Rethinking exclusion

It has become something of a commonsense among South Asian progressives that caste, religion and gender (increasingly sexuality) are the main axes along which exclusion and marginalization occurs in India. We have been so engrossed in this idea that we have largely ignored the actual processes of exclusion that have been creeping up on us over the last decade or so. These processes do not transcend caste, religion and gender. But they do rework them.

Let me illustrate. Between 2000 and 2002, a large number of squatters and slum residents in Hyderabad were offered new housing in a new development on the outskirts of the city. Having been involved in pulling together a coalition of sorts to resist forced evictions in the same areas in the late 90s, in 2004, I went visiting old acquaintances in the original slums and squatter settlements from where people were moved as well as in the new housing development area.

I was intrigued by the way different families adjusted to the new realities. First, the new development was dominated by a group of dalit families who had recently come into the city. Using their social networks, they managed to gain control of hooch and water trade in the new locality. Second, some of the dalit families who had been in the city for a longer period also seemed to do alright. Many of them managed to retain their claims to property in the original slums as well as get one room tenements allotted to themselves in the new settlements. While the parents continued to live in the old slum, their married children moved into the new tenements. Some of the established Muslim slum residents who owned small businesses also followed the same strategy.

The people who suffered the most were the hundreds of families which used to earlier live on the fringes of slums in the city without any claims had moved to the relocation site in the hope that they would be some day allotted a tenement. All of them had been living in large poultry farm kind of sheds for over two years. Many of them were Muslims although more and more Dalit and OBC families were joining them as the city government went about clearing out squatters.   They talked about how difficult life had been. Incomes had dwindled. Adolescent girls lived in constant fear of assaults by drunken males. Women could not leave children behind and go to work anymore because the new place as compared to the old established slum afforded no security for the children. One Muslim male committed suicide leaving behind a young widow and three children by setting himself afire.

As I probed further, it turned out that the terrible condition of  the Muslim families had to do with the fact that they  made a living in the informal labor markets in the city. Commuting from the new location to the city – to the familiar places where they had older social networks, contacts and connections was difficult and expensive. And if they did not reach on time, or if they showed up irregularly at the labor addas, their contacts were lost and they got gradually marginalized from the labor market. It was the same with many Muslims who were hawkers.

The situation with some of the dalits was somewhat different. Many of the dalit men and women who had roots in the city had regular jobs.  They could commute to the city in the confident knowledge that at the end of the month, their salary will be paid. Some of the dominant OBC and Dalit groups who moved in to the city from villages and had previous experience in hooch trade. In some families women were able to build connections with lower level government functionaries and create small microfinance networks. Often, ability go gain control over one area meant that they could eventually gain control over another. For example, a family that could control moneylending, could gain control over water and hooch as well. It was the people who could not work out these new opportunities that suffered badly. Although there was some regularity to it, such individuals could be the bearers of any social identity – for instance, none of the Muslims had regular jobs, many of the dalit women were previously domestic workers and had lost their incomes because there were no well todo neighborhoods in the vicinity which could employ them.

What complicated this whole scenario was that except for the first lot of housing plots, all the other houses and one room tenements were given on the basis of an assessment of the family’s ability to pay a monthly instalment for over 15 years to repay the 75000 rupee loan based on which the tenement was allotted to the families. Being excluded from this crucial loan, meant being excluded from everything else.  Being included required that one be able to mobilize a variety of resources including the kind of work one did, the kind of social networks, muscle power, and initial financial investments that one could muster up.

One can say that all these social groups – dalits, muslims and women share a common fate against the uppercaste, brahminical, city and therefore they can band together and fight. But I was not convinced that there was any easy way in which that sort of a battle line could be drawn with the oppressed on the one side and the oppressors on the other side. Nor could I think of any simple formula whereby one could identify any single identity such as caste or gender or religion being the determinant of marginalization. Alternatively one could swing to the other extreme and say that this sort of marginalization is overdetermined and completely contingent. There is no way we can tell what will happen to anyone. But that didnt make much sense either. There ARE patterns to the exclusion. It is just that the patterns are not the ones that my progressive commonsense told me to expect.

The only metaphor that came close to capturing the situation was ‘redlining’. Redlining  is an discriminatory practice by which banks and insurers exclude certain areas in American cities from their business. The term comes from the actual practice of drawing a red circle around the area that is to be excluded. These areas are usually characterized by high incidence of crime, high proportion of racial minority residents, low incomes and bad credit histories. Although redlining is illegal, corporations find ways to continue to exclude some areas. It is a matter of compiling information and profiling areas and then coming up with proper, legally correct justification. Their bottomline justification is that they simply do not want to do business with high risk clients.

On the face of it, redlining can seem like an irrelevant idea to exclusion in the Indian cities. But if the slum relocation described above is any indication of the directions in which our cities are moving, it is high time we began to reconsider our ideas about exclusion. Indian corporations and government agencies may not be able to draw a redline around an area like their counterparts in the 70s did in the United States. But that does not mean that they will not be thinking ‘redline.’ The corralling of the poor into these new relocations is a way of producing new spatial objects that can be governed according to new logics.  Increasingly as the poor in India will be held more and more responsible for their own lifechances, some will get penalized for being the wrong sort of person.  To imagine that this is all about a local conspiracy of the uppercastes and elites is foolhardy.  Microfinance today is one of the faster growing sectors in international finance markets. Models of collective liability developed in self help group style development in India and Bangladesh are being applied to racial minorites in the US, even as middle class white folks are investing their pension funds in microfinance ventures in India.

Understanding who is getting embraced by that deadly global redline – who will be the wrong kind of person is not going to be as easy as saying ah, it is a woman, it is a dalit or even that it is a Muslim.  I certainly never would have imagined that the Muslim hawker whom I had known as a cheerful person would end up finding life so difficult that he would end it by dowsing himself in kerosene and lighting the match stick.  What made it hurt even more was that his death and burial left his widow one can of kerosene and several hundreds of rupees short.