In late March 2020, after the Indian government instituted a nationwide lockdown to impede the spread of COVID-19, a perverse urban politics materialised on Delhi's streets – as it did in cities across the country. While those who could afford it socially distanced in their houses and high-rises, many from Delhi's migrant working class were left unsupported and out of work, looking for a way out of a city that had gradually been exiling them from its planned spaces. Stranded by the nationwide suspension of passenger rail services, thousands of Delhi's migrant labourers, along with their families, began walking back to their home states, often hundreds of kilometres away. The police officers charged with enforcing the lockdown across the city have been meting out punishment with their batons and throwing people into underserved shelters. Under a new legislative scope defined by crisis, the city's old hierarchies have gained a renewed sense of authority, and its urban poor have been perceived not as people but as potential carriers. This sheer inability to see humanity, and willingness to regularise trauma as a necessary evil of containment and orderly governance, is both a social and spatial issue – and it predates the current circumstances.
Delhi and its inequities has long been defined by a fight for who has a right to the city, diagrammed as it is by alien town planners, born from imperial collapse, and overwhelmingly populated by generations of Partition-era refugees. In her new book, Uncivil City: Ecology, Equity, and the Commons in Delhi, sociologist Amita Baviskar maps this fight over 20 years of writing on spatial and environmental politics in Delhi, expressing anxiety about the city's deteriorating ecology, partitioned public spaces, and diminishing collective life.
The book argues that the lives and landscape of Delhi have been undermined by a selective and self-serving rhetoric towards public space and the urban environment. "Bourgeois environmentalism"— as Baviskar terms it — is an environmentalism for the privileged few; a style of interpreting and legislating space based on the largely aesthetic categories of beauty, order, health, nuisance, and hazard. Fuelled by an extractive attitude toward the city's commons – its air, land, water, and green spaces – Delhi's political and social elite have capitalised on a system of valuing nature and space that "reflects the city's sharp hierarchies and shifting alliances." Although published shortly before the arrival of COVID-19 in India, Baviskar's thesis nonetheless echoes the events unfolding in the capital, and across urban India today. Rich in its references to contemporary urban scholarship on the Global South, the book charts Delhi's postcolonial planning history, its economic boom, and its rabid modernisation from a bottom-up perspective, asking two questions that feel relevant now more than ever: whose city? Whose environmentalism?
How did we get here?