Paper short abstract:

This panel aims to examine the role of a resurgent civil society in redefining the broad modalities through which urban subaltern groups broker everyday negotiations with the State.

Paper long abstract:

In the wake of a resurgent right-wing wave across the globe in recent years, we have duly witnessed the potential of populist politics in not only re-shaping political realignments (Laclau 2005), but also in a) re-drawing moral boundaries between groups and b) re-defining the very identification of categories like 'us' and 'them'. It is in this context, that the present paper teases out through an 'extended case-study' (Burawoy 1998) the ways in which newly emerging residential welfare associations/ neighborhood associations have employed populist political strategies in re-constructing place/space/territorial cleavages of subaltern groups (Chatterjee 2019. In this paper, I trace, the genealogy of local urban governance in Delhi and the populist developmental discourse within which such RWAs were instituted in the city of Delhi in general and among the valmikis in particular. I also explore as to how the setting up of a Resident Welfare Association (RWA) in a marginalized (dalit) neighbourhood in Central Delhi, has unsettled the hegemony of old, traditional community leaders viz., pradhans. Based on a 14-month field study, I show as to how the erstwhile/allegedly authoritarian right wing forces morph themselves into a discourse of 'new urban politics' which capitalizes on both a) the old cultural identity and b) the new economic precarity of the erstwhile culturally marginalised/ subaltern groups. Thus, in so doing, the paper, argues that the populist use of civil society forums like RWAs, have put forth a more nuanced and 'strategic' politics of brokerage (Bjorkman 2014).