ABSTRACT
Bangalore’s elitist policy, programmes and modernist developmentalism In 1998, S.M. Krishna, then chief minister of Karnataka, portrayed Bangalore as India’s ‘Silicon Valley’ as part of his vision to transform the city into another ‘Singapore’. Such rhetoric was also seen as a lesson for the country’s economic development and as a justification for high-grade infrastructure and services to particular Master Plan-designated areas and to counter ‘non-planned development’ and ‘slums’ (Benjamin 2000). Fifteen years later in 2013, Bangalore, a city of around 11 million inhabitants, was urged by international development agencies to address its failed infrastructure.1 Other public controversies that have gained political ground are those of land regularisation via ‘Akrama Sakrama’ (setting prior wrongs right). A previous work explored how Bangalore’s elite capture and rationalise the space of plan and policy via the rhetoric of ‘good governance’ (Benjamin 2010). The city’s vastly increased territorial boundary locks mega-projects, rationalised within a master-planning frame, towards a competitive ‘productive’ city. When accompanied by a political shift towards empowering special-purpose agencies under the rubric of hi-tech modernism, this frames other practices of governance within a binary of ‘traditional and customary’ (Benjamin 2010, 2014). Bangalore drains off its 3,200 ft plateau into three major valley systems, via a series of wetlands of ‘tanks’ or ponds called ‘kere’ in the local language, Kanadda.2 The keres are sites of intense contestations, which are revealed when one looks closely at the reworking of land tenures: a range of tenures connected to various seasonal agro practices, including fishing rights. This chapter points to the politics of these territories being conflated by higher levels of the government, but also via elite actions mobilising the judiciary into a homogeneous wasteland categorised as ‘public’; this re-categorisation feeds a land acquisition process used under eminent domain. It also opens up territory to large private developers for high-end housing or landscaped lakes under more recent forms of ‘public-private partnership’ management with elite resident welfare associations (RWAs).3 The important conceptual point here is that the homogeneous re-categorisation of wastelands portrays a singular logic of territoriality where both ‘urbanisation’
and market-based political experiments attempt to turn wetlands into manageable ‘lakes’. The logic of plan and policy with technical inputs from corporate partnerships is seen to serve as a counterweight to the threat from amorphous groups. It is important to note that even in neighbourhoods considered to be of very high income in terms of their plot sizes and relative level of infrastructure (and of course the occupations of their residents), not all are homogeneous in their attitudes towards the poor – including street hawkers and small shops. For instance, in Koramangala’s 3rd Block in south-east Bangalore (a case discussed later in this text), several residents blocked the dominant group who sought to mobilise the official machinery to act against ‘un-authorised hawkers and vendors’. This same group has fought to ensure free and open access to a library set up in the ‘neighbourhood’ park. Despite these relatively progressive actions, the only imaginary of these groups remains within the ‘plan and policy’. The intervention of techno-managerial policy planners and academics tends most often to co-produce a singular logic of territoriality and in turn notions of singular forms of private property. Scholars have astutely observed that such readings of law premised on private property are generative of violence.4 This framing of a ‘public common’ is, on closer examination, a privatised public to be managed via a ‘public-private partnership’ (PPP) whose marketbased business model is seen to replace what are posed as ‘traditional’ and customary practices. Significantly, two well-meaning groups of academics are supporters of this perspective: first, environmental academics who are driven by ‘scientific rationality’ (rather than politicised perspectives); second, environmental planners of a positivist persuasion who also seek techno-managerial systems as an approach, combined with de-politicised ideas of ‘participatory and inclusive planning’.5 The way forward is to soften the blow of the market by a humanised technocracy – adding another ‘P’ (standing for ‘people’) into the PPP and setting in place by participatory planning and NGO-driven consultation ‘inclusive’ policy and programmes that will protect ‘public interest’ in the ‘common’ (Unnikrishnan & Nagendra 2014, last page, concluding paragraph). This perspective is evidenced not just in legal argumentation, but also, as we shall shortly see, in descriptions of the ‘lakes’: ‘The lakes are now facing severe challenges due to pollution, encroachment and disruption in connectivity following urbanisation [emphasis by author]’ (Unnikrishnan & Nagendra 2014: 3). Located in ‘slums’, the poor are seen to be in exploitative existence within the ‘unorganised informal sector’ that marginalises them as ‘encroachers’ on ‘unplanned’ areas. All this serves to justify the ‘rule of law’ for the enforcement of mega-urban planning to control ‘slums’, while ‘governance reforms’ cut down ‘vote-bank’ politics. Such a framing entails the elite posing as a ‘civil society’ seeking to transform their neighbourhoods into micro-scapes of ‘India Shining’, uncontaminated by vote-bank politics.6 This is not a very different language and tone to that used in directives from the higher levels of courts, which a wider scholarship shows to be anti-poor in motivation. One intersect between these two sets of academics located in a nostalgia of ‘tradition and custom’ in the loss of a ‘common’ poses territorial contestations as ‘traditional and subaltern’ groups
conflicting with feudal power structures or the ‘land mafia’. The elephant in the room – the huge influence of elite residents and their well organised lobbying – is given a miss.7 Ironically, as witnessed in web-based group discussions, some well-meaning academic circles assist in producing technical reports framed for the legal process to feed a legal process to protect and hegemonise the plan and policy frame.8 In effect, progressive activists, academics, and some policy makers, tacitly accept the inevitability of ‘economic growth’ to be tapped for welfare purposes, but do so in seeking a constitutionally derived Habermasian space to frame ‘inclusive policy and programs’ (Flyberg & Richardson 2002). Unsurprisingly, there is an expansion of techno-rationalistic research – ‘evidence-based’ policy. This involves the extensive mobilisation of econometric data, the analysis of which justifies corporate partnerships dressed up as stakeholders to seek public funds and conducive, growth-oriented policy.9 Like ‘participatory planning and consultation’, these realms too emphasise cartographic logics – a visual aesthetic that frames the neat, landscape, colour-zoned plans with ‘unplanned’ territorial forms located as ‘encroachment’. These critiques located in contrasting ideological planes treat territory and land as a passive setting, set within homogenised tenurial categories. Other criticisms locate their efforts in a much higher conceptual frame of meta-historical changes – treating and constructing material terrains as a ‘local’ contingent on consciously received contractions in capitalism.
