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Abstract
The vast majority of the urban poor in Mumbai live in dehumanizing physical and political conditions, living in public but only reluctantly recognized as being a part of ‘the public’. The difficulties that the urban poor experience in accessing public facilities such as sanitation and water for example, reproduces and amplifies their marginality. Being compelled to take care of their bodily functions in degrading and public ways, they come to be seen as sub-human and consequently reproduced as targets of violence. Drawing on Iris Young's discussion of insurgent expressions of citizenship, this article examines the struggle waged by an alliance of pavement and slum dwellers to transform the way in which the state relates to its most impoverished urban citizens, and in so doing, to demonstrate an alternative conception of ‘the public’. The Alliance's practice helps reveal the politics through which the subject of public policy is constructed in neoliberal India, as well as provide us an opportunity to consider how it might be transformed to create a more just society.
Acknowledgements
I am grateful to the editors and the anonymous referees of the journal for their comments. Funding for my research was provided by the American Institute of Indian Studies, Taraknath Das Foundation, Foundation of Urban and Regional Studies, and Cornell University's Einaudi Center for International Studies and Polson Institute of Global Development.
Notes
1The names of certain locations and of pavement dwellers have been changed.
2 CitationUNDP's Human Development Report 2006 indicates that globally the sanitation deficit outweighs the deficit in the availability of potable water by two and a half times; 2.6 billion people live without access to adequate sanitation facilities (p.112).
3Supplementing the municipal toilets were pay-to-use toilets run by private foundations, a facility that did not do much to expand the toilet options for the poor as the regular use of a paid facility was beyond the reach of the average slum dwelling family.