Moving from ‘Giving Back’ to Engagement

This research note is part of the thematic section, Giving Back in Solidarity, in the special issue titled “Giving Back in Field Research,” published as Volume 10, Issue 2 in the Journal of Research Practice

Putting the Law in its Place: Analyses of recent developments in law relating to same-sex desire in India and Uganda

This collection of essays has been jointly produced by Sexuality Policy Watch and the IDS Sexuality and Development Programme. The collection of analyses presented here juxtaposes the Indian and the Ugandan contexts with the intention of opening up new questions for struggles in both these places, but also with the objective of generating a deeper conversation amongst activists and academics about the peculiarities of Law and Politics as distinct (if connected) realms of action. One feature of these various essays is to bring about the circulation of more nuanced analyses of the particular political-economic and cultural conditions for these dramatic developments in law , which take place at the intricate intersections between global economics, national politics and the so called ‘return of the religious’ (Derrida, 1998) in dogmatic manifestations. Another aspect examined by some of the authors regards the limitations and caveats of dominant juridical, economic and scientific rationales that currently pervade political struggles and advocacy in relation to human rights

In the Public's Interest: Evictions, Citizenship and Inequality in Contemporary Delhi

Millennial Delhi is a city whose landscape has been scarred by a series of evictions of the homes of some of its most vulnerable citizens. These evictions are different not just in degree but in kind from those that have come before. Evictions at this scale last occurred in Delhi during what is known as the Emergency from 1975-77 when democratic and fundamental rights were suspended. Unlike evictions within the Emergency, however, contemporary evictions have occurred through democratic processes rather than in their absence- they mark a different set of negotiations, legitimations, processes as well as horizons of resistance. A further factor makes contemporary evictions distinct: they were ordered not by the sarkar -the institutions of the executive across local, state and federal scales that govern the national capital - but by the adalat, the Judiciary. They were, in fact, ordered by the Delhi High Court and the Supreme Court of India within a unique judicial innovation in India called the Public Interest Litigation that had been established, ironically, to enable the poor to access justice in the highest courts of the land. To understand how the evictions of the poor can be read as acts in the "public interest," this dissertation argues that we must first locate the basti in the particularity of the production of space in Delhi. The Hindustani word "basti" comes from basna which means to settle or inhabit. It is the term used most often by the poor to describe their homes that are often marked by some measure of physical, economic, and infrastructural vulnerability. The basti is often reduced to the slum, a marker of illegal occupation of land and, more broadly, the dysfunctional landscape of the megacities of the global South. Yet this dissertation argues that more than just a `slum,' built environment, material housing stock, or planning category, a basti is, in fact, a territorialisation of a political engagement within which the poor negotiate their presence in as well as right to the city. It is a spatial manifestation of the negotiations of citizenship. Its eviction then represents not just the demolition of a built environment but the transformation of precisely this political engagement- an erasure of the poor's presence within and right to the city. Put another way, contemporary evictions represent an altered urban politics where a set of familiar referents- development, order, governance, citizens, and the public- are redefined to not only enable evictions but also to see them as acts of good governance, order and planning. Read this way, evictions allow us to access the central theoretical and ethical concern of this dissertation: the politics of the production and reproduction of poverty and inequality in the contemporary Indian city and the negotiations of citizenship that underlie it. Broadly, this dissertation argues that evictions make visible make visible a juridicalisation of politics in the Indian city. This juridicalisation is marked by the emergence of new frameworks, discourses and practices in urban politics that instantiate themselves in the city through the judiciary rather within the more familiar institutional compacts between institutions of representative government and urban residents. The juridicalisation of politics marks the expansion of the jurisdiction not just of the courts but also of the realm of the law within urban politics. As the sphere of authority of the Courts widens in the city, a series of questions, concerns, interventions, processes and debates within urban politics come to be come to seen, articulated, and addressed as juridical questions - they speak and are spoken about within the frameworks of law. Following its concern with the politics of poverty, inequality and citizenship, the dissertation traces juridicalisation along one particular vector: it shows how evictions were made to make "legal sense" within public interest litigations. Four key frameworks thus emerge: (a) planned illegalities; (b) planned development and/as crisis; (b) the impoverishment of poverty; and (c) the juridicalisation of resistance. The dissertation first constructs a spatial history of inhabitation in the city to challenge the assumed relationships between "illegality," planning and the settlements of the poor, arguing that the "illegal" production of urban space in Delhi comprises not just the `slum' but the production of illegal housing by the middle and upper middle classes as well. It does so by problematizing the familiar and commonsensical narrative of the "failure of planning" in the Indian city and showing that the traces of planning ensure that the city may not be as it was planned but it is an outcome of planning. It argues that illegality is the dominant mode of the production of housing in Delhi and that it is within illegalities that the production of urban space in the city must be understood. Questions of urban politics must thus look not at the dichotomy of the legal-illegal but instead at the ways in which planning and planned development produce illegality. Equally, they must interrogate the processes by which particular kinds of urban practices and actors are framed as "illegal" relative to others and what work such a framing is meant to do. Having established the relationship between illegality, planning and planned development in the city empirically, the dissertation then analyses a body of case law in the Delhi High Court and the Supreme Court of India to show that the Courts misrecognise illegality in their twin understandings of "encroachment" and "encroacher" when they portray the former as the visible manifestation of what they see as the crisis of the city and the latter as one of the actors primarily responsible for this crisis. Showing how the courts use narratives of the failure of "planned development" and what they call "Government" to justify their interventions into the city, the dissertation describes their attempt to make the city into a governable space using the "Plan in its legal position" to represent an idealized spatial order. Intervening in the crisis of the city towards this idealized order thus becomes not only the primary definition of public interest but also an ethico-moral imperative that acts as a rationality of judicial government.Further, the dissertation argues that the case-law on evictions makes visible the impoverishment of poverty, drawing upon Upendra Baxi's concept of impoverishment as a dynamic process of public decision-making in which it is considered just, right and fair that some people may become or stay impoverished. The Courts enable impoverishment by through the creation of the category of the "encroacher" that binds the identity of the poor to a spatial illegality and becomes the basis of a disavowal of their rights. Additionally, through the discursive erasure of the vulnerability of the poor and the emergence of a new "urban majority" as the subject of urban politics, they transform the poor into improper citizens thereby legitimizing a regime of differentiated citizenship. Using interviews with activists in urban social movements in Delhi, the dissertation further shows how the emergence of the judiciary as the site and object of resistance has resulted in the juridicalisation of resistance: the impact of the presence of the Court within the calculus of negotiation and confrontation as modes of engagement and resistance to evictions. The presence of the Court challenges the choice of strategies of urban social movements, introduces new actors and decision-making processes into movement spaces, alters the content of right-claims and forecloses certain kinds of claimants just as it shapes the political identity and history of basti and its residents themselves. Finally, in conclusion, the dissertation explores how new forms and claims to the city can emerge in response to these challenges that will be not just impassioned, but equitable and effective

The effect of maternal education on gender bias in care-seeking for common childhood illnesses

This paper assessed gender bias within hospitalisation rates to ascertain whether differential care-seeking practices significantly contribute to excess female mortality. It then examined the impact of socio-economic factors, particularly maternal education and economic status, on gender bias. The results find both the clear and significant impact of gender on hospitalisation rates, as well as the simultaneous inability of rising education and economic status to alleviate this bias. A secondary analysis was conducted within a uniquely large and ongoing randomised control trial that sought to measure the impact of Zinc supplementation on hospitalisations and deaths in low-income communities in New Delhi, India. During the course of the study, 85,633 children were enrolled and monitored over one year of follow-up. Of the 430 deaths that occurred, 230 were female (0.57% of total females), while 200 were male (0.43% of all males). Despite this higher mortality amongst females (pGender Care-seeking Excess female mortality Maternal education Socio-economic development India

The effect of maternal education on gender bias in care-seeking for common childhood illnesses

This paper assessed gender bias within hospitalisation rates to ascertain whether differential care-seeking practices significantly contribute to excess female mortality. It then examined the impact of socio-economic factors, particularly maternal education and economic status, on gender bias. The results find both the clear and significant impact of gender on hospitalisation rates, as well as the simultaneous inability of rising education and economic status to alleviate this bias. A secondary analysis was conducted within a uniquely large and ongoing randomised control trial that sought to measure the impact of Zinc supplementation on hospitalisations and deaths in low-income communities in New Delhi, India. During the course of the study, 85,633 children were enrolled and monitored over one year of follow-up. Of the 430 deaths that occurred, 230 were female (0.57% of total females), while 200 were male (0.43% of all males). Despite this higher mortality amongst females (p<0.02), girls were hospitalised far less frequently than boys. Of the 4418 children who were hospitalised at least once, 2854 (64.6%) were males and only 1564 (35.4%) were females, indicating a significantly lower rate of care-seeking for females (p<0.00). Curiously, our results show that gender bias is highest amongst highly educated mothers, and decreases steadily for children of mothers with a middle school education, a primary school education, and is lowest amongst mothers with no formal education. Put differently, female children of mothers with no formal education were significantly more likely to be hospitalised than children of mothers with several years of formal education, even after adjusting for all other factors. Economic status was not found to affect the association of gender and hospitalisation, though overall odds of hospitalisation rose with increasing economic status. Paternal education was found not to be significantly related to hospitalisation

Social Land Justice: Cases from Congo, Brazil, Indonesia and South Africa

The 7th Annual Irene Grootboom Memorial Dialogues consisted of four public lectures that brought community leaders, civil society and academics in conversation around the issue of urban land justice. The discussions explored the history of urban land dispossession, access to urban land in Cape Town in light of the impact of spatial apartheid on the majority of city residents, and the extent to which all people living in the city can have equal right to urban land. The evening, held at the City Hall, brought in five international urban scholars from different cities in the ‘global south’ to tell about stories and experiences of cities and land politics from Brazil, India, Democratic Republic of Congo and Indonesia. First to take the stage after an introduction by Edgar Pieterse, director of the ACC, was Filip De Boeck, from the Institute for Anthropological Research in Africa, The Netherlands. Well known for his book “Kinshasa: Tales of the Invisible City,” De Boeck told the story of a peri-urban community coming into contact with ‘experts,’ in this case an academic researcher from the United States and a private company with mining interests in the area, and how the devastation left by their visit often remains long after they have come and gone. The account resonated with the ways in which the rights of local communities in big cities too often get compromised by the impunity enjoyed by private/state interests, especially in the case of land occupation. Teresa Caldeira, professor of City and Regional Planning at UC Berkeley, gave a visually inspiring presentation of various informal settlements in São Paulo that have been designed and constructed through occupation by the residents of these neighbourhoods themselves. She referred to this process of city-making as “auto-construction,” that has led to the formation of peripheries that come to exist before intervention by the state. “The state comes after the fact,” and urbanises illegally occupied spaces with basic infrastructure. This process of making the city has, according to Caldeira, empowered citizens as they become political agents, shaping city space and enabling themselves to inhabit the city. By occupying land and organising politically, these residents prove that their actions can even change the constitution. Land occupations, or “overnight informal settlements,” as Ash Amin, professor of Geography at the University of Cambridge, refers to the phenomenon, have instigated much academic debate precisely due to the often impeccable organisation that takes place before they take place. Occupations are often as a result of collaborations between social movements, people who want housing, and university researchers who, together, design ‘models’ for how a neighbourhood should be constructed. Amin enlightened the audience at the City Hall lecture on two land occupations in Belo Horizonte, Brazil, and compared the success of each in creating community. Amin dispelled the notion of ‘infrastructure’ as being boring, suggesting through his observations that it is in fact the extent of community infrastructure present in a particular settlement that determines the extent to which the sustainability of a place can be secured. When communal infrastructure is built, “people feel that their futures are just as much about the future of the neighbourhood.” With a presentation entitled, “What is a house?” AbdouMaliq Simone, a visiting professor at the ACC, offered a series of photographs of houses in his “weird” neighbourhood, Tebet, Jakarta. Highlighting the diversity of houses, Simone explained how this reflected the diversity of residents that live there. Comparing his neighbourhood to another comprising square, uniform apartment blocks, Simone expressed concern for how this type of inner city planning does not engender a sense of community. For Simone, an availability of a range of everyday resources comes with a diversity of people within a particular neighbourhood. “Most of what I need I can find in my own neighbourhood,” Simone explained, and this is expressed through the material construction of people’s houses. Last to draw the audience’s attention was Gautam Bhan, senior consultant at the Indian Institute for Human Settlements. Bhan told a story of land occupation in the city of Delhi, India that, unlike most of his colleagues at the presenters’ table, did not suggest a happy ending. The evictions and demolitions of informal settlements that have taken place in prime land in the city of Delhi over the past decade have affected the lives of thousands and caused mass devastation for the city’s residents. Bhan described a community of people living in constant states of precariousness that “don’t know which way to turn, that don’t know what to sing in their songs” or what slogans to write on their banners. The sheer loss of hope Bhan expressed brought the conversation beyond occupation to a question of survival. What would it take for urban citizens to receive services “that take two years and not twenty? ” How can planning practice be used that help people buy time? The Delhi case was a reminder that, as much as these occupations inspire political participation, these neighbourhoods are not going to be left alone by the state. To conclude, Pieterse raised the point that unequal access to urban land is not an accident, but a direct result of unequal power relations within our societies. ‘The planned city,’ if it exists, is exclusive, and it is clear that occupation of land is a necessary initiative on behalf of city citizens as a means of engaging the state. Though the question still remains as to whether formal planning should be something we aspire towards, the risks we take along the way in building the city for ourselves is something we need to address seriously.status: publishe