The book, Migrants and Machine Politics: Urban Poor Seek Representation and Responsiveness by Adam Michael Auerbach and Tariq Thachil(Princeton: Princeton University Press in 2023)centres on the urban poor’s mode of demand-making for public and private goods to the higher echelons of political power by an effective selection of political brokers, negotiation and finally by acts of discarding them. The book is about political brokers who- are the residents of the same space as the urban poor but differently abled to leverage with extant powers. The success of brokers in getting results is contingent upon them being heard by the patrons higher up in the hierarchy. The book documents this journey– bringing anecdotes, interviews, quantitative methods and reflections in a perfect symphony. It discards the unilinearity so typical of earlier studies on the grassroots political landscape of India or elsewhere in the global south. Instead, it devises a methodological tool that helps study the fluid, mutable and contextual nature of politics in Indian slums. It talks of contingencies of power in the slums of two Indian cities of Jaipur and Bhopal, which bring alive the mechanisms that political machines employ.

The book enables us to think along three trajectories, in simultaneity – political, spatial and historical. Tethering to the political, the book sutures the historical and the spatial to read the grassroots claim-making in Indian cities. It is historical in the sense that history is both a medium and a factor. As a medium it traces the trajectory of making, rising and unmaking of political brokers, if not explicitly teased out but implicated in the study as a force to be recognised. On the other hand, political episodes in the slums which are of very recent origin lack any place-based community affiliation. History plays an important role in the making of political brokerage. The study focuses on slums that are inhabited by migrants from other regions.

The book is divided into chapters which facilitates the overall flow of the text and meanings. The first chapter unfolds the theoretical, methodological and empirical contribution of the study. The second chapter, How Brokers Emerge, observes that brokers are selected proactively based on their problem-resolution capacity and seldom selected based only on ethnic affiliations. Broker’s education, job profile and connectivity are instrumental in their selection and rejection. The third chapter, How Brokers Cultivate Clients, pinpoints the ambitious nature of the brokers in pursuing a political career. This ambition renders them immune to any prejudicial affiliation- they cater to clients irrespective of caste, class or religious affinity. They are much more attentive to the fact that party politics sustain the support of the majority.

The fourth chapter, How Patrons Select Brokers, underwrites the processes through which brokers are selected by the patrons – competition, accountability and representation. It is through intra and inter-party competition that the best man is selected; secondly, education plays a proxy for accountability in the process of broker selection. And, the brokers are represented within the political party ecosystem with chances of political ascendancy. The fifth chapter, How Patrons Respond to Brokered Requests, looks into the types of requests attended by the patrons. It is found that requests are promptly heard and attended which brings publicity and credit to the patron that enables further vote accumulation. Secondly, more populous slums are more favoured than the less populated ones. To this is added the identity of the broker. Patrons attend to only those who are successfully evaluated by him based on his subjective knowledge. The sixth chapter concludes with cases of how machine politics works across the globe and also corroborates this study with a national sample study. It ends with pinpointing the issues and transformation of machine politics that may come with political and administrative centralization of power in India.

The study’s main contribution lies in its ability to look at the political landscape of the marginalized in non-election times. While literature and media mimic the political and the spatial during elections, they are oblivious to the situation before and beyond that. This book simply fills in the gap robustly. Secondly, the work’s epistemic potential lies in its attempt to foreground the coming together of the clients, brokers and patrons. Unlike most of the existing text, this study underlines the factors and spontaneity of forging ties and disseminating claim-making. Thirdly, the use of mixed-method (i.e., both qualitative and quantitative) is praiseworthy. It amplifies the comprehensibility of the text and fixes the problem that readers have with winding and theoretically over-rigorous texts. Lastly, the book lays the ground for future researchers dealing with the present times. The author’s concern with disruption of the machine politics due to more centralization of political power in India is a provocation in itself. There may be instances of loosening networks of procurement, social capital and community gregariousness with the dominance of a more centralized public delivery system.

However, the work concentrating on the national political scenario fails to take note of the centralization mechanism in the states. In some of the states, the apocalypse forecasted by the authors is already at its peak. The delivery of public goods is administered by party-affiliated syndicates whereby not only the demands of the urban poor are unheard of but their entitlements are also stripped off in the most brutal and contemptuous ways. The authors’ limitation in taking note of such granular incidences is understood given the scope of the study. Secondly, the arguments, observations and comments made by the authors seem to be repetitive across the text. Starting from the introduction, the observations are unnecessarily repeated, making the text redundant at times.

Nevertheless, if not a white paper, the book is nothing less than a text that gives insight into the power geometries that undergird India’s proliferating urban slums. In sum, the book offers a much-needed addition to the literature on machine politics in urban areas of the global South.

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Swasti Vardhan Mishra teaches at Rabindra Bharati University and his interests lie in critical urban theories, grassroots politics, and critical cartography and its intertwining with geopolitics.