examined how privatization and corporatization affect health, education, and arts. Padma Prakash and Sangeeta Rege examine health care in Bombay during the 1990s in the context of a liberalizing economy, a fast-increasing socio-economic disparity, an assertive capital, and a civil society attempting to intervene and extract the most from an avaricious government. Mumbai/Bombay has lost inexpensive medical treatment. Rich municipal governments have disproportionately invested in infrastructure and commercial enterprises to encourage private investment.
Harris Solomon’s case study of ambulances that traverse and modify emergency time and space studied the imperatives to shift clinical space-time as one anchor for neoliberal transformation in Bombay. Ambulances allow urban analytics to examine how a city’s social fabric affects emergency response.
Sameera Khan investigates Mumbai’s new Islamic-English schools and the upwardly aspiring middle-class Muslim “subject” they create by teaching English, technology, and religious principles. The chapter places these institutions in the context of Muslim minority education and the state’s privatization push in recent decades. Such institutions may further marginalize Muslims by emphasizing Islamic identification and practice above English and technological abilities.
Olga Sooudi argues that during the late 1990s, neoliberal changes in Mumbai’s cultural environment prompted critiques, fears, and responses related to the system’s viability.
The twelve chapters here focusses on themes like – “informalization, deregulation, and restructuring; corporatization and privatization; and negotiation and resistance”. They present the techniques, programs, and policies that led to Bombay’s 1980s spatial rearrangement. The chapters further show how neoliberalism shapes modern societies’ organizational structures and people’s daily lives. To study how majoritarian neoliberalism is taking over Bombay and shaping its future, the authors have employed a variety of disciplinary approaches and a rich set of diverse methods ranging from ethnography, to surveys, analysis of aggregate data, interviews, personal history narratives, participant observation, newspaper content analysis etc. This work emphasizes that neoliberalism seeks political and intellectual hegemony as much as economic intervention. The volume would benefit from a concluding chapter to bring these different aspects together to make sense of the conglomeration of neoliberal and majoritarian regimes that shape Mumbai’s urban life.
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Suraj Beri is an Assistant Professor at the Department of Sociology, Central University of Nagaland, India.