Penn News Service (Edited)
Philadelphia, USA, July 1, 2023
Penn Political Science Professor Tariq Thachil explores how the most vulnerable individuals in India are making a political impact in his new book, Migrants and Machine Politics, with Co-Author Professor Adam Michael Auerbach of American University.
They said that over the next 30 years, India is expected to add approximately 400 million people to its cities, the largest expansion in the world, with many of them coming from rural areas with scarce resources.
Precedence of democracy
Currently, more than 50 of the country’s cities are home to more than a million people each.
There is no question that during such large-scale urbanisation, these migrants are shaping city politics, but Professor Thachil and Adam Michael Auerbach of American University wanted to understand how this process will occur.
They discuss this in their new book, Migrants and Machine Politics: How India’s Urban Poor Seek Representation and Responsiveness.
Professor Thachil, who is also Director of the Centre for Advanced Study of India at the University of Pennsylvania, said that in many wealthy Western democracies, urbanisation preceded full democratisation.
“In India, everyone got the right to vote in 1947 when the country was more than 80% rural. The impetus for this book was the desire to know what happens when democracy proceeds urbanisation and how poor migrants get integrated into city politics,” he said.
Drawing on years of fieldwork, including ethnographic observation, interviews, surveys, and experiments, Professors Thachil and Auerbach found that poor migrants in India’s slums are actively shaping urban politics and doing so in counterintuitive ways.
The myth and reality
“There is a popular portrayal of slum dwellers as completely subdued and dispossessed, living under the coercion of local strongmen and city elites, or exploited by cunning politicians who make empty promises. We found that those narratives did not square with a much more nuanced reality. Instead, migrants in these settlements are very politically aware, informed, and organised,” Professor Thachil said.
He said that he witnessed intense political competition, including residents holding informal community elections to select their local leaders. One, which had official rules and paper ballots, even engaged the local police to oversee the ballot counting.
“It mimicked the rituals of formal elections in India. This illustrates a much more popular democratic competitive politics than popular portrayals have suggested,” he said.
According to Professor Thachil, another common misconception of slum residents is that they prioritise shared ethnicity, caste, faith, or political party when making representative selections. Although those factors do matter, he discovered that residents consider who will most effectively make a change.
“We found evidence that the residents who are most likely to succeed in leadership positions are highly educated or who have jobs that place them in proximity to government bureaucracy so that they have the kind of ‘know how’ to get water connections or apply for welfare, for example. In some ways, it is more meritocratic than politics in wealthier settings in India. You have to earn your stripes as a slum leader and that has upstream implications for city politics because those local leaders then get absorbed into political parties.,” Professor Thachil said.
The political process
Migrants and Machine Politics delves further into those implications, examining how political parties assess and decide which slum leaders to incorporate into their political networks, in part because they want to deliver votes from within the dense slums.
“In this way, slum residents, who are otherwise vulnerable and dispossessed, actually have choices that aggregate to produce particular leaders,” Thachil said, adding that these people then become part of mainstream politics, sometimes holding crucial positions in those parties.
“This becomes a way for democracy to work from the bottom up in a system that is usually very top down,” he said.
According to Professor Thachil, such a more nuanced understanding of this group’s influence on politics is not meant to romanticise or celebrate the difficult conditions in which they reside.
“It is often because of how difficult those conditions are that they have had to be organised to fight against things like eviction efforts, because they live in insecure housing and do not have property rights, or to gain access to public services like water or electricity,” he said.
Professor Thachil hopes that by emphasising the potential of urbanisation for poor migrants in India, he has been able to demonstrate (through this book) that the most vulnerable can participate in city politics in a meaningful way.
“There are famous theories that predict that urbanisation will unlock economic development and more socially open or tolerant environments. But for places like India, a lot of that potential hinges on how poor migrants are woven into cities and the degree to which they are integrated or excluded,” he said.
Professor Thachil is currently working with Professor Auerbach on a project looking at governance challenges in small towns in the state of Rajasthan, in northern India. He is also working with CASI postdoctoral research fellow Shikhar Singh to study air pollution in Delhi, probing why such a chronic problem has not yet become an electorally salient issue.
