Day 24

In India, the turn of the century has been marked by a violent expansion of the urban frontier, a making way and making space for the new Indian middle classes, through the smashing of the homes and livelihoods of the urban poor. Such forms of violent urbanization are evident in Delhi, Mumbai, and Bangalore. This is also the case in Kolkata. Here, the long-standing Left Front government, led by the Marxist wing of the Communist Party of India, has sought to aggressively remake the city as a “world-class” urban environment. Such urban development has followed the predictable formula of elite enclaves of residence and leisure, economic zones to attract mobile capital, and civic campaigns to insure beauty and order in the city. In the Indian context at least, Kolkata belies any argument about Leftist exceptionalism. Neoliberalism has been as much at home in this Marxist-ruled region as it has been elsewhere in the country.

Yet, it is also in Kolkata that the ambitious project of making the world-class Indian city has been repeatedly blocked. Faced with fierce peasant uprisings and electoral challenges by opposition parties, the Left Front’s efforts to claim land and space for urban and industrial development have been stymied. Such a blockade calls into question the primary instruments of state power: eminent domain, zoning strategies, geobribes. But the blockade is also a lived experience, a part of the texture of everyday urban life in Kolkata, where infrastructures of circulation – roads, highways, trains, buses – are constantly subject to demonstrations, marches, shutdowns, and curfews. The imagined dynamism of the world-class city, a space inserted into global circulations of capital, thus comes to be “gheraoed,” or “encircled,” by protest. The world-class city is made to stand still.

In this essay, I examine these practices of protest and also demonstrate how they ultimately embolden rather than erode the hegemonic icon of the world-class city. I am interested in the making of consent to the world-class city because I think it is important to understand this icon as more than a fetish, as more than a commodity-on-display or a commodity-in-circulation. Instead, following Walter Benjamin, I conceptualize the world-class city as a phantasmagoria, the dream world of postcolonial development. Yet, this phantasmagoria is also a “dialectical image,” containing within it the radical potential of disenchantment and critique. In particular, I am interested in how the blockade of the Indian world-class city conjures up what Benjamin (1935: 10) titled “the law of dialectics at a standstill.” As Robinson (2004:715) has noted, the methodology of a “dialectics at a standstill” makes possible an understanding of the phantasmagoria (of urban life) as “as a site which potentially exposes the range of alternative future and past possibilities for organizing social life.” It is in this spirit that I turn to the discourses and practices that constitute the Indian world-class city and pay careful attention to its blockade.
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The urban question has not featured prominently in the plans that have guided the many decades of development in postcolonial India. It is the liberalization of the Indian economy, enthusiastically adopted by the Indian state, in the 1990s, that cast attention on India’s cities. A bold new national urban strategy, the National Urban Renewal Mission, launched in 2005 and named to pay homage to India’s first postcolonial modernizer, Jawaharlal Nehru, makes the case for investments in urban infrastructure. Its founding documents predict a massive increase in India’s urban population – from 28 percent in 2001 to 40 percent in 2021. It also yokes India’s economic future to this urban sector, stating that “by the year 2011, urban areas would contribute about 65% of gross domestic product.” These predictions are repeated in a recent report on Indian urbanization issued by McKinsey & Company. The report claims that between 2008 and 2030, “urban India will drive a near fourfold increase in average national income” and “unlock many new growth markets,” from infrastructure to health care (McKinsey & Company 2010: 17).

~~[ESSAY] The Blockade of the World-Class City: Dialectical Images of Indian Urbanism -by- Ananya Roy
from the book "WORLDING CITIES- ASIAN EXPERIMENTS AND THE ART OF BEING GLOBAL"