Applied Science, Faculty of
Community and Regional Planning (SCARP), School of
DSpace
UBCV
Mawani, Vrushti
Doctor of Philosophy - PhD
University of British Columbia
This dissertation examines the role of religious difference in shaping planning for water access in urban India. Uneven water access is widely linked with discriminatory urban planning practices. However, these broad associations preclude the role of other actors (builders, politicians, NGO workers, community leaders, etc.) in mediating technical plans and influencing water access. Equally, simplistic assumptions of religious discrimination obscure the nuanced understanding required for re-imagining planning approaches to improve water access. This challenge is amplified in divided cities, where uneven water access materially reproduces and emphasizes exclusion. I investigate how the interests and experiences of diverse actors across scales (re)produce uneven water access in segregated Muslim areas of Ahmedabad. Employing an ethnographic approach, I: (a) illustrate how religious difference mediates access to water in Ahmedabad’s Muslim areas; (b) locate the role of planning in how religious difference acquires infrastructural form; (c) make visible the everyday water struggles of Ahmedabad’s Muslim residents; and, (d) illuminate what makes it possible for certain actors to broker water access water in these contested sites. I shed light on the relational infrastructures of water access, i.e., the multi-scalar social, political, economic, technical, and emotional networks that influence water access. Uneven water access in Ahmedabad’s Muslim areas is bound up with practices of planning, but in ways not reducible to discriminatory ideas, intentions, or actions of planners. Instead, actors influencing planning and water governance from multiple institutional and spatial scales enlist discourses of ‘difference’ and ‘(il)legality’ to suit their own political and economic interests. These actors are located across state/non-state, formal/informal, legal/illegal, and most importantly, Hindu/Muslim boundaries. Equally, uneven water access is experienced as everyday emotional and embodied struggles which often subvert the implementation of technical plans meant to improve water access. This dissertation invites planners to attend more carefully to how multi-scalar interests and experiences interact with planning to shape community-level water access in segregated cities.
Brokered Borders Relational Infrastructures of Water Access in Segregated Ahmedabad, India by Vrushti Mawani A THESIS SUBMITTED IN PARTIAL FULFILLMENT OF THE REQUIREMENTS FOR THE DEGREE OF DOCTOR OF PHILOSOPHY in THE FACULTY OF GRADUATE AND POSTDOCTORAL STUDIES (Planning) THE UNIVERSITY OF BRITISH COLUMBIA (Vancouver) May 2021 © Vrushti Mawani, 2021 ii The following individuals certify that they have read, and recommend to the Faculty of Graduate and Postdoctoral Studies for acceptance, the dissertation entitled: Brokered Borders: Relational Infrastructures of Water Access in Segregated Ahmedabad, India submitted by Vrushti Mawani in partial fulfillment of the requirements for the degree of Doctor of Philosophy in Planning Examining Committee: Jordi Honey-Roses, Associate Professor, School of Community and Regional Planning, UBC Supervisor Leila Harris, Professor, Institute for Resources, Environment and Sustainability, UBC Supervisory Committee Member Lisa Björkman, Assistant Professor, Department of Urban and Public Affairs, University of Louisville Supervisory Committee Member Leonie Sandercock, Professor, School of Community and Regional Planning, UBC University Examiner Hisham Zerriffi, Associate Professor, Faculty of Forest Resources Management, UBC University Examiner iii Abstract This dissertation examines the role of religious difference in shaping planning for water access in urban India. Uneven water access is widely linked with discriminatory urban planning practices. However, these broad associations preclude the role of other actors (builders, politicians, NGO workers, community leaders, etc.) in mediating technical plans and influencing water access. Equally, simplistic assumptions of religious discrimination obscure the nuanced understanding required for re-imagining planning approaches to improve water access. This challenge is amplified in divided cities, where uneven water access materially reproduces and emphasizes exclusion. I investigate how the interests and experiences of diverse actors across scales (re)produce uneven water access in segregated Muslim areas of Ahmedabad. Employing an ethnographic approach, I: (a) illustrate how religious difference mediates access to water in Ahmedabad’s Muslim areas; (b) locate the role of planning in how religious difference acquires infrastructural form; (c) make visible the everyday water struggles of Ahmedabad’s Muslim residents; and, (d) illuminate what makes it possible for certain actors to broker water access water in these contested sites. I shed light on the relational infrastructures of water access, i.e., the multi-scalar social, political, economic, technical, and emotional networks that influence water access. Uneven water access in Ahmedabad’s Muslim areas is bound up with practices of planning, but in ways not reducible to discriminatory ideas, intentions, or actions of planners. Instead, actors influencing planning and water governance from multiple institutional and spatial scales enlist discourses of ‘difference’ and ‘(il)legality’ to suit their own political and economic interests. These actors are located across state/non-state, formal/informal, legal/illegal, and most importantly, Hindu/Muslim boundaries. Equally, uneven water access is experienced as everyday emotional and embodied struggles which often subvert the implementation of technical plans meant to improve water access. This dissertation invites planners to attend more carefully to how multi-scalar interests and experiences interact with planning to shape community-level water access in segregated cities. iv Lay Summary Popular and scholarly discourse often characterizes poor water access in segregated cities as a direct result of discriminatory urban planning practices. Practically however, the formulation and implementation of technical plans symbolize interactions between the interests, actions, and experiences of people from across institutional and community settings. I examine these interactions in the segregated Muslim areas of Ahmedabad, India, by studying how diverse social, political, and economic relationships influence plans meant to improve water access. I show that everyday water access is a culmination of the interests and aspirations of people from across religious boundaries. Actors across settings and religious divides shape planning. For a closer understanding of persistent inequality in segregated cities, I propose attending to the many everyday concerns and experiences of actors influencing planning. v Preface This dissertation is an original and individual ethnographic study conducted by Vrushti Mawani. The work reported in Chapters 3, 4, and 5 was approved by the UBC Behavioural Research Ethics Board (Certificate Number H16-01505). Parts of one section of chapter 1 (section 1.3) have been published as a book chapter in English: Mawani, Vrushti and Leaf, Michael, 2019. “Informality and Exclusion in Ahmedabad”, in Rocco, Roberto and Ballegooijen, Jan (Eds.), “The Routledge Handbook on Informal Urbanisation”: Routledge, New York. I conducted the literature review and wrote most parts of the chapter. An earlier version of chapter 3 has been published as a peer-reviewed paper in English: Mawani, Vrushti, 2019. ““Unmapped water access: Locating the Role of Religion in Access to Municipal Water Supply in Ahmedabad”, Water, 11, 1282”. It is available online here. I conducted the literature review and wrote the manuscript. Figures in Chapter 1 are either drawn or photographed by me or public domain issued by the government as a public health advisory in April 2020. Figures in Chapter 3 are photographed by me or public domain and retrieved from government website. Figures in Chapters 4 and 5 are photographed by me with the permission of participants. vi Table of Contents Abstract ......................................................................................................................................... iii Lay Summary ............................................................................................................................... iv Preface .............................................................................................................................................v Table of Contents ......................................................................................................................... vi List of Figures .................................................................................................................................x List of Abbreviations ................................................................................................................... xi Acknowledgements ..................................................................................................................... xii Dedication ................................................................................................................................... xiv Chapter 1: Relational Infrastructures of Segregation ................................................................1 1.1 Encountering the “border” .............................................................................................. 1 1.2 Segregation and the role of planning .............................................................................. 5 1.3 Framing this research: Locating my approach to examining the uneven infrastructures of Ahmedabad’s Muslim areas ................................................................................................. 14 1.3.1 Spatialization of difference in early Ahmedabad ...................................................... 14 1.3.2 Segregation in the “worlding” city ........................................................................... 16 1.3.3 Embedded Infrastructures of Deepening Divides post-2002 .................................... 22 1.3.4 Relational Infrastructures .......................................................................................... 29 1.3.5 Everyday experiences of infrastructure .................................................................... 34 1.4 Research questions ........................................................................................................ 36 vii 1.5 Research Objectives ...................................................................................................... 37 1.6 Dissertation structure .................................................................................................... 40 Chapter 2: Reading the Field: A note on Method .....................................................................43 2.1 Confronting how “sorted out” (I thought) I was ........................................................... 43 2.2 Data collection .............................................................................................................. 47 2.2.1 Dialogues and Interviews .......................................................................................... 49 2.2.2 Neighbourhood walks and participatory photo(mapping) ........................................ 51 2.3 Ethical considerations ................................................................................................... 52 2.4 Logistical challenges ..................................................................................................... 54 2.4.1 Official maps of water networks and infrastructures ................................................ 54 2.4.2 Population estimates ................................................................................................. 55 2.5 In summary: acknowledging limitations of this study .................................................. 56 Chapter 3: Unmapped Water Access: The Role of Planning ..................................................61 3.1 Introduction ................................................................................................................... 61 3.2 Disaggregating water governance in India ................................................................... 66 3.3 Municipal water supply in Ahmedabad ........................................................................ 70 3.3.1 Getting municipal water to Makhtampura and Sarkhej ............................................ 72 3.4 “There are no plots!” ..................................................................................................... 77 3.5 Selective and uneven planning? .................................................................................... 83 viii 3.6 In Conclusion: discursive co-articulations of ‘illegality’ and ‘religious difference’ .... 89 Chapter 4: “Making do”: Everyday water struggles of being Muslim in Ahmedabad.........92 4.1 Introduction: “Yeh roz ka hai” (“this is everyday”) ...................................................... 92 4.2 The lived experiences approach to water justice .......................................................... 97 4.3 Early water struggles of settling in a reserved zone ..................................................... 99 4.3.1 Bore ‘Failures’ ........................................................................................................ 101 4.4 A borewell built on humanitarian grounds that gives no water .................................. 103 4.4.1 Absent Water Lines................................................................................................. 107 4.5 Everyday “emotive realities” ...................................................................................... 109 4.6 “Making Do” (chalaa rahein hain) ............................................................................. 111 4.6.1 Unreliable tankers and neighbourhood politics ...................................................... 113 4.6.2 Ramzan in Summers ............................................................................................... 116 4.7 Conclusion: water justice as differentially embodied ................................................. 118 Chapter 5: Agents of Change: Managing Water, Managing Trust ......................................122 5.1 Introduction: “broker ka kaam” (the work of brokering) ............................................ 122 5.2 Brokers, their ability to get work done, trust, and religious identity .......................... 127 5.3 “Making legal” ............................................................................................................ 132 5.4 The contradictory role of partisan loyalties ................................................................ 139 5.5 “Our people are like that only” ................................................................................... 142 ix 5.6 Conclusions: the politics of water and trust ................................................................ 146 Chapter 6: Discourses and brokerage practices: spatializing religious difference ..............149 6.1 Religious difference, infrastructure politics, and ‘illegality’ ...................................... 152 6.1.1 On ‘illegality’ .......................................................................................................... 152 6.1.2 Complicating tidy notions on the role of religious difference ................................ 155 6.2 Segregation as emotionally experienced through everyday struggles over water ...... 157 6.2.1 Lived realities of residents ...................................................................................... 157 6.2.2 Emotional work of brokering water access ............................................................. 158 6.3 Water brokers as relational infrastructures of trust ..................................................... 159 6.4 Implications for planning research: on tracing segregation and brokerage ................ 162 6.4.1 On exclusion, intentionality, and planning: the role of discourse........................... 162 6.4.2 On brokers and religious identity ............................................................................ 164 Bibliography ...............................................................................................................................166 Appendices ..................................................................................................................................189 Appendix A : Question Guide for Residents .......................................................................... 189 Appendix B : Question Guide for Brokers ............................................................................. 190 Appendix C : Sample of Additional Individual-specific Follow-up Questions for Brokers .. 191 Appendix D : List and Profiles of Research Participants (Brokers) ....................................... 192 x List of Figures Figure 1.1. The “border” in Makhtampura, Ahmedabad ............................................................... 2 Figure 1.2. Location of Ahmedabad in India …………………………………………………...15 Figure 1.3. Location of Makhtampura and Sarkhej in Ahmedabad…………………………….. 26 Figure 3.1. Notice declaring technical details of the Makhtampura WDS. ……………………. 76 Figure 3.2. Area-wise water supply pumps and lines in the Makhtampura WDS……………….76 Figure 3.3 and 3.4. Densely-built, low-income housing in Makhtampura ...............……………79 Figure 3.5. Development Plan, 2021, by Ahmedabad Urban Development Authority………… 81 Figure 4.1. Industrial effluent released close to Faizalpur. …………………………………… 100 Figure 4.2. Municipal borewell that gives no water…………………………………………... 105 Figure 4.3. Water lines from an informal borewell…………………………………………… 112 Figure 4.4. Women filling water from a tanker……………………………………………….. 114 Figure 4.5. Women fetching water from tankers……………………………………………… 117 Figure 5.1. Handwritten request for municipal water lines…………………………………….143 xi List of Abbreviations AMC Ahmedabad Municipal Corporation AUDA Ahmedabad Urban Development Authority DP Development Plan GDCR Gujarat Development Control Regulations GTPUDA Gujarat Town Planning and Urban Development Act IE Institutional Ethnography TPS Town Planning Scheme ULCRA Urban Land Ceiling and Regulation Act WDS Water Distribution Station xii Acknowledgements This PhD journey has been by far the most tumultuous experience of my life, and I am deeply grateful to several people for helping me find my way through it. Foremost, I want to thank my research participants who made time for this project, and shared their knowledge, experiences, feelings, thoughts, and emotions contained in the pages of this dissertation. Thank you for inviting me into your neighbourhoods, homes, and offices, and for patiently helping me understand the complexities of Hindu-Muslim relations in Ahmedabad. Special thanks to Gazala Paul from Samerth for introducing me to the neighbourhoods and residents of Makhtampura. I have had the privilege of being supported by brilliant and generous supervisors and mentors. Jordi Honey-Roses, my PhD advisor, has taught me by example what empathetic and committed supervision looks like. Thank you for taking me on as your student so late in my programme, for always offering reassuring, careful yet critical feedback, and for making the time to discuss my writing despite time differences (and pandemics). Beyond this dissertation, you have inspired my current teaching and future research agenda in important ways, and I am grateful for your guidance in helping me develop them. Leila Harris and Lisa Björkman, my supervisory committee members, have been powerful role-models. Thank you for challenging my ideas, inspiring me to see ever-newer connections across my arguments, and pushing me to sharpen my writing. Michael Leaf and John Friedmann supported my early years at SCARP with compassion and warmth, and I thank them for helping me work through the initial ideas for my research. And Leonie Sandercock, who taught me to “be audacious” in my first year at SCARP, and Maged Senbel who supported and encouraged me in some very difficult times, have shaped this dissertation in more ways than they will know. Thank you. Living in Vancouver and studying at SCARP helped me find amazing, inspiring, and supportive friends for whom I am forever grateful. My brilliant and amazing friends at SCARP, Sara Ortiz Escalante, Magdalena Ugarte Urzua, Prajna Rao, and Jeremy Stone: thank you for sharing your minds, lives, and hearts with me. Thanks also to Navin Ramanakutty and Jeanine Rhemtulla, and their children Amaya and Cleo for their unwavering warmth, spontaneous dinners, playdates, trips to the beach and more. xiii I am grateful to CEPT University and Anant National University in Ahmedabad for offering me much more than just the opportunity to teach while I wrote this dissertation. I thank Pramath Raj Sinha and Garima Aggarwal for inspiring me and giving me hope about the future of higher education in India. And thanks also to my incredibly curious, creative, and hard-working students at both universities: I have learnt a lot by working with you. Thank you to my closest friends in Ahmedabad, Arjun Singh, Janki Singh, Keren Nazereth, and Rebecca Gonsalves: thank you for cheerfully encouraging me on while I wrote this dissertation. Laughing, eating, drinking, singing, dancing and arguing with you sustained and energized me. I am particularly grateful to Janki for the long drives and conversations during my hardest times in 2017: without you, I would have never come this far. Thanks also to my father, Uday Mawani and to my second set of parents, Hemant and Kalpana Jani. You stood by steadfast, patient, and supportive in different ways, even when this project seemed never-ending. Often you would gently ask, “how far along?” I know you will be happy, relieved, and proud of how this turned out. Special thanks to Chintan Jani, my husband, for filling our house with music, food, laughter, and love while I found my way through this research. Thank you for putting up with my unending DIY home projects as I de-stressed while writing, and for balancing out the ‘serious’ in me with your light-heartedness. I owe so much to my daughters, Aara and Maya, who fill me with inspiration and joy. Thank you for being patient with me and adapting to my unending work schedule. I am so grateful that we have been able to paint, adopt dogs, and travel together despite the pressures of writing this dissertation. I also thank Smita Mawani, the birth mother I never knew. I know you would have wanted this. My deepest gratitude to ma, Amita Adhiya, my mother who didn’t birth me, yet raised me and my daughters. You had decided that we would see this dissertation through. Thank you for teaching me how to persevere, how to be compassionate and dedicated, and yet not be overwhelmed. But most importantly, thank you for teaching me to trust myself. Research funding acknowledgement: I am grateful for financial support from the International Development Research Centre (IDRC) Doctoral Award, which helped me conduct extensive fieldwork. xiv Dedication For Ma, who made this dissertation possible in more ways than she will ever know. 1 Chapter 1: Relational Infrastructures of Segregation 1.1 Encountering the “border” “There was a wall. It did not look important. It was built of uncut rocks roughly mortared. An adult could look right over it, and even a child could climb it. Where it crossed the roadway, instead of having a gate it degenerated into mere geometry, a line, an idea of boundary. But the idea was real. It was important. For seven generations there had been nothing in the world more important than that wall. Like all walls it was ambiguous, two-faced. What was inside it and what was outside it depended upon which side of it you were on.” - Ursula Le Guin, The Dispossessed, 1974 During a visit to Makhtampura, a predominantly Muslim area in the city of Ahmedabad in June 2013, I came across a wall much like the one Le Guin describes. With a population of over 5.5 million (Census of India, 20111), Ahmedabad is the commercial capital of the western state of Gujarat, India. The wall I had come across in Makhtampura had masonry extending roughly 6 feet high, with another 2 feet of loose rolls of barbed wire along its upper edge. It turned a few sharp corners and ran uninterrupted for about 2 kilometres. Separating the city’s Hindu areas from its Muslim neighbourhoods, this wall reminded me strikingly of Le Guin’s wall: an unmistakable, unshakeable boundary, symbolic of the very different possibilities contained on either side. Residents from neighbourhoods on both sides called this wall, and the road that ran alongside it, the “border”. Physical and material differences visible on the two sides of this wall were stark. Well-painted middle-income apartment housing fitted with air-conditioners and paved roads on one side; crumbling, wastewater-logged streets, and small, dilapidated, densely packed houses on the other. Given the wide socio-economic disparities that are characteristic of Indian cities, it is not unusual to witness stark material differences separated by a mere wall. But what struck me about 1 https://www.census2011.co.in/census/city/314-ahmedabad.html 2 this particular wall was its uninterrupted length and impenetrable nature. In this, the wall seemed a material embodiment of the increasing Hindu-Muslim segregation and broader socio-economic inequities that have been noted for Ahmedabad (Spodek, 2011), and indeed for India (Gayer and Jaffrelot, 2012). Figure 1.1: The border in Makhtampura, Ahmedabad. Source: Vrushti Mawani, June 2015 Later in this chapter (section 1.3), I present a more detailed history of religious segregation in Ahmedabad, locating it amidst wider socio-economic and political currents. But as a brief introduction here, Ahmedabad has witnessed a rapid growth of predominantly Muslim settlements in its southern and south-western peripheries over the last 18 years, markedly after the 2002 Hindu-Muslim riots. In 2011, almost 14% of Ahmedabad’s population was reportedly Muslim2. But while the share of Muslims in Ahmedabad has grown steadily over the decades, 2 Accessible online at https://www.census2011.co.in/census/city/314-ahmedabad.html. Hindus comprise about 81% of Ahmedabad’s population and while numerous other religious minority communities – Sikhs, Buddhists, Jains, Christians, etc – also live in the city, Muslims are the city’s largest minority community. In contrast, Jains, Christians, Sikhs and Buddhists constitute 3.62%, 0.85%, 0.24% and 0.08% respectively of the total population. However, the total population and particularly the Muslim population are arguably underestimates. I describe the challenges associated with population calculations in Ahmedabad in chapter 2 (section 2.4) 3 from less than 11% in 1961 (Jaffrelot and Thomas, 2012: 52), their segregation has visibly sharpened (ibid). Ahmedabad’s Muslim settlements, on account of their material conditions and their sharp spatial separation from non-Muslim parts of the city are labelled ‘ghettos’ by sociologists, historians, geographers, and planners alike (Jaffrelot & Thomas, 2012; Chatterjee, 2012): “in Ahmedabad, Muslim ghettos – and there is no other kind of ghetto in the city – are typed by other residents as mini- Pakistans, and the road between these sadly impoverished and denuded localities and other areas is construed as the ‘border’” - Chandhoke, 2010: 2 The spatial form of segregated cities, of the sort Chandhoke invokes above, is symbolic of a wider unequal distribution of rights and privileges and cannot be understood without inquiring into the role of planning in shaping these areas. To clarify, by ‘planning’, I mean practices of land and resource management such as land use zoning, master-planning, infrastructure and transportation planning, and building codes; practices involving the conceptualization, financing, and building of material networks that make possible access to water, sanitation, electricity, transport, and more. And as Carl Nightingale shows in his “Global History of Divided Cities” (2012), planning practices such as land use zoning, building guidelines, eminent domain, evictions, demolitions, etc., have historically been complicit in fueling and legitimizing segregation. In Ahmedabad too, as I describe later in this chapter (section 1.3) and in chapter 3, scholars, activists, residents, and politicians have linked the emergence of predominantly Muslim areas with the uneven implementation of specific planning processes. And they have described exclusions visible in these areas in terms of disproportionately poor access to water. Through my graduate education as an urban designer and my subsequent work as a planner, I had come to understand well (or so I thought), the technical processes involved in planning and building urban infrastructure to meet basic needs like water. But that technical understanding did not help me grasp how religious difference could be reproduced spatially and materially as exclusion to water, as it seemed to in Makhtampura. Nor did it help me locate the role of planning in 4 influencing Muslim segregation in Ahmedabad. To clarify my stance on ‘religion’ upfront: I do not see ‘religion’ as being a stable, universal category; rather, I understand it as having been brought into reality discursively as a result of myriad historical narratives. Or to quote Talal Asad (1993: 116), “there cannot be a universal definition of religion, not only because its constituent elements and relationships are historically specific, but because that definition is itself the historical product of discursive processes.” When I refer to religious difference in Ahmedabad then, my intent is not to essentialize ‘difference’. Rather, following Nimord Luz (2015:278), “I use this term rather loosely as the sum total of understandings and spatial activities which are understood and labeled by those who perform them as emanating from religion.” Modern planning thought, with its focus on technical objectives, knowledge and action, posits socio-spatial ‘segregation’ along religious, ethnic, and ‘racial’ lines as external to rational planning practice. However, what we see in Ahmedabad is that increasing socio-spatial segregation and uneven access to water is a recent phenomenon, and one that has emerged in conjunction with formal and technocratic practices of planning. How does this happen? Is it simply the case that individual planners bring their non-rational/communal commitments to their work (whether consciously or otherwise)? Increasing religious segregation in contemporary Ahmedabad became both a puzzle and a worry for me, leading me to carry out the research which is contained in the pages of this dissertation. This dissertation is an ethnographic study of the role of religious difference in shaping planning and water access in urban India. Existing accounts on segregation link uneven water access with discriminatory planning practices and preclude the role of the many actors - across scales and institutional settings - in mediating technical plans and influencing water access. In doing so, they obscure the nuanced understanding required for re-formulating planning approaches to improve real-time water access. I examine and analyse how the interests and experiences of builders, politicians, community leaders, residents, borewell operators, and other actors culminate in the spatialization of uneven water access in the segregated Muslim areas of Ahmedabad. 5 I show how uneven water access in Ahmedabad’s Muslim areas is bound up with practices of planning, but in ways not reducible to discriminatory ideas, intentions, or actions of planners. Instead, actors influencing planning and water governance from multiple institutional and spatial scales enlist discourses of ‘difference’ to suit their own political and economic interests. These actors are located across blurry state/non-state, formal/informal, legal/illegal, and most importantly, Hindu/Muslim boundaries. Discourses of ‘illegality’ animate the influence these actors exert through technical planning processes, while the practical influence of this discursive circulation criminalizes and delegitimizes the need of the most vulnerable Muslim families. In addition, I suggest that discourses of ‘illegality’ have reified ‘religious difference’ and ‘segregation’ in Ahmedabad. Set against this backdrop, uneven water access is experienced as everyday emotional and embodied struggles which often subvert the implementation of technical plans meant to improve water access. 1.2 Segregation and the role of planning The division of cities by class, crafts, clans, gender, or other markers can be traced back thousands of years, to the earliest civilizations. But planning practices of segregating cities explicitly by colour and ‘race’ is relatively recent, finding early articulation in the 1700s in Indian cities under colonial rule (Nightingale, 2012: 19). While the word “segregation” was explicitly used only later, in the 1890s, Nightingale traces initial ideas of cities divided by colour to a 1711 map of Madras (now Chennai) which specifies materially bounded, and so-labeled ‘black’ and ‘white’ towns (ibid: 47). International colonial and capital interests and local politics cumulatively led to government authorities in Madras building walls enclosing and separating the city’s Black Town and White Town3. The British government passed several laws between the late 1600s and mid 1700s dictating who could buy property in what part of the city. Locational values accompanied these laws, as did stratified taxation structures: White Town 3 Needless to say, these divisions based on and labeled by colour interacted in complex ways with caste, class, occupation, religion, and gender, not to mention, with actual skin color. For instance, ‘Black Town’ residents in Indian cities included light-skinned non-European trading communities like the Baghdadi Jews, Ismailis, Bohras as well as European prostitutes. 6 property was taxed lower but valued higher. These processes set the stage for property logics that would later help cement colonial power in across Africa and Asia (ibid: 64 - 72). The case of Madras is important because it tells us how separating populations simply by walls opens the floodgates to many other mechanisms that reinforce exclusion and propel the accumulation of power. However, it is in the relationship between London and Calcutta (now Kolkata), the first and second-largest cities of the British Empire in 1800, and one of the routes most-travelled by professionals and intellectuals, that Nightingale locates the emergence of ‘racial’ segregation. Frequent travel between the two cities led to the emergence of transnational real-estate markets and to the circulation and fusion of methods of segregation. London became the world’s first city to implement class-based segregation tied to the industrial revolution through legal tools such as restrictive covenants. Locally, in London, distinctions between the suburb and inner-city arose (ibid: 97), while British restrictive covenants became precedents for the incorporation of racial restrictions in property deeds in the United states a century later. Calcutta on the other hand was segregated through evictions and demolitions rationalized by discourses on public health and sanitation, organized on intersecting logics of ‘race’ and disease. Cultural practices of ‘natives’ were posed as a public health threat, particularly for White Europeans, and the city erased, reorganized, and governed based on this rationale. In terms of planning tactics, this meant guidelines mandating boulevards, common sewers, straighter and parallel streets, forbidding thatched dwellings, and more (ibid: 94). Given the understanding we now have of ‘race’ as being socially constructed and “solidified” over time by law (Lopez, 1994), these practices of segregation come into view as those enlisted in the reification of ‘racial’ categories. On the one hand, ideas of dividing cities based on ‘race’ are embedded in the wider coalescence of political and economic interests around race in the late 1700s. Property rights were a key pivot around which social stratification based on discourses of racial differences was institutionalized. On the other, justifications for racial segregation were framed in terms of moral, political, cultural, and sexual threats that local populations posed for White colonisers. 7 Emanating from experiments in London and Calcutta in the early 1800s, ideas of dividing cities circulated across emerging and growing colonies in China, South-East Asia, Australasia and North America, finding ever newer articulations. Early plans for Singhapura, or Singapore, for instance, were drawn with segregated areas chalked out for White Europeans, Chinese, South Indians, Arabs, and Malay fishers. These racialized plans were rationalized as aiding administration to suit cultural differences, but prime land was always reserved as the European quarter. In Hong Kong, segregation found expression in terms of stipulations for architectural styles and character, learning to discourage traditional architecture through law and keeping local residents out of specific areas “without technically violating their property rights” (ibid: 140 - 144). Meanwhile, gold discoveries starting 1848 along the Pacific Rim had led to growing waves of White settlers, soon followed by Chinese, Latin American, free Black communities, and some others to America, Canada, Australia, and New Zealand. Grudges that had coalesced around discursively constructed ‘racial differences’ in other geographies transported themselves across the ocean to cities along the Pacific Rim, playing out first as violent clashes in gold fields and mines, and then as competition over jobs and wages in cities. These in turn set the stage for the emergence of Chinatowns in San Francisco, Vancouver, Melbourne, and other cities. Chinese communities here were small compared to the White population and sought safety in numbers. ‘Race’ had already started being used to divide these cities, with White settlers in US, Australia, and Canada declaring ‘native reserves’ to restrict indigenous groups to specific areas. In response to Chinese then, sanitary rhetoric was raised here yet again by White settler groups, but this time to object against Chinatowns entirely. Fused with arguments relating to the “racial threat to property values”, and learning from parallel experiments in South African cities, San Francisco passed a municipal ordinance in 1890 ordering Chinese and their businesses to move out of the city. Contested by Chinese activists, this divisive measure did not take practical shape. But it paved the way for how ‘race’ could acquire discursive power, get reified, and be spatialized through planning institutions and rationalizations such as ‘racial zoning’ (ibid: 148 – 54). Indeed, it became the precedent for the implementation of Jim Crow laws in Baltimore, where a municipal ordinance was passed to divide the city into Black and White blocks in 1910 (ibid:303). 8 Practices of employing rhetoric based on ‘racial differences’ to segregate cities took a firm hold on imaginations of colonial powers across the world with the bubonic plague outbreak. Emerging first in Hong Kong in 1894, followed by Bombay in 1896, the plague spread across the world, and alongwith it, so did measures to isolate and segregate some to protect others: indeed, this is when the word ‘segregation’ came explicitly into circulation (ibid: 3). To save Europeans in Hong Kong, Bombay, and other colonies, houses of local people were torn down and often burnt, and residents pushed into tents and hospitals, or onto ships for purposes of isolation (166 – 167). These practices were repeated in Honolulu in 1900, where much of the city’s Chinatown was burned down. Soon after, in San Francisco, Chinatown was forcibly cordoned off, exacerbating the disproportionate public health impact on the city’s Chinese community and pushing Chinese to seek protection in separate neighbourhoods. Back in the Asian colonies, taking cue from the Housing of the Working Classes Act passed in Britain in 1890, laws started being written to “transform” slums, which started being called “plague spots”. Enforced by pushing slumlords to adhere to strict building codes, or by government-led demolition of slums with promises to rehouse the poor in urban peripheries, these planning measures etched segregation patterns deeper (ibid:162) reifying racial categories further. Such practices of dividing cities, justified through discourses of public health and “sanitary thinking”, circulated further to African colonies in the 1900s. In Dakar, Senegal, the French razed huts and shacks belonging to the “native population”, relegating inhabitants – a tenth of the city’s total population – to the peripheries of the city. In German-held Duala, Cameroon, all native residents were ordered to be moved out, property titles to prime lands to be handed over to the few Whites, and buffer zones instituted between the Black and White areas (ibid: 182 – 185). Some of the most elaborate and brutal urban segregation strategies however, written into and implemented through planning, lie arguably in the apartheid system of South Africa. Ideas of separated urban areas based on ‘race’ were first birthed by British officers in South Africa between 1900 and 1906. This promise was delivered almost half a century later, in 1948, through detailed and codified measures such as “the rural native reserve system, the pass laws aimed to control influxes of nonworking black people to the cities, and the native location system in cities”. For Johannesberg, these laws acquired spatial form in terms of clearly segregated 9 sections: sprawling homes for white settlers in the north; white working-class neighbourhoods in the east; slums for the poorest white workers, Indians, mixed-race people and Blacks in the west; and dumping grounds, “sewage farms”, and living quarters for the all-male Black mine workers. Arguably, the dumping grounds and sewage farms physically and materially reproduced and reified the social status assigned by White settlers to the Black population (ibid: 231 – 233). Around the same time, an even more complex set of practices began emerging in the northern and western US cities that articulated lines of segregation in ever newer ways. ‘Blockbusting’ in Chicago was one such practice. With an exponential growth in Chicago’s Black population from 1900 to 1910, a set of real-estate agents called ‘blockbusters’ started instilling fear in poor White residents about how their neighbourhoods would soon be taken over by growing poor Black groups. To produce this effect, blockbusters hired Black and White actors to stage public theatrics to reinforce stereotypical roles. Many poor Whites, giving in to this fear, sold their homes at lower than usual rates to blockbusters, who in turn leased these properties to the ever-growing poor Black population at much higher prices. Importantly, in this game of reproducing segregation and reifying race for economic gain, blockbusters were both Black and White (ibid: 309 – 311). In this instance then, the role of real estate agents in mediating segregation along class and ‘race’ begins to emerge more clearly as one separate from the government. Equally, imaginations of ‘segregationists’ as being only White begin to blur. Indeed, as Preston Smith (2012) notes for Chicago, other actors from Black communities have also been noted for shaping segregation in American cities. In his words (ibid: xii - xvi), black civic leaders “themselves contributed to class segregation in black communities in the postwar period. Though they were not the architects of the policies that produced housing inequalities, black leaders helped legitimate housing stratification by devoting inconsistent attention to the political-economic foundations of residential segregation… they had their own reasons for pursuing a racial politics that… accommodate(d) a probusiness political economy.” Reviewing the global circulation of practices of segregation through the early 1700s to the mid-1900s reveals the increasing sophistication, complexity, and heterogeneity they have acquired over the centuries. This review also helps locate how planning is deployed: sometimes 10 subversively, and other times through blatant and brutal means, to achieve segregationist goals. Justifications for planning divided cities have ranged from diplomatic arguments regarding administrative ease (as in Singapore), to blatant ones tied at once to ‘race’, disease, and capital (as in Hong Kong, Bombay, Honolulu, San Francisco, Dakar, Duala, and Johannesberg). Materially, such planning has manifested as walls, racial zoning, building guidelines, evictions, demolitions, relocation, buffer zones, and even immigration laws. But equally, Smith’s (2012) account of Chicago reveals that actors influencing planning and segregation might not fall within neat divides of class, ‘race’, religion, etc. Back in Ahmedabad, walking along the border in Makhtampura in 2013, I felt rising within me anxieties about how to locate the role of planning in shaping religious segregation in 21st century Ahmedabad within this broader history. Residents I spoke to anchored their everyday experiences of living in Muslim Ahmedabad explicitly to religious segregation and exclusion. The quotes below are from dialogues and interviews I conducted during my fieldwork through 2016 to 2020. Reminiscent of assertions I had heard in 2013, they offer insights into how experiences of being Muslim - “the other” - in Ahmedabad coalesces simultaneously with the experience of discriminatory planning and uneven access to water. “Infrastructure work here has been done on the basis of discrimination... Show me how much of your allotted budget is spent on Muslim areas? No development has happened here.” - Neighbourhood leader, Sarkhej Ward4, interview, February 2017 “Like the streets in Hindu areas are paved, these streets should also be paved. This place stays so dirty because of these potholes. No one comes to visit us because we live like this… Like the Hindu areas, there should be water lines here also.” - Resident woman, Makhtampura Ward, interview, January 2020 4 Wards are the smallest administrative units in Indian cities 11 “Take any infrastructure – it is all bad. The condition here is worse than the rest of the city. This is a Muslim area…” - Resident man, Makhtampura Ward, interview, September 2017 The experiences of segregation offered by Muslim residents of Makhtampura and Sarkhej are tied at once to selective ‘development’, exclusion to physical infrastructure, and to difference – i.e., to the area being Muslim. But as the discussion above reveals, it might well be that discourses of difference acquire form through planning to produce segregation and unequal access to physical infrastructure. In turn, uneven access to resources might further reify the discursive categories enlisted in the spatial reproduction of difference in the first place. Sketched against this background, the residents’ conflation of Makhtampura and Sarkhej having poor infrastructure and being Muslim emerge as part of the larger puzzle of increasing religious segregation in Ahmedabad. As well, the residents’ assertions above demand clarifications on what is meant by ‘infrastructure’. On the one hand, infrastructure is conceived as “a system of substrates” (Star, 1990: 380), which due to its networked form, “facilitate(s) the flow of goods, people, or ideas, and allow for their exchange over time” (Larkin, 2013: 328). From this perspective, the first and third quotes above can be thought of as referring to material networks such as roads, water and drainage lines, electricity grids, etc., that make possible diverse flows through Ahmedabad’s Muslim areas. However, more recent scholarship invites us to think of infrastructures as not only physical networks, but as entangled and embedded within a complex network of social, economic, environmental, technical, and political relationships and practices (Graham and McFarlane, 2015; Swyngedouw, 2004; Star, 1999; Björkman, 2015). Indeed, this layered understanding of infrastructure is also what I highlight through the above review of segregation practices. Variously articulated, these relationships and practices “construct circulations of bodies, resources, affect and information” (Simone, 2015: 18). Infrastructure planning and building then is understood as shaped by various technical processes, everyday realities, and political interests (Björkman, 2015) across scales: from individual, neighbourhood, regional, and beyond (cf., Truelove, 2019). 12 Infrastructures, in other words, are not only material, but also relational. Relationships and everyday practices are infrastructures upon which our physical habitats are built (Simone, 2015: 18; Elyacher, 2010). This “social infrastructure” (Elyacher, 2010) binds together diverse formal and informal actors and often confounds conventional understandings of legal/illegal, state/non-state, and so on (Hansen and Stepputat, 2001; Ranganathan, 2014; Anand, 2011). Additionally, the relational nature of infrastructures lies not only in relationships that make flows possible, but also in their affective role. Through their material qualities and/or the political promises they embody, physical infrastructures can inspire awe, desire, hope, and progress, as much as be construed as physical manifestations of marginality (Harvey, 2010; De Boeck, 2011; Larkin, 2013, 2018; Knox, 2017). These affective qualities in turn influence the everyday experiences of infrastructure (cf., Sultana, 2015, 2020; Truelove, 2019; Gonzalez-Hidalgo and Zografos, 2019), as well as, I argue, reify categories of difference. Back in Ahmedabad, in Makhtampura ward with its reported population of about 450,000, less than 50% of the population has access to household level municipal water connections5. Other residents access water from a range of sources including private household-level borewells, neighbourhood-level borewells, municipal tankers and private tankers. This is in sharp contrast to data on the rest of the city: according to public data published by the municipal corporation, 80 – 98% of the city’s population have piped water supply (AMC, date uncertain6: 37). Yet, while the visibly uneven physical and material infrastructure of Ahmedabad’s Muslim areas has been analyzed and described at great length (see Chandhoke et al, 2007; Chandhoke, 2009; Mander, 2006), an account of everyday relational infrastructures influencing flows of water remains missing. As I describe in the following section (section 1.3), religious segregation in Ahmedabad has been theorized in terms of changes in economic and political power relations (Mahadevia, 2002; Breman, 2002, 2004; Chandhoke, 2010; Spodek, 2011; Mawani and Leaf, 5 These are my estimates, inferred from various data sources. I detail this further in chapter 3, section 3.4.1 6 Accessible online from the Ahmedabad Municipal Corporation website: https://ahmedabadcity.gov.in/portal/jsp/Static_pages/water_project.jsp 13 2019). Sociologist Jan Breman for instance locates the rise in Hindu-Muslim violence and segregation in Ahmedabad in “the globalized nature of the political economy that has emerged” in this city (2002: 1487). The phenomenon has also been explained in terms of a rise in Hindu fundamentalism (Desai, 2011; Spodek, 2011). Equally, segregation in Ahmedabad has been narrated through struggles faced by the city’s Muslim residents as a result of socio-spatial exclusion (Gayer and Jaffrelot, 2012; Desai, 2011; Mahadevia and Desai, 2019). But little remains said about the everyday practices, interests, relationships, and lived realities that have shaped, and are shaped by, unequal access to resources here. As well, the affective role of material and relational infrastructures in influencing the spatial (re)production of religious difference remains unexplored. It is these silences about everyday social, economic, political, and technical networks shaping water access that have informed the contours of my curiosity. I frame my research as an ethnography of relational infrastructures that constitute the context for visible, spatial religious segregation I focus on water infrastructures because residents repeatedly raised this issue during my early site visits. To clarify, when I say water access, I refer to issues of reliability, quality, quantity, and affordability, as well as what these imply for household and community dynamics. It is important to acknowledge here the slipperiness in thinking of infrastructures relationally. For, in Lisa Björkman’s words, “thinking about infrastructure relationally can … blur(s) the boundaries of what might “count” as infrastructure.” (2015: 13). To address this concern, in focusing on the relational infrastructures of water in Ahmedabad’s Muslim areas, I examine those actors, relationships, interests, and practices that play a significant role in influencing access to water in my research sites. I also attend to the lived realities shaped by these relational infrastructures, for it is these mundane experiences that help us grasp where the decisions and actions relating to everyday negotiations stem from (Sultana, 2011; cf., Rodina, 2016). I offer this dissertation then as an account of the multiple interests and power relations that culminate in the spatialization of exclusion and religious segregation experienced as access to water. More specifically, through this study, I: (a) illustrate how religious difference mediates access to water in Ahmedabad’s Muslim areas across scales; (b) locate the role of technical 14 planning in how religious difference acquires infrastructural form; (c) make visible the everyday water struggles of Ahmedabad’s Muslim residents, and; (d) illuminate what makes it possible for certain actors to broker access to water in these contested sites. To contextualize these overarching goals, I offer next (section 1.3) a brief history of Muslim segregation in contemporary Ahmedabad. Here, I review literature locating rising religious segregation in Ahmedabad amidst broader socio-economic and political currents to clarify my approach for examining relational infrastructures of segregation and water access. To sketch my analytical approach, I juxtapose this discussion against relevant theoretical and empirical work, highlighting how planning in Ahmedabad has been implicated in shaping segregation. I follow this with my research questions (section 1.4), after which I discuss in greater detail the objectives motivating my inquiry (section 1.5). I conclude this chapter with an overview of the structure and content of the remainder of the dissertation (section 1.6). 1.3 Framing this research: Locating my approach to examining the uneven infrastructures of Ahmedabad’s Muslim areas In this section I present my conceptual framework by: (1) offering a history of how the spatialization of religious segregation in Ahmedabad has been understood by wider scholarship and explain my choice of focusing on relational infrastructures for this research; (2) locating and clarifying the relational infrastructures of water access in Muslim Ahmedabad that I will focus on; and (3) outlining my analytical approach for examining mediations and everyday experiences of water access. 1.3.1 Spatialization of difference in early Ahmedabad Ahmedabad is India’s seventh largest city and the commercial capital of the western state of Gujarat. Its urban origins date back to 1411 when Ahmed Shah, a Sunni Muslim of the Muzaffarid dynasty, established this city as the capital of the Sultanate of Gujarat. Given this history of Mughal rule, strong Islamic influences, social and spatial, continued to shape Ahmedabad until the early 1800s when British colonial rule annexed Gujarat and the 15 predominantly Muslim elite who had directed the development of the city were replaced by British bureaucrats (Jaffrelot & Thomas, 2012: 44). The prominence of Islam in Ahmedabad declined significantly during its years under colonial rule: a shift that mirrored trends across India. Gayer and Jaffrelot (2012: 313 ‐ 314) attribute this decline to conflicted intra‐Muslim relations and the displacement of Urdu as the language for governance across the region through the 19th century. Simultaneously, Ahmedabad’s textile industry grew rapidly, and the city attained national prominence on account of its industrial role; prominence reflected in popular references to Ahmedabad of the late-1800s and early-1900s as the ‘Manchester of India’ (Spodek, 2011: 1). Figure 1.2: Location of Ahmedabad in India. Source: Drawn by Vrushti Mawani using Adobe Illustrator 16 Early references to socio-economic segregation based on caste and religion trace back to these early years of the city’s industrial history. Jan Breman (2004: 15–17) for instance, in his history of labour relations that have shaped Ahmedabad, highlights that in 1879, the city’s textile mill workers were mainly Muslims and lower-caste Hindus. And as the factories grew in capacity and number, labor was sourced from the countryside, again mainly from Muslim and lower caste Hindu households. These new migrant workers built self-help housing around textile mills in the city’s east (ibid: 31– 32): housing that became early markers of the spatialization of religious and caste-based differences in the city. The following description helps locate better the spatial characteristics of the city through these years: “(this part of) Ahmedabad developed during the latter half of the nineteenth century, around old villages on the periphery of the city, after the emergence of the textile industry. In these medieval villages turned industrial townships, slums and chawls (multi-storeyed concrete slums) mushroomed around the textile mills and other factories which had huge compounds and high walls. While this Ahmedabad retains much of the traditional caste-based lifestyle of the old villages, slums and chawls also carry the imprint of the social composition and segregated diversity of the textile mill workers… Prior to 1980, almost one-third of the textile workers were Dalit (literally “downtrodden” - including Scheduled castes, Scheduled tribes and Backward classes); another third were Muslim.” - Dutta, 2000: 15; quoting Yagnik, Nandy, et. al., 1997 1.3.2 Segregation in the “worlding” city Patterns of socio-economic and spatial segregation that took shape in industrial Ahmedabad under British rule deepened as India stepped into independence in 1947. During the India‐Pakistan Partition, Gayer & Jaffrelot (2012: 313 ‐ 314) point out, wealthier Muslim families migrated to Pakistan, leaving behind poorer families who retreated into the cities of India. Many have noted that amongst independent India’s minority communities, the Muslim community exhibits some of the deepest perceptions of deprivation in relation to issues of identity, security and equity (see Sachar Report, 2006: 237). The impact of Partition on Hindu-Muslim segregation specifically in Ahmedabad however remains contested. As I recount below, some have argued that segregation in Ahmedabad is a fallout of the large‐scale labour 17 informalization that accompanied liberalization-related reforms post‐1960s (Breman, 2002: 1485; Mahadevia, 2002), while others trace it back to historical conflicts embedded in spatial and cultural differences (Patel, 2006). In the mid-1960s, Ahmedabad was India’s most industrialized city, with its 133,000 textile workers constituting 10% of the city’s population (Spodek, 2011: 6). But with the onset of industrial liberalization in India, Ahmedabad’s textile mills started closing down starting the mid-1960s, and acceleratingly through the early 1980s (Breman, 2002). With deregulation in the guise of market reforms constituting the larger national context, discourse around the benefits of liberalization picked up pace in the state of Gujarat, leading to increased industrial competition and the rollback of legislation to protect labor (Kudva, 2009: 1623; Breman, 2001: 4804). Many of Ahmedabad’s textile mill workers, who were largely Muslim and lower-caste Hindus as mentioned earlier, lost their jobs. Of the 170,000 full-time workers employed in the city’s textile mills in the early eighties, 100,000 were retrenched by 1995 (Mahadevia, 2002: 4851). Tied to the post-1960s liberalization-led reforms nationally then, the retrenchment of textile mill workers in Ahmedabad has been associated with an increase in the number of workers comprising the informal sector of the city’s economy (Breman, 2001: 4810), and increased vulnerability for this newly informalized population (Mahadevia, 2002: 4853). Sujata Patel (2006) on the other hand traces rising Muslim segregation in Ahmedabad to its years of being under colonial rule, and to everyday politics that characterized communities from diverse castes and religions living separately, but in close quarters, in the walled city. These literal close quarters in Ahmedabad’s walled city, locally called pols, are dense neighbourhoods where community, identity, and territory intermixed to produce spatially and culturally specific social and economic codes of living. The growth of Ahmedabad’s walled city dates back to the city’s early years in the 15th century. With waves of migration to the city, pols segregated by caste and religion grew in Ahmedabad. Patel tells us how over time these tight-knit social structures from the walled city transported themselves across the river as Ahmedabad spread westwards. Municipal services and land were typically contentious issues over which conflicts between adjoining communities in 18 the pols emerged, she says, playing out along intersecting axes of caste, class, and religion (ibid). Arguably, cultural habits, including religious rituals (such as animal sacrifice by Muslims), food preferences (Muslims and some lower caste Hindus were non-vegetarian communities, while upper caste Hindus, Jains, etc. were ‘strict’ vegetarians), and the garbage disposal that follows, have historically been sources of conflict between these communities. Additionally, with a growing number of Muslims coming into the limelight for being involved with illicit activities like bootlegging and smuggling, generalizations for the “character” of the Muslim community began to abound. Together, these conflicts led to increasing incidents of Hindu-Muslim violence in Ahmedabad through the early 1940s and 50s, Patel tells us, arguing that these had already begun to reinforce a “ghetto mentality” in the city’s Muslim community. Again, parallels between these dynamics in Ahmedabad, and those that led to Chinese in cities of the Pacific Rim seeking safety in numbers, are difficult to miss. In Ahmedabad, “Muslims found it difficult to get land in areas of the western sector where upper-caste Hindus lived”, she says, leading to the “ghettoization” of Muslims in the walled city in the 1980s (Patel, 2006: 367 – 369). Disagreements between accounts anchoring Hindu-Muslim segregation in liberalization-related economic fallouts and those that historicize religious segregation to pol living continue to abound. In the meantime, the city started seeing major episodes of Hindu–Muslim violence, starting in 1969 and followed by a protracted period of violence in 1985. Locally, a large share of Ahmedabad’s Muslim community in the 1980s belonged to the suddenly disenfranchised working class. But more broadly too, the Hindu nationalist agenda had gained traction during the late 1980s and early 1990s. The cumulative impact of these developments across scales of nation and city led to urban violence and segregation in Ahmedabad shifting from being organized around a mix of class, caste, and religious differences, to instead finding articulation primarily around Hindu–Muslim differences (Spodek, 2011: 12– 13). Muslim families that lived in the inner city started to “flee and to segregate for the sake of safety” (ibid). It is in this context – of Ahmedabad being emblematic of the national ascent of Hindutva, the ideology centered on the belief that the entire Indian subcontinent is the homeland of the Hindus – that Spodek calls it “India’s shock city”. 19 The spatial impact of these segregation politics, organized along the lines of caste, class, and religion, has been noted in statistics on the growth of informal settlements7. According to one report, total housing in the city categorized as ‘slums’ increased from 17.2% in 1961 to 25.6% in 1991 (Dutta, 2000: 17). Another report estimates that the population living in informal settlements in the city grew from 23% in 1981 to 41% in 1996/97 (Breman, 2001: 4809). In 2001, a large share of these informal settlements was located in the city’s east and its south (Annez et al., 2012). This might in part be attributed to now informalized workers taking up employment in the new industries that had arrived in Ahmedabad’s eastern periphery, and setting up self-help housing nearby (Breman, 2001: 4808). But additionally, this spatialization of difference – or spatial segregation – has also been related to western Ahmedabad being inaccessible to many on account of caste, class, and religion since this is where “upper-caste Hindus live(d)” (Patel, 2006; Dutta, 2000). The emerging post-liberalization segregated city has been described as follows: “the city is broadly divided into at least three cities: the original core or the walled city where different communities live but where Hindus and Muslims have become more distanced than earlier, the industrial area on the eastern side of the walled city where Dalits and Muslims lived in close proximity in the same chawls but have now become segregated and distanced, and the western side of the city where the rich and the middle class migrated to establish their housing societies. Furthermore, the main Muslim ghettos have emerged towards the periphery in both the south-west and south-east… The city is therefore segmented in terms of class, caste and religion, as well as quality of housing, its typologies, and levels of services and amenities.” - Mahadevia, Desai, and Vyas, 2014: 16 (emphasis is mine) The story thus told of Ahmedabad’s urbanization connects liberalization policies with deepening religious segregation and exclusion to material infrastructure in no uncertain terms. 7 A combination of slums and chawls. Chawls are rows of rooms with or without sanitary facilities, and in Ahmedabad, were built to house labourers working in the mills. For more on the growth of slums and chawls in Ahmedabad, see Mahadevia, Desai, and Vyas, 2014 20 And indeed, the drawing of such connections between liberalization, uneven access to housing and infrastructure networks, segregation, and exclusion is not new. Nor is it unique to Ahmedabad, or India. Cities across the world have been theorized in this way by scholarship premised in political economy frameworks: for embodying the desires of capital in their spatial form. Graham and Marvin (2001) argue for instance that the economic and geopolitical shifts 1970s onward - privatisation, liberalisation, globalisation, and technological development –have led to uneven economic investments in cities, and this unevenness in turn has produced fractured infrastructure networks (ibid:91 – 92). These uneven infrastructure networks – of electricity, water, sewers, roads, and more – they posit, are inequitable “splintering urbanisms” that exclude groups of people based on class, gender, race, and sexuality (ibid: 123 - 125). But this emphasis on liberalization, globalization and economic relations as lead causes of observably uneven access to infrastructure occludes attention to the spatially and temporally particular micro-politics that shape cities. Kooy and Bakker (2008), using the case of Jakarta, argue for instance that while the water infrastructure of this city is indeed highly differentiated, this unevenness cannot be ascribed to neoliberalization alone. The fragmentation evident in infrastructure networks of Southern cities such as Jakarta might stem from a fundamentally different set of reasons than those observed in the “global cities” of the North and West. Infrastructure networks that look “splintered” in cities like Jakarta might well result from attempts by both colonial and postcolonial governments to “differentiate people by race and class” (ibid: 1844). Equally, they might also culminate from a “splintering from below”: i.e., they might be embodiments of efforts by excluded groups at accessing the resource or network in question (ibid: 1845). Kooy and Bakker thus offer the notion of postcolonial governmentality towards understanding infrastructural networks in Southern cities to focus our attention on material as well as discursive practices fixing power relations in space Aihwa Ong however argues that looking at cities of the South primarily through a postcolonial optic is also problematic. The implicit assumption of such approaches, she says, is that “outside the West, the Rest is inescapably postcolonial” (Ong, 2011: 8). The focus of such an optic is either on questions of resistance by subaltern groups, or on processes of “catching up” 21 with the modern (Western) ideal that Southern cities are seen to be entangled in. As a result, Ong contends that studies premised on postcolonial frameworks risk asking a similar set of questions and making nearly identical inferences relating to power and resistance, across very diverse sites. Urging for conceptual unbounding so as to ask more relevant, open-ended questions, she says: “Only by liberating the city as a conceptual container of capitalism and subaltern agency can different analytical approaches explore methods for explaining how an urban situation can be at once heterogeneously particular and irreducibly global” (ibid: 9). This need for conceptual unbounding then sets the stage for focusing on heterogeneous practices of worlding, i.e., “situated everyday practices” in cities of the South that defy tidy categorization (ibid: 12). Empirical accounts of urban infrastructure employing precisely such conceptual unbounding have highlighted how several other variables influence segregation and exclusion. Through her work in Mumbai, Lisa Björkman for instance, highlights how local water problems might not stem from a neighborhood being illegal to start with, from its “ontologically prior status as a slum”; rather, it might be water politics that lead to a legal municipal neighbourhood becoming re-imagined and treated as slum (Björkman, 2014: 38, 54). On the other hand, Asher Ghertner (2015), through the example of Delhi, shows how some illegal constructions enjoy all privileges of legality, including access to urban infrastructure, primarily because they look legal; because of their aesthetics. Both these studies point at how one set of worlding practices might involve the governance of space and infrastructure “on the basis of codes of appearance rather than through the calculative instruments of map, census, and survey.” (Ghertner, 2015: 4). Other worlding practices that have been found to influence the planning and building of infrastructure include, among others, the extent of political support garnered by a project (Shatkin, 2011: 79); the economic investment potential of a project (Goldman, 2011); ideals of being “world-class” represented by masterplanned, networked imaginaries (Ong, 2011; Björkman, 2015); and how local planners and engineers (come to) understand spatially and temporally specific sites (Ghertner, 2015; Björkman, 2018). For our understanding of segregation and exclusion in Ahmedabad, this scholarship suggests the need to refocus attention on the everyday practices of worlding influencing 22 planning, water access, and segregation in Ahmedabad. It makes the case for moving past tidy associations set up between liberalization, religious segregation, and infrastructural exclusion by scholarship premised in political economy frameworks. And it also pushes for asking different questions than those constrained by the frame of subaltern resistance. Such a refocusing of attention entails paying heed instead to the “actual human projects and goals unfolding in myriad circumstances of possibility and contingency” (Ong, 2011: ibid). 1.3.3 Embedded Infrastructures of Deepening Divides post-2002 One such human project shaping religious segregation in urban India has undoubtedly been the nationalist ideology of Hindutva. This movement has gained increasing traction since the 1980s owing to its potential for mass mobilization and electoral success through appeasing India’s Hindu majority. Renu Desai (2011: 100) describes in her influential essay the geopolitics integral to Hindutva as such: “Hindutva’s territorial imagining of India as a Hindu nation is … founded upon the exclusion and threat of the religious Other – particularly Muslims, whose threat is magnified by their construction of a pre-colonial Indian history that emphasizes the Muslim (Mughal) invasion, as well as by the postcolonial identification of Indian Muslims with Pakistan – and more recently, with a militant transnational Islam.” 8 Hindutva is seen as an important method of controlling labour. And for Ahmedabad, with its large and largely conservative middle-class, Hindutva is considered a key site through which economic and political interests are funneled (ibid). I have described in the earlier section how religious segregation in Ahmedabad is viewed as an economic and political fallout of liberalization and globalization by some and anchored in historical patterns of communal living by others. But in addition, two laws related to land and property promulgated in the 1970s and 8 Juergensmeyer (1996: 130) however asserts that Hindutva needs to be understood less as being motivated by religious concerns than as a symptom of social, economic, and political factors. His postulation is echoed in Arjun Appadurai’s argument about violence and terror being “the nightmarish side of globalization” (2006: 33). Appadurai squarely implicates the loss of national economies across the South, growing inequalities between classes and nations, and uncertainties produced by dematerialized, high- speed financial flows (ibid., 22– 27) in the production of large- scale ethnocidal violence. 23 1980s illuminate how Hindutva politics worked its way through planning to acquire spatial form in in Ahmedabad. The first of these is the Urban Land Ceiling and Regulation Act (ULCRA) promulgated by the government of India in 1976. While I discuss this in chapter 3 (section 3.5) in more detail, the ULCRA was enacted to facilitate a more equitable distribution of urban land. Targeting private land hoarding, this ordinance specified “ceilings” for private land ownership in cities and their peripheries. Land in excess of these ceilings was to be acquired by the government without compensation to the owners. But the practical implication of this planning strategy was quite different from what it had (reportedly) set out to achieve. Faced with the prospect of losing their lands without compensation, owners of lands in the peripheries of Ahmedabad sub-divided their excess lands and sold them off illegally before acquisitions by the government could be enforced. Transaction costs associated with such illegal sales were lower than legal transactions, and attracted small-time builders, who in turn further sub-divided lands, often times building cheap housing on them and selling it off to poor communities (from interviews, but also see Desai et al., 2016: 3). Properties on the peripheries of the city, particularly in the south and the east (since the west was dominated by upper-caste Hindus), became attractive options for poorer Muslims and lower-caste Hindus. The second planning mechanism that etched segregation harder into the landscape of Ahmedabad was the Disturbed Areas Act, legislated by the state of Gujarat in 1986. I have described this in detail elsewhere (Mawani and Leaf, 2019: 15). But briefly, this law was introduced by the state government at the request of Gujarat’s Muslim community following the 1985/86 Hindu-Muslim violence. Meant to prevent distressed property sales in Ahmedabad’s mixed neighbourhoods, the ordinance prohibits Hindus and Muslims from selling, leasing or transferring their property to one another in areas sensitive to violence, or ‘disturbed areas’, without explicit permission from the district collector. The list of ‘disturbed areas’ is drawn up based on police reports of Hindu-Muslim violence and is periodically updated. At the time of its enactment in 1986, this list included parts of the inner city as well as newer areas sensitive to violence. But in a recent update of this list in April 2013 suggests that an estimated 40% of 24 Ahmedabad is now governed by this law. Ironically, this increase is despite emphatic claims by the government that the state has been peaceful since 20029. Predominantly Muslim areas in the south-western and south-eastern parts of the city are part of this list, implying that no Hindu families can rent, lease or buy property in these areas. Aimed ostensibly at preventing distressed property sales, indeed at discouraging segregation, the Disturbed Areas Act has managed to reinforce segregation in Ahmedabad. Concurrently, housing in Ahmedabad’s non-Muslim areas has been made unavailable to Muslims through other implicit and explicit means as well. Desai et al., point out that of the public housing built by various planning authorities, little has been built in the city’s Muslim areas. Instead, “(a)ll the public housing schemes built for the poor and low-income groups that are allotted by lottery system have been built in Hindu areas of the city,” they say (2016: 6). Chatterjee’s review of public housing built by one planning authority (AUDA) reveals that of the 14 complexes and 4500 homes built and allotted, not one has been allotted to Muslims (2011: 2584). More implicitly, as I elaborate in chapter 3, resident associations and property owners in non-Muslim housing societies do not permit or engage in rent or sale transactions with Muslims10. Yet, growing Hindu– Muslim segregation in Ahmedabad was still being referred to as ‘expulsion’ from the industrial core of the city until 2001 (Breman, 2001: 4808). This segregation turned into expressly labeled ‘ghettoization’11 only after the gruesome 2002 Hindu– 9 http://archive.indianexpress.com/news/decade-after-riots-gujarat-adds-more-areas-to-disturbed-list/1159458/0 10 I shockingly found this within my own family. A close relative who lived alone in a large house, had expressed his desire to rent out part of his home to a student. When I brought along one of my dearest students, a Muslim, the relative politely backed out, later expressing disdain at me for not foreseeing that he would not want to associate with, let alone rent to, anyone “like that” with “tendencies of radicalization”. 11 It is important to clarify here that in highlighting the use of the word ‘ghetto’ for Ahmedabad’s Muslim areas, I am not validating the assignment of this label to Ahmedabad’s Muslim areas. I firmly believe that it is important to move past such labels, because of the policy implications associated with the use of pejorative terms of this kind (following Gilbert, 2007). The only times I use this term through this dissertation are either when the community uses it as a self-identifying label or to underscore the unproblematized-use by existing studies 25 Muslim violence that was unfurled in the city in the name of Hindutva. There is much recent scholarship on the scale and nature of this violence12. But briefly, this violence is associated with more than 100,000 houses and 15,000 businesses belonging largely to Muslims being destroyed, horrific instances of violence against Muslim women and children, and the death of more than two thousand Muslims (Desai, 2011: 112). A significant share of this violence took place in areas where large numbers of Muslim homes and businesses were located: central Ahmedabad – i.e., the walled city, which was home to many Muslim families (Patel, 2006: 367 – 369; Mahadevia, 2007: 23) – and eastern Ahmedabad, where the city’s erstwhile textile mills were located13. Muslim families displaced from these areas fled to the southern and south-western peripheries of the city. Makhtampura and Sarkhej in south-west Ahmedabad (Figure 3) grew into dense urban areas on account of this displacement and relocation. My research is located in these wards. A few clarifications are important at this point. In 2002, when Muslim families from central and eastern Ahmedabad began to settle in the southern and south-western parts of Ahmedabad, Makhtampura and Sarkhej did not exist as wards. They were villages that fell outside the boundaries of the Ahmedabad Municipal Corporation (AMC), and alongwith three other adjoining villages14, were part of a larger area locally called Juhapura. In 2006, these villages were incorporated within AMC limits, and in the years that followed Sarkhej and Makhtampura wards were delineated as separate administrative units. Sarkhej ward was delineated in 201015, and Makhtampura in 201516. As a result, most of the scholarly work on the history of segregation, exclusion, and infrastructure in these areas does not refer to the areas as 12 For extensive accounts of the scale and nature of this violence see Chandhoke et al., 2007; Desai, 2011: 112– 114; Jaffrelot & Thomas, 2012: 64– 65; Berenschot, 2012. 13 See Mahadevia, 2007: 23 for a map depicting areas of Ahmedabad where Hindu-Muslim violence was concentrated. 14 Vejalpur, Shahwadi, and Gyaspur (Mahadevia et. al., 2014: 43) 15 https://www.dnaindia.com/india/report-this-time-amdavadis-to-elect-192-councillors-1392896 16 Prior to this, the areas that now constitute Makhtampura ward were divided between Vejalpur ward, now to its north and Sarkhej ward, now to its west. 26 Sarkhej and Makhtampura, but instead refers to them collectively as Juhapura17. Reviewing the urban history of Juhapura then is helpful towards understanding water access in Makhtampura and Sarkhej. In other words, the history recounted below of the embedded infrastructures of Juhapura is essentially a history of the embedded infrastructures of Makhtampura and Sarkhej. Figure 1.3: Location of Makhtampura and Sarkhej wards. Source: AMC18 17 Indeed, this tendency continues. As I finalize this dissertation in early 2021, scholars continue to refer to this area as Juhapura (see Laliwala, Jaffrelot and Thakkar, 2021; accessible online at https://scroll.in/article/983339/in-ahmedabads-juhapura-exploring-the-paradoxes-of-muslim-ghettoisation). 18 Published in April 2020 to highlight COVID-19 containment strategy. Accessible online at https://www.deshgujarat.com/2020/04/28/6-wards-in-red-zone-42-in-orange-zone-in-ahmedabad/ Sarkhej Makhtampura 27 Juhapura’s history of urban infrastructure building traces back to 1973, when flood victims – Hindus and Muslims – from self-help housing along the banks of the Sabarmati River in Ahmedabad were relocated to a municipal colony here19. Following this, Juhapura began to receive an influx of low-income Muslim families from the walled city and eastern Ahmedabad, particularly after the 1985 and 1992 riots. Some of my research participants who relocated to Makhtampura from the inner city in the 1990s cited the safety offered by this then far-off area as desirable in the face of increasingly frequent Hindu-Muslim violence in the dense central and eastern parts of the city. Through these years, Juhapura, then peripheral to Ahmedabad, became a refuge for poor Muslim families. But after the 2002 riots, even middle-class and wealthier Muslims from mixed neighbourhoods of the city started moving to Juhapura in search of safety in numbers (Jaffrelot and Thomas, 2012: 69). With the Muslim population rapidly growing, Hindu families moved out of the area. The Disturbed Areas Act described above further etched these patterns of segregation (Mawani and Leaf, 2019). Juhapura’s Muslim population grew rapidly in the years that followed. Estimates from 2007 and 2009 suggest that in those years, Juhapura was home to 240,000 and 300,000 Muslims, close to half of the city’s total Muslim population (Mahadevia, 2007: 376; Chandhoke, 2009: 11). Until 2006, Juhapura fell outside the AMC (Ahmedabad Municipal Corporation) limits, rendering it ineligible to receive municipal infrastructure such as roads, water and drainage networks, and more (Jaffrelot & Thomas, 2012: 71 – 72). Additionally, as I describe in chapter 3 (section 3.5), a significant share of the post-2002 housing in Juhapura was built under diverse conditions of illegality. This became yet another contentious issue, further complicating the provision of municipal infrastructure here. In the views of city engineers and planners, the unauthorized housing so-built in Juhapura became an impediment to the implementation of the practices of land development and infrastructure planning followed in Ahmedabad. Amidst this, 19 ‘Colony’ is a term often used for urban residential neighbourhoods 28 a host of informal arrangements, including around water access, developed in the area to cater to people’s basic needs. Mahadevia Desai, and Vyas (2014: 44), describe the diverse water arrangements across Juhapura as follows: “The upper middle class formal societies… have their own bore wells or have municipal connections but the informal societies are mainly served by informal water providers who charge around Rs.200 per month per household for the supply. The water is provided through water supply lines laid from their private bore-wells. The water providers seem to operate through mafia-type processes as they control certain territories for water supply and seem to have groups of youth to collect the money. Such water providers are not to be found in all the areas, however. In… the areas south of Juhapura… most of the households have hand pumps since it is close to the riverbed and thus there is higher water table. (Municipal) (w)ater supply lines… has also been laid in few pockets but are not operational yet. The reason is not known. One reason worth exploring is whether the water mafias have played a role in discouraging formal water supply from entering the area since their business that would be adversely affected. At some places, institutions like masjid committees are supplying water to the societies. In a few areas, municipal councillors send water tankers, but this water is not adequate.” This work thus observes several uneven water access arrangements in Juhapura. From differentiated supply resulting from “mafia-type” private water providers in some areas, to hand pumps in neighbourhoods closer to the riverbed; from municipal water lines laid in some areas that do not give water, to water being supplied by religious organizations or by local politicians in others. These diverse arrangements arguably contribute to the tenuous access to infrastructure cited by residents of Makhtampura and Sarkhej. And, as discussed on the previous page, they are inextricably entangled with land politics and the spatial organization of religious difference in Ahmedabad. Numerous scholars have observed that material networks – how they are configured, accessed, and used – and their unevenness and disruptions provide insights into spatially and temporally specific land politics (Björkman, 2015; Anand, 2011; Ranganthan, 2014). In Mumbai, Björkman points out, while “above-ground landscapes have been rapidly reconfigured by “world class” city-building efforts, market reforms to facilitate the transformation have wreaked havoc on the city’s water pipes” (2015: 2). Ranganathan (2014) locates unevenness in Bangalore’s waterscape in inter-related land and water mafia networks that emerged in this city in the 1990s 29 to profit from the real-estate boom this city witnessed at the time. As well, she highlights how government institutions might in practice be working through these informal networks, thus rendering it impossible to separate the formal from the informal (2014: 91). These two instances assert how the functioning of anything as an infrastructure requires for it to be connected with a number of other material (technical) and non-material (financial, managerial, legal, institutional) instruments and processes (Hughes, 2012). They highlight the need to draw connections between the material and technical aspects that shape infrastructure and the social and political systems that influence decision-making. For instance, the creation of electric devices such as light bulbs means little if it isn’t accompanied by the building of “generators and transmission lines” on the one hand, and “organizational forms (such) as electrical manufacturing and utility holding companies” on the other (Hughes, 2012: 46). Just as the materialities and technicalities of infrastructure inform the socio-technical systems connected to it, changes in socio-technical systems in turn influence the materiality and immediate experience of infrastructure. It is owing to this quality, of being nested within, or even “sunk into” (Star, 1999: 381) other systems and structures, that infrastructure networks are conceived as “embedded” within wider political, technical, social, economic, and other networks. These insights help frame a critical inquiry into the many networks through which religious difference gets spatialized and manifests as uneven water infrastructure in Muslim Ahmedabad. When juxtaposed against the observations and speculations on Juhapura’s water arrangements by Mahadevia, Desai, and Vyas (2014), they urge the need to see the myriad actors, practices, relationships, and interests influencing water access in Juhapura as entangled in how religious difference influences infrastructure planning and building. My analytical attempt in chapter 3 is informed by this understanding. 1.3.4 Relational Infrastructures With material infrastructure networks being embedded within multiple other networks of actors, practices, relationships, and interests, the latter are understood as infrastructures in and of themselves. For being, allegorically, the infrastructure of infrastructure. These are “relational 30 infrastructures”: in Abdoumaliq Simone’s powerful postulation (2004, 2015), people and relationships mediating the governance and experience of infrastructure. Relational infrastructures are characterized by perpetual contingency and flexibility. Employing “game(s) of anticipation” and speculation on responses of others involved, relational infrastructures play out at multiple scales, and inform what a physical and material infrastructure becomes, how it is used, maintained, and so on (Simone, 2004; Simone, 2015; Elyacher, 2010). Attention to relational infrastructures has been shaped by two major fields of work: sociological inquiries into state-society relations (Abrams, 1988; Jessop, 1990; Hansen and Stepputat, 2001; Ferguson and Gupta, 2002 for instance) on the one hand, and science and technology studies (Callon, 1998; Latour, 1993, 2005) on the other. These two sets of thought differ in their substantive objects of inquiry, and hence their approach. Yet they find common ground in their shared concern over the reification of abstract constructs, such as ‘the state’, ‘the market’, ‘the economy’, ‘nature’, ‘the social’, and so on, as well as the theoretical and empirical problems such reification poses. The suggestion by early governance studies, to navigate this problematic terrain, was to understand the “state-idea” – erected and circulating in spatially and temporally specific contexts – as separate from the “state-system” – the actual institutional structures employed to govern (Abrams, 1988). However, soon after, the state-system was itself found requiring the acquiescence or complicity of non-state actors to propagate the state-idea (Jessop, 1990). The separation between the state-idea and state-system was, as a result, rendered thoroughly complicated. And yet, these two notions offer important insights for infrastructure studies. On the one hand, they imply that the governance of infrastructure as widely understood and experienced needs to be considered separately from formal institutional structures meant to govern the said infrastructure. Additionally, and on the other, institutional structures meant to govern infrastructure might well be drawing on non-state actors for purposes of governing. From this perspective, relational infrastructures include both the “idea” and the “system” at work in the governance of infrastructure. The “system” refers to the many interactions between state and non-state actors that influence infrastructure planning and governance. The “idea” on the other hand becomes the discursive and affective power embodied and exerted by 31 the interactions, and shapes infrastructure governance just as much. Each of these interactions in turn “seems to overflow with elements which are already in the situation coming from some other time, some other place, and generated by some other agency” (Latour, 2005: 166). An inquiry into relational infrastructures then, also entails understanding what these other times, places, and agencies involved in governing material infrastructure in a specific context might be. Adding empirical texture to this theoretical work, a growing body of scholarship has investigated the relational infrastructures shaping everyday life by mediating the planning and building of, access to, use of, and control over, material infrastructures. In cities with highly fragmented infrastructure networks such as Mumbai and Bangalore for instance, relational infrastructures mediating everyday access to water include plumbers, engineers, local councillors, water tanker operators, and so on, and their interests and practices (Anand, 2011; Ranganthan, 2014; Björkman, 2018).The influence of technical infrastructure plans, wider political objectives, and other more distant interests on access at community level of course continues to remain relevant. But attending to everyday relational infrastructures entails examining the interactions between such distant interests and the many everyday and immediate actors and practices influencing access to water. Relational infrastructures then mediate everyday access to water over time, and across political and spatial scales – institutional to neighbourhood; region to individual. Relationships configuring such processes of mediation, on the one hand, are representative of how power and authority are distributed across landscapes and waterscapes. But also, and on the other hand, methods of distributing and accessing resources in such contexts highlight the diverse political and economic tactics that shape urban citizenship claims. They offer insights into which tactics work, which don’t, and for whom (Anand, 2011: 553). For my research, inquiring into relational infrastructures entails developing a “disaggregated” account (Hansen and Stepputat, 2001: 9) of the multiple forms of power and authority operating across scales – urban, neighbourhood, community, and individual – and mediating water access in Muslim Ahmedabad. In India, as in much of South Asia, one kind of mediating actor – the broker – is a particularly important relational infrastructure. Brokers are broadly conceived as “intermediaries 32 who use political contacts and knowledge of official procedures to help citizens, particularly the poor, deal with state institutions” (Berenschot, 2014: 196). The significance of the broker figure in India traces back to historical social structures of patronage (Piliavsky, 2014). But the perseverance, indeed proliferation, of the broker in post-independence India, is premised in complex institutional structures and bureaucratic procedures, and low levels of education among ordinary people (Reddy and Haragopal, 1985). The plumbers, engineers, politicians, etc. who facilitate access to water in Mumbai and Bangalore amidst the fragmented material networks that besiege these cities are some examples of water brokers. As are the “mafia-type” informal water providers, religious organizations, municipal councilors, and others that Mahadevia, Desai, and Vyas (2014) say influence everyday water access in Makhtampura and Sarkhej. Examining brokers as relational infrastructures shaping water access involves studying the many networks and scales across which they work. While the state might enlist brokers in its actions to govern (Jessop, 1990), brokers might equally enlist the state to protect or enhance their individual interests and directly or indirectly influence water governance. Sujata Patel’s account of the networks of Ahmedabad’s “gangs, police, and politicians” (2006: 370) offers some insights into how interactions between these groups might have influenced religious segregation in the city. It also points at how formal state actors might be found operating across formal-informal and legal-illegal divides. Equally, and perhaps most importantly, conceiving Ahmedabad’s water brokers as relational infrastructures allows us to study the role of these actors in the city’s increasing socio-spatial segregation. Returning to the empirical focus of this dissertation, how water brokers interact with planning to influence water access, becomes an important question. Consider the following quote by Mahadevia and Desai (2019: 190) on the role of “informal water suppliers” in one of Ahmedabad’s Muslim areas: “The informal water suppliers are motivated purely by profit; their approach to supplying water reflects this, with fixed territories of supply to protect profits and coercive practices. They collect monthly charges whether or not they are able to supply adequate water. Residents are unable to oppose this due to a lack of alternative sources and the high-handedness and threats from the suppliers. In fact, residents cannot even complain about these operators without raising their ire. Multiple types of everyday conflicts emerge from the coercive management of water supply systems by these non-state actors.” 33 The informal water suppliers here are all believed to be acting from the same set of interests, and through similar mechanisms. As water brokers, they are also understood as exerting a similarly nature of authority and power over residents. But studies from elsewhere tell us that brokers, even those operating at the same geographical scale, or belonging to the same side of the formal/informal divide (however defined!), are not a homogenous lot! The diverse tactics employed by brokers have been examined and explained in terms of competitiveness of local broker networks (Berenschot, 2019), as well as brokers’ own mental frameworks and aspirations (Aspinall, 2014: 548). While some brokers are found to be exploitative, others are also known to embody an emancipatory stance. Sometimes, the same brokers might simultaneously embody both attributes (Piliavsky, 2014). And while some brokers, as Mahadevia and Desai (2019) point out in the quote above, obstruct water access, others also facilitate it. Indeed, in my sites I came across brokers who have been able to improve water access in important ways, despite the legal and political challenges that besiege Makhtampura and Sarkhej. Furthermore, as Honey-Roses (2009) points out, even when the interests of exploitative brokers might be antithetical to community interests, community members might yet be at once “resistant and complicit” to these interests! The ability of brokers to get work, such as improving water access, done then has been related, on the one hand, to trust relations through which brokerage practices operate (Björkman, forthcoming). And indeed, as Scott Bollens (2012: 13) reminds us, trust relations are particularly important in polarized cities. Defining trust as “socially learned and socially confirmed expectations that people have of each other, of the organizations and institutions in which they live, and of the natural and moral social orders, that set the fundamental understandings of their lives’ (ibid: citing Barber, 1983, p. 165), Bollens says that in segregated cities with histories of violence and discrimination spurred by ‘differences’ such as ‘race’ and ‘religion’, trust is missing. On the other hand, broker-client relations in India have been tied in diverse and complex ways to caste and religion (Auerbach and Thachil, 2018: 784). The case of Ahmedabad then raises questions on how trust and religious identity influence the role of brokers in shaping planning and water access. 34 These insights frame my inquiry for chapter 5, where I examine how trust and religious identity animate the role of brokers in shaping planning practice and water access in Makhtampura and Sarkhej. 1.3.5 Everyday experiences of infrastructure Finally, in addition to influencing material and resource flows of various kinds, infrastructures also shape everyday experiences. The everyday experience of infrastructure has been conceived in two ways: (a) the affective role exerted by material infrastructure, and, (b) the emotional and embodied everyday experience of infrastructure. For my research on the relational infrastructure of segregation in Ahmedabad, both these sets of scholarship offer important insights. To begin with, infrastructures symbolize wider social relations. For instance, communities experiencing everyday interruptions in accessing services might perceive their infrastructure as a “metonym of their marginality” (Appel, Anand, and Gupta, 2018: 11; Harvey, 2010; Anand, 2017; Harvey, 2018). The material infrastructures they can (or cannot) access, mediate the relationship they perceive between themselves and the powers that be. In this sense, infrastructures play performative and political roles, as “concrete semiotic and aesthetic vehicles oriented to addressees” (Larkin, 2013: 329). This provocative imagination offered by Brian Larkin is symbolic of a larger turn towards materiality by scholarship seeking to understand the relationship between power, politics, and society (Knox, 2017: 365; Amin, 2014: 137). Infrastructures are understood by these scholars as being infused with material as well as political powers. For example, the political aesthetics (Larkin, 2018) of infrastructures might be traced in electrification projects legitimizing a specific political authority (Schwenkel, 2018), and water meters measuring not only delivered water, but also moral behavior (Von Schnitzler, 2008). Materially, a “crumbling tarmac” might signify a wider state of fragmented politics (Knox, 2017: 372). While a concrete dam or bridge, given the material ability of concrete of binding together “elements that otherwise refuse or fail to cohere”, might communicate the possibility of producing “reliable, predictable structures” (Harvey, 2010: 28). Similarly, infrastructure left half-built might symbolize the suspension of “hopes of modernity and 35 progress” (Gupta, 2018). Infrastructures have thus been understood for embodying and in turn generating emotions such as desire, awe, accomplishment, pride, dejection, and so on. Employing this perspective then, the everyday experience of infrastructures has been studied and explained in terms of the affective role of materiality. These affective powers imbued in material infrastructures influence everyday perceptions and actions in multiple ways. For instance, values of connectivity, exchange, and power embodied by roads might facilitate the enlistment of Albanian citizens by the government to contribute labour towards building roads ultimately not used for decades to come (Dalakoglu, 2010). This “infrastructure fetishism” (ibid) can also be noted in the affective influence of infrastructure extending much beyond the people likely to benefit from the said infrastructure. As Asher Ghertner’s findings in Delhi (2015: 4), echoed in Filip De Boeck’s insights from Kinshasa (2011: 278), suggest, infrastructures carrying the promise of modernity invoke emotions such as desire and fantasy even among those who have been displaced to make way for these very edifices; among people who will most likely have no right to the thus-built “heterotopias” (De Boeck, 2011). Further, material infrastructure does not exert its affective influence on everyday perceptions and actions in any stable way either. In Jimma, Ethiopia for example, dams and hydroelectric infrastructure are viewed with suspicion while road building is invested with popular “faith in progress” (Mains, 2012). Two different kinds of infrastructures, being built at the same time, through similar financial networks, and causing roughly similar inconveniences (see Mains, 2012: 5 for details), might invoke different responses based on the broader promises they each embody. And perceptions and actions thus shaped by material infrastructure further influence everyday contestations and negotiations pertaining to access to and use of a resource. These everyday contestations and negotiations then, are also relational infrastructures. They constitute everyday lived realities that are emotionally experienced and embodied by individuals and communities entangled in these struggles: lived realities upon which further access to, and use of, material infrastructures is premised. Consider for example the conflicts observed by scholars in relation to access to and use of water in the Muslim areas of 36 Ahmedabad: “Multiple types of everyday conflicts emerge from the coercive management of water supply systems by… non-state actors.” (Mahadevia and Desai, 2019: 190). Such everyday conflicts shape the decisions and actions of residents in relation to their everyday water access in diverse ways. As feminist political ecologists point out, struggles over resources such as water are “everyday, embodied, and emotional relations” (Harris, 2015: 158), that “shape the way critical resources are managed and experienced in everyday survival struggles” (Sultana, 2011: 164). Such everyday experiences are tied as much to technical and economic factors such as unreliable piped water connections and unaffordable and undrinkable privately accessed water (Mitlin, et al., 2019), as to socio-political specificities such as gender, class, and occupation (Harris, 2008). In other words, social identities and water struggles co-construct each other (Harris, 2015: 170; Nightingale, 2011, 2019). And just as brokers are not a homogenous lot, neither are residents. A disaggregated understanding of relational infrastructures then needs to illuminate how differences in social identities at micro-sites influence emotional and embodied everyday experiences of water access. These insights inform my analytical approach in chapter 4, where I make visible the everyday water struggles of Makhtampura’s residents. In the next section (1.4), I distill my research questions emerging from the discussion above, followed by outlining my research objectives (1.5). 1.4 Research questions Based on the conceptual framework presented above, I ask three overarching research questions which I address through the three analytical chapters (chapters 3, 4, and 5 respectively) of this dissertation: 1. How does religious difference influence the planning and building of urban (water) infrastructures in Ahmedabad’s Muslim areas? 2. How are everyday water struggles emotionally experienced and embodied in Ahmedabad’s Muslim areas?, and, 3. How – on account of what relationships – have brokers improved water access across these sites? 37 1.5 Research Objectives In asking the questions listed above, I have four interconnected objectives. My first research objective is to build an account of how religious difference mediates access to water in the contemporary Indian city. Scholars from the fields of planning, geography, and anthropology alike have argued that religious, ethnic, and racial differences manifest spatially, in myriad ways, and through multiple mechanisms20 (Yiftachel, 2006a; AlSayyad and Massoumi, 2011). However, as I discuss above (section 1.2) we also know now that constructs like ‘race’ have themselves been reified through specific spatial actions and planning practices. In India, the spatialization of difference in the post-liberalization era has been examined and explained primarily in terms of an increased control over land and resources by majority groups. This argument has been made, among others, for Mumbai by Arjun Appadurai (2000) and Qudsiya Contractor (2012), and for Ahmedabad by Jan Breman (2002) and Darshini Mahadevia (2002) as I recount in section 1.3. And more recently, scholars have remarked that water supply systems in Ahmedabad’s Muslim areas are “a driver of structural violence”, noting immediately thereafter that “(t)his is an urban planning issue” (Mahadevia and Desai, 2019: 190). But a detailed, disaggregated everyday understanding of how – through what exchanges, processes, practices, relationships, and interests – this “urban planning issue’” of water systems driving “structural violence” comes to be remains missing. Examining the role of “relational infrastructures” (Simone, 2015), i.e., everyday actors, practices, and interests, that influence how religious difference further shapes planning and water access helps build such a disaggregated understanding. 20 The spatialization of religious difference has also been narrated in two other broad ways. (a) In terms of fundamentalist religious organizations stepping in for the state to consolidate control over people and territories: Giovannini (2011) for instance argues that by providing food and other basic needs to poor families in the refugee settlements of Gaza, Hamas has been able to gain preferential access to refugees, and in turn, has been able to radicalize them. She emphasizes that the isolation of the camps – their spatial and social characteristics – make their “Islamization” possible (ibid: 156). (b) As a response to, and rejection of, modernity, along with a crisis over national identities (Desai, 2011 ; Williams, 2011) 38 Relatedly, my second research objective is to locate the role of technical planning in how religious difference acquires infrastructural form. For the past decade and a half, poor access to water in Ahmedabad’s Muslim areas has been tied to how the implementation of technical plans to improve water access is deadlocked here. This impasse in turn is anchored in the widespread illegal constructions in these areas. These associations are made by residents and local leaders alike and are apparent in judicial appeals as well as in interviews and dialogues I conducted during my research (I discuss these in detail in chapter 3). This reported impossibility in turn is conflated with religious difference by planners, engineers, residents, politicians, NGO workers, and others21. On the one hand, such associations reporting the spatialization of religious difference exclusion through planning echo assertions by scholars on the elitist intent of Indian planning processes more broadly. For instance, it has been argued that, “(a)s an instrument of planning, the Master Plan has… deemed many areas of the city to be illegal and, as a result, the Indian state has engineered the “elite capture” of urban spaces.” (Mahadevia and Desai, 2019: 178). This argument echoes other provocations regarding the strategies of exclusion deliberately employed by the Indian state in deciding how, how much, and where infrastructure planning and land development are carried out (Roy, 2009), as well as wider scholarship highlighting the use of planning instruments - such as eminent domain and land use controls - as tools for “social control” (for instance, Watson, 2009; Yiftachel, 2006a, 2009). However, “planning” cannot be thought of as a singular, stable, predictable event or act. Arguably, and extending a conception offered by Lisa Björkman (2015: 14), planning unfolds across three registers: (1) the “abstract logics” of planning involving calculations, forecasts, plan-drawing, budgeting, etc.,; (2) the real-time processes and activities of implementing land management and infrastructure planning; and (3) a “semiotic register”, where certain aspects of plans come to signify the “power, knowledge, and authority” at work in producing and 21 albeit in different and contrasting ways, depending on the social location of the writer / interviewee / research participant 39 implementing the plans. Simultaneously, the knowledge, authority, and interests involved in co-producing plans or their implementation might not necessarily align (cf., Björkman, 2018). Back in Ahmedabad’s Muslim areas then, ubiquitously attributing the visibly poor water infrastructures to the non-implementation of planning, and in turn tying this to religious difference, obfuscates the everyday micro-politics mediating the many practical aspects of planning in these waterscapes. Premised in this understanding, my second research objective is to examine the planning mechanisms implicated in producing exclusion to water in Makhtampura and Sarkhej, by analyzing interactions between the three registers highlighted above. My third research objective is to make visible the everyday water struggles of Ahmedabad’s Muslim residents. While contestations relating to planning and building of material water networks and flows of water are mediated in many ways, residents of Ahmedabad’s Muslim areas continue to do what they can to access water. Their everyday efforts, negotiations, and struggles then arguably constitute relational infrastructures operating at the individual/community scale, as much as mediations of planning mechanisms do at an urban/regional scale (Truelove, 2019). These everyday water struggles in turn are emotionally experienced and embodied (Sultana, 2015, 2020; Truelove, 2011, 2019; Harris, 2015), and are experiences of water justice (Zwartaveen and Boelens, 2014). Examining the details of everyday water struggles helps grasp the real-time impact of water infrastructures and makes possible a nuanced understanding of water justice; something that a focus on regional or even urban relationships obfuscates (Rodina, 2016). It helps illuminate the community-level power structures that might be impacting flows of water (Anand, 2011). And arguably, it also illustrates the role of everyday water struggles, tied by residents to planning practices, in reifying discursive categories such as religious difference. For Ahmedabad’s Muslim areas, despite all the critical and scholarly attention they have received on account of their evidently poor access to infrastructure, a grounded account of the everyday negotiations and struggles, and how these constitute emotional, and embodied experiences of water access remains missing. This is the gap that I hope to fill through this third research objective. 40 Finally, my fourth research objective is to illuminate what makes it possible for certain actors to broker access to water in these contested sites, and to trace the role of religious identity and trust relations in mediating their practices. For despite the many challenges that have besieged these neighbourhoods, access to water has improved in some parts in recent years, with certain actors emerging as particularly important water brokers facilitating these improvements (chapter 5). Examining how – through what practices and relationships, and to what end – these brokers influence planning and water access in Ahmedabad’s Muslim areas is my contribution to empirical literature on how cities in the south become possible. It is my attempt at, to use the words of Lawhon and Truelove (2020: 4), taking “seriously the actually existing contexts and practices shaping southern cities”. The next section concludes this chapter by offering an overview of the chapters that follow. 1.6 Dissertation structure The remainder of this dissertation is organized into five more chapters. In Chapter 2, I describe details on the frameworks and methods that I have used to gather and analyze my data. I begin by explaining methodological dilemmas I faced when I first began fieldwork, followed by the framework I arrived at for conducting my research, my positionality, and details of my data gathering methods. I conclude the chapter by summarizing the logistical challenges I encountered during fieldwork, followed by a discussion of some limitations of this research design. In Chapter 3, I examine how religious difference mediates knowledge and power, which in turn influences access to water infrastructures. Engineers and planners tie poor access to municipal water in Ahmedabad’s Muslim areas to the difficulties of implementing specific planning mechanisms, which, in turn, have been premised on widespread illegal constructions that have developed across these sites. Residents perceive this explanation by engineers and planners as a deliberate state-led intent to discriminate against them because of their religion. This perception is emphasized and circulated by local politicians. Using these associations and 41 perceptions as my entry-points, I show through this chapter how religious difference becomes a discursive category mediating the formulation and implementation of technical plans. I illustrate that interrupted implementation of plans and related unevenness in water access here should not be thought of as a “state-led” exercise as imagined by residents and portrayed by local politicians. Instead, this unevenness in reality is a culmination of intense mediations between influential actors with varying interests, located across state/non-state, legal/illegal, and most importantly, Hindu/Muslim boundaries. In Chapter 4, I describe community and individual-level everyday water struggles constituting the foreground for the uneven implementation of technical plans. Adopting a water justice perspective, I describe the everyday experiences of uneven water access narrated by residents of Faizalpur22, a Muslim neighbourhood in southern Makhtampura. Legal guidelines around land-use zoning have rendered municipal infrastructure building in Faizalpur impermissible. In this waterscape, residents describe their everyday water struggles - the ways in which they negotiate access to water - as ‘making do’. I trace the lived experiences of Faizalpur’s residents to understand their everyday water struggles and illuminate the routinized practices, contestations, and negotiations that residents engage in to access water. These experiences involve a recurrent assessment of complex financial and social risks, sometimes based on historical precedents, other times based on intuitive understandings of social hierarchy. I show how plural and constantly shifting emotional experiences of these negotiations and practices include fear and mistrust (while paying for unreliable informal water connections), relief (when these connections give water as promised), and grief and anger (when monies invested in such connections are lost). These differential emotional and embodied experiences of water access are tied on the one hand to community-level power structures, and to household and individual factors like age, gender, health, income, and piety. But equally, they are enmeshed within constructs like (il)legality reified by planning mechanisms like land-use zoning. Together, 22 The neighbourhood’s name has been changed to protect identities of residents. 42 these experiences shape residents’ decision-making relating to everyday water access in ways that end up subverting the implementation of technical plans meant to improve water access. In Chapter 5 I shed light on brokers as relational infrastructures who work in myriad ways to improve water access amidst planning-related contestations and the everyday water struggles described earlier. Specifically, I examine the role of trust and religious identity in mediating the actions and ability of two different kinds of brokers to make water flow through Makhtampura. I illustrate how brokers influence water access by intervening at specific junctures in technical planning processes, and how community-level micro-dynamics shape residents’ trust in brokers, as well as the ability of brokers to improve water access. Persistent water struggles in some neighbourhoods might, on the one hand, reflect a dynamic landscape constituted by bids for political power by community leaders. On the other hand, they might also symbolize the choices and uneven efforts of veteran brokers to work in politically less contested neighbourhoods. I show how neighbourhoods with especially contested histories of water access are also those besought with challenges posed by planning categories like ‘(il)legality’. These sites then are fertile grounds for the emergence of community leaders with often clashing political aspirations, and these clashes also end up subverting the implementation of technical plans meant to improve water access. I conclude the dissertation with Chapter 6. I tie together findings from my research in relation to the objectives detailed earlier in this chapter and outline implications pertaining to my insights. 43 Chapter 2: Reading the Field: A note on Method In this chapter, I present details on the frameworks and methods that I have used to gather and analyze data. I begin by describing the methodological dilemmas in reading the field, followed by explaining how I worked through these challenges (section 2.1). I then offer details of my data gathering methods (section 2.2), ethical considerations that shaped the minutiae of data collection and management (section 2.3), and a discussion of logistical challenges I encountered during fieldwork (section 2.4). I conclude with a summary of the chapter and the limitations of my research approach (section 2.5). 2.1 Confronting how “sorted out” (I thought) I was “(W)e’ve geographically, politically, and even spiritually sorted ourselves into like-minded groups in which we silence dissent, grow more extreme in our thinking, and consume only facts that support our beliefs - making it even easier to ignore evidence that our positions are wrong… The sorting we do to ourselves and to one another is, at best, unintentional and reflexive. At worst, it is stereotyping that dehumanizes.” – Brown, 2017: 88 When I arrived in Ahmedabad to begin my fieldwork, I thought I was “sorted”. I had identified a series of neatly laid out methods – formal interviews, group and individual dialogues, and neighbourhood walks – through which to collect data. I had identified data sources – maps, judicial documents, government correspondence, legal guidelines, media reports, tax papers, photographs, interview transcripts – which would help me explain the role of planning in shaping uneven water access across my sites. And I did indeed use many of these methods and data sources as I detail in later sections (2.2) of this chapter. But in addition to being logistically “sorted”, I was to find soon that I was also quite problematically “sorted out” regarding how I was reading my field. With the premise of my inquiry being the discriminatory context of segregated Ahmedabad, I expected to see in my data clear evidence of intentional discrimination. From the very outset, the research prompting this dissertation was my “way of tackling inequalities and 44 challenging orthodoxies” (Baillie Smith and Jenkins, 2012: 75). I was comfortable with, and indeed I sought out and welcomed, evidence that would confirm discriminatory planning and water governance. My deep-set belief at this early point in fieldwork was very much that uneven water access in Ahmedabad’s Muslim areas was a product of intentional discriminatory practices by the Hindu majority. However, as my data collection progressed, I started to find that the reality was not as tidy as I had designed for it to be while chalking out the methods section of my research proposal. I had to confront how “sorted out” (I thought) I was. For as I illustrate through the chapters that follow, uneven access to water in Ahmedabad’s Muslim areas is indeed shaped by discriminatory planning and politics. But the role of ‘religious difference’ in animating these politics and practices is not what I had imagined it would be. I was to discover from my research that some pervasive patterns of unevenness are also symbolic of inter-personal, community-level, micro-dynamics that transcend religious divides and defy neat categorization. For instance, I show in chapter 3 that Muslim builders obstruct the implementation of technical plans to improve water access just as much as Hindu builders do. And in chapter 5 I recount how persistent uneven water access in the most vulnerable neighbourhoods also stem from bids for political power by local Muslim community leaders, who obstruct improvements in water access for their political and economic interests. I was not prepared to encounter these findings. I found the gap between what I had hoped to find, versus what I was finding in reality, deeply unsettling. On the one hand, I could see that I needed to account for these insights to be able to add nuance to existing scholarship on religious segregation in Ahmedabad, on water access and governance, and on the politics of planning that shape urban India. And yet, the contrast between my imagined (complex and intimidating, yet neatly divided) “field” versus the not-so-tidy reality had turned into an intense struggle. Partly, as described on the previous page, this struggle was because I could not reconcile my fieldwork findings that did not fall neatly across religious divides with my other experiences during 45 fieldwork that clearly belied discriminatory sentiments held by Hindus towards Muslims. In equal measure though, another part of my struggle was anchored in my born-and-raised in the privileged parts of western Ahmedabad, Hindu-by-birth identity. While I self-identify as Buddhist, my name states that I am of Hindu descent. I renounced the caste structures that my last name locates me within soon after turning 18. But I realized only during my fieldwork that being able to question and renounce caste structures itself was a privilege. Many of my Muslim research participants, particularly the women, on seeing me going about my research with my toddler in a carrier, would question me on gender relations in the caste I (apparently) fall under. Since I speak Gujarati and Hindi, and am technically Ahmedabadi, my participants felt comfortable asking me personal questions. Answering their questions was not problematic per se, but these exchanges inevitably brought forth comparisons between ‘my’ life /community/ possibilities, and ‘theirs’. These were deeply unsettling exchanges for me: I was often left feeling guilty for being privileged, angry and helpless for knowing I couldn’t change anything instantly, and together, speechless and withdrawn. On the other hand, many of my Hindu participants were very vocal about their views of Muslims as undesirable. Expecting me to concur with their concerns, they shared with me in detail their efforts to keep services and infrastructure away from Muslim areas. I felt caught in torturous dilemmas at such moments. Do I make clear how I do not share the same sentiments, or do I not? If I do, I would likely lose out on access to data that needs to become visible. On the other hand, what does withholding that information say about my politics? I ended up allowing these research participants to share what they wanted to, without clarifying how I felt about it, at the cost of feeling torn and upset about it for days. My early choices then only served to intensify my internal struggle: a struggle that multiplied manifold when I started associating questions, insights, and decisions from my fieldwork with broader politics unfolding across India23. To quote Baillie Smith and Jenkins (2012: 75), this struggle seemed to stem from my “multiple and overlapping commitments and loyalties throughout the research process – to (my) participants, to 23 In particular, the violence against peacefully dissenting university students across the country 46 the various organisations (I was) work(ing) with, to (my) own multiple professional, personal and political loyalties.” For me, the core of this struggle consisted of staying committed to my research findings in the face of an increasingly brutal Hindu Nationalist agenda. My earlier way of thinking had also shaped my initial methodological approach. Because of my tidy conceptions of Hindu-Muslim relations, I had initially designed my research almost entirely as an Institutional Ethnography (IE) (Smith, 2005; Campbell & Gregor, 2002). The core objective of IE, as opposed to simply ethnography, is to unravel “ruling relations” (Campbell & Gregor, 2002: 59), and I had found resonance in this objective because I had pre-read my field in Ahmedabad as a set of (neat) ruling relations. However, a deeper engagement with my research sites and participants unsettled my reading of the field as a specific, stable set of ‘ruling relations’ (re)producing uneven water access. In turn, this involved a break from a straightforward IE. For I found that the ‘ruling relations’ practically (re)producing uneven water access in Ahmedabad are quite different and far more complex and dynamic than the straightforward ones widely circulated by popular and scholarly discourse. Widdowfield remarks on how “unsettling experiences” in the field can potentially paralyze research as much as ethical dilemmas do (2000: 201) and suggests that overcoming such paralysis requires clarifying positionality as well as re-articulating research implications/impact. The empirical aspects triggering my research struggle (and some level of paralysis) entailed my fieldwork findings confounding the straightforward impact – of illustrating how planning in Ahmedabad discriminated based on religious differences and showing how it produced uneven water access – that I had initially outlined for myself. I didn’t see that in framing my implications this way, I too was reifying ‘religious difference’ and ‘planning’ as homogenous, stable categories. Widdowfield’s advice pushed me to re-work and clarify the implications of my research. I began to define the latter, in lay terms, as tracing and making visible how myriad actors across scales, settings, and across the Hindu-Muslim divide mediate planning practices and influence water access. Eventually, I ended up using specific elements from IE to organize my early approach to fieldwork and to gather data (section 2.2). In particular, the IE framework shaped my entry into 47 the site (beginning from the neighbourhoods), a systematic approach to research participants (categorizing them as primary and secondary) and listening for “texts” (relevant documents) through the interactions. But while IE helped me develop a strategy for tracing texts, I realized that I also needed a framework for examining discourses around ‘illegality’ and ‘religious difference’ that kept coming up during my fieldwork. I found these discourses being employed on the one hand by diverse actors like engineers, planners, builders, politicians, NGO workers, and other brokers to explain their perspectives on, and role in, mediating planning and water access in my sites. And I could also see these same discourses in narratives of residents describing persistently poor water access. It started becoming clear to me that the discursive circulation of these categories was perpetuating “social patterns like domination, discrimination, exploitation, dehumanization, naturalization,”, and was becoming “(ideologically driven) ‘common sense’” (Catalano and Waugh, 2020: 2). It was on account of these findings that I sought help from critical discourse analysis to think through my data. Learning from the critical discourse analysis framework, I began to study the role of these categories across scales, or to use Fairclough’s words, to understand relationships between “‘micro’ events… and ‘macro’ structures” (1985: 739). Further, following Setha Low’s assertion that “language produces, reproduces and transforms social structures and social relations” (Low, 2016: 124), I began to trace how language discursively, performatively, and materially (re)produced spatial relations and identities (cf. ibid: 119). Analytically, this juxtaposition of methods allowed me to foreground and trace the interests and experiences of actors across three scales – urban/ward (chapter 3), individual/community (chapter 4), and neighbourhood (chapter 5) – while examining the relational infrastructures of water access in Makhtampura and Sarkhej. And in doing so, I began to see the recursive relationship between specific notional constructs that worked discursively through planning practices to reproduce uneven water access. 2.2 Data collection I collected data over 30 months from October 2016 to December 2017 and from January 2019 to March 2020. I was introduced to Sarkhej and Makhtampura by the field workers and 48 project officers of Samerth24, an Ahmedabad-based NGO that I had partnered with for my research. I used an ethnographic approach, combining: (a) in-depth dialogues and semi-structured interviews with residents and actors identified by residents as important for their everyday access to water; (b) neighbourhood walks; and (c) secondary research, including collecting and analyzing relevant documents identified by research participants. I began my fieldwork by sharing my research intent - of studying water access and infrastructure in Sarkhej and Makhtampura – with the project officers and field workers of Samerth. Based on discussions that ensued, I identified three sites across the two wards. Samerth’s field officers introduced me to these sites, and then to one or two people within each neighbourhood. Following initial introductions, I recruited participants through snowball sampling. I identified four more sites through field workers from two other NGOs Saath Charitable Trust25, and Mahila Housing (SEWA) Trust26, that I met through the Samerth staff. To recruit primary participants here I followed a similar process as described above. And I identified two more sites in the latter part of my fieldwork based on some successful water infrastructure improvement having occurred here. Primary participant recruitment at these two sites was more organic and resulted from my initial visits to these sites and casual conversations. Of the nine sites in total, five are located in Makhtampura ward, and four in Sarkhej ward. I have used pseudonyms for all sites to protect the identity of participants wherever specific neighbourhoods are referred to. In each site, I started gathering data by talking with 3 or 4 residents. The first part of my fieldwork began from the selected neighbourhoods across Sarkhej and Makhtampura. This choice was premised on the IE logic of taking as starting point the “everyday world as problematic” (Smith, 2005: 40). I followed these conversations by meeting actors – members of 24 https://www.samerth.org/ 25 https://saath.org/ 26 https://www.mahilahousingtrust.org/ 49 community organizations, NGO officials, ward councillors (politicians), municipal engineers and bureaucrats, planners, builders, formal and informal business owners – that residents mentioned as being important for their water access. Borrowing from the IE framework, I categorized my research participants as primary participants and secondary participants. The actors listed above are referred to as secondary participants hereon. I identified additional people to talk to through publicly available sources (newspapers, government websites, media channels) based on their involvement with planning and governance in Ahmedabad, contacting them via phone calls or emails. 2.2.1 Dialogues and Interviews When I first set out to gather data, I had imagined conducting dialogues with residents and semi-structured interviews with the brokers. These choices were based on my understanding (then) of what kind of interactions might be preferred by whom, as well as on the different kinds of data collection interactions I envisioned between these two groups. However, some interactions that were meant to be dialogues turned into semi-structured interviews, and vice-versa. Considering how the data gathering practically unraveled, I discuss both methods here together. Sinha and Back (2014) point out that gathering data through dialogues makes it possible to share control of the physical setting and trajectory of the interaction with research participants. While interviews are typically conducted in quiet places, for privacy as much as ease of transcription, dialogues are spatially located in public places (a café, a park, etc.) to reduce the hierarchal gap between researchers and participants. Interviews inherently might be thought of as extractive: dialogues, more participatory. The flexibility of dialogues makes it possible to observe, discuss, and analyse relevant pieces of data together with participants. It allows for participants to be actively involved in decision-making relating to research methods and analytical choices. In contrast with the interview method, it makes room for the co-construction of knowledge (ibid). 50 I chose dialogues as my method for interactions with residents based on these considerations, and I planned to begin with group dialogues, followed by individual dialogues27. In each neighbourhood, I approached resident women first, since the everyday work of accessing water is typically a responsibility borne by women. My conversations with the women focused on gathering descriptions, opinions, stories, and experiences of their everyday water access by inquiring into how their access to water had changed over the years and why, who they approached in times of water troubles, how these negotiations had evolved, and how they viewed their access to water in comparison to the rest of the city, and so on. I also asked them about documents relating to their water access arrangements during these interactions. This focus on documents is inspired by the attention to “texts” by scholarship on Institutional Ethnography (DeVault and McCoy, 2001: 765; Campbell and Gregor, 2002: 69). Documents that residents brought to my attention included property papers, water connection papers, Public Interest Litigations (PILs), judicial rulings, newspaper reports, photos, and so on. Details emerging through the dialogues directed the conversation and identification of further questions, but I used an interview guide28 to ensure that my broad questions relating to water access were addressed. In total, I conducted in-depth dialogues with 7 groups and 14 individual participants (spread across multiple meetings). At least half the interactions lost some of the defining characteristics of the dialogue method discussed above on account of preferences of the participants. Many participants chose to not engage in looking at data (such as photographs, news reports, etc.) together or discussing aspects of analytical importance. Often they simply did 27 But this neat plan collapsed as well. In four of my sites, I was able to begin with group dialogues with the women and then progress to individual interactions. But in the rest, I was unable to do so because the women’s schedules didn’t match. In these cases, I began with individual dialogues. In three neighbourhoods where I began with group dialogues, the women did not want to have follow-up individual interactions. In two more neighbourhoods, the women insisted I speak to the men in their families, stating that the men knew the neighbourhood-level water access history better. While these were unforeseen variations, using dialogues as method allowed the flexibility to begin with either group or individual interactions, and include men as primary participants where required. 28 See Appendix A 51 not have the time. Yet, using dialogues as method allowed the flexibility to let initial conversations evolve in diverse ways, depending on participant preferences. After identifying brokers through primary participants, I set up times to interact with them. As opposed to my interactions with residents, I had notes on specific questions based on dialogues with residents that I wanted to ask the brokers. Like with the residents, I used a common interview guide to begin with29, along with additional individual-specific questions30. I asked brokers questions towards understanding their role in influencing water infrastructure and access in Makhtampura and Sarkhej. But some brokers ended up being more comfortable with the dialogue method than with the interview format. They often preferred to talk with me informally and in group/public settings; offered suggestions on what my analytical focus should be31; and expressed interest in looking at data with me, discussing, deliberating, and arriving at understandings together. I observed that NGO field workers and community and political leaders preferred the dialogue method, while bureaucratic officers seemed more comfortable with the interview format. My data gathering work with this group of participants32 thus ranged across settings: from neighbourhood streets, ward offices, planning offices, offices of NGOs, architects’ offices, real-estate developers’ offices, politicians’ homes, cafes, academic institutions, water distribution stations, and so on. I conducted dialogues and interviews with 45 brokers33 in total. 2.2.2 Neighbourhood walks and participatory photo(mapping) Following the dialogues and interviews, I conducted neighbourhood walks (Carpiano, 2009; Evans and Jones, 2011) with some participants to better understand their water access 29 See Appendix B 30 See Appendix C 31 I did not take on all their suggestions, but I found some suggestions very insightful 32 Since the difference between dialogues and interviews blurs quite a bit with this group of participants, I have listed all brokers together under a common “dialogues and interviews” heading to avoid confusion. 33 See Appendix D, with total number of participants, their roles, and neighbourhood walks conducted. 52 arrangements and experiences. In each case, we started from the participants homes, but as opposed to me insisting on a pre-determined route, routes for these walks were decided by participants based on aspects important to them. I attempted using participatory photomapping through this exercise but found most of my participants reluctant and had to abandon this method34. In cases where I felt that my participants were avoiding going to places that had come up as significant during dialogues with them, I remarked on this and asked if and why this might be the case but did not insist on being taken to those places. These interactions in themselves made evident some related power and gender issues that determined experiences and practices of water access. I conducted a total of 24 neighbourhood walks: 12 with residents, and another 12 with brokers, specifically NGO workers, ward engineers, and political leaders. I then separately visited these sites by myself for observation and further dialogues. 2.3 Ethical considerations Several ethical considerations were involved in the design of my research. In terms of formal protocols, I followed the Canadian Tri-Council Policy Statement on Ethical Conduct for Research Involving Humans (TCPS2) guidelines and my research was approved by the University of British Columbia’s Research Ethics Board (Certificate Number H16-01505). According to TCPS2, my project classified as posing minimal risk to research participants, since my data gathering occurred in everyday settings of participants. As mentioned in the previous section, I conducted interviews, dialogues, and neighbourhood walks with residents at their homes, in their immediate neighbourhoods, or in the case of engineers, 34 The rationale for using this method can be summed up as such: “images, narratives and other qualitative data produced by participating community residents” make possible “the integration of experiential data with spatial data” (Dennis, et al., 2009 : 467). I had hoped to attach narratives gathered during the neighbourhood walks with photographs taken by participants and tag both these to specific spatial locations on maps. My reluctance of participants to engage in this exercise seemed to stem from sharam (shame): they were ashamed to be seen going around taking pictures of their own area. 53 planners, politicians, NGO workers, etc., at mutually agreed venues like municipal offices, business premises (shops / offices of private water suppliers), and public work sites (like those where water lines were being laid). All research participants were over the age of 19 and gave their consent to participate in the research. I sought oral consent instead of written given, in part, the suspicion and fear people can feel when they see typed papers and are required to sign on them, but also, because for me written consent forms reproduced hierarchies between ‘me’ and ‘them’. In the content of my interactions (see Appendices A, B, and C for details), as described earlier, I sought participants’ descriptions, opinions, stories, and reflections on their experiences of water access, or on their role in shaping water access. This being my focus, I did not seek any personal information from participants that may put them at risk of psychological or social harm any more than they might be subject to in their everyday lives. As well, while assessing vulnerability of participants for my research, I followed article 4.7 of TCPS2, which states that, “individuals should not automatically be considered vulnerable simply because of assumptions made about the vulnerability of the group to which they belong. Their particular circumstances shall be considered in the context of the proposed research.” I assured participants of confidentiality and their right to withdraw from the study prior to the submission to the dissertation. No participants withdrew from the study. All participants were assured anonymity and confidentiality in any publication that would result from the research, including the dissertation, to address any fears or perceived risks. While some participants asked to be identified, their identification could risk the identification of other participants who do not wish to be identified. Considering this, I have used pseudonyms for all participants and community-level neighbourhoods. Dialogues and interviews were scheduled to last between 45 to 90 minutes, but often went on for longer when preferred by participants. Most conversations were audio recorded and later transcribed. Some interviewees, specifically public officials, were not comfortable with being recorded. I used hand-written notes in these cases. All interviews were conducted in English, Hindi, or Gujarati. Interviews in Hindi and Gujarati were translated by me at the time of transcription. Further, given that data gathered for my project 54 could turn sensitive at any point amidst wider political battles coalescing around Hindu-Muslim relations in India, I have been particularly careful in storing and managing my collected data. In addition to following UBC protocols regarding data storage and protection, and I personally transcribed all recorded dialogues and interviews. 2.4 Logistical challenges In addition to the methodological challenges highlighted earlier in this chapter, I also encountered some logistical challenges. The most pressing of these were to do with robust official data. I was unable to access official base-level data such as population figures for the wards where I carried out data collection, city-level water supply networks, and so on for a few different reasons. 2.4.1 Official maps of water networks and infrastructures When I first started looking for background information on city-level water access in Ahmedabad, I found very little data available. I had hoped to collect this data to better contextualize water-access practices in my sites. When I requested municipal officials at the Water Projects Department at the Ahmedabad Municipal Corporation (AMC) to see any city-level official data of this kind that they might have, I was told that that they do not have updated maps of city-level water infrastructures. When I asked them how they carry out repairs, maintenance and so on in the absence of such maps / records, they said, "we do this work everyday and know our city inside-out. We don’t need detailed maps for this." This gap in city-level data seemed rather bizarre to me, especially given the fact that Ahmedabad is carrying out pilot projects for 24x7 water supply in two neighbourhoods. On asking if I could have a look at whatever pieces of information they had, I was told that this was highly sensitive data and could not be shared. While I found city-level data from 2006 through secondary searches, I was unable to find current official data. To work around this challenge by mapping the city-level water infrastructure with three other women also interested in water-55 related issues, through a public engagement imitative called "Ahmedabad Water Walks"35. Conducting these walks became an immensely rich exercise in itself, and brought to my notice various other perspectives towards examining water access in Ahmedabad. 2.4.2 Population estimates I had hoped to gather population estimates for Makhtampura and Sarkhej wards to quantitatively contextualize the water infrastructures (water distribution stations, piping network, municipal borewells, and so on) already built here as well as those planned. However, when I asked local councillors and ward officers how many people currently lived in their wards, they gave me 2011 census figures for the Sarkhej ward. The Makhtampura ward, which did not exist in 2011 as mentioned above, had no ‘official’ baseline data on population. And in relation, since the Sarkhej boundaries had also changed in 2015, the official data that I was given was significantly off the mark. This gap in data stems from the fact that the census board carries out population surveys and publishes ‘official’ ward-wise population data every 10 years (the last one was in 2011). Municipal elections on the other hand, are conducted every five years (the last one in Ahmedabad was in 2015) and are often accompanied by changes in ward boundaries. However, population surveys are not carried out in the newly or differently delineated wards after municipal elections. This results in an impossibility of having approximate population figures after municipal elections, or indeed, even comparing census data produced every decade (since ward boundaries are likely to have changed over the decade). Two local politicians from Sarkhej and Makhtampura explained to me how ward-level population figures are estimated following municipal ward elections. As reported by them, ward-level population estimates are based on the total number of votes received by a ward during municipal elections. The number of votes is then multiplied by the average household size of 4, 35 Details of these walks can be found at http://veditum.org/city-walks/waterwalksamd/ and http://veditum.org/editorial/ahmedabad-city-water-walks-sabarmati-beyond-the-barrage/. 56 and the resulting number is used for a population estimate. Needless to say, this number would be off the mark, since: (a) many people don’t vote, and (b) using an average household size of 4 would likely not be applicable to all parts of Makhtampura and Sarkhej, and (c) arguably, from some households, more than one person votes! Yet, the only population figures I have to go by are based on calculations that follow this logic. 2.5 In summary: acknowledging limitations of this study Through this chapter, I have offered details of the frameworks and methods used to conduct this dissertation research, and my rationale and process for doing so. My methodological choices were informed by dilemmas concerning positionality, research ethics, and preconceived notions regarding planning and Hindu-Muslim relations in Ahmedabad, where I was unconsciously transplanting national and urban political fights to community-level dynamics. I have described how I worked through these struggles and the methodological choices that I made in the process. Broadly, I used dialogues, interviews, and neighbourhood walks as data gathering methods. Analytically, I traced recursive relationships between discursive constructs, everyday experiences, and uneven water access, by attending to particular junctures of formulation and implementation of technical plans. However, it would be naive if I did not acknowledge that as with any qualitative inquiry, my approach to this research has its own limitations. Below, I list four limitations that might influence readers’ perceptions of my research. The first limitation involves the absence of accounts of Hindu-Muslim violence in participants’ accounts of water access, and of the role of water from the perspective of Muslim religious customs. Much has been written about the scale and nature of the 2002 Hindu-Muslim violence in Ahmedabad (Mahadevia, 2002; Desai, 2011), and it might be surprising that no references to this violence come up in the chapters that follow. Residents linked poor water access with their inability to find housing in non-Muslim parts of the city, but they did not refer to experiences of the 2002 Hindu-Muslim violence itself. Some might consider this a limitation 57 of my research since I did not ask residents explicit questions on their experiences of the 2002 violence. And it might also be that residents did not feel comfortable talking about their experience of violence – as Muslims – with me, given my evident Hindu identity. However, it might also be that these absences stem from the experience of violence for residents being quite different to what outsiders might imagine. On the one hand, the violence in Ahmedabad is almost two decades old. While violence that occurred close to 20 years ago might be considered recent in northern/western contexts, in Indian cities where brutal violence and killings over elections, housing, and water, are commonplace, it is the more recent and routine experiences of violence that residents report. In my research sites for instance, one group of women participants told me how they had experienced protracted everyday violence at the hands of Muslim owners of gambling houses located in their own neighborhood between 2006 to 2008. This internal violence came much after the 2002 violence. In extension, while the Hindu-Muslim riots were gruesome, not all Muslims personally experienced violence. For a sense of scale, the Muslim population in Ahmedabad is over 800,000. Many Muslim families moved to southern Ahmedabad - my sites - to minimize chances of encountering violence. While the role of public memory is unquestionable, not all my research participants themselves or their families encountered violence during 2002. Furthermore, the issues emphasized by residents might also suggest that getting through everyday tasks of keeping their families fed, bathed, and well takes up most of the time and energy of residents. It is possible that everyday survival concerns residents in immediate, proximate ways much more than what happened 20 years ago. Similarly, water plays a crucial role in Islam’s religious customs of purification (Oestigaard, 2005: 91). Peloso and Harris (2017: 7) for instance recount how Muslim residents of Accra, Ghana, regarded interrupted piped water supply as “an obstruction to moral purity”, and as “a factor that inhibited religious devotional practices”. Given this background, some might wonder whether my research participants mentioned how uneven access to water impacted their religious practices. However, my participants did not refer to these aspects, except for references to water struggles during Ramzan (section 4.6), while describing their everyday water struggles. 58 And while referring to Ramzan too, they emphasized the extra labour of fetching water while fasting but did not mention aspects relating to purity. These absences might be considered a limitation since I had not included explicit questions inquiring into experiences of Hindu-Muslim violence or into impacts of water access on religious customs in my interview guide. My interview guide (appendix A) shows that I inquired more broadly about everyday struggles of accessing water, leaving it to participants to take the conversation in directions they felt important. However, it might also be that water access vis-a-vis religiosity might not be an important concern in the face of more routine, basic struggles. My participants referred extensively to struggles of bathing, washing, keeping their families clean, etc., describing how they 'make do' in the face of these struggles (section 4.6). The possibility that my evident Hindu identity might have deterred them from describing how water access affected their religious customs cannot be foreclosed. But it might also be that my participants emphasized the aspects that were most proximate and important to them in relation to water access. These diverse prospects add depth to conceptions of religiosity and water access. They illustrate that connections between religion and water might look very different in different contexts and raise the possibility that in some contexts these connections might practically not be as important to residents as their immediate basic needs. A second limitation that some readers might perceive in my research is the absence of a deeper focus on intersectional aspects, particularly caste, while examining segregation and water access in my research sites. Many have noted the prevalence of caste-based segregation in Indian cities. For instance, in many Indian metropolitan cities, caste is a much stronger marker of residential segregation than class (Vithayathil and Singh, 2012), and groups from historically marginalized castes are often found to disproportionately reside in slums (Gupta et al 2009: 19). Further, there are several castes and sub-castes even among Muslim communities which might have differential socio-political relations with influential actors and institutions in the city (cf., Auerbach and Thachil, 2018: 780); relations that might affect access to water in diverse ways. I fully recognize the absence of a deeper focus on these dynamics as they shape everyday water access in my sites as a limitation. However, I believe that without the close understanding that I 59 now have, it would have been difficult to locate community-level intersectional issues within a broader technical and political context. The insights that I have arrived at through this dissertation research position me better to engage deeper with intersectionality where water access and religious difference in urban India are concerned, and I regard this as an avenue for future work. A third limitation pertains to my Hindu-by-birth positionality. Regardless of how much I have worked on my guilt and privilege of being born Hindu in a country with an increasingly overt Hindu nationalist agenda, I acknowledge that my analysis of uneven water access in the segregated Muslim parts of Ahmedabad is inevitably coloured. While I draw on diverse data sources - both Hindu and Muslim, across class and scales of community and institutional settings - to develop my analysis, I recognize that I do not share the lived realities of violence and segregation experienced by many of my research participants. This is a blind spot, and I am deeply aware of it. Yet, I believe that this separate-ness played an important role in allowing me to focus on the multi-scalar interests and lived realities shaping everyday water struggles of Muslim families. Relatedly, my choice to continually re-focus attention on my participants when they asked me personal questions is another limitation shaping my inquiry. I am keenly aware that this choice could be construed by some as a way of me retaining power over my research participants, and indeed I initially saw it this way too. However, I adopted this method after much deliberation: I came to see that when participants asked me personal questions hinting at my privilege, if I answered them in detail, I risked focusing too much attention on myself and away from their issues. I started to see interactions with participants, particularly residents, as important spaces where they could feel heard and seen, where their everyday experiences could be acknowledged. Allowing a shift in attention from them to me destabilized this space. I navigated this insider-outsider relationship by offering some details on my life, sharing some of my everyday struggles with them, but always consciously re-focusing on their everyday experiences of water access. Finally, a fourth limitation, in extension to the point above, relates to my analytical choice of focusing on the reification of discursive categories. Some might argue, and rightly so, 60 that this focus itself stems from a position of privilege. For reified or otherwise, experiences of difference are real. Or to quote Libby Porter (2010: 18), “difference exists and is materially relevant to our social practices and relations”. Yet, I would dare argue, limiting of course my argument to the context of planning, water access, and Muslim segregation in Ahmedabad, that it is only in tracing discourses circulating across scales that I am able to offer a critical understanding of the role of planning in shaping uneven water access and religious segregation. In the next chapter, I offer one example of such recursive reification, premised on discourses of ‘illegality’, and how it works to allow the unchallenged persistence of selective planning and uneven water governance. - 61 Chapter 3: Unmapped Water Access: The Role of Planning 3.1 Introduction “… The corporation has sanctioned T.P Scheme 84(B) for our area and through the implementation of this scheme, pucca36 roads, street lights, and drinking water from the Narmada have been provided in a large part of the area. Despite being part of this same T.P. Scheme, only our area with Muslim population (sic) has been discriminated against by not providing us the basic services due to us through the implementation of the T.P. This is illegal and is in violation of our basic rights… We have been deprived of clean drinking water by this biased treatment. This step of the municipal corporation is inappropriate, unreasonable, illegal, and clearly unconstitutional.” - Letter by Sarkhej residents to Ahmedabad Municipal Corporation, 10.11.201537 “Every time we ask them to build infrastructure, they give some excuse or the other. Like the T.P. is not final yet, it is at this stage, that stage, etc… Call it our misfortune.” - Municipal Councillor, Makhtampura Ward; Interview, 05.09.2017 In September 2017, I met with one of the four municipal councilors38 of Makhtampura ward at the hot, dusty construction site of a new water distribution station. I had hoped to understand from him the role of ward-level spatial planning in influencing residents’ access to municipal water in Makhtampura. In response to my questions, he highlighted some key planning processes and how they shaped water access in Makhtampura and Sarkhej. But he expressed particular anguish over one practice: the Town Planning Scheme, which the first quote 36 The word ‘pucca’ is an adaptation from Hindi and broadly denotes ‘properly constructed’ (as opposed to ‘kachha’ is used to mean ‘temporary’ or ‘poorly built’). Literally translated, ‘pucca’ means cooked, while ‘kachha’ means raw. 37 Submitted in the High Court of Gujarat at Ahmedabad as Annexure E of Writ Petition (PIL) 37 of 2016 by Amrish Patel and Musebhai Khatumbara. The original document is in Gujarati and has been translated for the purposes of this dissertation by me. 38 Political leaders at the ward level, councilors play an important role in mediating community-level water access. A detailed account of one councilor’s role in improving water access follows later, in chapter 5. 62 above calls the ‘T.P. Scheme’ (TPS hereon). An area-level planning mechanism followed in Ahmedabad, the TPS entails the pooling and reconstitution of land for building physical infrastructure like roads, drainage and water networks, etc.39. In contrast to the land acquisition method40 widely practiced in other parts of India, the TPS process is praised for being participatory, democratic and equitable (for landowners), financially and politically strategic (for city planning agencies), and efficient at rapidly building physical infrastructure networks (Ballaney and Patel, 2009: 203). But, contrary to these wider accounts commending the equity and efficiency of this process, residents and politicians of Makhtampura and Sarkhej hold the TPS responsible for water access here remaining unmapped, i.e., for the planning and building of physical water networks remaining missing. The opening quotes are only two examples of how residents and political leaders implicate the TPS in producing unmapped water access. But other public interest litigation appeals, media reports, scholars, and municipal officials also echo this sentiment (Desai et al, 2016; John and Daruwala, 2015; Ahmed, 2009). These allegations suggest that uneven access to water in the city’s Muslim areas has resulted atleast in part from the selective implementation of planning processes such as the TPS and should be read as the spatialization of state-led discrimination against the Muslim community. Desai et al say (2016: 6) for instance: “Urban planning and policies have… created exclusions in the city… (W)hat we have in Ahmedabad today are informal localities in its southern periphery that are borne out of a combination of exclusionary planning & policies and communal polarisation & segregation. These informal spaces have become “containers” for large sections of the marginalized religious minority and carry a stigma characteristic of ghettos. This has contributed to creating an unshakeable sense of Hindu-Muslim difference and antagonism in Ahmedabad,” 39 While the Town Planning Scheme process is outlined briefly later in this chapter, see Ballaney and Patel, 2009: 199 - 202 for details on the steps involved in formulating, proposing, and implementing a TPS 40 Employing the principle of eminent domain 63 This assertion, tying spatial and material unevenness in Ahmedabad’s Muslim areas to planning echoes broader arguments (such as Roy, 2005, 2009) on the exclusionary nature of planning across India. Ananya Roy describes planning in India as “the relationship between the published plan and unmapped territory” (Roy, 2009: 81) involving flexible and selective state-led exercises of acquiring land, altering land use, and so on, often in violation of its own laws. Core goals of such maneuvers, she suggests, are accumulation and authority. For instance, some agricultural lands might selectively be converted to urban or industrial lands to meet industrial or urban development objectives. Such acts of “deregulation” (an intentional lack of regulation maintained by the state) and “unmapping” (deliberate planning practices of not mapping) (ibid: 83), she suggests, are central to the implementation of planning mechanisms such as land use controls, eminent domain, masterplans and so on (see also, Watson, 2009). Urban governance in India, according to Roy’s powerful formulation, operates as much through an “‘unmapping’ of cities” as it does through more widely recognized governing technologies such as “visibility, counting, mapping, and enumerating” (ibid). These suggestions lend important nuance to understandings of mapping as an exercise of political power by the state (Mitchell, 2002: 90). For if mapping is to be understood as a central tool with which to govern and control territories, so should unmapping. This conception of unmapping as a deliberate state-directed strategy of denying water access in Ahmedabad’s Muslim areas indeed seems to provide a straightforward explanation for the opening quotes above. Recent accounts of uneven water governance however have complicated such associations of spatial and material exclusion to state-led intentionality directed through institutionalized planning processes. Lisa Björkman (2015) for instance shows how the unmapping of Mumbai’s water networks, far from being a deliberate hegemonic act of the state, was instead an inadvertent consequence of numerous technical, technological, and material planning efforts to map and govern; efforts mediated by a host of formal and informal actors. In extension, the state itself is understood as fragmented and heterogeneous, raising Akhil Gupta’s seminal provocation on “blurred boundaries” (1995) between what and who is state and non-state. These studies unsettle the conflation of visibly unmapped water access with ‘state’-directed exclusionary planning. They assert instead the need to understand more closely how and 64 why unmapped contexts come to be. Equally, to understand the role of planning in shaping uneven water access such as in Ahmedabad’s Muslim areas, this scholarship suggests critical inquiries into practices and actors that influence the formulation and implementation of planning processes. I take the above discussion of unmapping as my point of departure to examine the role of planning in influencing water access in Ahmedabad’s Muslim areas. The first question informing my inquiry is: How, in the formulation and/or implementation of planning processes such as the TPS, does differentiated water access come into being? Next, I call into conversation suggestions by scholars, residents, and politicians that processes like the TPS are spatial embodiments of discriminatory planning against Ahmedabad’s Muslims. My objective in doing so is to locate the role of religious difference in influencing the planning and building of material water networks. My second question then is: How does religious difference influence the planning and building of urban (water) infrastructures in Ahmedabad’s Muslim areas? Further, with conceptions of unmapping being, in the end, conceptions of governance, and taking the definition of governance as processes “of decision making… structured by institutions (laws, rules, norms, and customs) and shaped by ideological preferences” (Bakker, 2010 : 44), I ask a third question: What insights might the case of uneven water access in Ahmedabad’s Muslim areas offer for water governance in cities divided by religion? I ask these questions because I am concerned about political implications of direct ways of examining, understanding, and explaining water governance in contexts of deep socio-economic differences. My concerns are premised in arguments such as Laura Pulido’s (1996) on visibly discriminatory governance of environmental resources. Pulido problematizes reductive ways of defining, identifying, and theorizing environmental racism for obscuring a deeper understanding of how ‘race’41 discursively comes together with other socio-political and 41 While Pulido focuses on ‘race’ while analyzing environmental governance in the US, her suggestions are instructive to my inquiry into religious difference here. For, as clarified in chapter 1, just as I understand ‘race’ for being socially constructed, I understand ‘religion’ for being likewise. 65 economic forces to constitute oppressive situations. She insists then on the need to deconstruct discourses and assumptions constituting monolithic understandings of racism in order to “move to a more meaningful and nuanced understanding of what environmental racism is, how it is produced, and how an anti-racist and left movement can develop” (ibid: 144). Following Pulido, I suggest that asking questions on the role of religious difference in mediating planning and water access is important to develop a nuanced, more meaningful and critical understanding of exclusionary planning and water governance in Ahmedabad’s Muslim areas. The easy implication of planning processes such as the TPS (and the Development Plan, as subsequent sections illustrate) occludes a deeper understanding of processes and relationships that unfold across multiple registers to influence water access in the city’s Muslim neighbourhoods. These taken-for-granted associations suggest the deliberate complicity of planning in producing unmapped water access. But reductive ways of associating uneven water governance with state-led intentionality to discriminate on the basis of religion obscures how in reality religion comes together with socio-economic and political forces to constitute observable unmapped water access. This propensity, on the one hand, runs the risk of reproducing rhetoric, which is problematic in itself because it reinforces wider monolithic assumptions about communities (cf. Gilbert, 2007). Relatedly, and on the other hand, it also allows easy explanations for cited ‘impossibilities’ and inaction escape unchallenged, and thwarts possibilities of any meaningful change. To address the questions listed on the previous page, I examine the physical, economic, material, technical, ideological, and political processes that have influenced planning and water access in Makhtampura and Sarkhej. Water access is produced through the deployment of a complex set of infrastructures that are not only physical and material things in themselves, but also constitutive of relations, desires, and promises (Larkin, 2013). In Mumbai for instance, Björkman (2015: 13) describes how “… a water distribution main laid with much pomp and show by a politician in the run-up to an election might work as much to demonstrate a political aspirant’s capacity to mobilize the apparatus of the state as it does to improve water supply to a neighbourhood”. And yet symbolic desires cannot take physical form without putting to work a 66 range of material, physical, and bureaucratic processes. So, on the one hand, the interests producing water access might be traced to political desires of a specific kind. While on the other hand, the material and physical work of producing access unfolds through institutionalized technical procedures as well as spatio-temporally specific conditions such as legalities, regulations, already existing infrastructures, what place is upstream or downstream from another, up-network or down-network, and so on. within other words, water access is mediated by physical, material, technical, technological, bureaucratic, ideological, and political processes at multiple levels (Orlove and Caton, 2010). These insights inform my analytical approach in this chapter. In the sections that follow, I begin by reviewing relevant literature on water access and governance contextualizing it against scholarship on practices of mediation in urban India (section 3.2). Through this review, I present a framework for disaggregating water governance towards locating the role of planning in influencing unmapped water access in Ahmedabad’s Muslim areas. I then offer an overview of municipal water supply in Ahmedabad, followed by a closer look at the planning technicalities involved in bringing municipal water to Makhtampura and Sarkhej (section 3.3). After this, I trace the role of two planning processes – the TPS and the DP – in shaping water access in these two wards alongside narratives of key actors describing their roles in the formulation and implementation of these plans (sections 3.4 and 3.5). In conclusion, I suggest that visibly unmapped water access in divided cities might stem from the actions of influential actors across religious divides. In Makhtampura specifically, I argue that unmapped water access results from the discursive co-articulations of ‘legality’ and ‘religious difference’, which in turn seem entangled in the class interests of specific actors. 3.2 Disaggregating water governance in India From a broader environmental resource governance perspective, water governance has been understood as the many “institutional arrangements, spatial scales, organizational structures and social actors involved in making decisions” (Perreault, 2014 : 236 ; Himley, 2008) regarding water resources, the flow of water, who gets to access how much water, through what mechanisms, and so on. Institutional practices produced through a codification of spatially and 67 temporally specific sociopolitical struggles then become constituents of governance and determinants of access to resources such as water (Bridge and Jonas, 2002: 759 – 760). According to this formulation, “(b)y defining what is economically, technologically, and politically possible at particular moments”, institutional practices lend “coherence and stability” to processes of water governance (ibid). Institutional arrangements and practices however need to be understood as much in terms of objectives they ostensibly are set up to achieve, as well as practical consequences they end up producing. And this inquiry in turn cannot be adequately conducted without, on the one hand, calling into question the ideological basis and definition of needs that such arrangements and practices are premised upon, and on the other, examining aspects of everyday life that mediate the implementation of codified institutional practices. Regional water governance in western India for instance involves the institutionalization of arrangements enacted through the building of water infrastructures such as large dams ostensibly to mitigate water scarcity in the region. However, the condition of water scarcity that these arrangements have been predicated upon has itself been called into question. Indeed, critical scholars have argued that as opposed to being a natural condition, scarcity is often socially constructed and mediated by myriad socio-political interests (Mehta, 2001, 2007; also Contractor, 2012). In other words, as Rittel and Webber assert in their seminal work on “dilemmas” that plague planning propositions, “(t)he choice of explanation determines the nature of the problem’s resolution” (1973: 6). This work then highlights then need to prise open naturalised conditions upon which institutionalized planning practices determining water governance are founded. Further, as has been noted by Grindle and Thomas (1991), the journey of a planning proposition from formulation to implementation is not linear, but rather interactive. Actors with diverse interests intervene, mediate, and influence what gets practically implemented. Regarding the role of planning in shaping water governance then, on the one hand, attempts at governing 68 might require the state to enlist the support of actors42 who would, by conventional understandings of the state, be considered non-state (Jessop, 1990). On the other, and as a consequence, actions construed and constructed as governance and typically thought to be state directed, might in reality not be contained within the ambit of formal government institutions (Lund, 2006). Premised in this understanding, governance is posited as “the amalgamated result of the exercise of power by a variety of local institutions and the imposition of external institutions, conjugated with the idea of a state43” (ibid: 686). As a result, in geographies with highly fragmented knowledge, power, and authority, the possibility of formal government institutions exercising “effective legal sovereignty over a territory and its population” are recognized for being particularly tenuous (Hansen and Stepputat, 2006: 297). Accounts of water governance in cities like Mumbai and Bangalore offer empirical depth to the above understanding. They illustrate how the everyday work of producing water access – laying pipes, installing connections, regulating valves, and so on – is mediated, or brokered, by myriad actors depending on site and time specific socio-political and material-hydraulic conditions. Such brokers include water mafias, water tanker operators, plumbers, local politicians, and water engineers, to name a few (Björkman, 2018; Ranganathan, 2014; Contractor, 2012; Anand, 2011). With water shortages increasingly cutting across class lines and legal statuses (Björkman, 2014: 499), brokers are known to mediate water access for a range of interests: from immediate to long-term financial profit, demonstrating influence over the state apparatus, making evident the ability to offer social protection, lobbying for political interests, to managing their professional reputations (Ranganathan, 2014: 91). I have discussed practices of mediation and brokerage in chapter 1 (section 1.3.4), and I offer sharper focus on these actors and practices in chapter 5. Nevertheless, for understandings of water governance, the scholarship 42 Earlier work by Lipsky (1980) on ‘street level bureaucrats’ presents insights on somewhat similar dynamics, although with very different legal, political, and economic specificities than can be observed in postcolonial contexts. 43 The state-idea referring to the qualities, actions, authority, etc. generally associated with government institutions (Abrams, 1988 : 69) 69 on intermediaries illustrates how everyday knowledge and authority are constituted, exercised, experienced, and narrated in relation to water governance in India. In doing so, it also underscores broader assertions that the Indian state cannot be thought of as a homogenous, predetermined, static entity (Ferguson and Gupta, 2002) capable of exercising power on its own (Jessop, 1990). Needless to say, the logics directing these diverse practices of mediation are often not in alignment with abstract planning logics determining how water distribution and supply is “conceptualized, materialized and institutionalized” (Björkman, 2018: 278). While institutional planning practices might well be symbolic of powers and interests dominant at the time of codification, their implementation is mediated by the knowledge and authority serving numerous other social, political, economic, and hydraulic interests. For my inquiry into the role of planning in shaping water access in Makhtampura and Sarkhej, this discussion highlights the need to examine how codified planning practices shaping water governance are mediated by various actors in socio-politically specific everyday scenarios. In other words, it calls for a disaggregated understanding of interests and relationships that influence planning, and in extension, water access in Ahmedabad'. To further contextualize the discussion, allow me to explain briefly what I mean by access. In advancing a ‘theory of access,’ Ribot and Peluso define access as “… the ability to benefit from things – including material objects, persons, institutions and symbols” (2003: 153). In doing so, they make the case for understanding access as the ability to benefit from a resource rather than the right to do so. Their formulation presents an alternative to a rights-based, property-centric view: legally enshrined individual rights, Ribot and Peluso point out, constitute only one set of relationships among many defining access44. The ability to benefit from a resource is influenced as much by social relationships and factors such as ideological and discursive manipulations, relations of production and exchange, socially and legally forbidden 44 In other words, the difference between ‘property’ and ‘access’ is that between the ‘right to benefit’ and the ‘ability to benefit’ (Ribot and Peluso, 2003 : 160) 70 acts such as theft, corruption, and so on, as by property. In other words, analysing access requires a close examination of the many socio-economic, political, and material powers embodied by institutions, people, processes, and relationships that might influence the ability of people to benefit from a resource (ibid). Further, they offer an analytical rubric entailing the identification and mapping of “mechanisms by which access is gained, maintained, and controlled” (ibid: 160). For the substantive focus of this chapter, two other terms defining access relations become important ; “control” and “maintenance”, i.e., relations that control the access of others to a resource, as opposed to relations that maintain their access to a resource45. In the sections that follow, I use insights from the above discussion on disaggregating water governance and access to analyse whether and how religious difference influences planning and water governance in Ahmedabad. To contextualize access to municipal water in Makhtampura and Sarkhej, I begin by offering an overview of municipal water supply in Ahmedabad. 3.3 Municipal water supply in Ahmedabad Ahmedabad’s history of piped municipal water supply is over a century old, dating back to 1891. Since then, several water supply projects have been built to meet the city’s growing needs (see Yadav et. al., 2014 for more on this). However, the city’s history of supplying large amounts of surface water as part of its municipal supplies is relatively recent, and can be traced back to 19-odd years ago, to 2002, when waters from the Narmada River were brought to Ahmedabad through the Sardar Sarovar Project. Prior to this highly contentious water supply intervention, the city depended primarily on its groundwater reserves along with non-perennial surface water sourced from the Sabarmati River. Since 2002 however, Ahmedabad has grown increasingly reliant on the Narmada as its primary source of water (AMC, 2013). Currently, 45 While the myriad powers embodied by these categories might be echoed in the stance of political economy on relations between capital and labour, the narrow confines of ‘class’ are discarded here, and control and maintenance understood as a broader set of powers that influence the ability to benefit from a resource (ibid : 159) 71 about 75% of Ahmedabad’s total municipally supplied water is reportedly surface water from the Narmada46. Access to municipally supplied Narmada waters is much sought after in Ahmedabad for multiple reasons. Rapidly depleting groundwater levels, Gujarat being ‘drought-prone’, and Sabarmati waters being non-perennial and insufficient for the rapidly growing city are some of the most widely cited reasons (see Yadav, et. al., 2014 for more). On account of these persistent water problems, the arrival of Narmada waters in Ahmedabad in 2002 was welcomed with much revelry47. Municipal and state officers continue to celebrate the improvements Narmada waters have meant for municipal water access in Ahmedabad. In their view, by drawing increasing amounts of water from the Narmada, the Ahmedabad Municipal Corporation (AMC) has been able to decrease its dependence on groundwater. According to an official document, until the year 2000, 61% of the city’s municipally supplied water was groundwater, while by 2010, this had reduced to 10% (AMC, 2013; Yadav et al., 2014). This reduced drawing of groundwater by the AMC for municipal supplies is however often conflated with a general decrease in the use of groundwater. For instance, one proactive disclosure by AMC’s Water Projects department claims that the use of groundwater in Ahmedabad would be completely stopped by 2009 – 2010 which would mean better health for the city’s residents (AMC, date uncertain48: 36). Recent data on groundwater levels however belie such projections. Statistics from the Central Groundwater Board show that groundwater levels across Ahmedabad, as across the state of Gujarat, have continued to fall rapidly (CGWB, 2016: 2). 46 This is based on my calculations using statistics provided on pages 10, 13 and 14, in the ICRIER document published by AMC in 2013. 47 For instance, one news piece published in August 2002 says : “For many in Ahmedabad, the past few months have been a nightmare. But on August 28, dreams flowed along with the river's current - literally - when colourful boats and thousands of diyas (lamps) floated in the till recently parched and putrid Sabarmati river… The merriment was made possible by the diversion of water to Sabarmati from the overflowing Narmada dam, 225 km away, a few days ago. Slogans like "Narmade, Sarvade" (O Narmada, our lifeline) rent the air as firecrackers lit up the sky in myriad colours.” 48 Though it seems like the document was published between 2005 and 2009. 72 The incongruence between AMC’s projections and CGWB’s findings can be attributed to two facts. First, most middle-income and higher-income neighbourhoods in Ahmedabad, despite having legal access to municipal water, continue to draw unchecked amounts of groundwater from their private individual or shared borewells. Water consumption in these neighbourhoods is much above the 140 LPCD that the municipal water supplied by the AMC provides for. The gap between this need and the municipal supply is met by privately drawn unaccounted-for groundwater. Second, households that are unable to access municipally supplied water (legally or illegally) resort to drawing water from the ground, from shared or private borewells, if they have the means to. This is in addition to unregulated use of groundwater by industrial and commercial establishments. Simply put, the municipal corporation having decreased its reliance on groundwater needs to be disentangled from larger assumptions around the decrease in groundwater use across the city. This in turn calls into question the rationale behind bringing Narmada waters to Ahmedabad to begin with, and the logic of the Sardar Sarovar Dam and the Narmada Pipeline Project in extension (see Luxion, 2017 for more on this). As far as physical networks supplying water within Ahmedabad are concerned, , municipal water is directed from source to homes as follows: (a) source to (b) treatment plant to (c) trunk mains to (d) local Water Distribution Stations (WDSs from here on) and underground tanks to (e) residences (AMC, 2013: 11). Drawing on Ribot and Peluso’s theory of access, these five junctures become moments at which water access might be controlled, limited, facilitated, negotiated or otherwise mediated. The flow of municipal water from source to treatment plant influences the city more broadly, while laying down trunk mains, building WDSs and getting water to them, and getting water from WDSs to people’s homes through distribution networks are locality or neighbourhood specific issues. 3.3.1 Getting municipal water to Makhtampura and Sarkhej Makhtampura and Sarkhej wards lie in the southern and south-western parts of Ahmedabad (figure 1.3) and are predominantly Muslim areas (section 1.3.3). According to 2018 estimates by respective municipal councillors, about 95% of the population in Makhtampura and 73 50% of the population in Sarkhej is Muslim49. Neighbourhoods constituting current day Makhtampura and Sarkhej wards were included within AMC limits in 2006 as part of a wider process of expanding the city’s municipal limits50. Prior to their incorporation within the AMC, these neighbourhoods were part of villages, and were governed by administrative bodies called ‘gram panchayats’. The inclusion of an area within the AMC carries an important implication in relation to water access: the possibility of accessing Narmada waters through municipal WDSs. And as mentioned above, Narmada waters are more desirable than the groundwater that villages and municipalities outside of AMC limits depend on51. Getting municipally supplied water to flow through an area once it is incorporated within city limits requires the planning and building of trunk mains and local WDSs which offer neighbourhood-level storage capacity. These processes in turn require land and roads to be identified, acquired and developed by the municipal corporation. Planning authorities identify and delineate land for building physical water infrastructure through a two-stage planning process called the Development Plan (DP) – Town Planning Scheme (TPS) mechanism. These processes are in turn is governed by the Gujarat Town Planning and Urban Development Act (GTPUD Act), 1976. The DP is a metropolitan land-use plan revised roughly every decade by the Ahmedabad Urban Development Authority (AUDA) and serves purportedly as a “comprehensive strategic document for the development of the city” (Ballaney and Patel 2009, 194). The process of drafting a DP involves the identification of lands on the city’s periphery where urban expansion is deemed likely, followed by the assignment of uses to these lands and 49 I was given these estimates by the Municipal Councillors of Makhtampura and Sarkhej wards. These estimates are not Census based but are rather extrapolations based on the electoral lists of the wards. As highlighted in chapter 2, there are no accurate population estimates available for these areas. 50 A total of 259.16 sq. kms. of land was incorporated from the Ahmedabad Urban Development Authority (AUDA) into the AMC in 2006 51 Though not always. In response to an RTI letter submitted by a farmer activist asking about how much Narmada water was being supplied to an elite township outside the AMC limits, the Sardar Sarovar Narmada Nigam Ltd (SSNNL) responded by quoting the precise amount of water being supplied (when none should have been supplied). This is among the few exceptions however ; for the most part, the possibility of accessing Narmada water only opens up on incorporation within AMC limits. 74 their rezoning based on population estimates and other projections and needs. As municipal city boundaries expand, lands rezoned from agricultural to other uses by the DP are divided into smaller areas, typically of 100 – 200 hectares52, and detailed plans in the form of TPSs are drawn for them by relevant agencies53 (Ballaney and Patel, 2009; Sanyal and Deuskar, 2012; Mahadevia et al., 2018). The process of developing these plans involves pooling land from land owners, estimating physical and social infrastructure (roads, water distribution stations and networks, sewage plants, schools, hospitals, etc.) that might be required for the rezoned uses, deducting and reserving lands for building this infrastructure, reconstituting plots, and returning them to landowners54 (Ballaney and Patel, 2009 : 194 – 198). The abstract planning logics driving the DP – TPS process thus technically influence urban water governance at three moments: (a) when land use and zoning (or rezoning from agricultural to other uses) are determined, (b) at the time of proposing and implementing a TPS, which includes pooling and reconstituting plots to identify and reserve lands for building roads (which would carry the trunk infrastructure and other water pipelines) and WDSs, and, (c) when distribution networks supplying municipal water from WDSs to people’s homes are planned and laid. 52 In recent times however, TPS have been developed for much larger areas of upto 1500 hectares (Mahadevia et al, 2018: 7) 53 The relevant authorities being AMC for central city areas and AUDA for surrounding areas – Sanyal and Deuskar, 2012: 156 54 One problem in the supply of water and other basic services through the TPS lies in the fact that the TPS deals only with landowners; it does not engage with informal settlers. This is further complicated by the fact that the ‘landowners’ in question have often been found to be land assemblers and speculators who might have acquired agricultural land by forging documents, coercion and so on. The high level of discretion with which local planning officers prioritise the implementation of specific TPS as well as significant levels of corruption in the planning office are yet other issues to consider (Sanyal and Deuskar, 2012: 169 – 172). Increasingly, some land is also deducted in this process towards building AUDA’s land bank; this reserve land is set aside for being auctioned and sold to meet financial needs of the development agency. For details of financial transactions between land-owners and the planning agency involved in this process, see Ballaney and Patel, 2009 : 198 – 202 ; Sanyal and Deuskar, 2012 : 160 75 As far as access to municipal water is concerned, stark differences between Makhtampura and Sarkhej, and other parts of the city is not new. According to one report (Mahadevia, 2001: 85), in 2001, only 20% households in the Muslim areas of southern Ahmedabad were supplied with municipal water as opposed to 85% households in the suburbs of western Ahmedabad, and 45% households in the city’s eastern peripheries. Similar disparities are noted for electricity and drainage connections. As compared to over 95% households in western Ahmedabad, only 10% households in the southern Muslim peripheries had electricity connections (also see Roy, 2006: 4365). These differences have intensified in the years since55. As I finalize this dissertation in January 2021, almost a decade and a half after the area was included within AMC limits, only one new WDS has been built in Makhtampura, a ward of over 450,000 people. Municipal water from this WDS started being supplied to neighbourhoods only in 2016. Figure 3.1 below is an image of the public notice displayed at this WDS offering technical details of water supplied from it. The notice states that about 75,000 households will receive water from here when all its pumps are operational. An operator I interviewed at this WDS in early 2017 told me, with the ward engineer confirming this, that only half the pumps were operational since distribution networks have not yet been laid in many parts of the ward for reasons described later (section 3.5). Extrapolating from this, less than 40,000 households received water from here. Figure 3.2 is an inside view of the WDS showing the numerous pumps installed, half of which lie unused for the lack of distribution networks. 55 For instance, Renu Desai (2011: 115) points out that residents of Makhtampura and Sarkhej face discrimination by banks. As a result, she says, “access to land, real estate, and urban services in the most spacious and well-serviced areas of the city has increasingly become the exclusive right of Hindus” (ibid). 76 Figure 3.1: Notice declaring technical details of the Makhtampura WDS. Photo by Vrushti Mawani. Figure 3.2: Area-wise water supply pumps and lines in the Makhtampura WDS. Photo by Vrushti Mawani. In addition to this WDS, according to the ward engineer, Makhtampura has 13 municipal borewells which supply water to a total of 15,000 households, and an old water tank in Sankalit Nagar that supplies water to about 5000 households. It is important to note here that the number of actual households accessing municipal water might be more or less. Many households have installed illegal connections to municipal water lines, while some lines, particularly the older ones, are not always functional. Yet, based on the above estimates, it would appear that of the 450,000 people that live in Makhtampura, roughly 60,000 families have household-level legal municipal connections, i.e., less than 50% of the population. The remaining ward residents access water from a range of sources including (but not limited to) private household-level borewells, neighbourhood-level borewells, municipal tankers and private tankers. 77 3.4 “There are no plots!” When I asked municipal authorities about the persistent absence of physical water networks in Makhtampura, planners and engineers cited the impossibility of building roads and the unavailability of land for building WDSs as the two biggest issues. While one WDS has been built, they told me, planning and building more has been difficult because of this lack of land, or ‘plots’. They further tied these challenges to extensive ‘illegal’ constructions in the two wards. According to estimates by the one ward engineer, 85% to 90% of the construction in Makhtampura is ‘illegal’, and as I describe below, these illegalities are of diverse types. As a brief refresher to the area’s history (section 1.3), Makhtampura started urbanizing in 1973 when flood victims – low-income Hindus and Muslims both – from informal settlements along the Sabarmati riverbanks were resettled to a municipal colony built here56. More low‐income Muslim families from the walled city and eastern Ahmedabad moved and settled here after the 1985 riots and again after the 1992 riots. After the 2002 violence, even middle‐class and wealthier Muslims started moving here from mixed neighbourhoods of the city in search of safety in numbers (Jaffrelot and Thomas, 2012: 69), and with a swelling Muslim population, Hindu families moved out of the area. The sudden influx of people to Makhtampura after the 2002 riots led to a steep and urgent demand for housing. But lands in Makhtampura were at this time not zoned, planned, or equipped with material networks to support a large population. While many of these lands were zoned for agricultural use at the time, other illegal tenure conditions already existed here as they did in other peripheries of Ahmedabad. Desai et al (2016: 3) trace these illegalities back to the early 1980s as emerging from market responses to the Urban Land (Ceiling and Regulation) Act 56 The urban history of this area began with a municipal resettlement colony called Sankalit Nagar, built by the AMC, Housing and Urban Development Corporation (HUDCO) and a city‐based NGO called the Ahmedabad Study Action Group (ASAG). Sankalit Nagar was meant to house 2700 families (Jaffrelot and Thomas, 2011 : 69). When I inquired in July 2015, a local NGO pegged the current population here at about 10,000 households ; an increase attributed to many original allottees having sold their homes to other families and others having extended their homes beyond original plot lines. 78 (ULCRA) of 1976. The ULCRA states that its core objective was “preventing the concentration of urban land in the hands of a few persons and speculation and profiteering therein and… bringing about an equitable distribution of land in urban agglomerations to subserve the common good” (ULCRA, 1976: 157). Formulated to dismantle private land hoarding, this Act specified “ceilings” for private land ownership in cities and their peripheries. Land in excess of these ceilings was to be acquired by the government without compensation to the owners. Faced with this prospect, many land owners sub-divided their excess lands and sold them off illegally before acquisitions by the state could be enforced. Transaction costs associated with such illegal sales were lower than legal transactions, and attracted small-time builders (from interviews, but also see Desai et al., 2016: 3). Illegal lands in the peripheries of Ahmedabad thus proliferated as a practical consequence of a planning mechanism ostensibly aimed at distributing land more equitably. In the post-2002 influx of Muslim families to Makhtampura, many small-time builders who had acquired land here through illegal channels saw the possibility of making windfall profits. They built cheap housing and sold it off hurriedly using quasi-legal documents to worried and desperate families. As a result, a significant share of the post‐2002 housing in Makhtampura was built on lands under diverse conditions of illegality. This is the background against which the claim by municipal engineers and planners, that the TPS cannot be implemented and thus municipal water cannot be supplied in Makhtampura because of the “widespread illegal construction” here, needs to be understood. Muslim households fleeing the mixed-living areas of Ahmedabad following the 2002 violence needed housing urgently. In the absence of help by the state, coupled with the losses many of them had incurred due to their businesses and homes being looted and burnt down (Jaffrelot and Thomas, 2012), they had to resort to cheap, private alternatives58. The illegal cheap housing newly built in Makhtampura and other southern fringes of the city met these constraints. In other words, the buying of illegal 57 http://mohua.gov.in/upload/uploadfiles/files/ulcra_1976.pdf 58 Some religious organisations set up relief camps, but these had limited capacity. 79 cheap housing in Makhtampura by Muslim families was, paraphrasing Oren Yiftachel (2009: 92), borne out of necessity. Locally specific land illegalities emerging in the face of religious violence and displacement here are nested within illegalities that mushroomed years ago in response to a national planning maneuver aimed at greater equity. Figures 3.3 and 3.4: Densely-built, low-income housing in Makhtampura: Photos by Vrushti Mawani. But the repeated claim by municipal officers, that “there are no plots!” to build WDSs because of widespread illegalities is oblivious to this history. The emphasis by planners and engineers on “illegal” as a category to describe much of Makhtampura becomes a way to treat the ward (cf. Björkman, 2014). As Björkman argues, “illegality”, alongwith other planning terms such as “urban regeneration”, “buffer zones”, “CBD” etc., is yet another category that translates “planning regulations into a system of civil stratification” (ibid: 93).These categories can equally render legitimate or delegitimize. The emphasis by Makhtampura’s planners and engineers on illegal construction as being the reason for the impossibility of implementing TPSs and thus of 80 building material water networks, delegitimizes, and indeed criminalizes, families that live in illegal housing in Makhtampura. Set against this background of intense contestations, Makhtampura was included within AMC limits in 2006, implying that people living here were now liable to pay property taxes to the AMC. 30% of these taxes go towards paying for water and sanitation infrastructure. It is important to note that the AMC’s collection of property tax is delinked from the legal tenure status of properties (see Mahadevia et al, 2018 : 5), i.e., all properties that fall within AMC limits are charged a municipal property tax regardless of their legal status. Indeed, the collection of property taxes from informal settlements by the AMC has been understood as a way of increasing tenure security of residents in such areas (ibid). For residents of Makhtampura too, starting to pay municipal property taxes post-2006 implied holding the AMC liable for providing access to municipal water. But, as highlighted earlier, actually making municipal water access possible requires the AMC to planning and building of material networks, laying pipelines, building WDSs. For this in turn the corporation needs to delineate and acquire roads and plots that these infrastructures can be reserved for and built on. It is this context that the planners and engineers draw on while claiming that “there are no plots” to build WDSs, nor roads to lay water pipelines. When I asked a senior engineers at Makhtampura about this claimed lack of plots and roads to facilitate access to municipal water supply, he was visibly perturbed. While conceding that identifying and developing plots and roads in the densely constructed Makhtampura was problematic, he drew my attention to the large stretches of land to the south of Makhtampura and Sarkhej wards on the revised Development Plan59 (see figure 3.5) designated for use as “general agricultural zone” and the rest reserved for “sewage treatment plants”. “Agricultural zone means 59 Can be viewed online and accessed at http://www.auda.org.in/RDP/ 81 no residential development can be done. TP can also not be done and so piped municipal water supply is not possible...” he complained. Figure 3.5: Development Plan, 2021, Ahmedabad Urban Development Authority: Source, AUDA. A comparison of the most recent DP (for 2021) with the earlier DP (for 2011) shows that lands in Makhtampura and Sarkhej zoned for sewage treatment plants and agricultural use now, 82 were also zoned so earlier. However, these lands are adjacent to another set of agricultural lands further west, along the corporation’s periphery but beyond the boundaries of Makhtampura and Sarkhej, which have been rezoned for building affordable housing in the most recent DP. The zoning of agricultural lands in Makhtampura has not changed; in fact, the ward official’s quarrel, echoed by the councillor, is that the zoning of agricultural lands in Makhtampura and Sarkhej has remained the same when instead it needed to have been changed to physical water infrastructure for these two wards. In rezoning agricultural lands further to the corporation’s periphery while maintaining agricultural use zoning for lands in Makhtampura and Sarkhej, the DP becomes an embodiment of selective possibilities. In the face of repeated complaints by planners and engineers about the lack of plots for building water infrastructures, this selectiveness embodied by the DP is not lost on the ward official or councillor. The rezoning of agricultural lands adjacent to Makhtampura and Sarkhej (lands which are also non-Muslim) to build affordable housing makes possible the proposition of TPSs, and in extension access to municipal water, in those adjoining parts. But in Makhtampura and Sarkhej wards – wards that desperately need water networks and have repeatedly been denied it, ostensibly for lack of land – agricultural lands continue to remain zoned as before. In the words of the ward engineer then: “How can they say there are no plots when there is so much agricultural land in the wards? They can change the zoning of that land and build public infrastructure. If they want.” Interview, May 2018 In addition to rezoning, there are other planning mechanisms too that can be implemented for re-thinking the use of agricultural lands in Makhtampura to address the needs of residents. One such instance is the ‘overlay zone’ category. In the General Development Control Regulations (GDCR) published under the GTPUD Act, an overlay zone is defined as “an additional zone… with different set of development regulations over an established/existing base zone to regulate development in such a zone to achieve a specific set of goals defined in the Development Plan” (AUDA, 2015: 21). Simply put, areas zoned using this mechanism can benefit from uses prescribed for the base zone as well as the overlay zone. The newly defined 83 Transit Zone in Ahmedabad is one such overlay zone, as is the Residential Affordable Housing zone60. The rationale for making exceptions for these two zones, and indeed the ‘will’ to do so, can be traced in the emphasis on the economic benefits that these two zones will offer through greater saleable floor area of the high-density development planned here (AUDA, 2013). The complaint of the Makhtampura ward engineer then is that revisions to the DP have made new provisions for building high-density transit and infrastructure corridors and affordable housing in adjoining areas. But in Makhtampura, despite the ‘shortage’ of land to build municipal water infrastructures, no zoning revisions or provisions have been made. 3.5 Selective and uneven planning? This account calls for explicit engagement with the minutiae involved in the formulation and implementation of planning processes such as the DP and TPS that infuse in them the kind of selectiveness described above. In this section, I focus on the TPS in particular. The TPS process deals only with land owners and not occupiers (Sanyal and Deuskar, 2012: 169 – 172). This has posed foundational problems for Makhtampura, where as a result of the ‘illegalities’ described above, land tenure in much of the ward is thoroughly contested. Other studies have noted the challenges in formulating and implementing TPSs to plan and build material networks in a neighbouring Muslim area called Dani Limda which also has widespread illegal constructions and diverse and complex tenure arrangements (Mahadevia et al., 2018: 18). But as the authors show in this latter case, Ahmedabad’s planning authorities are capable of going to ingeniously accommodating existing illegal constructions61 by revising otherwise 60 Although the GDCR is self-contradictory about whether the Residential Affordable Housing (RAH) zone is an overlay zone or not ! The document states that the RAH zone is an overlay zone at one place (GDCR, 2015 : 62), and 40 pages later the same document categorically insists that the RAH zone shall not be considered as an overlay zone (ibid : 103). My conclusion however, based on a review of other legal documents (such as The Gujarat Government Gazette, 2013 : 161) is that it is an overlay zone. 61 such as changing ratios where allocation of open space is concerned 84 standard planning norms to map and build basic services. The AMC must have had its reasons to accommodate illegalities and map water networks in Dani Limda. But back in Makhtampura and Sarkhej, a closer look at negotiations between land owners and public authorities in sheds light on the forces influencing the formulation and implementation of TPSs, and thus what is mapped and left unmapped here. Some lands within the TPS that much of Makhtampura is part of are owned by a few Hindu builders. I met one of the more influential builders in early 2017 to understand his experience with the implementation of the TPS in the area. In response to my questions, he animatedly told me about his own role in the TPS process. He had carried out protracted negotiations with planning authorities (AUDA) from 2008 to 2010, he said, to get them to revise their plan of building a major road (meant to carry trunk lines) that would pass through his lands and connect with “the minority community”. Disallowing such a thoroughfare, in his view, was necessary in the “interest of communal harmony”. Additionally, he told me, building this road would also “lower the value of property”. His negotiations with the planning authorities had cost him dearly62 he claimed. But he eventually managed to procure development permission for his land based on a masterplan that protected both his interests cited above. As a result of his negotiations with them, he recounted, AUDA “had kept a buffer zone” between the Muslim area and his lands. In 2011 however, he told me with visibly growing aggravation, the AMC took over from AUDA as the planning authority for this area and proposed a Draft TPS that completely overturned his agreement with AUDA over the road. Finally, the road was built anyway. The networks laid under this road are currently key to the supply of municipal water from the only WDS in Makhtampura. I could trace the builder’s anxieties relating to “communal harmony” and “property value” to his client’s sentiments. For instance, one resident of an apartment complex built by 62 In exchange for their change of decision, he had paid money as well as handed over parts of his lands to them. 85 him, pointing at the high barbed wire fencing all along the roughly 4.5 feet boundary wall of the society told me: “there are safety issues. We are right next to this (Muslim) area right? We need to be extra careful. Who knows when there might be trouble!” While barbed wire fencing mounted on compound walls is a phenomenon not limited to the city’s Muslim areas (indeed this is noticeable across Ahmedabad), the reason cited here, of being “right next to this (Muslim) area” is important in understanding the sentiments held and reproduced by residents of the Hindu society. Another resident, less concerned with so-called “safety issues,” highlighted how being located next to a predominantly Muslim area had meant that very few Gujaratis had bought apartments in the society. Apartments in this housing complex as a result have been bought primarily by young, working, non-Gujarati professionals, since they “don’t have that history”; the history in reference being that of the 2002 Hindu-Muslim violence. Being desirable for a limited set of investors has in turn limited the real estate values of this housing. The builder’s concerns for maintaining communal harmony and protecting real estate values by disallowing the proposed thoroughfare are embedded in the above emotional and economic context. His concerns relating to religious difference might well have influenced unmapped water access in Makhtampura. But these concerns themselves are further tied up in fears of violence expressed by his clients and echoed broadly across the city. These fears (and in turn, his negotiations with the planning authority) are also entangled with the builder’s class interests – his fears of reduced property values - making it difficult to link the production of unmapped water access to religious difference alone. Echoing Yiftachel’s description of unmapped spaces, or “gray spaces” as he calls them, unmapped water access in Makhtampura showcases how negotiations shaping planning are driven simultaneously by “logics of capital, governance and identity” (2009:93). Equally, this account shows that while the state enlists non-state actors in its attempts to govern (Jessop 1990), powerful non-state actors also enlist the state to protect their own interests. And they may well do so through planning, in ways that end up influencing water governance. 86 The question then is: why did the AMC in the (new) proposed Draft TPS overturn decisions regarding (not) building the road that the Hindu builder had negotiated with AUDA? An enthusiastic retired planner familiar with the area reminded me of a High Court judgement in 201063 which ordered the AMC to “immediately and forthwith provide clean, hygienic and regular supply of drinking water and sewage facilities” to Makhtampura. At a hearing earlier that year, the AMC had been asked to present responses to the lack of drinking water and drainage infrastructures here. Presumably – the judgement implies – the AMC had responded by submitting to the court that a certain set of physical water infrastructures would be built by 2012. The road that the builder had opposed was critical to the construction of the now-promised WDS and trunk infrastructures. The AMC taking over as planning authority for the area and (re-)mapping the road while drafting the TPS also meant a (re-)mapping of earlier unmapped water infrastructures and municipal water access in the area. Negotiations animating what remains unmapped or gets mapped are tied up then in pressures exerted on formal institutional bodies not only by influential individuals but also by public authorities such as the judiciary. Furthermore, interests driving such variegated pressures are often divergent as the case of water governance in Makhtampura demonstrates. The process of encrypting decisions in planning is often driven by clashing interests. On the one hand, this account points at the highly unstable landscape of shifting power, interests, and negotiations between influential actors - in this case, planning authorities, builders and legal landholders, and the judiciary - across which access to municipal water unfolds. In Ahmedabad, concerns relating to religious difference indeed constitute one set of variables producing this instability. But equally, economic interests such as real estate values, and legal and political interests such as heeding directives of the judiciary, are other powerful factors animating this landscape. On the other hand, this is also an account of an influential actor, and from a ‘majority’ community, despite having incurred various in-kind and financial costs, being 63 Nadeem vs State on 7 October, 2010 : available online at https://indiankanoon.org/doc/1444997/ 87 left hung out to dry as a result of instabilities arising from changes in pressures and interests among government institutions. This instance suggests that in divided cities, narratives framed around religious difference might animate processes by which influential actors enlist the state to protect their interests. However, the extent or success of this influence should not be thought of as pre-defined or stable but instead as vulnerable to other interests and pressures. Further complicating this context is the story of legal Muslim landholders in the area not agreeing to propositions in drafted TPSs because of economic losses (or lower economic gains) the implementation of these planning decisions might imply for them. The TPS allows planning authorities to deduct upto 40% land from individual landholdings through the process of pooling and reconstitution and return the remaining land to landowners. As one influential Muslim builder explained to me, progress on the implementation of most TPSs in Makhtampura is currently at a standstill because the spatial assignment of reconstituted land parcels has not been acceptable to many landowners. In his words, “if your earlier plot was along a 30 mt road, and (after reconstitution) they relocate you along a 12 mt road, nobody is going to tolerate that! That’s when you contest it.” The disadvantage produced by such re-allocations is that of reduced profit. Road widths relate directly to permissible building heights and use; on wider roads, taller buildings can be built on the same plot size and building uses can also be more diverse64. Re-allocated plots on narrower roads directly affect economic interests leading to contestations, in this case between Muslim legal landowners and the planning authorities. The process of finalizing plots and roads for building water infrastructures thus in reality is also tied up in legal disputes arising from such disagreements. The instance of Muslim landowners obstructing the implementation of TPSs complicates frequently repeated allegations holding discriminatory planning responsible for uneven water governance in Makhtampura. It illustrates that visibly unmapped access to municipal water might well also be a result of the class interests of influential non-state actors of the same 64 http://www.auda.org.in/uploads/Assets/impactfee/Salient_features_of_Prevailing_GDCR.pdf 88 religious identity obstructing the implementation of technical plans to protect their financial interests. Equally, this account adds empirical depth to existing studies on the role of local actors in influencing water access in Muslim areas of other Indian cities. For instance, Qudsiya Contractor (2012) shows through the case of a low-income Muslim neighbourhood in Mumbai that local influential actors like elected politicians play a crucial role in challenging uneven water access. The case of Makhtampura however highlights that other types of local influential Muslim actors, such as builders, might further exacerbate uneven access to municipal water. Indeed in Ahmedabad too, a number of other Muslim actors such as local politicians, NGO officials, and citizen groups have played important roles in facilitating municipal water access in the area. And I have described some of these dynamics in chapter 5. But it is important to recognize that there are also other influential Muslim actors whose economic interests are at loggerheads with the implementation of plans required for improving access to municipal water in Makhtampura and who have ended up obstructing municipal water access. Simply put, this account emphasizes the need to disentangle religious identity from interests and actions that facilitate or obstruct access to water. Furthermore, the Muslim builder has challenged the implementation of the TPS in Makhtampura through legal channels; through grievance redressal methods that are part of the technical planning process. These negotiations complicate the easy and stable rhetoric offered by planners and engineers linking the impasse in building municipal water networks in Makhtampura with widespread illegal constructions here. They render unstable the conflation of the TPS in Makhtampura being suspended in animation with the lack of plots and roads because of illegal constructions. They raise the possibility that it might not be (only) illegal constructions, but (also) routine contestations typical of any planning process that lead to visibly uneven water governance in Makhtampura. And indeed negotiations between land owners and planning authorities over technical propositions for land pooling and reconstitution are not peculiar to Muslim parts of the city. Legal land owners from across Ahmedabad routinely enter into such contestations with planning authorities over TPS propositions. But what is peculiar to Ahmedabad’s Muslim areas is the easily accessible and widely circulated explanation of widespread illegal constructions as being the cause for the non-implementation of the TPS. On 89 the one hand, and as stated above, the repeated reference to illegality makes possible a delegitimization and crimimalization of the needs of Makhtampura’s Muslim families through planning. On the other hand, shrouded in technicalities, this tactic also occludes the micro-politics that in reality animate this context, and allows selective planning and uneven water governance to persist unchallenged. 3.6 In Conclusion: discursive co-articulations of ‘illegality’ and ‘religious difference’ Through this chapter I have offered insights on some of the varied interests influencing planning practices and in turn water governance in Makhtampura, a predominantly Muslim area of Ahmedabad. In doing so, I have tried to locate the role of planning in influencing water governance in cities divided by religion, and to illuminate the role of religious difference in shaping planning and water governance. My analysis of the micro-politics involved in the formulation and implementation of the TPS reveals how ‘illegality’ is a key discursive category animating the impossibility of implementing technical plans and in extension influencing water governance in Makhtampura. For engineers and planners, the oft-reproduced rhetoric of suddenly increased illegal constructions post-2002 has become an easy way of explaining away the uneven implementation of TPSs here. In turn, the impossibility of implementing TPSs has become a widely circulated explanation for visibly unmapped water access. But as I illustrate through the account above, challenges in implementing the TPS in Makhtampura stem as much from routine negotiations held by legal land owners and builders with planning authorities. Through these negotiations, the builders try to ensure that their myriad social, political, and economic interests are met. Most importantly, these contestations and negotiations are carried out through legal channels set up as part of the planning process. In the face of this reality, the repeated emphasis on “illegality” as a planning category to describe much construction in Makhtampura becomes a way to treat the neighbourhood. Emphasizing illegal constructions as being the reason for the impossibility of planning and thus of supplying water, delegitimizes the needs of, and indeed criminalizes, families that live in illegal housing in Makhtampura. Equally, this discursive tactic allows 90 selective planning and uneven water governance to persist unchallenged by obscuring the micro-politics that in reality animate this context. Further, these insights on illegality as a planning category influencing water governance also illustrate nested relationships between technical planning processes across scales. The possibility of accessing municipal water in Makhtampura is nested within the possibility of implementing area-level infrastructure plans through TPSs. The implementation of TPSs in turn is entangled simultaneously with discursive as well as practical implications of planning categories such as legal or illegal. But the ontological nature of these planning categories – the history of how certain tenure arrangements came into being – themselves is nested within social and political realities such as urgent housing demands by Muslim households following the experience of violence. Equally, the emergence of illegality can be traced, perhaps counter-intuitively, to the implementation of national planning policies such as the ULCRA aimed at equitable land distribution. The formulation and implementation of the DP and the TPS control - makes possible or obstructs - the laying of trunk infrastructure and the construction of WDSs in Ahmedabad. These infrastructures in turn determine the ability or inability of a neighbourhood to legally receive municipal water supply. But in Makhtampura, the decisions encrypted into these planning processes and their implementation are influenced simultaneously by everyday economic interests such as those of the Hindu and Muslim builders. ‘Religious difference’ then emerges as yet another discursive category animating the influence that some of these actors (might) have on planning processes. And even when it does, even when mediations driven by discourses on religious difference are powerful enough to influence spatial planning and thus water governance, these plans are themselves also vulnerable to other political, legal, and economic pressures. Water governance in Makhtampura as a result unfolds in an unstable landscape of unmapping and mapping, where the discursive power of ‘religious difference’ is only one aspect influencing instability. Finally, and perhaps most importantly then, the account of uneven water access in Ahmedabad’s Muslim areas adds depth to understandings of majority-minority relations in 91 divided cities. Much of the work on access to housing and basic services in cities of the south divided by religion, insightful and instructive in its own right, has organized its insights across two broad registers; (1) vis‐à‐vis the instrumental role of religious organizations in providing these (Harb, 2011; Giovannini, 2011), and (2) as majoritarian groups exerting control over land and resources (Yiftachel, 2006b, 2009; Appadurai, 2000). These studies however describe majority and minority groups as divergent from each other but homogenous in themselves, each operating from ideals and interests contained neatly within confines of religious identity. But the case of Makhtampura demonstrates that visibly unmapped water access in divided cities might in reality stem from the actions of influential actors across religious divides. While the Hindu builder’s negotiations with planning authorities had earlier shaped uneven water governance in Makhtampura, contestations by Muslim builders have meant the persistence of inadequate access. A city might present stark physical divisions based on religion, and indeed religious difference might have been the basis for such divisions to have historically come into being. But pressures influencing the reproduction of spatial and material unevenness over time might not be aligned along religious divides (alone). Instead, what we see in Makhtampura are perhaps echoes of Yiftachel’s conception of ‘grey spaces’ which he says emerge from the intersection of “logics of capital, governance and identity” (2009:93). In conclusion then, I suggest that unmapped water access in Makhtampura results from the discursive co-articulations of ‘legality’ and ‘religious difference’, which in turn are driven by class interests, particularly vis-à-vis property ownership. These insights offer avenues for further research examining how discourses of ‘illegality’ and ‘religious difference’ shape, and are in turn shaped by, class politics in urban India. While discourses of illegality and religious difference continue to shape planning and water access in Makhtampura in myriad ways, residents continue to do what they can to access water. In the next chapter, I offer an account of how residents ‘make do’ in this contested waterscape. 92 Chapter 4: “Making do”: Everyday water struggles of being Muslim in Ahmedabad 4.1 Introduction: “Yeh roz ka hai” (“this is everyday”) “For two years we took water from tankers. Two years. Even in the summer, during Ramzan. While fasting we would fill from tankers. We have suffered terribly… Right now, because it is cold, we get some water (from the private borewell). But in March, April, at the time of Ramzan, it will stop again. Then tankers will come again. This is how we make do.” “The (municipal) bore(well) has been built since over a year, yet no water is being given from it... He (gesturing at the councilor) has been saying for over a year now that water will come. But they are not giving lines.” - Women of Faizalpur, January 2020 “Oi, lady! Don’t keep harping on! Okay, the bore has been built. Now take the water through your eyes! Take it! How many times have I told you? Demand! If you want water lines, fill in the application forms and submit them at the corporation. I have told you to make written applications, haven’t I? How many times did I tell you this? There is a system! Papers will be made. Files will go. Then lines can come.” - Municipal councilor, to the women of Faizalpur, January 2020 Faizalpur65 is a low-income Muslim neighbourhood in Makhtampura built soon after the 2002 violence. A municipal borewell has been built in Faizalpur, on “humanitarian grounds” I was told by ward engineers, despite the area being legally ineligible to receive municipal infrastructure. I visited the neighbourhood in January 2020 to understand the borewell construction from a legal-technical planning perspective. And the ward engineers’ repeated reference to its ‘humanitarian’ nature got me interested in understanding this development from a water justice perspective as well. 65 The name of the neighbourhood has been changed to protect the identity of residents. There are no clear numbers on the population of this neighbourhood, but local engineers and politicians estimate it at “over 50,000 atleast” 93 But what started out as a discussion between the municipal councilor and a group of resident women escalated quickly into a heated argument. The women were concerned that the little water they currently received through private connections would soon dry out. They wanted the councilor to deliver on his promise of installing water lines and household connections from the new borewell. One woman, dismissive of the councilor’s efforts, implied that he was not doing enough to bring water to their homes. The councilor grew visibly aggressive towards the woman for challenging his efforts. Fortunately, some of the other women intervened, distracting the councilor by praising his efforts, and diffused the tension. As the councilor calmed down, one of the women turned to me and said in a low voice, “yeh roz ka hai” - “this is everyday”. I had first visited Faizalpur seven months earlier; in May 2019, in the peak of Ahmedabad’s summer. With daily highs surpassing 45 degrees Celsius, simply standing outside under the afternoon sun was a challenge. The local councilor had brought me here to show me the new municipal borewell, built on (private) cemetery lands in late 2018. Faizalpur was technically a “no-development” zone, and as detailed later (section 4.4), is legally ineligible to receive municipal infrastructure (GTPUD Act, 1976: 129). Yet, the municipal borewell construction had been accomplished here, despite technical planning guidelines expressly disallowing it. This instance stands in sharp contrast to the account of unmapped water access described in the previous chapter. In chapter 3, the impossibility of building material water networks in Makhtampura is linked by planners and engineers to illegal constructions, while we saw that atleast part of the impasse has nothing to do with practical illegalities. The municipal borewell construction in Faizalpur on the other hand is an instance of material water infrastructure being built, arguably illegally, by government authorities! The councilor, suitably proud of his role in making the borewell possible, had brought me here to witness the material fruits of his labours. The politics of municipal borewell construction in Faizalpur were interesting indeed. And yet, as the quotes introducing this chapter suggest, water struggles in the neighbourhood have persisted. For reasons explained later (section 4.5), water lines from the borewell to individual homes have not yet been laid. The Faizalpur borewell construction is a technical feat 94 accomplished through a subversion of planning guidelines associated with land use zoning, by government authorities themselves. But in terms of practical implications, the borewell construction has not meant relief for residents in terms of everyday water access. Set against this context, the women of Faizalpur described their ongoing everyday water struggles – their experience of water injustice – as everyday acts of ‘making do’. It is this disjuncture, of persistent water struggles in Faizalpur despite the construction of a much-celebrated borewell built by municipal authorities on ‘humanitarian grounds’ (but in subversion of legal-technical guidelines) that I take as my point of departure for this chapter. Technical and material water arrangements are spatial and temporal manifestations of power relations constituting the physical context for how water justice is experienced (Boelens, 2014). In this sense, it is perhaps unsurprising that technicalities determining quantity and quality of water access are often the focus of policy recommendations for water justice (Truelove, 2019: 2). But focusing attention to only the technical and material arrangements can be problematic in two ways. First, such a focus renders ‘natural’ the causes of water shortages and injustice (Loftus, 2015). Premised in the assumption that ‘better’ technical and material arrangements are in themselves enough to yield water justice, such an approach privileges technocratic quick fixes. Yet this assumption is far from reality. Practically, water justice is shaped as much by the locality-specific arrangements of power and authority. Second then, and in extension, an overwhelming emphasis on technical and material aspects risks depoliticizing water justice. It obfuscates an understanding of local power structures that complicate technical and material water access arrangements (Loftus, 2015). As well, it occludes an understanding of how water justice is experienced as a result of locally negotiated power and authority (Truelove, 2019; Loftus, 2015). To address these shortcomings of the focus on technocratic approaches, inquiries into water justice have been urged attention as much to the legal or formal prescription and implementation of water arrangements, as to how these arrangements are experienced by users (Zwartaveen and Boelens, 2014: 147). Across scales, studies into water justice are invited to 95 probe not only notable crises that make for headlines but also “mundane and enduring” everyday water struggles (Peloso, Morinville, and Harris, 2018). Everyday water struggles in turn are tied to myriad technical and economic factors such as unreliable piped water connections and unaffordable and undrinkable privately accessed water (Mitlin, et al., 2019). And they are equally anchored in socio-politically specific variables such as gender, class, and occupation (Harris, 2008). Recognizing this multiplicity of variables influencing water struggles, scholars foregrounding the ‘everyday’ have demanded an intersectional understanding of how water justice is differentially negotiated and experienced. Put together, these studies suggest that grasping water justice requires attention to multi-scalar dynamics (Wilson, et al., 2019), stretching, on the one hand, from abstract and technical planning processes to politics at regional, urban, community and individual levels, and on the other, across distributive and experiential aspects. These multi-scalar forces can then be thought of as relational infrastructures, which themselves are embedded within systemic historical trajectories. Back in Faizalpur, the emotionally charged interaction that I had witnessed, and the women’s reference to its “everyday” nature, point at how water justice has been (and continues to be) negotiated and experienced in this neighbourhood. But arguably, following from the discussion above, these experiences cannot be understood outside of the broader historical and political landscape of religious segregation and technical planning amidst which they have taken shape. Equally, the women’s lament at the municipal bore not supplying water, the absence of municipal water lines, and their emphasis on ‘making do’ by accessing water from tankers highlight some of the ways in which they experience and negotiate water insecurity. But, given that stories of water struggles are layered stories of power (Sultana, 2018), surely everyday practices of ‘making do’ in the absence of municipal water in Faizalpur entail many more negotiations than accessing water from tankers. I have two objectives through this chapter: (a) to contextualize the persistent water struggles of ‘making do’ amidst wider historical, socio-political, technical, and economic relations, and (b) to make visible what everyday water struggles of ‘making do’ in Faizalpur’s waterscape entail. In relation to my first objective, I ask: what are the wider historical, political, 96 and technical relations within which everyday experiences of water justice, of ‘making do’, in Faizalpur are embedded? I address this question by attending to the ‘lived experiences’ – everyday social, political, economic, and technical practices, realities and negotiations – that this neighbourhood’s everyday water struggles are premised upon. Empirically, I trace residents’ experiences of accessing water in Faizalpur in two ways: (a) through informal, household-level connections to private borewells, and (b) through municipally supplied water tankers. I foreground everyday water struggles against the material infrastructural context of the municipal borewell built against all odds and the conspicuously absent municipal water lines. Focusing on everyday experiences helps grasp the human impacts of water governance in Faizalpur which would remain invisible if only the legal, technical, and material aspects of water infrastructures were examined. In doing so, I offer through the first half of this chapter empirical insights on lived experiences of water justice in low-income Muslim areas of Ahmedabad, interwoven with the legal, technical, and material specificities of Faizalpur. To address my second objective, I draw on studies that show how social identities and water struggles co-construct each other and that environmental struggles are also emotional and embodied struggles (Harris, 2015: 170; Nightingale, 2011, 2019; Sultana, 2011; Gonzalez-Hidalgo and Zografos, 2019: 4; Truelove, 2019). In doing so, I trace the contours of social identities and emotions co-constructing the Faizalpur waterscape and ask: what are the emotional and embodied experiences of water justice that are revealed through attention to everyday acts of ‘making do’ in Faizalpur? I pay particular attention to how the co-construction of social identities and water struggles unfolds differentially even across individuals who prima facie share social identities. For instance, two women from the same neighbourhood, sharing caste or religious identities, and belonging to the same class, might yet experience and embody water struggles in diverse ways because of their own differential power and authority within the neighbourhood. It might even be, as Frances Cleaver points out, that those experiencing everyday water struggles are themselves entangled in water injustices being “routinized, accepted and reproduced” (2018: 246). By directing my attention in this way through the second half of this chapter, I make visible the co-construction of water struggles, social identities, and emotional and embodied experiences of water justice in Faizalpur. 97 The remainder of this chapter is organized as follows: I begin by discussing how water justice has been conceptualized and theorized to set the premise for my analytical approach and to locate my focus on ‘situated’ understandings that privilege lived experiences (section 4.2). I then use insights from this discussion to locate water struggles of Faizalpur’s residents within the social, technical, and material historical context of this neighbourhood (section 4.3), focusing specifically on the implications of the municipal borewell being constructed while the water lines remain absent (section 4.4). Following this, I narrow my focus on everyday experiences further and go back to the literature to sketch a framework for analyzing everyday water struggles (section 4.5). I then offer insights on the emotional and embodied experiences of ‘making do’ in Faizalpur (section 4.6). In conclusion (section 4.7), I argue that everyday experiences of water justice in Faizalpur cannot be understood outside of the discursive power of planning terms like ‘illegality’ and ‘land use zoning’. And I suggest that these firmly material water struggles need to be understood as everyday emotional experiences of religious segregation. 4.2 The lived experiences approach to water justice Following the tradition of environmental justice studies, inquiries into water justice have historically focused on questions of distribution, inequality, and water struggles of individuals or groups (Movik, 2014: 187). Early scholarship in the field of environmental justice employed a distributive perspective and asked questions relating to (in)equality and (in)equity in distribution of access to, use of, and control over resources (Perreault, et al., 2018: 347). However, important as these questions were, they did not sufficiently engage with the social, spatial, political, and material specificities undergirding unequal distribution to begin with (Schlosberg, 2004). In recognition of this shortcoming, inquiries into environmental justice turned attention to include procedural aspects relating to fairness in distribution, representation, participation, and recognition, as well as to impacts of distribution patterns on broader life possibilities of individuals or groups (ibid; Walker and Bulkeley, 2006). Contemporary water justice studies are emblematic of this expanded analytical scope of the environmental justice field. They focus on issues ranging from ‘allocation discourses’ driving water policy (Movik, 2014), to the reconfiguration of hydrosocial territories (Swyngedouw and 98 Boelens, 2018), to water privatization and mobilization of notions of scarcity (Ahlers, 2010), to lived experiences of water insecurity (Sultana, 2011; Perreault, 2018; Rodina, 2016). Even within water justice studies examining lived experiences, considerable heterogeneity can be noted in analytical approaches. Some scholars have focused on making visible the impacts of uneven water access by examining the entanglements of physiological and emotional health with water struggles (Collins et al, 2018; Sultana, 2011). For instance, Collins and colleagues (2018) illustrate how water insecurity experienced by pregnant and post-partum women in western Kenya has inordinate impacts on their physical and psychosocial health, nutrition, and economic wellbeing. Others articulate water justice in terms of material experiences of water infrastructures and ways of negotiating access to water (Rodina, 2016; Anand, 2011). Together, this scholarship thoroughly unsettles the distributive justice perspective that probes water justice solely through legal and institutional arrangements. It demonstrates that physical water infrastructures built solely on the basis of technical plans might not translate in access to sufficient quantities of water at all, and might even exacerbate water stress (Birkenholtz, 2013). Additionally, it highlights how individual and collective memories might take material shape and assume form as “monuments, memorial sites… landscapes” (Perrault, 2018: 316), or, I argue, water arrangements. Water justice then is located equally in technical and economic issues such as water quantity, quality, reliability, and affordability (Sultana, 2018: 484); in the politics of material objects such as pumps, pipes and valves (Anand, 2011, Björkman, 2015); and in the role of thoroughly intangible aspects such as social networks (Anand, 2011), individual and collective experiences and memories (Perrault, 2018), as well as discursive planning and governance categories (chapter 3). Additionally, everyday water struggles unfold across four interconnected procedural and spatial sites: water resources/infrastructures themselves; legal stipulations and norms undergirding water distribution; distribution of power and authority influencing decision-making and water management; and discourses and knowledge through which water distribution is legitimized (Zwartaveen and Boelens, 2014: 155). These sites become key junctures at which to 99 anchor empirical studies into everyday water struggles. Water justice from a lived experiences lens has also been traced through community and household-level storage methods, hygiene (Dapaah and Harris, 2017), education, income, location, and disease prevalence (Mahama et. al., 2014). Recognizing that water justice unfolds simultaneously across multiple sites is important towards building more grounded accounts. But this plurality of sites might also be a core reason for water justice’s intractability. Indeed, everyday water injustices are found “nested” within ever-shifting physical and political boundaries; as much of land, as of ethnicity and power (Joshi, 2015). They might even be located in the everyday actions through which water injustice is normalized and reproduced by the very individuals and groups subject to it (Cleaver, 2018). It is precisely amidst this plurality and seeming intractability then, I argue, that the everyday struggles of water justice must be grasped. Paraphrasing Alex Loftus (2012: x), it is only in situated, differentiated and disaggregated accounts of everyday water struggles shaping the Faizalpur waterscape might we be able to “hear, feel, and begin to touch” the shape of water (in)justice in this neighbourhood. Drawing on this discussion, I turn next to how Faizalpur’s water access arrangements have evolved over the last 18-odd years since its growth as an urban neighbourhood. 4.3 Early water struggles of settling in a reserved zone Faizalpur was built under diverse conditions of illegality following the 2002 Hindu-Muslim violence as part of the larger resettlement of Muslim households from across Ahmedabad and other parts of the state in Makhtampura (section 3.5). Poorer families bought the cheapest, most poorly constructed houses, leading to the settlement of Faizalpur and its surrounding areas. Families I met told me that when they first started buying homes in Faizalpur, groundwater was available at a depth of 15 feet and could be drawn from household-level borewells. Access to water, they said, started becoming a problem 2009 onward, with the simultaneous depletion and pollution of groundwater. One resident told me: 100 “We are here since 20 years. First we had our own bore… We made it in 800 rupees … We used to get good water from it. That lasted for 5 – 10 years. But after that the water became undrinkable.” - Interview, January 2020 Figure 4.1: Industrial effluent released close to Faizalpur. Source: Vrushti Mawani, September, 2016 The water turning “undrinkable” was partly a consequence of the area’s proximity to the release point for (mostly untreated) industrial effluent and wastewater from across the city (cf. Maheshwari, 2016; see image above). But in addition, residents also described how the scores of septic tanks, rapidly and often poorly constructed for individual homes in the absence of municipal sewage and drainage systems, leaked into upper aquifers, further polluting the groundwater. In the words of one resident: “There were no drainage lines at that time. The septic tanks which were 7 feet under (ground) would become filled with drainage water, and all of this would overflow and get mixed with drinking water. Because of this, once bug-infested water started coming out of our taps. Inch-long bugs. And the smell was also so bad!” - Faizalpur resident, Interview, May 2019 With groundwater from upper aquifers thus rendered undrinkable, residents say they turned to the only option available to them: even deeper borewells that could reach aquifers at 80 - 100 feet and access sufficient quantities of water safe for consumption. 101 “When water from the 15 feet river (aquifer) went bad, we made deeper bore(wells). (Building these) meant more money. But what could we do? At that time, even tankers didn’t come. And bottled water was too expensive.” - Faizalpur resident, Interview, January 2020 The emphasis by Faizalpur’s residents on deeper borewells being their only option to mitigate water woes is contextualized against the legal-technical planning history of the neighbourhood. As I have described in the previous chapter, municipal water infrastructure in Ahmedabad is typically built on plots identified as public purpose plots, in areas identified for urban development. In the 1998 Development Plan (DP) proposed by the Ahmedabad Urban Development Authority (AUDA), the area that Faizalpur and its adjacent neighbourhoods were later built upon was declared reserved for building sewage treatment plants (STPs). STPs are public purpose infrastructures. Lands reserved for public purpose infrastructure are assigned a “no development zones” status, and legal guidelines governing such lands expressly forbid their “development” by “owner or occupier” (GTPUD Act, 1976: 129).” In other words, lands identified as development zones are considered eligible to receive municipal water infrastructure, while those reserved as no-development zones are ineligible. Through the early years of its settlement, Faizalpur’s land-use zoning status rendered it ineligible to receive municipal water infrastructure. And with no other arrangements to access sufficient or safe water in these early years – water tankers not yet plying here, and bottled water being too expensive – residents started building deeper borewells reaching 80 – 100 feet below the ground. 4.3.1 Bore ‘Failures’ “Six years ago, we made a bore at 80 feet. But water doesn’t come. It gave water for 1.5 / 2 months. Then it failed. Money got wasted. We had paid 15,000 (for it).” - Faizalpur resident, Interview, February 2020 Over the years, borewells at 80 – 100 feet have also ‘failed’ because of increased groundwater extraction through ever-growing numbers of borewells. Safe groundwater in Faizalpur has now receded to 500 – 700 feet. Building a borewell that can tap into aquifers this deep is significantly more expensive. Most households, with average family sizes of 5 to 7, have 102 monthly incomes of 10,000 to 15,000 rupees. Constructing borewells that can reach aquifers at 500 – 700 feet costs over three times this average household income. Spending such large amounts of money is not an option for most families, especially given uncertainties around how long even these aquifers will yield water. One resident described her experience of uncertain groundwater and consequent decision-making as follows: “those who have more money build deeper borewells. So they get water. But poor people like us can’t dig (deep wells) right? We don’t have that much money. That’s why we took this water line (from an informal borewell operator).” - Faizalpur resident, Interview, January 2020 With most households unable to build individual borewells, informal borewell businesses promising water have proliferated in Faizalpur and many residents have sought connections from them. These businesses seek advance monies - between 5000 and 7000 rupees per household - for laying distribution networks from borewells to homes. In addition, they solicit monthly maintenance charges of 250 to 400 rupees for paying electricity bills associated with running the borewell pump, and so on. In return, households receive water for half hour to an hour every day. But even these investments are not risk-free. There is no paperwork involved in transactions relating to informal water provision, and in extension, no liability for informal providers to deliver on their promises. Faizalpur residents reported having lost money to multiple such vendors, who sought advance monies and disappeared. One resident woman said she had lost over 25,000 rupees – more than twice her family’s monthly income – to three informal borewell businesses, and still didn’t have a connection that gave water. It is these historical everyday struggles upon which the construction of the municipal borewell in Faizalpur is premised: struggles embedded at once in the 2002 Hindu-Muslim violence, and the displacement and resettlement that followed; in the planning and land-use zoning history of the area; and in the class dynamics that have shaped water-related decisions and actions of residents. And it is also these struggles that contextualize the conspicuous and continuing absence of municipal water lines in Faizalpur and the protracted water struggles these have meant for residents. For it is the absence of water lines, despite the construction of the 103 borewell, that forms the material landscape for current persisting everyday water struggles. In the next section, I discuss how the municipal borewell construction in Faizalpur was accomplished and why water lines remain absent. 4.4 A borewell built on humanitarian grounds that gives no water As mentioned at the start of this chapter, despite land-use zoning disallowing the construction of municipal water infrastructure in Faizalpur, a borewell has been built here on “humanitarian grounds” with special permission from the municipal commissioner. Water lines however remain to be laid. As a result, the borewell lends no relief to residents. On the contrary, being able to see the borewell everyday, yet not getting water from it, only deepens the residents’ despair and frustration as this resident woman describes: “The bore has been built since a year and a half, and yet no water is being given from it… It is a big government bore. (One) can see it even from this distance. Behind that wall. But when the line will come, when we will get water, who knows...” - Faizalpur resident, Interview, January 2020 A municipal borewell that gives no water because of absent water lines then constitutes the material context shaping contemporary everyday experiences of water injustice in Faizalpur. Probing this material context requires interrogating the paralysis in installing water lines in this neighbourhood. When I ask the local councilor why no water lines have been installed in Faizalpur, he draws my attention back to the area’s land-use status of being an ‘acquired zone’: “This entire area is an “acquired zone”. The land has been acquired by the Government for (Sewage) Treatment Plant. So each time we ask for municipal infrastructure, the AMC says “how can we give water there?” But it hasn’t been used for the Treatment Plant. So many people live here! Look at it! It is a residential zone!” - Interview, May 2019 In response to my question regarding absent water lines then, the councilor offers the fervent appeal that Faizalpur, a visibly dense occupied area, has no business being labelled a no-development zone or, in extension, being deprived of municipal water infrastructure. He insists 104 that Faizalpur’s legal land-use zoning is incongruent with observable reality. The contradiction he highlights between purported legality and reality is further complicated by institutional ambiguity regarding the current legal status of these lands. While over two decades have passed since Faizalpur and its surroundings were declared reserved for sewage treatment plants (STPs), no STPs have been built. Legal decrees require that lands declared as reserved zones but not physically acquired within 10 years of reservation be released by planning authorities for development. Since Faizalpur has not been physically acquired since 20-plus years, it should have been released for development. Simply put, had legal guidelines been followed, Faizalpur would today be entitled to receive municipal water. But neither have these lands been physically acquired, and nor have they been released for development. When I ask the Makhtampura ward engineer about the current status of the Faizalpur lands, he too responds vaguely: “our internal paperwork is ongoing to understand the status of these lands”. With municipal infrastructure provision being inextricably entangled with land-use status, and land-use status in Faizalpur being suspended in animation, building new water infrastructure in this neighbourhood has been fraught with legal obstacles. And yet, despite these obstructions, a municipal borewell has been built. Deeper engagement with tactics that have made the Faizalpur borewell construction possible contextualizes the continuing absence of water lines and in turn the everyday water struggles that this paper focuses on. For the neighbourhood’s legal-technical context renders the construction of the municipal borewell no small feat. In the words of the Assistant Municipal Commissioner of Makhtampura ward: “… No government officer will dare to do such a thing. The Faizalpur bore(well) has been made in the cemetery (kabrastaan). You should study it to understand out-of-the-box administrative and planning decisions! This thing that I have told you, no one has ever done in the history of the corporation. No one. Show her that bore!” - Interview, Jan 2020 105 Figure 4.2: Municipal borewell that gives no water. Source: Vrushti Mawani, May 2019 In holding up the Faizalpur borewell as an “out-of-the-box” example of administration and infrastructure planning, the officer implicitly draws attention to the borewell having been constructed despite the legal zoning status of the area disallowing municipal infrastructure 106 building here. When I probe further, the councilor tells me that the Faizalpur borewell construction became possible because the request for building it was framed as a plea for “making work possible in non-TP (non-Town Planning) areas on humanitarian grounds”. As described in the previous chapter, Town Planning Schemes are technical mechanisms through which municipal infrastructure is planned and built in areas identified for development (chapter 3; Mawani, 2019). Referring to an area as “non-TP” means highlighting the fact that municipal infrastructure through a town planning scheme has not been provided here. But Faizalpur, a “no-development” zone, is ineligible to receive a town planning scheme in the first instance. Technically then, the reference to the “non-TP” nature of Faizalpur in framing the request for a municipal borewell is irrelevant. Yet, the councilor emphasizes, holding the “non-TP” status of the Faizalpur lands central in the borewell construction plea, and simultaneously avoiding all mention of the zoning status of the lands, was critical. He contextualizes his assertion by referring to a 2015 resolution mandating the provision of municipal basic services even in areas where town planning schemes have not been approved. In his view, this manner of argument framing allows for a careful avoidance of the ‘acquired’ status of the Faizalpur lands, which is very important, because, in his words, “if we talk about acquired, we will get nothing… Then they will start talking about demolishing in the acquired…” Water justice at the scale of municipal infrastructure building in Faizalpur is thus sought based on a careful assessment of which legalities to activate and which to skirt. The legal-technical specificity of this neighbourhood, i.e., its zoning status, which prohibits the building of municipal infrastructure, is carefully kept off the table. And, as explained by the councilor, it is critical for it to continue being kept off the table, if water justice is a goal. Simultaneously, the emphasis on the “humanitarian” nature of fulfilling the request for water lines is important. At the time of sanctioning municipal infrastructure for an area not eligible to receive it, a request framed on ‘humanitarian grounds’ can outweigh counter-arguments that might be asserted based on legality and technicality. In other words, what we see in Faizalpur yet again then is how categories like ‘legal/illegal’ and ‘TPS or non-TP’ do not really determine what happens. Instead they are part of the discursive landscape of explanations and narrations that reproduce persistent water struggles. 107 But in any case, this account lends nuance to the need cited by water justice scholars of challenging “distributional assumptions and consequences” (Roth et al., 2018: 43). It suggests instead that in deeply contested contexts like Faizalpur, selectivity might need to be exercised in endeavors seeking water justice. Indeed, overtly challenging foundational distributional assumptions and consequences might not only obstruct water justice, but might potentially even have detrimental consequences, such as raking up discussions on demolitions. To achieve everyday water justice, infrastructural requests must activate discursive categories such as ‘humanitarian need’ that possess the moral power to outweigh legal and technical arguments. This discussion highlights the strategic discursive choices that have facilitated the construction of the Faizalpur borewell. But it does not yet explain the absence of water lines. I turn to this next. I begin by making visible the nature of everyday struggles Faizalpur’s residents experience in the absence of municipal water lines, followed by a discussion of why water lines remain absent, i.e., why the municipal borewell does not give water, and why everyday water struggles persist. 4.4.1 Absent Water Lines “Since there are no lines (we) have to fill water from tanker(s). My clothes don’t fit me properly because my shoulder has started hanging lower. Because of carrying buckets (from the tanker) all the time.” “When older women or pregnant women have to fetch water (from tankers), it becomes very difficult. They bring small utensils and fill those. How much can that water last? If we get (municipal) water lines, these troubles will diminish.” - Faizalpur residents, Interviews, January 2020 As the quotes above suggest, many Faizalpur residents experience the absence of municipal water lines in terms of myriad bodily struggles. In this neighbourhood, as in many other vulnerable communities across the world, women are predominantly responsible for fetching water for their families. The embodied struggles narrated here are thus centrally women’s experiences. Faizalpur’s resident women sketch their everyday water struggles as embodied experiences inextricably entangled with the material absence of water lines. And the 108 absence of municipal water lines in Faizalpur is indeed puzzling. Typically, when a water distribution station or a borewell is built in Ahmedabad, a distribution network plan is already in place even if its construction follows later. For instance, in the case of a new water distribution station currently being constructed at the north-east corner of Makhtampura ward, work for installing water lines is already ongoing, despite the tank itself not being ready yet. Citing this instance from the same ward, I ask the councilor why the network from the Faizalpur borewell has not been laid. He responds by circling back, yet again, to the area’s contested land-use zoning status. Given the reserved status of lands in Faizalpur, he says, infrastructural demands have to be made “one after the other” instead of all at once. Capital costs required for building all physical water infrastructures at once in an area legally ineligible for such infrastructure building would have been too large to sanction. In his opinion, requesting water lines at the time of requesting the borewell would have paralysed the decision-making process entirely, potentially obstructing even the borewell construction. The ward engineer confirms this rationale. Larger the capital investment required for municipal infrastructure, greater the time required to process its sanction, and in extension, higher the likelihood of the project being put on hold. Faizalpur’s contentious land-use zoning status could easily become a further obstruction in the sanction of the work. The councilor’s logic was, “now that the borewell has been built… (water lines) will come too, some day or the other, on humanitarian grounds.” This rationale echoes the logic implicit in requests accentuating the need for providing infrastructure in “non-TP” areas, while carefully avoiding reference to contested zoning status. Infrastructural requests for water justice then are not only carefully framed, but also strategically timed. While these myriad legal and technical conjectures continue to shape the material infrastructures of Faizalpur, residents continue to experience water struggles every day. Inquiries into water management and water justice, even those premised in a lived experiences approach, have historically focused on national, regional, watershed, and neighbourhood scales (Truelove, 2019: 2). But such a focus occludes a spatially, temporally, and socially specific understanding of everyday water struggles. For instance, the two quotes at the start of this sub-section highlight 109 how everyday water struggles for older women and pregnant women would be different to those of many other residents. Their experiences of water justice then would also be diverse. Even with ubiquitously absent water lines, everyday water struggles experienced by an older woman would be shaped by whether her neighbours or family members help her carry the water or not; how many family members she has; how close to her home the tanker stops; whether a hose can be attached from the tanker to fill water for her, and so on. This woman’s experience of fetching water will in turn inform her future decisions of accessing water. On the one hand then, water struggles are arenas across which power and authority are performed, negotiated, and experienced at multiple scales. On the other hand, they are “emotive realities” (Sultana, 2011: 163) that impact how water access in vulnerable communities is not just sought, but also fought over. A deeper, more disaggregated account of water justice then requires attending to individual negotiations over water, and how they are emotionally experienced and embodied. In the sections that follow, I offer an account of this nature. I first discuss work that relates emotional and embodied everyday water struggles with water justice, and then use insights from this discussion to make visible the everyday water struggles of Faizalpur’s residents. 4.5 Everyday “emotive realities”66 A growing body of empirical work on water governance and justice argues that, “(e)motions matter in resource struggles… (and) influence the outcomes of practices and processes of resource access/use/control.” (Sultana, 2011: 164). This provocation builds on assertions by the sub-field of emotional geographies, on how emotions might deliver the radical potential of critical geography (Bondi, 2005; Thein, 2005). Studies grounded in feminist political ecology (FPE) frameworks have advanced this approach by making visible how “gender – in relation to class, race and other relevant axes of power – shapes access to and control over natural resources” (Sundberg, 2017). They have illuminated how social identities are relationally 66 Phrase borrowed from Farhana Sultana, 2011: 163 110 produced through everyday material practices. Integrating ideas from the fields of emotional geographies (Bondi, 2005 ; Thein, 2005) and feminist political ecology (Harris, 2015 ; Nightingale, 2019), recent work on emotional political ecology (Sultana, 2015, 2020 ; Gonzalez-Hidalgo and Zografos, 2019), and embodied political ecology (Doshi, 2017 ; Truelove, 2019) has urged for the need to refocus analytical attention to “embodied emotions, feelings, and lived experiences” (Sultana, 2015 : 634) as sites for understanding resource conflicts . . These approaches to understanding environmental justice privilege epistemological frameworks based on affect and emotion, as opposed to economics-based dimensions such as property rights, productivity, efficiency, and so on (Harris, 2015: 167; Doshi, 2017; Sultana, 2015). For instance, Sultana (2015) highlights the multiple kinds of sufferings and emotional distress embodied and expressed by women, while discussing water stress in rural Bangladesh. Attention to “everyday, embodied, and emotional relations” with water is useful in challenging hegemonic practices relating to water distribution (Harris, 2015: 158). It also shifts analytical focus away from scales entangled in distributional assumptions such as the national, regional, and so on, attending instead to the scale of the body (Truelove, 2019). As well, it allows an examination of the many ways in which these scales, from “the intimate” to “the national”, are connected (Elmhirst, 2011). As Yaffa Truelove (2011: 147) notes, “(b)odily experiences, including the wear and tear of water labor, water-related health problems, the physical experience of criminalization for illegal practices and the disciplining required for water-related health issues (including diarrhea and menstruation for example), are intimately tied to the experience of urban space and rights.” Shaped by the myriad ways in which authority is enacted, these embodied experiences significantly impact women’s everyday lives, influence opportunities they might or might not be able to access, and reproduce social identities, difference, and exclusion (ibid). Embodied and emotionally experienced water struggles also spill over into familial and other social relations (Harris, 2006; Truelove, 2011; Sultana, 2011). For instance, Sultana notes that in an “arsenic waterscape”, women in rural Bangladesh resort to drawing water from contaminated sources to meet their families’ needs. Being aware of risks associated with 111 consuming polluted water, yet requiring basic amounts of water and thus exercising this choice, carries its own emotional anxieties for the women (2015: 637). For women who work as domestic helpers in urban India, having to ask for water from employers to meet their families’ needs might mean working longer hours, or otherwise ingratiating employers; acts experienced as embodied and emotional burdens in and of themselves. Or in areas with informal water arrangements and established power and authority structures, fetching water might mean women being tagged as criminals ‘stealing’ water, and in turn having to contend with the embarrassment and frustrations associated with bearing these labels (Truelove, 2011). Multiple scales of authority – regional, community, neighbourhood-based, and domestic – thus constitute emotive realities and influence water justice. Understanding water justice then requires careful attention to these multi-scalar emotive realities shaped by how authority is exerted within a context, which in turn contextualize and mediate everyday experiences of water access. I draw on this understanding to probe in the following section the various scales of local authority exerted, and emotive realities produced, in Faizalpur, and their role in facilitating or obstructing water justice. I attend specifically to the plurality of emotive realities produced when social and spatial differences (gender, age, affordability, geographical location) interact with material experiences of accessing water (through pumps, tankers, pipes, and seasonal variations). 4.6 “Making Do” (chalaa rahein hain) As described in the sections on the borewell that does not give water and the absent municipal water lines, strategically framed and timed demands for municipal water infrastructure continue to shape Faizalpur’s waterscape in the background. Meanwhile, households in the neighbourhood persevere by “making do” in various ways to meet their ongoing water needs. Households that can afford it and are within the range of a private distribution network, buy water from informal borewell operators. In exchange, they get water for an hour a day on good days and for half hour a day or every alternate day in the summer months. Despite private connections being unreliable, women are thankful for them, primarily because of the distress 112 they experienced when they were entirely reliant on tankers. The quote below captures how the construction of private borewells is perceived: “It (household water connection from private borewell) has solved such a big problem for us. We had to depend completely on tankers earlier, and there used to be so many fights. Stone pelting, physical violence, police cases. So much has happened. At least all that has stopped because of this bore.” - Faizalpur resident, Interview, January 2020 Figure 4.3: Water lines from an informal borewell. Source: Vrushti Mawani, Jan 2020 But even on good days, water pressure in connections from informal borewells is low. As a result the water collected is insufficient to meet basic needs for drinking, cooking, washing, 113 and cleaning. To increase pressure and draw more water, as well as to pump water to overhead storage tanks, better off households attach motors to their connections. This further reduces water pressure in the connections of their neighbours. In an already anxious waterscape, differential water pressure then transforms into, and erupts as, fights between neighbours. One resident woman whose family does not own a motor had this to say: “They have money to buy motors. So they pull more water and we hardly get any. Then where do we get water from? We know who has motors. If our (water) pressure reduces, we march into their homes to see. Then they start fighting with us, (saying) ‘you are bullying us. We don’t attach motors.’”. - Faizalpur resident, Interview, May 2019 “Making do” in this fragile waterscape involves adhering to locally established norms such as not attaching motors to connections towards sharing available water equitably and amicably; norms that are followed more in some neighbourhoods and less in others. 4.6.1 Unreliable tankers and neighbourhood politics While conventions around attaching motors partially mitigate fights over the use of connections from informal borewells, water collected and stored by households is never enough. As a result, despite private connections, many households rely on tankers for drinking water. Households located further away from private borewells, and families unable to afford advance monies and monthly charges, don’t have private connections. They rely entirely on water tankers since tanker water is supplied free of cost by the municipal corporation. Accessing water from tankers has its own set of challenges, including quality and reliability of water supplied; fights among residents over who gets to fill first, and how much; and general disgruntlement among residents over what time the tankers come, how often they come, where in the neighbourhood they stand, how long they wait at each spot, how much water they bring, and so on. As one woman told me, “We have had so many fights because of this… So much time is spent just in wrapping up fights that filling water gets left by the wayside… Imagine how much it must mess with our minds (“sochiye, kitna dimaag kharaab hota hoga”).” 114 - Faizalpur resident, Interview, March 2019 This discontent sometimes spills over in the form of anger at tanker operators, despite a tacit acknowledgement among residents that tanker drivers are usually just following orders given to them by ward engineers. When I visited one such family to understand their current water access, the woman of the house rushed into her kitchen and brought out a large empty plastic cannister. Waving it at me, she said, “Rahim (the tanker driver) is such a rascal (kameena)! He doesn’t give water even once in three days. Even when we shout after him, he goes away… He gives water only to the neighbourhoods that call him up and register requests.” - Faizalpur resident, Interview, March 2019 Figure 4.4: Women filling water from a tanker. Source: Vrushti Mawani, Jan 2020 115 Requests for water tankers are registered by neighbourhood leaders (locally called “mohalle ke aagevan”, literally meaning “neighbourhood forward”). Yet, given the maximum number of tankers that the corporation can send to Faizalpur everyday (between 4 and 6 was the estimate that the neighbourhood leader gave me), not all requests can be met. Consequently, residents in need of water, on seeing tankers passing by and supplying water to adjoining neighbourhoods whose registered requests are being serviced, are often left seething. The role of neighbourhood leader, often assumed by an older woman, and involving liaising with the tanker operator, regulating the supply of tankers, and keeping peace at the time of filling water each time a tanker comes, is thus a powerful one. Neighbourhood leaders are not elected; rather, community members seem to assign these positions of leadership to specific people based on a combination of how long the person has lived in the neighbourhood, how ‘socially connected’ her/his family is, and their age. One such leader, a grandmother of four, described how her role as a neighbourhood leader required her to perform multiple tasks including calling out to everyone when the tanker arrived, ensuring that only a few women fill water at one time, checking that no water is wasted at the time of filling, and even, in relevant neighbourhoods, checking people’s homes unannounced for motors attached to private water connections. Keeping peace while filling water from tankers however is especially important, for if fights break out frequently, tankers stop coming. And to do so, as this woman told me, neighbourhood leaders resort to threats if they have too: “the public listens to me, but I have to threaten sometimes. (If they fight) I call out to the tanker guy and tell him to stop the water and start the tanker and leave. I tell the women that no one will fill water. I also will not fill. If there are fights, no one gets to fill water. Sometimes I stop the tanker completely for a few days. Then they (the women) come and say ‘please call the tanker’. I tell them that if they fight in the future, the tanker will be stopped. That’s how they have become disciplined… But I lose my mind in managing all this.” - Faizalpur resident, Interview, March 2019 Older women playing the role of neighbourhood leader are thus besieged by pressures of disciplining the others. Younger women on the other hand often begrudge these power structures 116 and express their frustration with them. In their view, older women position themselves as leaders to derive other benefits, such as public respect, business networks, free services, etc. Yet, in the face of the older women’s authority, they find themselves embroiled within these power structures and constrained by them. One young woman, attributing the delay in submitting a hand-written request for municipal water lines to the corporation to the authority exerted by the leader in her neighbourhood, expressed her frustration as follows: “The councilor left the application here with us a long time ago. But since she said no, we couldn’t do anything about it. She wants to be the leader here. The water situation is going to become so bad in April. We must do something soon. But if we do something when she has said not to, we have to listen to everyone’s curses (gaaliyaan khaani padti hain). That is a big problem. After all, we have to live here right?” I discuss why and how municipal councilors might have no choice but to defer to the power of such neighbourhood leaders in the next chapter. But here, micro-politics at the neighbourhood level, and emotions embodied as a result of authority exerted at this scale, thus play a critical role in shaping everyday experiences of water justice. 4.6.2 Ramzan in Summers The month of fasting and spiritual reflection for Muslims, Ramzan, coincides with Ahmedabad’s worst summer months67. With temperatures outside soaring well above 40 degrees Celsius, sometimes getting close to 50, water supplied through private connections dries up across Faizalpur, and dependence on water tankers increases. The struggles of women here, of fasting from dawn to dusk in such crippling weather, with the more devout even abstaining from drinking water, are compounded with the additional burden of having to fetch water from tankers. This is particularly problematic when fetching water from tankers is primarily the responsibility of elderly women or women unable to lift weight for health reasons. A middle-aged woman resident of Faizalpur, anxious for the months to come, said: 67 April, May, and June 117 “In those months, we don’t wash clothes for 2 – 3 days sometimes. And if water still doesn’t come, we bundle up our clothes and take them to the homes of our relatives who have water… We wash and bathe there and come back. But this takes time, and we have to take care of jobs and businesses. Even sending kids to school becomes difficult. And how many times can we go to others’ homes? In those days, we go mad, (thinking) where do we go for water.” - Faizalpur resident, Interview, March 2019 Figure 4.5: Women fetching water from tankers. Source: Vrushti Mawani, Jan 2020 118 Along with taking on obligations of relatives, the time, money, and energy spent by women in transporting washing to faraway places while dealing with usual family management tasks such as sending children to school, cooking, cleaning, and so on, become additional burdens during these hot months of fasting. The frustration experienced as a result of this multiplicity of burdens at such times is expressed through phrases such as “we go mad”. Often private borewell operators cash in on this acute need for water during Ramzan, the woman told me further: “Their current supply of one hour a day, they will cut down to half an hour on purpose. Then they will start talking about increasing money. They always do this… And if the summer is bad, their bores might even fail. Like so many others… When these bores fail, who will spend the money to repair them? Money spent becomes gutter then.” Anxiety around the lack of guarantees attached to receiving water from her private connection, even if she agrees to pay more money, is an embodied concern that has grown out of this resident’s knowledge of the local hydrogeology (uncertainties regarding groundwater levels), and of the prevalent lack of liability and accountability (as witnessed in dealings of private operators). The despair experienced with just the possibility of losing invested money in this way is expressed in the reference to monies thus lost “becoming gutter”. Such anxieties, echoed by other women I spoke to, in turn shape families’ decisions on mitigating water woes in the summer months: whether to spend even more but risk less by buying water bottles from the market, or not spend at all and rely completely on tankers. 4.7 Conclusion: water justice as differentially embodied Through this chapter I offer a multi-scalar analysis of lived experiences of water (in)justice in low-income Muslim areas of Ahmedabad, interwoven with the legal, technical, and material specificities of Faizalpur. Recent work has argued for tracing the embeddedness of water (in)justice across national, regional and community scales, and for making visible how these patterns “unequally shape the experience of water and its governance at the bodily scale” (Truelove, 2019: 2). I amplify this argument by showing through the case of Faizalpur that attending simultaneously to multiple scales can help grasp the mundane and persevering human 119 impacts of overlapping historical, political and technical relations. The account of water justice in Faizalpur is emblematic of how social, material, and technical aspects shaping access to water interact in space and time to produce differential emotional and embodied experiences of water justice. As well, these persevering everyday water struggles suggest that segregation is experienced not only in physical or material terms, but also in emotional, everyday terms.. I also add further empirical depth through this chapter to my argument from chapter 3 on how discursive planning categories like ‘illegality’ shape uneven water access and persistent water struggles. From a technical, planning perspective, land use zoning is yet another discursive category around which water justice in Faizalpur has historically coalesced. The settlement of poor Muslim families post-2002 became possible here precisely because these large swathes of reserved land were available for hurried construction and occupation. Subsequently, a municipal borewell was built in Faizalpur, despite its legal zoning status disallowing the building of municipal infrastructure here. Enduring everyday water struggles of Faizalpur’s residents became the premise for this “out-of-the-box” development. Prima facie, this development became possible through carefully framed requests skirting the issue of contested land-use zoning and activating other discursive categories, notably the ‘humanitarian’ nature of providing water here: framing that possesses the moral power to outweigh legal and technical arguments. However, the intensely political nature of this sanction cannot be denied. For the planning authorities themselves did not acquire the reserved land in the time span specified by planning guidelines, presumably because of the illegalities that proliferated in this area following the ULCRA promulgation1980 onwards (see section 3.5). But nor have they released the lands for development. By focusing on the lived realities of water injustice in Faizalpur then, I demonstrate the everyday impacts of these deeply entangled planning and political complexities. Further, I highlight through this chapter how water justice at the scale of municipal infrastructure building in Faizalpur has been sought based on a careful assessment of which legalities to activate and which to skirt. Zoning status, which in this case would obstruct water justice, is carefully kept off the table. This account then lends nuance to the need cited by water justice scholars of challenging “distributional assumptions and consequences” (Roth et al., 2018: 120 43). It suggests instead that in contexts like Faizalpur, selectivity might need to be exercised in such an endeavor. Indeed, challenging foundational distributional assumptions and consequences in contexts like Faizalpur might not only obstruct water justice, but might potentially have other detrimental consequences as well. And yet, despite the borewell built on humanitarian grounds, everyday water struggles of residents persist in the absence of municipal water lines connecting the borewell to individual homes. Water lines were not installed in Faizalpur at the time of building the municipal borewell on account of the financial implications of building all water infrastructure together in an area ineligible to receive it. This instance highlights that not only do infrastructural requests for water justice in Faizalpur need to be carefully framed; they also need to be incrementally timed. The effectiveness of employing the water justice strategy of selectively activating discursive categories is tenuous and always contingent on other variables such as costs. As a result, water justice in contested contexts such as Faizalpur is sought at a very slow pace, which in turn means protracted water struggles for residents. Everyday water struggles in turn, are arenas where power and authority are performed, negotiated, and experienced. Paraphrasing Andrea Nightingale (2011: 154), the identity of Faizalpur’s residents, as low-income Muslims unable to access housing elsewhere in the city, is deeply intertwined with their water struggles, and embodied as firmly material everyday experiences. Such materiality might be noted as much in rapidly falling groundwater levels, ever-deepened borewells that ‘fail’, visible municipal borewells that do not give water, conspicuously absent water lines, everyday negotiations with neighbours on pumps, water pressure, tanker timings, queues for fetching, and not being able to bathe or wash for days. Just as much, it might be located in frequent aggressive exchanges with local leaders and acquiescence to local authority structures. A disaggregated understanding of water justice in this context demands keen attention to micro-politics at neighbourhood levels, and emotions embodied as a result of “making do” in the face of these everyday water struggles. Returning to the questions I set out to answer through this chapter: What practices and negotiations does ‘making do’ in Faizalpur’s contested waterscape 121 entail? And what are the emotional and embodied experiences of ‘making do’ in Faizalpur that are revealed through attention to locally-specific differentiated social identities? In Faizalpur’s fragile waterscape, “making do” involves adhering to locally agreed upon norms such as not attaching motors to connections so as to share available water equitably and amicably; norms that are followed in some neighbourhoods and not so much in others. It also means getting used to the doubt, anger, and helplessness that arise when these norms are not followed. “Making do” requires constantly assessing the risks involved in paying for private informal water connections as opposed to depending on unreliable tankers and the possibility of aggressive exchanges while fetching water. It manifests equally through expressions of gratitude when informal providers deliver on their promises, feelings of fear while paying for informal water connections, and experiences of grief when monies so invested are lost. It entails fetching buckets full of water from tankers in peak summer while fasting. For those with informal connections, ‘making do’ means being prepared to pay more or get lesser water, less frequently than promised. Sometimes it means all of these. For older women and women with health issues, it involves drawing strength from their Ramzan prayers to bear bodily suffering to meet their families’ water needs through these particularly difficult days. The physical pain and grief embodied as a result, the anxiety of hoping and waiting for tankers to come, and the fear and helplessness associated with the likelihood of having to pay informal providers more money and yet this not being a safeguard for reliable water, are all part of “making do”. In Faizalpur’s complex and contested landscape where water struggles have historically coalesced around land-use zoning status, residents, particularly the women, have been “making do” in these myriad ways for close to eighteen years now. In their words, “yeh roz ka hai”. This is every day. 122 Chapter 5: Agents of Change: Managing Water, Managing Trust 5.1 Introduction: “broker ka kaam” (the work of brokering) “When the ward inspector goes out into the field to survey the area, I guide him. It isn’t necessary that a ward inspector would know every part of an area. So they (the municipal corporation) employ a local person. As a result, there is greater safety… Because there is love between me and them (the residents). They welcome me. Trust me. I know their internal details. I can go into anyone’s house without ringing the bell… So everyone has benefitted. The ward, the corporation, and the people.” - Farooqbhai, interview, December 2017 I first met Farooqbhai during a neighbourhood walk in Makhtampura. I was introduced to him by an NGO worker who was helping me understand the area better68. Farooqbhai, I was told, knew the families in the neighbourhood and their water struggles closely. He was a resident of Makhtampura and so knew the history of the area from personal experience. But in addition, he had also played an important role in making the planning and building of physical infrastructure possible here. Having him walk with us through the neighbourhood would be helpful, the NGO worker emphasized. His presence, I was told, would quell any suspicion residents might feel towards me, and would encourage them to share their experiences more openly. As we walked through the neighbourhood, residents greeted Farooqbhai enthusiastically. Farooqbhai seemed to know the families we visited by first name. He asked about their health, wellbeing, jobs, and studies, as much as he did about their applications and claims relating to land, property, and basic services. His interactions with residents revealed his close understanding of residents’ needs, sentiments, and mental frameworks, as well as of legalities and bureaucratic processes. When I asked him what he did, he told me he worked with the municipal corporation. As described in the quote above, he saw his role as that of a guide, 68 I had arranged for the walk with the NGO worker based on a discussion with the NGO. The NGO has been working on livelihood projects in the area for years. The field worker is also Muslim, lives in the neighbourhood, and knows Farooqbhai on account of the latter’s role in mediating property regularisation. 123 advisor, and counselor, doing “the work of brokering” for both the corporation and the residents of Makhtampura. Residents that I met separately did not see Farooqbhai as part of the corporation however, describing him instead as “an agent” and a “broker”: someone “with connections”. Farooqbhai however emphasized his integration with the corporation by using the Hindi phrase “mein corporation ki roti khaata hoon”, literally meaning “I eat the corporation’s bread”: a metaphor for working loyally for someone powerful and remaining fed as a result. Regardless of these differences in perspectives, it was evident that Farooqbhai was influential. But I did not understand why he was important: what it was that he provided guidance and advice on, what he brokered, or indeed his role in relation to the area’s water struggles. I arranged to meet Farooqbhai again some days later to understand better his role in relation to water access in Makhtampura. He clarified that he was not a formal corporation employee. Rather, he worked for the corporation informally, he said, on “property regularization” and “property tax” matters in Makhtampura and Sarkhej. Later in this chapter (section 5.3), I offer details on how Farooqbhai makes the state accessible to ordinary residents, and how the tasks he performs relate to planning and water access. But to clarify the import of my interaction with Farooqbhai in informing my analytical logic for this dissertation that examines how religious difference mediates water access and planning, it was one particular invocation by Farooqbhai that captured my attention. When I asked him why and how he had come to do the kind of “brokering work” that he did, he said, ““I am a local. I am Muslim. I am from here. That’s the biggest thing… People trust me.” On the one hand, through this assertion, Farooqbhai holds people’s trust in him central to making access to water possible in Makhtampura. But at the same time, and on the other hand, in his view, the residents’ trust in him is inextricably entangled in his identity as a local Muslim. Farooqbhai thus seems to suggest that the trust invested by residents in him is inseparable from his Muslim identity. His ability to make water access possible in Makhtampura – or to successfully broker access to water – he implies, is predicated not only on his knowledge of state institutions and social networks, but also on his religious identity. 124 These two relationships that Farooqbhai invokes are my points of departure for this chapter. I found Faroobhai’s assertion interesting because many brokers that I met during my research raised the trust – “bharosa”, “vishwaas” – people had in them as crucial to their ability to making work, such as the flow of water, possible. For instance, Sayidaben, a local leader-turned-municipal councilor of Sarkhej ward, tied her ability to make water flow and residents’ trust in her at once with her ability to exerting political pressure. “In our kind of work, knowing how to exert pressure (dabaan kaise daalna), even on seniors, is very important. Only then will people trust us.” - - Sayidaben, Interview, February 2017 Aadilbhai, a municipal councilor from Makhtampura, linked his ability to improve water access and people’s trust in him with acts of selflessness and service. “We have served people since so many years right? People have seen that (I) have made water flow through so many neighbourhoods. Whatever challenges (I) faced, (I) never stopped fighting for people’s rights. So people trust (me). Support (me). And in our work, without people’s trust and support, nothing can be done.” - Aadilbhai, Interview, May 2019 Neither of these brokers then linked religious identity with their trustworthiness and ability to get work done in the way Farooqbhai did. Recent studies note the role of both religious identity and trust in shaping broker-client relations. But these associations do not seem to work in stable ways. Trust in a broker might be premised in their ability to get work done (Björkman, forthcoming), but ability is only one trustworthiness factor in addition to benevolence and integrity (Mayer and Gavin, 2005). While clients might prefer brokers who share their religious identity, brokers are known to be indifferent to religion, choosing instead to reinforce popular perceptions of being equally accessible to all (Auerbach and Thachil, 2018, 2019). As well, other factors, such as political partisanship seemed to influence broker-client trust relations in important ways (ibid). Through the course of my research too, I met several other Muslim brokers in Makhtampura and Sarkhej who did not fit the tidy set of associations between religious identity, trust, and the ability to 125 improve water access drawn by Farooqbhai. These other actors include NGO workers, municipal councilors, informal borewell operators, community leaders, builders, engineers, resident leaders who have influenced water access in wide-ranging ways. Some of these actors, such as informal borewell operators and builders, have somewhat improved water access but are not trusted (chapter 4). Others, such as resident leaders and NGO workers, might be trusted for other purposes such as general legal advice, but their attempts at brokering access to water have been unsuccessful. As well, relevant literature including that cited above, seemed to suggest that there might be factors other than religious identity shaping broker-client trust relations as well as brokers’ ability to get work done. With a view to understanding the role of trust, religious identity, and potentially other factors (not evident at the outset) in mediating brokers’ ability to influence planning and water access in Makhtampura and Sarkhej, I ask the following four questions through this chapter: How - through what relationships and practices - do influential brokers improve water access in Makhtampura? How do they intervene in technical planning processes towards improving water access? How might we locate the role of trust and religious identity in shaping relationships between residents and brokers who have improved water access in Makhtampura? And are there other factors that influence these trust relations and/or the ability of brokers to improve water access? To address these questions, I examine two brokers: Farooqbhai, described above, who has been helping residents with their property regularization and taxes only over the past decade, and Aadilbhai, a veteran broker, and a local-leader-turned-politician. The data presented in this chapter is a combination of interviews with Aadilbhai and Farooqbhai, and dialogues with residents that shed light on the role of these two brokers in relation to water access and infrastructure politics in Makhtampura. I chose these two actors because they represent two typologies of brokers. First, Farooqbhai’s core identity is that of a broker: for residents, he is someone located outside the (discriminatory) state, but with the knowledge and networks to make water access possible. Aadilbhai on the other hand is foremost a politician, albeit one whose political success stems from his initial role as a local leader cum broker. Second, in 126 exchange for Farooqbhai’s efforts, residents pay him money. For Aadilbhai’s efforts, people are expected to vote for him. As will become clear through the following sections, these two aspects mediate the trust relations of these two brokers with residents and influence their ability to improve water access. One caveat is important at this point. While others have categorized brokers into different types based on their motivating interests (Aspinall, 2014), I do not intend to offer any neat categorizations through this account; rather, I simply aim to show the heterogeneity in broker-client relationships that shape community-level water access. Through the sections that follow, I begin by offering details on how Farooqbhai brokers access to water in Makhtampura by illuminating his role at specific junctures in technical planning processes (section 5.3). Insights in this section offer important connections to the discourses of ‘illegality’ that I highlight in chapters 3 and 4, for one of Farooqbhai’s key interventions seems to be his knowledge of how to ‘make’ residents’ properties ‘legal’ towards improving water access. In his case, his religious identity does seem to help him carry out his tasks. Following this, to inquire into other factors influencing his ability to improve access to water, I turn to Aadilbhai, a veteran political leader in Makhtampura, who over the past two decades has brokered water access here in important ways, despite frequent fights with residents (sections 5.4 and 5.5). The case of Aadilbhai is important because it complicates any neat location of religious identity and trust in broker-client relations and brings into relief some of the community-level micro-dynamics that at once shape the ability of brokers, their trust relations with residents, as well as their ability to improve water access. It is also Aadilbhai’s case that connects with the account of the neighbourhood leader cited in chapter 4 who did not ‘support’ Aadilbhai in his attempts to improve water access. In conclusion (section 5.6), I argue that closer attention to how trust is managed offers important insights on how water is managed. Specifically, I suggest that religious identity might directly have little to do with the ability of brokers to make water flow. It might shape trust relations between brokers and residents but not in ways that Farooqbhai suggests. As well, persistent water struggles in neighbourhoods might, on the one hand, reflect a dynamic landscape constituted by bids for political power by community leaders. On the other hand however, they might also be suggestive of the choices and uneven efforts of veteran leaders to work in politically less contested neighbourhoods. 127 But first, to probe the associations invoked by Farooqbhai, I turn to a discussion of brokers, their ability to get work done, and the role of trust and religious identity in shaping these aspects. To do so, I call into conversation relevant propositions by trust research with scholarship on mediation and brokerage. 5.2 Brokers, their ability to get work done, trust, and religious identity Brokers like Farooqbhai are not unusual or new social actors and they perform particularly salient roles in South Asian politics (Lindquist, 2015: 164; Piliavsky, 2014: 5). In India, given low levels of education among ordinary citizens, their limited ability to access state institutions, and the ineffectiveness of state institutions themselves, brokers make the state accessible to ordinary citizens in myriad and important ways (Reddy and Haragopal, 1985; Manor, 2000; Jha et. al., 2007; Berenschot, 2019). By tapping into connections, obligations or friendships, they facilitate access to goods, services, jobs, and more (Hansen and Verkaaik, 2009: 20). As a result, brokers in India are viewed as enduring “vital” political forms in their own right on account of how ubiquitously they shape everyday life (Piliavsky, 2014: 4). Yet, since brokerage practices often involve asymmetrical power relationships, discomfort with the term ‘brokerage’ remains. The implicit assumption driving this discomfort is that relationships between brokers and clients are invariably exploitative ones, where brokers exert authority and power over clients in overt and covert ways (Lindquist, 2015). Recent work however has destabilized this notion. Ranganathan (2014) for instance shows how even powerful water brokers are held accountable for their “services” by citizens. Aspinall (2014), adding further texture to conventional imaginations of brokers, highlights how practices of mediation employed by brokers are driven by their varied, individual mental frameworks and aspirations. He identifies three sub-categories: “activist brokers”, defined by a specific ideological (political, ethnic, religious, etc) loyalty; “clientelist brokers”, driven by material benefits and long-term gains (such as a political position); and, “opportunist brokers” (driven by immediate material benefits) (ibid: 548). To re-state the scope of this chapter, in identifying this literature, I do not intend to categorize Farooqbhai and Aadilbhai in any of these buckets; indeed, I disagree with the neatness of this categorization, and am unsure if it is productive at all. Rather, I highlight this 128 work to emphasize that brokers are not a homogenous lot. Instead, practices of mediation unravel based on diverse logics and contextual circumstances. I contribute to the body of work above by offering insights on the power dynamics, ideologies, mental frameworks, and aspirations shaping the water access improvement efforts of Farooqbhai and Aadilbhai. These reflections are further contextualized by scholarship that connects brokerage practices with trust relations and religious identity. On the one hand, recent work has marked renewed interest in examining the “geographies and socialities of trust” through which contemporary brokerage practices operate (Björkman, forthcoming). Amidst the social, economic, and political uncertainties brought on by late modernity, a trusted broker often becomes a risk-mitigation resource for people (ibid). And brokers too, in addition to requiring the skills and networks to make work (such as access to water) possible, are noted for needing relations of trust spanning across communities, scales, and geographies. The association of trust with the possibility of meeting (financial and/or political) objectives extends far beyond relationships between brokers and clients. Indeed, trust has been found to reduce transaction costs in organizations, increase cooperative behavior, facilitate dispute resolutions in situations of conflict, aid economic growth, improve judicial efficiency and so on (Kramer, 1999; Glaeser et. al., 2000). Broadly defined as “a psychological state comprising the intention to accept vulnerability based upon positive expectations of the intentions or behavior of another”, trust relations are anchored in attitudes, behaviours, decisions, and social networks that encourage the “willingness to be vulnerable” (Rousseau et. al., 1998: 395). Further, presence/perception of risk or uncertainty are necessary preconditions for relations of trust to emerge (ibid: 394 – 395). And whether the trusted person exhibits risk-taking abilities at such moments to mitigate the situation determines the course for the initial trust imbued in them: for whether it strengthens or weakens (ibid). Given that the forms of risk and trust themselves change over the course of a certain set of trust relations, trust cannot be thought of as stable and unchanging psychological state. Rather, it needs to be understood as a dynamic, ever-changing “process” (Skinner et. al., 2013: 208). In being dynamic then, trust is also “relational” (Kramer, 1999). “Its presence (and maintenance), or its absence… emerges from, and defines, the 129 relationship between parties” (Skinner et. al., 2013: 208). For instance, drawing on organizational trust dynamics, initially high levels of employee trust recede over time if employees perceive low reciprocity from their organizations, or if they feel subject to excessive surveillance and monitoring (Kramer, 1999). Trust then comes into view as a key relational infrastructure (Simone, 2015) upon which organizational dynamics are premised. Factors influencing how trust emerges and changes over time, or trustworthiness factors, are used to measure trust within a context. And given the widely established importance of trust, scholars from diverse disciplines such as psychology, sociology, and economics have examined trustworthiness factors. One set of these studies has suggestions relevant to locating how religious identity might mediate trust relations between brokers and clients in Makhtampura. Glaeser et. al., (2000: 814 – 816) suggest for instance that: (a) similarities in race and nationality, and the duration of acquaintance between trustors and trustees, are strong trustworthiness factors and predictors of trust, and (b) minority groups in specific contexts – they highlight Black Americans – might be less trusting overall. Their assertions resonate with other trust research that identifies “cultural-ethnic similarity” as a key trustworthiness factor69 (McAllister, 1995: 25). Another second set of studies from trust research offers insights that help locate Farooqbhai’s trustworthiness as a broker in terms of his ability to make water flow through Makhtampura. Mayer and Gavin (2005) for instance, identify “ability, benevolence, and integrity” as key trustworthiness dimensions. They locate “ability” as a predictor of trust in the perception of “skills and competencies (exhibited by the trustee)”; “benevolence” in “the trustor's… perception that the trustee cares about the trustor”; and “integrity” in the perception that “the trustee adheres to a set of principles that the trustor finds acceptable” (ibid: 874). While 69 This work is part of another sub-field within trust scholarship that focuses on the different types of trust that mediate relationships between trustors and trustees. In doing so, it adds nuance to what factors might constitute foundational dimensions for trustworthiness in diverse contexts. From the perspective adopted by this work, trust can be separated in two broad types: cognition-based trust, stemming from rational assessments such as “peer reliability”, “cultural-ethnic similarity”, “professional credentials”, and “dependability”; and affect-based trust, premised in “reciprocated interpersonal care and concern” (McAllister, 1995: 25). 130 racial, cultural, ethnic, religious similarities70 are not explicitly mentioned here, the possibility that these aspects are enmeshed in perceptions of benevolence and integrity cannot be foreclosed. Reading this work through scholarship on patronage in India helps locate trust and trustworthiness amidst practices of brokerage and mediation. As mentioned earlier in this section, relationships of brokerage and trust in India are deep-seated and enduring. They can be traced back to times when kings built loyal subjects through practices of giving and receiving (Piliavsky, 2014). Receiving their subjects’ loyalties through the exchange of gifts, favours, and protection, was as important to monarchs as receiving gifts and favours was to their subjects (ibid: 9 – 10). And for both sides, equally important as what was being exchanged, were details of how the exchange was conducted (ibid: 22). This historicizing can be extended to current times to understand why certain practices of mediation earn loyalty and trust, while others might be received more instrumentally or even critically, even if material exchanges in the two transactions are the same. As Piliavsky powerfully asserts, “(y)ou can shove some cash into a voter’s pocket…, but this does not itself… guarantee electoral loyalty”. The portrayal of generosity, of selflessness, of seva (service), in acts of mediation has been considered key to brokers earning the loyalty of people, and in turn is key to their ability to make work possible (ibid; Berenschot, 2014). Selflessness and service might well be considered as constituents of the construct of benevolence highlighted by the trust literature. For brokers, actions embodying benevolence might become strong predictors of trust. In Ahmedabad, the proliferation of brokers has been tied simultaneously to increased economic post-liberalization vulnerability among the already poor, as well as to deep-set social divides, such as those around caste (Berenschot, 2014: 197). As noted by others (such as Manor, 2000: 820), brokers here too become influential as a result of their connections, skills, ability to provide a service, familiarity with administrative procedures and other languages and customs. Their ability to make work, such as the flow of water, possible, is tied to their ability of making 70 For while these might be socially constructed, they are regardless markers through which people negotiate everyday lives and are hence important 131 the state accessible to ordinary people. The “ability” and “integrity” that trust research emphasizes as attributes of trustworthiness, with everyday citizens being trustors, might thus be located in whether a broker can make the state accessible or not, in ways that are (perceived as being) duly attentive to the needs of citizens. Conversely, state institutions also often rely on the same brokers to ensure compliance and desired behaviours from citizens (Berenschot, 2014: 197). Since the success of brokers is premised as much on maintaining strong connections with, and retaining the trust of, state institutions, brokers need to also demonstrate their ability of ensuring compliance from citizens. In other words, the trust relations that make it possible for a broker to improve water access need to be conceived as stretching to residents as well as formal state authorities. Considered alongside suggestions by trust research cited above on shared religious/racial/ethnic identity as being a predictor of trust, it is possible that religious identity plays a role in shaping actions of brokers that might be perceived by clients as benevolence. However, recent work examining how religious and caste identities mediate the relationship between clients and brokers complicates this assumption. For instance, a study conducted in 2015 across 2199 slum households from the cities of Jaipur and Bhopal in India suggests that India’s urban poor are likely to select brokers from their own caste or religion (Auerbach and Thachil, 2018: 784). But the converse was not found to be true. Brokers, particularly slum leaders from the same settlements in Jaipur and Bhopal, rallying for improvements in water, drainage, etc. are found as being “indifferent to religion” insofar as their choice of clients is concerned (Auerbach and Thachil, 2019: 9 – 10). Instead, these brokers come into view as “ambitious entrepreneurs seeking upwardly mobile political careers, rather than actors content to remain perpetual intermediaries within their locality” (ibid: 15). And to meet such ambitions, brokers confound expectations of favoritism based on shared religion and ethnicity, instead aiming to develop a diverse client base towards growing and cementing their reputations. As well, and perhaps unsurprisingly, this study finds that trust between brokers and clients is found to have little to do with shared religious identity (ibid: 11). Partisan loyalties however, i.e., membership in political parties, emerge as strong predictors driving brokers preferences for clients (ibid: 10). 132 Given this diversity in variables impacting broker-client relationships, to understand precisely what relationships and conditions make it possible for Farooqbhai to facilitate water access in Makhtampura requires analyzing the specifics of Faroobhai’s role in relation to planning and water access. For, as Auerbach and Thachil point out, broker-client relationships of trust and (if and) how religious identity mediates them are spatially and politically contextual. They are themselves embedded within myriad other conditions such as land tenure security, resident education levels, responsiveness of local government authorities, diversity of client base, etc. (ibid: 15). In the next section, I illuminate some of these contextually specific conditions amidst which Farooqbhai’s work of brokering water access unfolds. 5.3 “Making legal” One of Farooqbhai’s key interventions towards improving water access in Makhtampura seems to be his knowledge of how to ‘make’ residents’ properties ‘legal’. This part of his role is contextualized in the fact that the planning and building of municipal water infrastructure in Ahmedabad is tied to the building of roads carrying trunk infrastructure and the acquisition of plots of land to build WDSs (chapter 3). As mentioned throughout the dissertation, the rapid construction of dense neighbourhoods under diverse illegal conditions following 2002 in many parts of Makhtampura has complicated this process of building roads, trunk infrastructure, and WDSs. The neighbourhoods so built are legally aberrant across scales. These aberrations include: (a) unauthorized extensions built on legal, authorized buildings, (b) constructions built without necessary building permissions, (c) constructions on lands with contested property ownership, and (d) constructions in areas not zoned for development. Owners, occupiers, and users of these diverse unauthorized constructions contest the building of wide municipal roads, fearing that municipal road building will entail demolition of (parts of) their properties without compensation. Ward engineers told me that fears relating to such demolitions are amplified in Makhtampura and Sarkhej, on account of the religious identity of residents. In the words of these officers, any attempt by ward officials at building roads for trunk infrastructure “could turn into communal violence” because of people’s fear of demolitions. 133 On the one hand, this invocation of the possibility of violence by ward engineers is premised in a wider perception among AMC officials that working in the city’s Muslim areas is “dangerous”. Working or living close to the city’s Muslim community is widely considered “a hazard” by non-Muslims (Chapter 3). And while I show in that chapter how this sentiment creeps into popular narratives of the city’s non-Muslims (ibid), it has also found its way into legal documents. Consider for instance, an appeal made in 2015 by the city’s zonal71 engineers to the Corporation regarding the provision of municipal water and drainage connections in Sarkhej and Makhtampura. The appeal begins by describing how, amidst the lack of legal access to municipal water and drainage infrastructure, residents in these wards have built illegal connections to existing networks. Any attempt by AMC engineers to cut such connections, the appeal says, is met with aggression from residents. “The staff is also continuously worried about several anti-social elements,” it reports, and as a result, illegal connections cannot be cut. The appeal then explores the possibility of cutting illegal connections with police protection. But given that the staff must visit the field often to attend to complaints, it deems police protection every time unlikely. The appeal concludes with the concern that the staff could end up being subjected to the anger of residents, leading to “bodily injuries or their lives being threatened.” Echoing the fears voiced by the appeal, ward engineers I spoke to reminded me of the frequent violent clashes that erupt in Makhtampura and Sarkhej between municipal workers, residents, police officers, and political leaders72. Fears of “bodily injuries” while cutting illegal water connections stated by municipal officers stem from their experiences of clashes with residents while demolishing illegal constructions in Makhtampura73. These demolitions in turn are tied to legalities and contestations over land and construction in the area (refer to section 3.5 71 The city of Ahmedabad is divided into 6 administrative zones, each of which has a number of wards under it. Sarkhej and Makhtampur wards fall under the New West Zone 72 For one reports on such a clash, see https://www.indiatoday.in/india/story/juhapura-ahmedabad-demolition-drive-congress-muslim-protest-246262-2015-03-29 73 The demolition of one such construction in late 2020 as documented by news media and can be viewed at https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=WeA14_3wFUg 134 for more). Residents’ responses to municipal actions are triggered at once by mistrust in planning authorities and the association of such actions with a discriminatory, majoritarian regime. For instance, consider the following statements by residents of one neighbourhood where reportedly building extensions on roads have delayed the building of municipal roads and the laying of water lines: “the corporation doesn’t tell us anything. When construction is happening, they don’t do anything. What do we know when we buy houses? And then suddenly they come and demolish. Because this is a Muslim area. Are there no illegal constructions in Hindu areas? Then why don’t (they) demolish there?” “The corporation just comes and demolishes. That’s what they do in other Muslim areas. And then where will we go? So when they come to demolish, of course we will riot.” - Makhtampura residents, interviews, Jan 2017 This statement underscores my key insight from chapter 3: that discourses of ‘illegality’ have reified ‘religious difference’ and ‘segregation’ in Ahmedabad. And municipal officers – engineers and planners – seem to be seen as central to the workings of a discriminatory state. Amidst this, any action by planning authorities against illegalities of any kind are met with aggression. Equally, the possibility of violence between residents and municipal officers over demolitions in Makhtampura is also “a political problem”, Farooqbhai told me. It becomes grounds for fights between political leaders, planners and engineers, and bureaucratic authorities, he emphasized. Farooqbhai’s assertions echo Mahadevia and Desai’s analysis (2019: 185) of the right-wing political party in Ahmedabad increasingly wooing Muslim votes, and demolitions in large Muslim areas attracting “bad press” and contradicting this political interest. It is this landscape of fear and mistrust – the fear of violence perceived by municipal officers and the mistrust towards planning authorities as well as a discriminatory state felt by residents – that renders Farooqbhai’s role so important. His role as an agent, advisor, counselor is contextualized by the fear non-Muslim AMC workers feel regarding working in Makhtampura, 135 and the mistrust residents of Makhtampura feel about their properties getting demolished in ways not acceptable to them. In cases where unauthorized building extensions on legal constructions obstruct the laying of roads for water lines and acquisition of plots for WDSs, Farooqbhai shares TPS details with residents and users, explains the benefits they would experience once the material infrastructure is built, and in many cases convinces them to demolish parts of their own properties. Farooqbhai told me how he had even convinced a mosque trust to tear down parts of its claimed property based on the material benefits he promised they would reap in terms of improved access to water and drainage, as well as increased property values, if a municipal road was built along its front. It is such mediations that Farooqbhai refers to when he speaks of “property regularization”. But more importantly, in his words, this nature of property regularization is also the process of making property legal: “When we demolish unauthorized parts, then our property becomes legal right? So I explain this to people. That once you demolish these parts and municipality starts giving you water, then your property will become legal. Now of course people want their property to be legal. So I tell them how they can make their property legal.” - Farooqbhai, interview, January 2019 Technically of course this blanket claim – of making all kinds of property legal simply by demolishing certain parts – is disputable. For whether this happens or not depends on individual building illegalities involved. But nevertheless, this is how Farooqbhai positions his services. And presumably, given how categories like illegality have frustrated water access in the area over the years, this notion of their property becoming legal through a (relatively) simple act might be attractive for some residents. As indeed, this resident who had recently demolished a small part of his front yard based on Farooqbhai’s recommendations seems to suggest: “If by demolishing one part, our property also becomes legal and water also comes, then it is good only. And then instead of the corporation demolishing, we can only demolish right? Corporation might be good, but still some fear remains (about them). Then Farooqbhai showed 136 me the TPS plan and told me that the road will be built like this. Farooqbhai also lives here only. He has also experienced struggles like us. And he also understands property matters. We trust him. So we demolished as per his advice.” - Makhtampura resident, interview, February 2019 In offering these details, this resident explicitly associates Farooqbhai being a local resident with being trustworthy. Additionally, since Makhtampura is predominantly Muslim and has much illegal construction, the dual struggle that these two aspects bring seems to be an implicit marker of identification and trust. Finally, Farooqbhai’s knowledge of “property matters” shapes residents’ responses to (and compliance with) his advice. Other cases include buildings constructed without formal permissions where residents often do not have institutionally acceptable paperwork to prove the existence of the building they reside in: paperwork that municipal officers ubiquitously refer to as “proofs”. Specifically, such proof entails the property tax bills and receipts issued by the corporation. Again, as I describe in chapter 3 (section 3.5), in Ahmedabad, property tax assessment and payment, as well as the provision of municipal water and drainage, have been delinked from tenure status. Even properties categorized as illegal are required to pay property taxes, and in turn they can rightfully demand access to municipal water, as long as they furnish property tax payment proof. But getting properties assessed for tax payments is a complex and time-consuming process. It requires familiarity with the technicalities invoked in property tax assessment, as well as the skill and confidence to negotiate over technicalities with municipal officers. Consider for instance, the equation set up by the AMC for property tax assessment: “General Tax = Carpet Area (sq.mts.) x Rate74 x F1 (location factor) x F2 (age factor) x F3 (usage factor) x F4 (occupancy factor)”75. 74 Different “rates” are prescribed by the AMC for only two categories: residential and commercial. This limited prescription of rates in itself can be problematic, since many people use their homes for work, their workplaces to house their workers, and so on. 75 Available for public reference at the AMC website: https://ahmedabadcity.gov.in/portal/jsp/Static_pages/assessment__tax_static.jsp. 137 Establishing the value of each parameter constituting this equation – F1, F2, F3, and F4 – is a complex task. For instance, the value of the “location factor” is determined by whether the building is to be categorized as being part of a “posh area”, “good area”, “medium area”, or “poor area”. Laying claim to any of these values/categories depends not only on how knowledgeable the claimant/resident is about urban development in the city, but also on their negotiation skills. In other words, these values can be rationalized in myriad ways and are negotiable. The value thus decided in turn determines the property tax residents need to pay. For ordinary residents, such complex negotiations are daunting. Often unfamiliar with and suspicious of bureaucratic processes and paperwork, Makhtampura’s residents are additionally also worried about not receiving water even after getting their property taxes assessed and paying them regularly. One woman from Faizalpur for instance had this to say about not getting her property taxes assessed: “So many people here pay tax. But have they got water yet? Then why should I pay? The corporation just wants to take money and not give facilities. Is there a guarantee that I will get water?” - Interview, Makhtampura resident, May 2019 In the absence of a trusted advisor/agent/broker then, residents often choose to avoid registering for property tax assessments. But in the absence of property tax assessments, the AMC does not provide municipal water. It is precisely this technically and politically contested landscape that renders Farooqbhai’s role as water broker so important. He counsels residents to get their properties assessed for tax payment, convinces them that the AMC will not use the information they provide only for property tax purposes, fills out forms, and negotiates assessment rates between municipal authorities and residents. He cites examples of other residents who started getting water after starting to pay property taxes. It is these mediations and tasks that he refers to when he lists “property tax” work as one of his key roles. When residents default on the payment of property taxes, he visits them, inquires after their reason for defaulting, counsels them to pay up, and follows up until the taxes have been collected. These tasks fall under his role of “tax ki vasooli”, i.e., tax collection. For carrying out these works, Farooqbhai 138 charges a consultancy fee76 from the residents. The residents receive municipal water, streetlights, etc. as a result of filed property taxes and regularized properties. In turn, the residents’ trust in Farooqbhai’s abilities is deepened. Residents registering as property tax payees and regularly paying assessed taxes is crucial information and resource for the AMC to continue and expand their water and drainage networks. Ward officials needing assistance on property tax assessments, collections, or demolition of ‘encroachments’ so as to then build roads, lay water lines, and more, call upon Farooqbhai and give him details of aberrant properties. Acting on this information, Farooqbhai approaches residents, alerts them to the corporation’s message, advises them to get their taxes assessed and paid, properties ‘regularized’, helps them with relevant paperwork, and so on. His reward from the corporation is not in the form of direct payments, but instead, in the form of a steady stream of work. Through his various tasks then, Farooqbhai facilitates the implementation of technical plans for the AMC, and in doing so, makes access to water possible. In doing so, he was – and is – a key relational infrastructure of water access for Makhtampura. Returning then to Farooqbhai’s association of being local and Muslim and being able to improve water access that I began this chapter with, perhaps that association can be explained through the details of his role offered above. Perhaps, and as the residents cited in this section suggest, being a minority group that has experienced decades of systemic discrimination and physical violence, Ahmedabad’s Muslim community is less trusting of government authorities (planners and engineers in particular), who at once symbolize the Hindu majority and a discriminatory state. This might explain residents’ trust in Farooqbhai, a long-time Muslim resident of Makhtampura, who is conversant with bureaucratic paperwork that makes access to water possible in Ahmedabad and is yet not officially part of a state institution but has connections with municipal officers. 76 These fees are not to be confused with bribes. Bribes are unofficial payments made to officials to get them to do the work they are supposed to do anyway, and for which they get paid officially. Farooqbhai does not get paid for this work by anyone else. He offers his services to people for a price, just like any other professional would. 139 But, as highlighted in the introduction, this straightforward association between trust, religious identity, and brokers’ ability to get work done is destabilized by findings from elsewhere (Auerbach and Thachil 2019). Instead, partisan loyalties are known for shaping broker-client relations (ibid) as well as for influencing the ability of a broker to get work done (Berenschot, 2014) in important ways. To examine whether and how partisan loyalties influence the ability of brokers to improve water access, and to locate the role of trust and religious identity in mediating the ability of brokers who are also elected political leaders, I turn next to Aadilbhai. Aadilbhai is a veteran Congress leader from Makhtampura, currently a municipal councilor, who residents, NGO workers, and municipal officers recount as an important figure in improving access to water here. Through the section below, I examine the relationships and practices through which Aadilbhai has been able to make water flow through his ward, attending to whether and how his partisan loyalties, religious identity and trust (interact to) shape his ability of improving water access. 5.4 The contradictory role of partisan loyalties In March 2019 I accompanied Aadilbhai on a walk through a neighbourhood called Waydanagar77 in southern Makhtampura. With summer and Ramzaan both approaching, Aadilbhai wanted to check on the frequency, quantity and quality of water being supplied to this area through tankers. Waydanagar being adjacent to Faizalpur (chapter 4), I tagged along. On the way there, Aadilbhai complained about backpain, saying the doctor had advised bedrest. He followed this quickly with justifications on choosing to be out on the field despite medical advice through a rhetorical question: “When (I) know how much work is there, how to sit at home?” As we walked along the dusty, uneven roads of the neighbourhood, people flocked around him, some requesting, others angrily demanding, water lines. Fielding questions with expert ambiguity, he addressed most concerns, some patiently, others less so. He found out what he wanted to about the frequency, quantity, and quality of tanker water being supplied, pacified 77 Name changed 140 people with assertions like, “I am working on it. Rest assured! Water will come soon. Inshallah78” and we walked on. He seemed to sense my question: when will water really come here. But before I could ask, he turned to me and said: “what else can be said? It will take the time it takes. But I have to at least give them hope no? They know (me). They trust (me). They see that I have brought water in other areas. When the system takes time, they get angry and lose hope. So it is very important that I be in touch with them regularly (and) reassure them. Otherwise they will lose trust (in me)! This is why, even if the back hurts, (I) must come (to check on them).” - Aadilbhai, interview, March 2019 Aadilbhai has worked on improving water access in Makhtampura for almost two decades. And he has done so in myriad ways, ranging from filing Public Interest Litigations (PILs) at the High Court, to leading public protests against the corporation. His efforts have led to improved water access in the area, but not fast enough for trust relations between him and the residents to be premised primarily on his ability to achieve outcomes. For instance, he first filed a PIL demanding water and drainage connections in the area in 2002. But municipal infrastructure started being constructed here only a decade later, and water first started flowing to select neighbourhoods in Makhtampura only in 2016. Many neighbourhoods continue to lack reliable water access. He has been able to improve water access in the ward, but only very slowly. Given this, he argues that if he doesn’t frequently visit and reassure residents who lack secure access to water, they would also lose trust in him. Additionally, he tells me, delays in improving water access might lead residents to also lose patience and become aggressive, risking damage (even if inadvertent) to the little progress made. As such, Aadilbhai holds up acts of selfless service – visiting people to reassure them frequently despite significant bodily discomfort and despite recognizing that in reality water will take time to come – as crucial to his work of facilitating water access. He seems to imply that for maintaining trust relations, 78 An exclamation often used in exchanges within the Muslim community, meaning “if Allah wills it”. 141 demonstrating benevolence through actions that embody selflessness is important, especially when his ability to achieve outcomes might be considered questionable. But while he explicitly emphasizes acts that would be perceived by residents as selfless service, his assertions also bring into relief how he himself ties his trustworthiness only tenuously to his ability to improve water access. Residents of Makhtampura seem to share Aadilbhai’s perception. One elderly resident of Waydanagar who I spoke to described Aadilbhai’s ability and benevolence as follows: “Aadilbhai grew up before my eyes. He was an absolutely ordinary man. He has faced many struggles. But he did a lot of social work. He has been working hard for 15-20 years to improve this area… But he is a Congress corporator. The speed with which BJP corporators get work done, he can’t. Because if they (BJP corporators) allow them (Congress corporators) to get so much importance, their (BJP) vote bank gets affected.” - Resident man, Waydanagar, Interview, November 2016 This view, of Aadilbhai’s ability to achieve outcomes being constrained by his partisan loyalties, was also echoed by some other residents and NGO workers of Makhtampura. Regionally and nationally, the Muslim community remains predominantly loyal to the Congress party (Lokniti, 2019), a historical trend that is linked to the ruling party BJP’s agenda of Hindu nationalism. While the BJP is in power nationally and in Ahmedabad, the Congress party’s power is understood for being in rapid decline (Rai and Kumar, 2017). In this complex landscape of fraught politics and votebanks divided for the most part along the lines of religion, Makhtampura’s residents linking Aadilbhai’s partisanship with a limited ability in achieving outcomes is not surprising. When contextualized against this wider political landscape, Aadilbhai’s emphasis on acts of selflessness take on additional significance. He hopes that his frequent acts of benevolence will be reminders for residents about who to vote for in future elections. In his words: “Only if we labour like this will people remember who to vote for at the time of elections.” - Aadilbhai, interview, May 2019 142 This part of Aadilbhai’s story complicates any neat location of religious identity and trust in broker-client relations. His formative history of being a local, ordinary man, committed to social work seems to imbue benevolence in him. Being Muslim, coming from a poor family, and having demonstrated care over time through “social work” imbue trustworthiness in Aadilbhai for the residents of Makhtampura. But his partisan loyalties, linked closely to his religious identity, seem to cast doubts in residents’ minds over his ability to make water flow. In trust relations between water brokers and clients then, religious identity might at once have contrasting impacts on perceptions of benevolence and ability. 5.5 “Our people are like that only” While Aadilbhai negotiates popular perceptions concerning his ability to make water flow through acts that he believes demonstrate selflessness, many residents respond to his benevolence with indifference, doubt, and resistance. In Waydanagar for instance, on the one hand residents are not confident that Congress party politicians such as Aadilbhai will deliver on their promises. As a result, residents often do not put in the work Aadilbhai asks them to. For instance, they ignore his appeals to sign and submit applications for water lines that he can forward to municipal officers. When Aadilbhai demonstrates his commitment to serve them by drafting and hand-writing applications and distributing them through the area for residents’ signatures, the residents respond by saying: “What applications? How many times to make applications? Just take us all to the municipality and we will tell them ourselves.” - Waydanagar resident, January 2020 143 Figure 5.1: Handwritten request for municipal water lines. Source: Vrushti Mawani, Jan 2020 But additionally, even when they (grudgingly) acknowledge that Aadilbhai can bring water services through other parts of Makhtampura, residents view his actions and efforts as self-serving. For instance, a woman resident from Waydanagar suggested that Aadilbhai’s action of circulating handwritten requests for water lines was just another step in his bid for political power. In her words: 144 “In other places (he) has brought water. But here (he) brings so many forms and ask us to fill (them). Then (he) tell us, “we are doing so much for you. You vote for us.” But water doesn’t come. They only care about votes.” - Waydanagar resident, interview, January 2020 Adilbhai is aware of these popular sentiments. Expressing frustration for this rejection by residents of not just his ability but also his acts of benevolence, he tells me: “See, we do the work because we have to. But the heart knows. If the community itself cares, it is a great joy to work. But what to do? Our people are like that only. When we do a rally, if they have a big problem, everyone will come out. And as soon as the problem is over, that’s it. Then no one comes out.… Then you know what they say? “You are a politician. You do it.” You idiots! We are politicians, but labouring for you!” - Aadilbhai, interview, May 2019 I press on, asking him what he means by “our people are like that only”. He clarifies that education levels are low in the area, and most people “are drowning” in everyday struggles of trying to earn a living. How are they to find the time to fill up forms, or show up at campaigns? Amidst this, he says, he does what he can. As a result, he says, working in some neighbourhoods is easier than others, also admitting that the neighbourhoods which are easier to work in might not be the neediest. While he claims that he works across neighbourhoods, regardless of class, caste, and so on, he follows this by defending his choice to focus more on some neighbourhoods and less on others: “we work for all people. (we) don’t discriminate based of caste, community, Hindu, Muslim… But where we have the support of people, our trust also sits there. Work also gets done more quickly in such places. Then we work there.” - Aadilbhai, interview, January 2020 When I ask him what sort of actions by residents indicate support (or the lack thereof), he tells me that neighbourhoods where he faces most resistance from residents are those where community leaders have their own political ambitions. These aspiring community leaders, he says, gain the favour of senior state-level politicians through acts of sycophancy (“chaaploosi”) 145 and position themselves as contenders for ward-level political power. But to do so, they also brainwash (“patti padhaate hain”) residents into being critical of Aadilbhai’s power and ability to get work done. Such subversive interventions by community leaders weaken residents’ trust in him, Aadilbhai tells me. And in extension they don’t carry out the tasks that he needs them to, to improve neighbourhood-level water access. In Waydanagar for instance, which is an entirely Muslim neighbourhood, community leaders, reportedly aspiring politicians being wooed by the BJP, have obstructed documentation (such as the filling of aforementioned requests) that Aadilbhai insists is crucial for him to demand water lines. A young woman resident told me how an older woman leader, to whom Aadilbhai had delegated the work of getting residents’ signatures on requests for water lines, had begun attending BJP rallies. Subsequently, she had also stalled the work of getting the said requests signed by residents. This sheds new light on the statement by the elderly male resident cited earlier about Aadilbhai not being able to make water flow fast enough through Makhtampura because of being a Congress leader. In his view ward-level BJP politicians obstruct the work proposed by Congress councilors to protect their votebanks. However, it might be aspiring community-level leaders who practically block the ability of brokers like Aadilbhai to make water flow. And these findings also add depth to existing understandings of how religious identity influences the distribution of electoral votes in Ahmedabad. Contrary to the popular perception that the Muslim community in Ahmedabad votes for the Congress, I found that many Muslim residents who really need water claim to be party agnostic. As the young woman from Waydanagar told me: “You came here today, you gave us water, then we will trust you. What do we care which party you are from? We only care about water.” - Waydanagar resident, interview, February 2020 Some residents thus tie their trust in a broker unequivocally in the broker’s ability to bring water services, notwithstanding the broker’s political allegiance. However, this is a landscape where the ability of influential brokers to make water flow is itself determined by the 146 political aspirations of community leaders. Equally, neighbourhoods with long-standing histories of water struggles are arguably also fertile grounds for aspiring community leaders to forge new political allegiances Further, these political aspirations of community leaders seem to be party agnostic as well. For it is not only the right-wing BJP leadership that community leaders are attracted to. Indeed, community leaders in Waydanagar who have gained favour with senior state-level Congress leaders have also obstructed Aadilbhai’s attempts at improving water access here. 5.6 Conclusions: the politics of water and trust In this chapter, I have examined the role of trust and religious identity in mediating the ability of brokers to make water flow through Makhtampura through the cases of Farooqbhai and Aadilbhai. Farooqbhai is not an elected political leader. His role as a broker is defined by the networks he has at community-levels and with municipal officers. He unequivocally ties his Muslim identity to people’s trust in him and his ability to make water flow through Makhtampura. By intervening at specific junctures in technical planning processes, he proposes that he makes existing illegalities legal to make water flow. Aadilbhai on the other hand is a veteran political leader. He insists that he works for people regardless of their religious or caste background. He ties people’s trust in him at once to the selflessness with which he has served them as well as to his proven ability to make water flow, albeit slowly. Aadilbhai’s trust relations with residents contradict Farooqbhai’s insistence that he can make water flow through Makhtampura because “I am Muslim, people trust me”. People might trust Aadilbhai in some ways because of his history of being from a poor Muslim family, being well-known among residents for his decades’ long political career, and for the “social work” that some residents say he has done in the area for over two decades. But yet his demonstrations of benevolence, given his limited ability to improve water access in neighbourhoods like Waydanagar, are not enough to retain people’s trust and support. 147 Given the resistance he faces in neighbourhoods like Waydanagar then, Aadilbhai chooses to focus on improving water access in other politically less challenging neighbourhoods. The state of water access in a neighbourhood then might not reflect broker-client trust relations in the simplistic ways that Farooqbhai suggests. Rather, neighbourhood-level influence exerted by community leaders might influence micro-dynamics of broker-client trust relations which in turn might lead brokers to attend to improving water access in a spatially uneven manner. Observably poor water access in an area might thus well be a manifestation of spatially uneven efforts by brokers to improve water access and infrastructure. Equally, I argue that trust relations between veteran brokers and residents are especially tenuous in low-income Muslim neighbourhoods like Waydanagar where discourses of illegality have rendered water access particularly unreliable. Trust between residents and brokers here is shaped by bids for political power across scales - neighbourhood, ward, constituency, and state. These bids for power in turn influence the ability of veteran brokers to make water flow through a neighbourhood. Residents in the meantime, continue to tie their trust in veteran brokers to the latter’s ability to make water access possible. Whether they actually trust or whether they term their political support as trust remains to be examined. Nevertheless, in the background, it might be clashes over political power between veteran brokers and aspiring leaders that influence whether water flows through these neighbourhoods or not. Amidst this, frequent visits to residents that Aadilbhai calls acts of selflessness and service, might have little to do with service. Instead, they likely serve the dual role of keeping checks on ever-changing neighbourhood-level power dynamics and the influence being exerted by community leaders, while also reminding residents of his presence. In extension then, and on the other hand, religious identity in neighbourhoods like Waydanagar comes into view yet again as a discursive category mediating long-standing and emerging trust relations in contrasting ways. Some, like the elderly resident from Waydanagar, conflate veteran Muslim leaders such as Aadilbhai’s long-standing partisan loyalties to the Congress party with their truncated ability to make water flow. This association is enmeshed with the imagination that Muslims are predominantly loyal to the Congress. For others however, 148 such as the aspiring community leaders described above, being a local Muslim leader might be a way to earn favour with senior political leaders and build allegiances. Such new political networks, coalescing around the Muslim identity of community leaders, might obstruct veteran brokers’ attempts to make water flow. But the persistence of uneven water access in particularly contested landscapes might actually have little to do with the religious identity of brokers. In sum, I argue through this chapter that community-level micro-dynamics influence broker-client trust relations and shape the role and ability of brokers to improve water access. These micro-dynamics pertain equally to socio-political histories and to legal-technical land status. But most importantly, they pertain to the emotions, imaginations, and consequent actions these histories and ‘statuses’ evoke among people. Trust indeed seems to be an important factor mediating the ability of brokers to improve water access, but it cannot be related to religious identity in any stable way. I suggest that for studies of water governance and planning, closer attention to how trust is managed would offer important insights on how water is managed. 149 Chapter 6: Discourses and brokerage practices: spatializing religious difference As I write this concluding chapter in October 2020, religious segregation in Ahmedabad has acquired multiple additional dimensions. The first COVID-19 cases began emerging in India in March 2020. Shortly after, on 31 March, media and political leaders started aggressively associating the spread of coronavirus in the country with a religious Muslim gathering in Delhi by an Islamic organization called the Tablighi Jamaat (Prasad, 2020). One of the milder statements included the Chief Minister of the state of Gujarat saying that “COVID spread like a forest fire when Tablighi Jamaat attendees entered Gujarat” (Pandey, 2020). What followed was familiar and heart-breaking. It led to increased verbal and physical abuse towards Muslims across India, a boycott of their businesses, and even arrests and criminal charges (Yasir, 2020; Al Saba, 2020). In Ahmedabad, which became India’s second worst coronavirus affected city by late April 2020, a high share of COVID-19 infections were reported from Muslim-dominated areas (Hirway and Mahadevia, 2020). City-based scholar-activists, not unlike politicians and media from across the country, linked this spatialization of disease at once with the Jamaat gathering in Delhi, which some Muslims from Ahmedabad had reportedly attended and contracted the disease from (ibid). Additionally, these scholars suggested that the dense, “ghettoized” nature of the city’s Muslim areas, and poor access to water and sanitation, led to an especially rapid spread of infection (ibid). Others however highlighted how the Jamaat incident had led to increased violence towards Muslims, often by workers of the ruling political party, and increased arrests of Muslims by police (Grewal, 2020). These instances served as reminders of historical patterns of Hindu-Muslim violence, infusing fear among the city’s Muslims to get themselves tested. Media reports on segregation permeating to COVID patient management through instances such as 150 Ahmedabad’s largest government COVID hospital segregating Muslim and non-Muslim patients further intensified these fears79 (Ghosh and Dabhi, 2020). In areas of Makhtampura and Sarkhej where water access was already unreliable pre-COVID, residents reported a surge in fear and anger in the early days of the outbreak80. These heated responses were unsurprising. When access to water for drinking and washing was hard to secure in the summer months of April, May, and June even in ordinary years, ensuring frequent hand washing was impossible. And without additional wash water, keeping their already vulnerable families safe from COVID was significantly more difficult. The rapid spread of the virus in the city’s Muslim areas also impacted several local leaders and activists who were at the frontlines of not just the COVID battle, but also of water security. Many of my research participants, including Aadilbhai, Farooqbhai, and three of the NGO workers who had helped me navigate my research all contracted the virus. With many of these leaders simultaneously out of action, residents’ everyday struggles for water intensified manifold. In addition, the implementation of a prolonged and strict nationwide lockdown worsened the already erratic supply of water through tankers and informal borewell operators in especially vulnerable sites like Faizalpur and Waydanagar. Tanker operators became less frequent, borewell operators even harder to track down, and visits by political leaders and municipal engineers and workers less frequent. I began the research contained in the pages of this dissertation, on the relational infrastructures of water access in Ahmedabad’s Muslim areas, much before the COVID outbreak. My research questions involved examining: (a) how religious difference influences the planning and building of urban (water) infrastructures in Ahmedabad’s Muslim areas (b) how 79 Hospital managers offered vague explanations for this, saying that it was done to ensure the “comfort” of both communities 80 My research participants gave me these details through phone conversations. In the early months of the COVID outbreak, with reports on the city’s Muslim areas being disproportionately affected, I phoned my participants to check on their health. It was during these conversations that I learnt of these new water struggles. 151 everyday water struggles are experienced across these sites, and, (c) How, and on account of what relationships, brokers improve water access across in Ahmedabad’s Muslim areas. In asking these questions, I found that uneven water access in Ahmedabad’s Muslim areas is bound up with practices of planning, but in ways not reducible to discriminatory ideas, intentions, or actions of planners. Instead, actors influencing planning and water governance from multiple institutional and spatial scales enlist discourses of ‘difference’ and ‘illegality’ to suit their own political and economic interests. Discourses of ‘illegality’ animate the influence these actors exert through technical planning processes, while the practical influence of this discursive circulation criminalizes and delegitimizes the need of the most vulnerable Muslim families. In other words, I suggest that discursive co-articulations of ‘illegality’ and ‘difference’ work their way through planning to reproduce segregation. Actors exerting authority through these discursive tactics are located in multi-scalar institutional and community settings, and across state/non-state, formal/informal, legal/illegal, and most importantly, Hindu/Muslim boundaries. Set against this backdrop, uneven water access is experienced as everyday emotional struggles which sometimes inadvertently also obstruct the implementation of technical plans meant to improve water access. While I embarked upon my research much before the COVID outbreak, my insights acquire additional gravitas considering the sudden and multiple uneven impacts of COVID-19 described above, which illustrate how uneven access to material networks in marginalized communities can intensify disproportionately and unforeseeably. COVID-19 has exposed deep-set gender, religious, racial, and caste-based biases, not just in Ahmedabad, but across the world (Sarkar, 2020; Al Saba, 2020; Honey-Roses, et al., 2020; de Haan, 2020; Pavlos, Bartlett, and Galea, 2020). In divided geographies shaped by such biases, tenuous infrastructural arrangements crumble easily in times of added stress. In this context of intensifying inequalities, this dissertation is a call for planning research to critically interrogate how discourses of religious difference and illegality intersect to reproduce uneven access to land and resources. It also urges that planning attend to how multi-scalar brokerage practices of actors across religious divides 152 impact the formulation, implementation, facilitation, and obstruction of plans meant to improve water access in Indian cities. The rest of this chapter is organized as follows: First, I summarize insights from my research against the three questions listed above, calling into conversation arguments from relevant bodies of literature (sections 6.1 – 6.3). I clarify within these sections how my work draws from, builds on, or amplifies existing understandings. Next, I discuss implications of my insights for planning research (section 6.4). I conclude the chapter, and this dissertation, with a note on how my research contributes to scholarship in the fields of feminist political ecology and critical urban studies (section 6.5). 6.1 Religious difference, infrastructure politics, and ‘illegality’ I have traced through this research how ‘religious difference’ - discursively and practically - mediates knowledge and power influencing the formulation and implementation of technical plans for improving water access. To do so, I examined the interests of, and relationships between, actors mediating the planning and building of material water infrastructures. My insights in this regard are across two registers: (a) the role of ‘illegality’, and (b) complicating tidy notions regarding the role of religious difference. 6.1.1 On ‘illegality’ The first cross-cutting insight emerging from my inquiry is that ‘illegality’ is a key discursive category mediating everyday water access in segregated Ahmedabad. In chapter 3, I show how engineers and planners employ the rhetoric of increased illegal constructions post-2002 in the city’s Muslim areas to explain away the uneven implementation of infrastructure plans for improving water access. In turn, the impossibility of implementing plans has become a widely circulated explanation for visibly unmapped water access. But my evidence shows that challenges in implementing infrastructure plans in Makhtampura can be traced instead to routine negotiations held by legal land-owners and builders with planning authorities: negotiations through which builders try to protect their myriad social, political, and 153 economic interests. The repeated emphasis on “illegality” by engineers and planners to describe this area then becomes a way to treat the ward. Premising the impossibility of planning and thus of supplying municipal water in illegality delegitimizes the needs of families that had to resort to living in illegal housing in Makhtampura. Equally, this discursive tactic obscures the micro-politics that in reality animate municipal infrastructure building in Makhtampura and allows selective planning and uneven water governance to persist unchallenged. In chapter 4, I add further depth to this understanding by illustrating the discursive and practical roles of ‘illegality’ in shaping persistent everyday water struggles. I show how the settlement of poor Muslim families in Faizalpur post-2002 is inseparable from the (il)legal status of this land. Yet, while the legal-technical specificity of this neighbourhood, i.e., its zoning status, prohibits the building of municipal water networks here, a municipal borewell has been built in Faizalpur based on requests foregrounding the enduring everyday water struggles of residents. This case shows how carefully framed requests can make municipal water infrastructure possible even in areas where such infrastructure might legally be prohibited. The careful-ness of such requests lies in skirting issues pertaining to (il)legality, instead activating other discursive categories, such as ‘humanitarian’ need: categories that possesses the moral power to outweigh legal and technical arguments (section 4.4). I suggest through this part of my analysis that categories like ‘legal/illegal’ do not really determine what happens; instead, they are part of the discursive landscape of explanations and narrations that reproduce persistent water struggles. These findings lend important nuance to calls by water justice scholars to challenge “distributional assumptions and consequences” (Roth et al., 2018: 43). The case of Faizalpur suggests instead that challenging foundational distributional assumptions in contested geographies might, counter-intuitively, obstruct water justice. Instead, careful selectivity might be the only way for real-time water justice endeavors to succeed. Further, given how central ‘illegality’ is – discursively and practically – to persistent everyday water struggles, it is not surprising that water brokers also employ discourses of (il)legality to further their political and economic interests. In chapter 5, I recount how some brokers position their services for improving water access by highlighting their knowledge of 154 ‘making’ properties ‘legal’. The planning and building of municipal water networks in Ahmedabad is tied to building roads that can carry trunk infrastructure. In the city’s Muslim areas, dense neighbourhoods constructed under diverse conditions of illegality since 2002 have complicated this process. Engineers and planners premise impossibilities of building water networks in these varied illegalities. As well, actions by these officials (regarded by residents as part of a discriminatory state) against illegal constructions and connections encounter residents’ suspicion and aggression. In this context of widespread mistrust, residents seek out water brokers who proffer the knowledge of tackling persistent problems that tie back to ‘illegality’ (section 5.3). My findings on how multi-scalar discourses of ‘illegality’ mediate water access build on existing understandings of informality in water governance in southern cities. Specifically, I offer empirical texture to existing studies on practices (cf. Kooy, 2014) and actors (Ranganathan, 2014; Anand, 2017; Bjorkman, 2018) that shape informality in urban water supply. Michelle Kooy suggests that, “informality in the urban water supply sector can been understood not as a failure of the state, technology, or development to achieve the urban infrastructural ideal, but rather as a particular mode of urban development that is reliant on, and productive of, a range of informal practices in urban water supply.” (2014: 36). The accounts I offer through this dissertation are together an example of such a range of informal practices animated in diverse ways by discourses of illegality. Informality in my study sites can be traced in the selective (de)activation of categories while requesting municipal water infrastructure in areas legally not entitled to it. Just as well, it can be located in practices of water brokers carrying (misleading) promises of ‘making’ property ‘legal’. Further, I deepen existing understandings on how different kinds of actors intervening in urban water supply systems across scales employ discursive tactics of illegality. Malini Ranganathan suggests that informal actors influencing water governance are often found exerting authority by “mimicking… formal governmental rationalities, technologies and discourses” (2014: 94). My data amplifies her assertion and shows that discourses of illegality constitute an important governmental rationality and discourse mimicked by informal actors. 155 These insights on the multi-scalar role of ‘illegality’ – across community and institutional settings – in mediating water access also bear direct implications for planning research which I discuss later (section 6.4). 6.1.2 Complicating tidy notions on the role of religious difference The second key insight emerging from my study is that water access in my Ahmedabad’s Muslim areas is shaped by diverse actors and interests not neatly separable by religious identity. On the one hand, I show through chapters 3 and 5 how water access in Ahmedabad’s Muslim areas is bound up in technical planning processes which in turn are shaped by the interests of actors located across state/non-state, formal/informal, legal/illegal, and most importantly, Hindu/Muslim boundaries. In chapter 3, we see that while the Hindu builder’s negotiations with planning authorities shaped uneven water access in Makhtampura, contestations by Muslim builders meant the persistence of inadequate water access (section 3.5). While the Hindu builder’s actions were animated by discourses of ‘religious difference’, his actions came across as premised in how his economic (property) interests would be impacted by proximity to the ‘minority community’. The Muslim builder’s actions were from the outset located firmly in protecting his real estate value. This account then illustrates how class interests across religious divides mediate the planning and building of water infrastructures. It emphasizes the need to disentangle religious identity from interests and actions that facilitate or obstruct access to water. On the other hand, my evidence in chapter 5 shows how political partisanship and religious identity impact broker-client trust relations and in turn influence water access in contradictory, unforeseeable and unstable ways (section 5.4). In segregated contexts like Ahmedabad, partisan loyalties of brokers, linked closely with their religious identity, have contrasting impacts on residents’ perceptions of their ability to make water flow. This part of my research then highlights that at the scale of the community, religious identity interacts with partisan loyalties to influence infrastructure politics in ways that complicate tidy imaginations of Hindu-Muslim relations. 156 Taken together, the findings I have presented in chapters 3 and 5 demonstrate that interests influencing the reproduction of uneven material networks in divided cities are not aligned along religious divides alone. Instead, I suggest, uneven water access in segregated contexts might result from discursive co-articulations of ‘illegality’ and ‘religious difference’: co-articulations that in Ahmedabad are driven at one level by class interests of Hindu and Muslim real-estate developers, and at another level by complex party politics. These insights carry important implications for how water governance in segregated cities is understood and theorized. In divided cities, markers of difference like ‘race’ and ‘class’ are often taken as “static categories, instead of as social relations” ignoring the fact that the reproduction of these categories is itself historically and spatially contingent (Pulido, Sidawi, and Vos, 1996: 420). However, identifying, analyzing and explaining resource governance and justice in divided geographies without probing taken-for-granted assumptions – such as neat imaginations of the Hindu-Muslim divide – is deeply problematic (Pulido, 1996). It occludes a grounded understanding of how religious, racial, ethnic, caste-based, gender-based differences (even though these are all themselves socially constructed) come together with other socio-political and economic forces to constitute oppressive situations. Instead, paraphrasing Pulido (ibid: 144), grasping water governance in divided cities more meaningfully requires that we deconstruct discourses and assumptions constituting monolithic understandings of majority-minority relations. My evidence on religious difference and infrastructure politics also draws on and deepens scholarship on the spatialization of religious, ethnic, and racial differences globally (Yiftachel, 2006a; AlSayyad and Massoumi, 2011; Bollens, 2012) and within India (Appadurai, 2000; Breman, 2002; Mahadevia, 2002; Desai, 2011). By inquiring into the politics of planning and building water infrastructures in Ahmedabad’s Muslim areas, I offer an example of how religious difference acquires material form in India (Appadurai, 2000; Breman, 2002; Mahadevia, 2002; Desai, 2011). Scholarship on the spatialization of difference has illuminated how majoritarian groups exert control over land and resources (Yiftachel, 2006b, 2009; Appadurai, 2000), and how religious organizations at times fill the gap when the state does not provide basic services 157 (Harb, 2011; Giovannini, 2011). Much of this work presents neat divides between majority and minority groups, insofar as their interests regarding, and actions towards, each other are concerned. I add to this literature by showing that majority and minority groups have heterogeneous interests and ideals even within themselves that do not tidily follow the confines of religious identity. 6.2 Segregation as emotionally experienced through everyday struggles over water This finding emerges from a synthesis of the analysis presented in chapters 4 and 5. Segregation is experienced not only physically, but also emotionally, by residents as everyday struggles over accessing water, and by brokers as everyday labours of improving access to water. 6.2.1 Lived realities of residents My findings in chapter 4 are an example of how everyday water struggles are emotionally experienced by the residents of Faizalpur. Through this part of my work, I respond to calls by feminist political ecologists for greater attention to everyday experiences of water struggles, and to emotions embodied as a result of these struggles (Sultana, 2011, 2015, 2020; Harris, 2015; Nightingale, 2011; Truelove, 2011, 2019). I take seriously suggestions for tracing the embeddedness of neighbourhood-level water struggles across national, regional and community scales, and for making visible how these patterns “unequally shape the experience of water and its governance at the bodily scale” (Truelove, 2019: 2). I show how Faizalpur’s settlement as a low-income Muslim area and the lived realities of residents’ water access are intertwined with the legal and technical contestations over land-use zoning that besiege the site (section 4.3). As material experiences, these lived realities entail enduring struggles around rapidly falling groundwater levels, ever-deepened illegal borewells that ‘fail’, visible municipal borewells that do not give water, conspicuously absent water lines, everyday negotiations with neighbours on pumps, water pressure, tanker timings, queues for fetching, and not being able to bathe or wash for days. Emotionally, these struggles are experienced as anger and helplessness when agreed-upon norms of sharing water at neighbourhood level are not followed; as anxiety and fear while 158 paying for informal water connections in the absence of municipal connections; as grief when monies so invested are lost. They are embodied through the physical pain that accompanies fetching buckets full of water from tankers in peak summer while fasting for Ramzan. For older women and women with health issues, such embodied experiences involve drawing strength from their prayers to bear bodily suffering to meet their families’ water needs. These everyday emotionally experienced water struggles of Faizalpur’s residents are deeply intertwined with the settlement of low-income Muslim families here as segregation deepened in Ahmedabad post 2002. Given this, I suggest that emotionally experienced everyday water struggles, in the form of anger, trust, fear, grief, etc., need to be understood as emotional everyday experiences of religious segregation. 6.2.2 Emotional work of brokering water access In addition to residents’ everyday water struggles being emotional experiences, a closer look at the everyday dynamics of brokering water access recounted in chapter 5 reveals that the work of water brokers is intensely emotional as well. Waydanagar’s residents refusing to comply with Aadilbhai’s requests to submit applications for water lines and Aadilbhai’s frustrated response – “our people are like that only” – is one example (section 5.5). Statements by residents of Waydanagar and Aadilbhai linking the latter’s efforts to improve water access with his partisan loyalties and political motivations (ibid) is another example. Some Waydanagar residents label Aadilbhai’s efforts to improve water networks in as ineffective and tokenistic; meant to serve his political interests of claiming and retaining votes. Others associate his partisan loyalty to the Congress with a limited ability to get work done (section 5.4). Yet, Aadilbhai continues to work on improving water access because – in his words – he wants people to vote for him. But he also expresses anger and resignation over these exchanges and describes how they impact his decision-making over which neighbourhoods to prioritize. These exchanges are firmly contextualized in brokers’ everyday efforts of improving water access. And while residents’ narratives indicate their understanding of political dynamics, it cannot be ignored that these exchanges are emotional experiences for brokers. 159 The emotional work of brokering water access can also be read in data presented in chapter 4. The introductory vignette in that chapter, capturing arguments between the municipal councilor and Faizalpur’s women residents, is one example. While I offer details on how this fight, and others, over accessing water are emotionally experienced water struggles for women residents, it is important to see that such exchanges are also emotional experiences for brokers. Furthermore, popular opinion of political interests and partisanship are entangled with religious identity across India, and in segregated Ahmedabad, are also spatialized (section 5.4). It is in this context then that brokers’ emotional experiences of facilitating water access for Ahmedabad’s Muslim areas need to be seen as emotional experiences of segregation. 6.3 Water brokers as relational infrastructures of trust My third overarching insight pertains to how trust relations between water brokers and residents shape community-level water access. Studying how brokers intervene in planning processes to improve water access in Ahmedabad’s Muslim areas helps us understand broker-resident trust relations at two intersecting yet distinct scales: first, as mediated in diverse and sometimes contradictory ways by brokers’ religious identity and political partisanship; and second, as impacted by bids for power by other community leaders. My evidence suggests that religious identity and partisan loyalties interact to shape broker-client trust relations, and in extension, the ability of brokers to improve water access, but not always in conventionally imagined ways. In segregated cities like Ahmedabad, the role of religious identity in shaping trust relations between brokers and residents is often conceived as follows: a minority group that has experienced decades of violence and systemic discrimination is less trusting of government authorities who at once symbolize the majority community and a discriminatory state. Such a group might trust a broker who shares their religious identity. However, I found instead that this relationship is far more complex. On the one hand, trust relations between brokers and clients in divided geographies might be premised in the discursive tactics (such as ‘illegality’) reproducing segregation in the first place. Farooqbhai’s purported knowledge in ‘making’ properties ‘legal’, and Makhtampura’s residents citing this 160 ability as a reason to trust Farooqbhai (section 5.3) is an explicit example of this dynamic. While Farooqbhai’s role description is not technically accurate, with the wider tenure context of Makhtampura being that of ‘illegality’ which in turn has reproduced the ‘segregated’ ‘Muslim’ identity of residents, his touted ability of ‘making legal’ acquires purchase among residents. On the other hand, given how religious identity and political partisanship (are thought to) intersect in Ahmedabad, a broker’s Muslim identity might signal an inability to get work done and might negatively impact trust between brokers and residents (section 5.4). These findings reinforce my earlier insight: that religious identity in itself might directly have little to do with the ability of brokers to make water flow. Additionally, Aadilbhai’s case also highlights how community-level micro-dynamics in the form of bids for power by community leaders influence trust relations between veteran brokers and residents, and in turn the ability of brokers to make water flow (section 5.5). Community leaders aspiring for ward-level political power often subvert the efforts of veteran brokers to improve water access by mediating trust between brokers and residents. And a closer look at interactions at this scale complicates understandings of trust between brokers and residents vis-à-vis brokers’ partisan allegiances. Residents associate their trust in a broker with the broker’s ability to bring water services, notwithstanding a broker’s political allegiance. Reflecting this sentiment perhaps, political aspirations of community leaders seem to be party agnostic as well. For example, Aadilbhai’s efforts at improving water access in Waydanagar are subverted by Muslim community leaders attracted to the right-wing BJP, as well as community leaders who have gained favour with senior state-level Congress leaders. This analysis deepens the finding presented earlier on how political partisanship and religious identity interact to shape broker-residents’ trust relations. On the one hand, residents might see a veteran Muslim broker’s membership in the Congress party in a BJP-ruled state as a limited ability to get work done. On the other hand, community leaders vying for political power with various parties, including the Congress, disrupt trust relations between veteran brokers and residents. In both cases, the result is that residents do not take seriously requests by veteran brokers to carry out community-level tasks that would facilitate the building of water networks. These dynamics in turn might lead veteran brokers to focus their attention on improving water access in uneven ways. Persistently 161 poor water access in contested Muslim areas then might be suggestive of spatially uneven efforts by veteran leaders to work in politically less challenging neighbourhoods. Through these insights, I contribute to the growing body of work on the role of religious identity in shaping broker-client trust relations and the spatial implications of these dynamics. Specifically, my findings offer implications across two key registers: for studies on brokers and mediation; and, for examining spatial and infrastructural unevenness. Broker-client trust relations and religious identity have been highlighted by recent literature as important factors mediating the ability of brokers to get work done (Björkman, 2021; Auerbach and Thachil, 2018, 2019). Auerbach and Thachil (2018, 2019) have found that religious identity impacts broker-client relations in diverse ways. While clients might prefer brokers who share their religious identity, brokers are found to be indifferent to religion, choosing instead to reinforce popular perceptions of being equally accessible to all and thereby improve their reputations of being ‘effective’ (Auerbach and Thachil, 2018, 2019). Responding to Auerbach and Thachil’s call “to spark a research agenda on the determinants of client preferences for informal leaders across varied national and local contexts” (2018: 776), I offer an ethnographic account of how trust and religious identity interact in complex ways to shape broker-client relations in divided cities. Further, these authors recognize that political partisanship and religious identity interact to influence broker-client trust relations. They highlight how slum residents discriminate against Muslim slum leaders (2018: 784) and suggest that this discrimination might stem from a combination of social prejudice as well as concerns that such leaders may face discrimination from other officials and leaders (ibid: 786). I contribute to these insights in four ways. First, the studies cited above were located in Jaipur and Bhopal, cities which are not as markedly segregated as Ahmedabad. Through my research, I show how these dynamics unfold in a more sharply divided Indian city. Second, through my accounts of conflicts between Aadilbhai and Waydanagar’s residents (section 5.5), I show how negotiations around water access and planning become sites where discrimination of residents towards Muslim brokers finds shape, even when the residents are also Muslim. Third, I make visible the role of other Muslim community leaders with political aspirations in mediating 162 how residents discriminate against veteran leaders (ibid). Fourth, I show how Muslim brokers like Farooqbhai mobilize discourses of illegality and religion – discourses upon which segregation is premised – to build trust with residents (section 5.3). In extension, my findings suggest that examining community-level trust relations, particularly between residents and brokers, are an important perspective from which segregation and uneven water access need to be probed. Trust research has focused attention primarily on organizational dynamics, and interpersonal relationships (Tomlinson et al., 2020). It has offered important insights on how various trustworthiness dimensions – benevolence, ability, integrity – impact cognition-based trust or affect-based trust (ibid). But more expansive engagement with how spatial and material contexts mediate trust relations remains missing. I have attempted to illustrate these connections somewhat through the case of Farooqbhai, but undoubtedly more work is needed in this direction. This is an avenue for further research that could be developed through an expansion of the substantive scope of trust research. Studies on trust need to critically engage with the fields such as planning, infrastructure governance, and political ecology to generate grounded insights on the enduring inequalities that characterize our cities. 6.4 Implications for planning research: on tracing segregation and brokerage My core intent through this dissertation was to locate the role of planning in spatializing religious difference. In this regard, my findings offer implications for planning research across two key registers. First, I add depth to studies linking segregation to intentional state-led planning practices, globally (Watson, 2009; Yiftachel, 2006a, 2009), as well as in India specifically (Mahadevia and Desai, 2019; cf. Roy, 2009). Second, I suggest the need for planning to develop granular accounts of how multi-scalar forms of knowledge and authority across religious divides mediate planning processes meant to improve water access in divided cities (Björkman, 2018; Anand, 2017; Ranganathan, 2014). 6.4.1 On exclusion, intentionality, and planning: the role of discourse Since over two decades ago, scholars have been asserting that planning, through its ‘dark side’, exerts social control (Yiftachel, 1998). Planning mechanisms such as eminent domain, land 163 acquisition, land use zoning, master plans, and other guidelines are conceived as strategies of exclusion directing who gets access to land and resources (Yiftachel, 2006a, 2009; Watson, 2009; Roy, 2009; Mahadevia and Desai, 2019). In Ahmedabad too, planners, engineers, residents, politicians, NGO workers, and others link exclusion to material water networks in the city’s Muslim areas to difficulties of implementing planning processes such as the TPS (sections 3.3 and 3.4). My research adds depth to this scholarship by showing that as opposed to discriminatory planning practices, it is the multi-scalar circulation of specific discursive categories that reproduces segregation. One example illustrating this pertains to the purported role of illegality (as an objective ‘out there’ type of reality) in obstructing planning versus illegality being simply a discursive multi-scalar narrative shaping and explaining what ends up happening on ground. This dissertation shows how planners and engineers resort to rhetoric on illegal constructions to explain away the challenges with implementing infrastructure planning processes such as the TPS (section 3.4). Their overwhelming reference to illegality, to quote Zanotto (2020: 106) “construct(s) reality in ways as to leave little room for questions and alternatives”. And this is important, because later we see that carefully framed requests emphasizing the ‘humanitarian’ aspects of providing water (and skirting issues of legality) succeed in getting infrastructure built even in subversion of legal statuses (section 4.4). These contrasting accounts show that planning ‘alternatives’ are possible, and already exist. But the emphasis on criminalizing discourses such as illegality obstructs access to these alternatives, let alone their implementation. For planning research, rejecting easy associations between visibly uneven water access and discriminatory planning, and instead tracing criminalizing discourses, is important because: (a) As my findings show (section 3.5), it might not be illegality obstructing the implementation of planning processes in the first place. In such a context, associating uneven water access with discriminatory planning obstructs an understanding of the real-time micro-politics that animate planning. (b) Such an approach illuminates the historical – political, institutional, cultural – constituents reproducing discourses of illegality and allows a more grounded understanding of land and resource politics. Here I follow Fairclough’s suggestion that discursive practices and 164 material realities co-construct each other (1985). For planning, this means that criminalizing discourses of illegality have themselves emerged from and been reproduced by broader historical structures (cf. Zanotto, 2020: 110). And finally, (c) Adopting such an approach helps locate more informed and strategic ways of improving water access for minority groups by de-emphasizing criminalizing discourses, instead drawing on existing alternatives that transcend constraints (such as the municipal borewell in Faizalpur). 6.4.2 On brokers and religious identity My research is an example of how processes of formulating and implementing plans in divided cities is thoroughly mediated. Overarchingly, my research is yet another example of how planning cannot be thought of as a singular, stable, pre-determined and predictable event or act (cf. Grindle and Thomas, 1991; Björkman, 2015: 14). All along the way, stretching from formulation to implementation, planning is influenced by actors with diverse interests (ibid). Others have illustrated how planning processes are entangled with economic, social, legal, and political interests of actors located across blurry state/non-state, formal/informal, and legal/illegal boundaries (Björkman, 2018; Anand, 2017; Ranganathan, 2014). I add to this work by locating how religious identity – being Hindu or Muslim – shapes the authority exerted by a broker on planning processes in ways not conventionally imagined. I found for instance that, on the one hand, Hindu and Muslim builders might obstruct planning for similar (economic) reasons, although they might employ discourses of ‘religious difference’ in different ways (section 3.5). As a result, decisions encoded in technical plans might be a culmination of intense mediations between influential state and non-state, Hindu and Muslim actors. Further, mediations driven by discourses of religious difference might indeed a powerful force influencing the implementation of plans for improving water access (ibid). Echoing Yiftachel’s description of unmapped spaces, or “gray spaces” as he calls them, uneven water access in Ahmedabad’s Muslim areas reflects how negotiations shaping planning are driven simultaneously by “logics of capital, governance and identity” (2009:93). And adding to the argument that the state enlists non-state actors in its attempts to govern (Jessop 1990), this account shows how powerful non-state actors enlist the state to protect their own interests, by 165 mobilizing discourses of religious difference. in ways that end up influencing water governance. However, such plans are simultaneously also vulnerable to other political, legal, and economic pressures, highlighting that religious difference is only one discursive category influencing planning in divided cities. On the other hand, Muslim brokers working at improving water access might encounter resistance from the community for various reasons. In this case, enduring water struggles might reflect how contestations between brokers and residents, notwithstanding their shared religious identities, impede the implementation of planning processes. Together, these findings suggest that while planning practices might well be symbolic of dominant power and interests at the time of codification, their locality-specific implementation is shaped by knowledge and authority across scales serving interests that might have been unforeseeable at the time of formulation. 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Water International, 39(2), 143-158 189 Appendices Appendix A : Question Guide for Residents 190 Appendix B : Question Guide for Brokers 191 Appendix C : Sample of Additional Individual-specific Follow-up Questions for Brokers Questions for AMC water engineers General 1. What are the various new water projects coming up in the Makhtampura-Sarkhej area? What would the command areas of these projects would be? Muskaan Garden WDS (discussed in chapter 3) 2. How has water access in Juhapura changed as a result of the Muskaan Garden water distribution station? Whose initiative was it to construct it? What were the challenges and breakthroughs through the process of constructing it? 3. How far is the network of the muskaan garden WDS spread? How much of it is operational? 4. What is the model followed for supplying water from the WDS to individual homes (municipality’s v/s household’s contribution)? Is the same distribution model followed across Ahmedabad or are there variations? 5. What has the role of the TPS been in influencing the construction of muskaan garden WDS? New water access projects 6. Two new water projects have come up in the area – one new borewell at the mir fakir jhopdi and the other next to al muqaam. Can you describe how these water projects got initiated and what is their status right now? 7. How is the planning of water access projects (for instance the new tank next to al-muqaam) done? Whose budget is used for it (local corporators? water project department?)? How is this budgeting decided? 192 Appendix D : List and Profiles of Research Participants (Brokers) Participant identity Role Neighbourhood walks 1 Resident leader 1 Key actor in facilitating the building of a common borewell in a middle-income, Muslim neighbourhood Walk 1 2 Real-estate developer 1 Developer of a middle-income, Muslim neighbourhood 3 Real-estate developer 2 Developer of a middle-income, Muslim neighbourhood 4 Activist 1 Founder of an environmental-rights' based NGO in Ahmedabad 5 NGO project officer 1 NGO officer from Samerth Walk 2 6 Water Operator 1 Operates a Water Distribution Station in Makhtampura 7 Politician 1 Muslim municipal councilor who has played an active role in shaping water access in the area since the year 2000 Walk 3 + 4 8 Engineer 1 Ward level water engineer 9 Political supporter 1 Muslim woman, previously a supporter of the Congress, now a supporter and neighbourhood-level leader of the BJP 10 Political supporter 2 Muslim man and a BJP supporter Walk 5 11 Political supporter 3 Muslim woman, previously a supporter of the Congress, now a supporter of the BJP 12 Politician 2 Senior Hindu political leader who has been active in the area since 1995 13 Businessman 1 Owns and operates a bottled water plant in Sarkhej 14 NGO project officer 2 Muslim woman running an NGO in Makhtampura for over a decade Walk 6 15 NGO project officer 3 Muslim man, field worker for a city-based NGO, resident of Makhtampura Walk 7 16 Engineer 2 Water engineer at the municipal corporation, works on projects in the Sarkhej and Makhtampura wards 17 Engineer 3 Senior engineer at the municipal corporation 18 Engineer 4 Senior engineer at the municipal corporation 193 19 Community leader 1 Neighbourhood leader from Makhtampura who liaises with ward officers for community needs 20 Architect 1 Designed and got built the first municipal colony in Makhtampura in the 1970s 21 Agent 1 Consults residents for property regularization and tax payment matters Walk 8 22 Water Operator 2 Operator at a water distribution station in Makhtampura Walk 9 23 Water Operator 3 Operator of borewell pump and valves in a neighbourhood in Sarkhej 24 Water Operator 4 Operator of borewell pump and valves in a neighbourhood in Makhtampura Walk 10 25 Planner 1 Senior planner who has been involved with implementing Town Planning Schemes across Gujarat 26 NGO project officer 3 Project coordinator, overseeing women's capacity building activities in Sarkhej 27 Municipal Planner 2 Used to head the planning department at municipal level 28 Real-estate developer 3 Hindu builder 29 NGO project officer 4 Field worker coordinating women's capacity building activities in Sarkhej Walk 11 30 RWA Secretary 1 Coordinates resident needs regarding water with ward engineers and planners 31 Planner 2 Teaches planning in Ahmedabad and consults for infrastructure planning projects in the city 32 NGO project officer 5 Field worker coordinating women's capacity building activities in Sarkhej 33 Businessman 2 A contractor for the municipal corporation managing water filtration systems 34 Planner 3 Teaches planning in Ahmedabad and has consulted for numerous water and sanitation improvement projects in the city 35 Planner 4 Teaches planning in Ahmedabad and is a consultant for smart city projects across India 36 Planner 5 Town Planning Officer at AUDA (Ahmedabad Urban Development Authority). Facilitates the TPS implementation process. 194 37 Politician 3 Muslim municipal councilor, Makhtampura ward Walk 12 38 Politician 4 Hindu Municipal councilor, Sarkhej ward 39 Planner 6 A critical voice in the planning field in Ahmedabad. Teaches and has been a consultant for multiple transportation planning projects 40 NGO project officer 5 Heads an Ahmedabad-based NGO that runs WASH schemes in low-income urban areas across India 41 Activist 2 Farmer activist who works on regional and state-level water-related issues 42 Engineer 5 Ward Engineer, Makhtampura 43 Planner 7 Retired chief planner at municipal level 44 NGO project officer 6 Coordinates multiple housing and livelihood related projects across Ahmedabad, including Makhtampura and Sarkhej 45 Planner 8 Heads city-level municipal planning
Thesis/Dissertation
eng
Planning
Vancouver : University of British Columbia Library
Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivatives 4.0 International
Graduate
Honey-Rosés, Jordi
Brokered borders : relational infrastructures of water access in segregated Ahmedabad, India
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