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DOI: 10.1177/2233865916631925ias.sagepub.com
Religion, poverty and conflict in a garbage slum of Ahmedabad
Jason MiklianPeace Research Institute Oslo (PRIO), Norway
Ida Roland BirkvadPeace Research Institute Oslo (PRIO), Norway
AbstractAhmedabad is often called an Indian ‘success story’ in terms of economic urbanization, but it is also a city highly segregated along religious and caste lines, and a flashpoint in the 2002 Hindu–Muslim riots that left thousands dead. Most of the Muslim communities relocated after the violence work in a vast informal sector around the city’s landfills and waste management peripheries that are disregarded by local government and endemic with corruption. While many scholars see this as a recipe for violent conflict, we explore the garbage slum community in Chandola to show that a leveling of social stratification and reduction of segregation amongst Hindu and Muslim communities in this slum results in a more congruous inter-group relationship than current literatures on the relationship between poverty, religion and violence might predict. However, their unity has come at the expense of jointly ‘othering’ an even more vulnerable group of newcomers – a Bangladeshi migrant community that is persecuted both by the state as well as by fellow residents. We show that while violence markers are constituted in new ways, challenging some assumptions of how inter-group violence is triggered, the fundamental societal weaknesses that facilitate such tensions remain prevalent despite changing conflict actor allegiances.
KeywordsAhmedabad, Bangladesh, communalism, governance, Hindus, India, migration, Muslims, riots, slums
A background of communal violence in Ahmedabad
Located in the wealthy western Indian state of Gujarat, Ahmedabad hosts over six million people and is one of the fastest-growing cities in the world, doubling in size over the last 15 years. Ahmedabad has achieved a strong degree of economic success, and is often viewed as a ‘success
story’ amongst Indian cities. This growth has presented several significant challenges as the city has struggled to keep pace with the influx of incoming migrants, tense communal relations and uneven increases in standards of living over the past two decades. In 2002, these tensions spilled over into riots between Hindus and Muslims. The burning of 59 people aboard a train carrying mostly Hindu pilgrims near Godhra, Gujarat sparked state-wide riots that mainly targeted Muslims, and some three thousand were killed, many in Ahmedabad.
Since then, Ahmedabad has been increasingly segregated along religious, ethnic, and caste lines, to the point where many parts of the city are over 99% segregated (Census of India, 2012). Many of the Muslim communities displaced by the riots were relocated to lands adjacent to city landfills. The violence left scholars proposing many different causal factors for the riots. Some suggested macro causes for violence, including resource scarcity and youth bulges (Urdal, 2008), economic disparities between Hindus and Muslims (Stewart, 2008), areas of deep electoral competition (Dhattiwala and Biggs, 2012) and tensions related to poverty, inequality and social exclusion (Kanbur, 2007; Puri, 2014).
Other scholars look to the city itself, arguing that poorly developed local civil societies (Varshney, 2003), law and order and other structural factors (Varadarajan, 2002), urban margin-alization (Bobbio, 2015; Pandey, 2006) and residential segregation in particular (Field et al., 2008) were causal factors for violence, and that proximate factors (inverse distance to police sta-tion, degree of segregation before violence, relative affluence) can exacerbate its risk (Gupte et al., 2014); with wealth factors refuted by Bohlken and Sergenti (2010), or an increasing degree of wealth in Muslim communities vis-a-vis their Hindu counterparts (Mittra and Ray, 2014). Still others see interactions running between local, regional and global processes, such as the role of globalization and liberalization in framing a more threatening ‘other’ for Hindus in Ahmedabad (Chatterjee, 2009b, 2011), the relationship between violence, rioting and the societal reorganiza-tions required by large-scale urbanization (Bobbio, 2015; Chatterjee, 2009c) or a combination of weak civil society and state-making of ethnic markers and political triggers (Chandhoke, 2009; Chatterjee, 2009a).
Political causes for riot-based violence have also been extensively studied, especially in the case of Hindu nationalism (e.g. Brass, 1990; Gupta, 2010; Hansen, 1999; Jaffrelot, 2007). These per-spectives consider ethnic violence as largely generated by political elites, with state support of religious othering and latent approval of segregation as explanatory triggers for violence in Ahmedabad. Then-Chief Minister (and now Prime Minister) Narendra Modi (Communalism Combat, 2002: 77-78) provided tacit acknowledgement of where the state’s position lay for Muslim victims shortly after the 2002 riots ended, asking rhetorically: ‘What should we do, run relief camps for them? Do we want to open baby producing centres? …We have to teach a lesson to those who are increasing the population at an alarming rate.’1 Echoing others, Gupta (2010: 123) con-cludes by arguing that ‘if a “new” normal that Muslims in Gujarat can live by is to be arrived at, it will have to be largely by taking over power from Modi, establishing the rule of law and delivering justice to the victims of 2002.’
Developments since the riots have represented new challenges to community relations: there has been no substantive change in rule of law, justice for the 2002 victims has been nonexistent (Jaffrelot, 2012), and Modi is now Prime Minister of India. For many of the scholars mentioned above, these elements would be explanatory factors for a significant increase of violence not just in Gujarat but also in other areas with deep Hindu–Muslim divisions across the country. If any-thing, most of the causal factors for violence proposed above have worsened since 2002. Yet, additional large-scale outbreaks of violence have not come to pass and prevalent attitudes in Ahmedabad are that segregation has brought peace.2 This comparative lack of violence since bears further examination. Crucially, this situation of relative peace, while more often than not the normal state of affairs in India, does not mean that the risk of violence has reduced nor that
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violence may not take place in the near future. Rather, most causal explanations generated by political science scholars, in particular to explain past Hindu–Muslim violence, would have pre-dicted much more violence than what we see today.
To attempt to provide additional context for this situation, we conducted field studies in one of the worst-affected communities of Ahmedabad – the Chandola landfill slum on the outskirts of the city. Chandola hosts socio-economic characteristics that place it at a great potential danger of vio-lence according to many contemporary scholars, also hosting many Muslim communities that were forcibly displaced to Chandola after the 2002 riots. Using Chandola as a window, we explore how Ahmedabad’s structural pressures intersect with its violent past and its potential for violent future undercurrents. Our primary discovery is that there is a levelling of social stratification and reduc-tion of segregation amongst Hindu and Muslim communities in Chandola, which supports a more harmonious communal relationship than many scholars of poverty, inequality and violence in India would predict. However, this unity has come at the expense of jointly discriminating against an even more vulnerable group of newcomers – Bangladeshi migrants. Millions of Bangladeshis have informally migrated to India in order to escape poverty and hunger, and in the process risk physical violence, deportation and other dangers, and landfills like Chandola are among the few places where they can hide in plain sight.
In this article, we set aside both technocratic trash solution-building literature and deep analyses of the politics of communal conflict, as they have their own well-researched drivers and issue sets that are beyond the scope of this paper. To better understand the causes and consequences of com-munal relations in the most vulnerable spaces, our interest instead is in exploring how a distinctly urban concern carries the potential to engender peaceful relationships or generate conflict between communities where structural components would suggest otherwise. We begin from a position that is skeptical of simplistic causal explanations of violence, preferring instead a functionalist frame-work to understand the changing dynamics of conflict in Chandola as tensions between vulnerable communities have taken different forms than some have expected.
We have elected a novel approach that uses the lens of waste management as a window into ‘everyday living’ amongst the most vulnerable in Ahmedabad. We conducted nearly 100 inter-views in two stages over an 18-month period, employing Donini’s (2007) ‘perceptions’ approach in the interest of gaining the best available view of the state of play and of local community under-standings of political processes. The presentation of selected interviews here is intended to illus-trate representative stories and, to the greatest extent possible, consensus opinions of the community. While there were occasional outliers found in some interviews, we feel that our presentation in this article provides the most accurate snapshot of overall local community experiences and percep-tions, and should be taken as such. The presentation is also designed to be a contemporary over-view, and not a historicized account as such. While generalizability is always a potential concern in such situations (see Ritchie and Lewis, 2003), such a perspective can distill a more vivid summarization and humanization of findings when researching complex livelihood interactions. All interviews in this section were conducted in two field visits in September to October 2014 and in July to August 2015. We conducted approximately 100 open-ended interviews in total, and con-ducted follow-up interviews of key respondents where possible for quality control and triangulation. Snowball technique was employed, and multiple visits conducted during each stage to familiarize ourselves with surroundings as well as to avoid giving the projection of bias to one particular com-munity or set of elite actors. All names were changed for protection.
Our article proceeds as follows: first, we explore how waste management in urban India defines the citizens living within its shadow. Second, we explore Hindu, Muslim and Bangladeshi com-munities in Chandola to show the influence of spatial and economic triggers for violence, high-lighting the experiences of community residents to illustrate livelihoods, Hindu–Muslim relations and Gujarati–Bangladeshi relations. Next, we present five findings, and situate them within
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existing scholarly understandings of the conflict–religion–poverty relationship in India:3 that Hindu–Muslim communal barriers can erode at the bottom of Indian society; that the ‘poor’ are not necessarily the conflict pawns of the ‘powerful’; that the Indian waste scene is corrupt but not anarchic; that ‘othering’ is a predictor for violence rooted in a lack of social and physical mobility; and that discrimination and vulnerability are inter-related drivers of conflict, and are often facili-tated by local government incapacity. Finally, we discuss these findings in the context of the rela-tionship between poverty, religion and conflict in India, providing suggestions on how to broaden beyond this case to explore these relationships more systematically.
Contextualizing violence through waste management in India
Waste management concerns in India are considered an urgent issue to address. Most existing litera-ture focuses on personal risk and public health (Allen et al., 1999; Mishra et al., 2012), environmental degradation and technocratic solutions to improve waste management efficiency (Sharholy et al., 2008; Shinde and Iyer, 2013; Wilson, 2007; Zhu et al., 2008), child labor and other livelihood con-cerns within the ‘ragpicking’ scene (Sharma and Hebalkar, 2013; Singh and Chari, 2012; Soni, 2014),4 or transnational criminal waste flows that see India as the world’s garbage dump for elec-tronic, biomedical and other undesirable hazardous waste (Demaria, 2010; Joseph, 2007; Liddick, 2010; Widmer et al., 2005). These elements echo in Ahmedabad, a rapidly growing city that is the biggest and the oldest municipality of Gujarat, and hosts waste management challenges typical to that of other large and mid-size Indian cities (Kumar et al., 2008). Ahmedabad is viewed as a ‘success story’ in terms of waste management and recycling (Zhu et al., 2008: 30). It has been a focal point of Prime Minister Narendra Modi’s varied public campaigns on waste management since his time as Chief Minister of Gujarat in 2001, most notably in his ‘Nirmal Gujarat’ (Clean Gujarat) campaign.
However, underlying problems remain. For example, 149 of Ahmedabad’s 2500 formal collec-tion employees have died since 1993 in manhole incidents alone (Manav Garima, 2013). Over 30% of families in the informal collection business have had a family member die from collection activi-ties (Mishra et al., 2012). The unofficial figure of trash-related deaths in Ahmedabad reaches well into the thousands, accounting for the estimated 30,000 people working in the more lightly regulated informal waste collection industry (Asnani, 2006). These groups are more vulnerable due to their more limited access to safety or health resources, and work in the illegal dumping market composed of various corrosive and illegal materials. In particular, Ahmedabad’s main dumping site of Pirana receives an average 4200 metric tons of garbage daily – far in excess of its 1800 ton/d capacity. Misra (2014) estimates that the cumulative result is some 100 million metric tons of accumulated and unprocessed garbage cast in and around Pirana, which is visible in the shape of large black hills that emit toxic odors and gases like methane across the neighborhood. Pirana is the most well known of Ahmedabad’s dumps, but has been increasingly difficult to access by scholars due to its unsavory reputation and potential subsequent embarrassment for local authorities.
However, the Chandola landfill shares many of these same characteristics, and is thus the focal point of our study. Consisting of five different 75-foot-high garbage hills, Chandola is a typical ‘unimproved’ landfill site of Ahmedabad. The garbage hills are surrounded by small shacks that have been built for housing, constructed with cement bags and boards. Chandola is a final destination for large amounts of medical and industrial hazardous waste, which is delivered illegally at night in leaking metal barrels, contaminating nearby residential grounds.5 Children ranging from the ages of 2 to 14 sit under the shacks to pick and sort garbage. There are 60–80 shacks on each hill, with small tea stalls and some plastic/waste buyers scattered about. There is also widespread prostitution. Women wait along the road for clients, and they use the shrubs for cover, charging between Rs 150 and 200 (US$2.20–3) per session.6 The local surroundings are
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unhygienic (the garbage hills are the main play area for neighborhood children) and malnutrition is endemic.
Most who live in and around the landfill are families of Muslim victims of the 2002 riots, and are either engaged in scavenging activities or are city garbage collectors. For the most part, the approximately 1000 Hindu citizens at Chandola were welcoming of the 2000 Muslim riot victims when they were forcibly resettled there. For example, in one shack lives Lilaben with her five grandchildren. Lilaben does not remember her age but looks to be around 50–55, and works segre-gating plastic from other trash. Her earliest memories are from this landfill:
I was born in this garbage, my parents did this before me, and I continue doing this, I’ve done this work since I was a child. I would like to retire but my joints give me a problem if I sit idle and farm work is too hard to do… I earn Rs 200–300 (US$3–4) daily on average. We’ve stayed on this land since times unknown but…as laborers, my family gets paid so little and this year we have no hope of even that. However, the government has promised us a house.7
Lilaben’s hope of a house is reflective of promises made by local politicians, who tend to come into this community only during election season, promise tangible goods, and rarely return. Stationed on top of one of the landfills in a broken rickshaw, 23-year-old Anwar is one of the approximately 500 people living and working on the landfill that are from Bangladesh:
I’ve been living here for more than 17 years now. I was born in Bangladesh but since childhood I’ve just seen India. I come from a family of embroiderers – my father, mother and three sisters still embroider fabrics there. I’ve never held a needle, I want to pick garbage instead. It is said that if you work hard enough and look long enough, you will find gold someday. Though such an incident has never occurred in the last 11 years of my working here, I am sure it is true. People throw such good things into garbage (and) this hill is a gold mine…A day’s hard work earns me around Rs 700–800 while my elderly parents and young sisters strain their eyes to get Rs 2–3 from one fabric. What use is artistry?8
In her mid-30s, Rafaiza and her four children also come from Bangladesh, and live in a temporary tin shack on top of one of the landfills. Rafaiza and all of her children work on the landfill, as well as the two husbands of her two oldest daughters. During the conversation her pre-teen son Imon played with a stove lighter and a hammer while helping prevent his siblings from crawling outside into the garbage. Unable to attend school due to his Bangladeshi status, Imon instead helps in the family business. While physical violence in Chandola manifests occasionally, these types of struc-tural violence and discriminatory markers are more common on an everyday basis. When asked her children’s ages, Rafaiza was unsure, asking back:
How much should one remember in everyday life? We came from Bangladesh three years back because there is no food there. We left the village and followed our villagers to Ahmedabad to work here. My husband and I take turns to work and take care of children.9
In addition to those working on the landfills, a number of municipal workers and landfill employ-ees dot the grounds. For example, 19-year-old Prem supervises the trucks and the people that work at the landfill for the Ahmedabad Municipal Corporation (AMC). The job was passed on to him from his father, who worked there for more than 20 years:
He retired two years ago and since then I take care of things around here. I coordinate the 200–300 trucks that dump on the landfill, assure that water is being thrown on the garbage to push it in further into the landfill, and supervise the [trash] pickers.10
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Muslim co-workers Shabeer, 19, and Ues, 16, work alongside Prem, a Hindu, making 30–35 rounds a day with their truck to the city and back to the landfill, with each overloaded container weighing at least 10 tons. Shabeer has worked on the landfill since he was 12, dropping out of school to feed his family of eight and becoming a driver for the garbage trucks with the local municipality. Shabeer considers it to be a dangerous job:
There are no safety precautions for us or medical benefits. Even if the truck breaks under the pressure, is ill-maintained, meets an accident, etc. the driver has to pay it up from the meager salary.11
Shabeer and Ues say that they have never felt discrimination, bias or religious tensions between Hindus and Muslims on the landfill:12 ‘We all live in separate pockets of the same area but there are no biases. We all are similar – but of course we will never be neighbours.12 The Hindu Prem agrees, saying that there isn’t a big divide between the Hindu and Muslim individuals who also identify as Gujaratis: ‘We all live around each other in harmony. There are occasional fights when someone drives rash or things but these are few and far between and never fatal.’13 But Prem feels differently about the Bangladeshi migrants:
We don’t mingle with them. Apart from language being a problem, they tend to be more aggressive…fights break out when there is metal around. If there is a big fight, we make all the pickers – Gujaratis and Bangladeshis alike, leave the landfill. When no one gets to work, they all come back to their senses.’14
Bharat, a 21-year-old Hindu who has picked scrap from the landfill for several years, puts it more succinctly:
Bangladeshis and we remain a separate entity…the AMC guys are with us so we have enough back up [in case of violence]. When there is a confrontation between a local guy and Bangladeshi, local people stand together, regardless of us being Hindu or Muslim. There are differences between us [local Hindus and Muslims], but we have to stay in the same locality and stay united.15
The long-time resident Lilaben has seen how the landfill’s previous domination by Gujaratis has become more competitive from the influx of Bangladeshi migrants: ‘The Banglas are a separate group. The communities don’t inter-mingle. We Gujaratis don’t talk to the Bangladeshis until needed to.’15 Shabeer agrees: ‘We are wary of them because they are new, their life style is different and language is a major hindrance.’15
But for the Bangladeshis, the experience cuts more deeply than a ‘separate but equal’ mentality. As Rafaiza notes:
I’m Bangla so I can’t enroll my children into a school. They ask me for an ID card but I have none. The maximum police can do is deport us. And we come back again because there is no food in Bangladesh. The only people who are a really troublesome are the goons on both sides. They create unnecessary problems and get us good Bangladeshis into trouble.16
21-year-old Bangladeshi migrant Daksha feels similarly. Not only does she feel institutionally discriminated against, she also feels threatened by her Gujarati neighbors:
More and more Banglas are coming to these hills. We don’t speak (the local) language. We swear at each other and fight with each other in different languages…Gujarati women keep screaming at me. I can’t understand what they say. Sometimes I fight back in Bangla and other times I just leave it. Together with my husband, I earn 500–600 rupees a day much of which goes into food and rent. [Still,] we are much better off on these hills than the plains of Bangladesh.16
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The exploration of community relations at Chandola adds nuance to existing analyses of violence in Ahmedabad that emphasize the Hindu–Muslim divide and socio-economic marginalization as key structural triggers for violence. In Chandola, we find that Hindu and Muslim communities live in rela-tive peace, with few stated tensions between the groups. The influx of forcibly displaced Muslims after the 2002 riots has not exacerbated major communal tensions – even in an area of deep resource scar-city and worsening levels of social and economic deprivation. Interviewees at Chandola explained that the experience of economic hardship is shared amongst the two communities, resulting in a levelling of social stratification and a reduction in segregation between Hindus and Muslims. However, these peaceful relations rest on the creation of a new ‘other’ in the community. With Hindus and Muslims self-identifying as ‘Gujarati’ first, they distinguish themselves from the influx of Bangladeshi migrants whom they see as an economic and societal threat. Further, there is little religious solidarity between Muslim Gujaratis and their Bangladeshi counterparts at Chandola. Instead, individuals like Shabeer, a Muslim, and Prem, a Hindu, are allies in a new logic of violence that targets Bangla migrants.
Exploring five characteristics of the conflict–religion–poverty relationship
In the following section, we contextualize the experiences from Chandola into a discussion on the relationship between poverty, conflict, state capacity and the changing dynamics of local discrimi-nation. Our research led to five findings on the relationship between religion, poverty and conflict, supporting some scholars while challenging others. The five findings are:
1) Hindu-Muslim communal barriers can erode at the bottom of Indian society.
In the context of communal violence in India, the overwhelming focus both in public debate and scholarly work has been on tension and conflict between Hindus and Muslims (see Brass, 2003; Hansen, 1999; Jaffrelot, 2003). Here, communalism is largely associated with religious difference as a main trigger of violence, explained through historical narratives of the Partition of India and Pakistan, Hindutva’s belief that Indian Muslims carry an ultimate allegiance to the umma – not to the Indian state – or ideas of a Hindu ‘homeland’. In uncovering the political and economic motiva-tions behind antagonistic communal discourse, research has tended to understand communalism as constituted by entities identified through religious affiliation.
However, while communal tensions between Hindus and Muslims remain a defining element of Gujarati society writ large, relative peace between the Hindu and Muslim communities of post-riot Chandola, as well as their mutual preferred self-identification as Gujaratis, bears further examina-tion. The focus of violence is directed instead upon Muslim Bangladeshi migrants, with Gujarati Muslims siding with their Hindu neighbors. In Chandola, interviewees consistently forwarded a sense of ‘Gujaratiness’ over the more rigid religious or caste markers that historically affix identity amongst Indian poor. Even so, structural violence and the exclusion of lower castes, Dalits and Muslims continues throughout India. This is particularly true of communities like Chandola, which are often seen by the societal elites as a uniform ‘ragpicker’ caste.17 Chandola’s realities speak to the nuanced layers of social stratification, complicating traditional interpretations of caste hierar-chy. They are also fluid. So it is in Chandola where demographic changes create new categories of identification that re-define systems of hierarchy and difference.
These changes can be understood through a broader exploration of the nature of riots and violence in contemporary India. Riots in India are pervasive and enduring, and the institution of communal tension is beneficial to large sections of society, perpetuating an insecure environment. This idea of how conflict is instigated, maintained and explained involves understanding the
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institutionalization of conflict as something that does not rely on a particular ‘out’ group or defining antagonism. Rather, it functions as a mechanism that is able to co-opt different and changing lines of conflict (Brass, 2003). This understanding circumvents another problematic aspect of causal explanatory frameworks, namely that of assigning blame. While often driven by good intentions, the alignment of cause with blame is an active, political intervention into the production of a particular riot’s meaning, running the risk of obfuscating society’s shared responsibility and implication as well as fueling processes of ‘othering’. Also, the dangers of labeling violence as ‘communalism’ risks reducing other motivations – political advantage, profit, personal vengeance – to a single mode of interpretation (Brass, 2003). In searching for causality, the label of ‘Hindu–Muslim communal-ism’ further muddies the relationship between private motivation and public explanation.
While Brass (2003) applies his functionalist model primarily on Hindu–Muslim riots, this approach can hold additional explanatory power. Its focus on how a diverse range of stake-holders, often with no ties to each other, benefit from a certain institutionalized logic of antagonism and exclusion, can also be seen in Chandola. In addition, Chandola provides a vivid example of how Hindutva-led concerns over where Indian Muslim allegiances ‘truly lie’ are in fact both contextual and more local in nature than inflammatory assumptions might claim – with many respondents call-ing themselves neither Indian nor Muslim first, but Gujarati. We later elaborate on how this func-tionalist approach to Chandola’s conflict metrics is further supported by processes of ‘othering’.
2) The poor are not merely conflict pawns of the elite.
The relationship between conflict and poverty is assumed to be causal and reciprocal (Blomberg et al., 2006; Braithwaite et al., 2016; Goodhand, 2001), seeing rising income levels and human development as a stabilizing factor for conflict-ridden societies. Others (Ohlsson, 2000) have found that poverty in itself is not a detriment to peace but is the rapid nature of societal change that determines conflict levels. Broad-based, abrupt processes of marginalization and the loss or limited access to livelihoods are conflict triggers, mobilizing unemployed young men. Justino (2006), however, holds that there is at present only tenuous indications of a causal connection between poverty and violence, urging more research on localized contexts. Indeed, factors of societal change, increased inequality and poverty as well as structural marginalization are factors that con-tradict when considering Ahmedabad’s post-riot growth and conflict metrics.
Scholars (Brass, 2003; Jaffrelot, 2007, 2012; Ohlsson, 2000) have argued that the myth of the ‘irrational’ and chaotic nature of civil wars and riots help mask its actual orchestrated, elite-driven nature. Here, the poor are often seen as pawns, ready to be deployed at the wish of political and other elites. Often, a causal relationship is seen between the outbreak of riots on the one hand, and the proximity to elections and the capacity and will of state governments to instigate violence, on the other (Varshney and Gubler, 2012). Varshney (2014) sees the potential for outbreaks of com-munal violence as a kind of tug of war between the elites of the Hindu Right and the Muslim Right, implying that people lower on the socio-economic ladder follow suit in whatever decisions are made from the top. Much of the literature suggesting a relationship between poverty and compli-ance with communal leadership falls short of explaining the cooperative relationship between Chandola’s socially and economically deprived Hindus and Muslims, and their unwillingness to participate in the standard logics of Hindu–Muslim antagonism.
Another factor is that of income levels and inequality. Varshney (2012) sees the decrease in communal violence since 1993 as a function of the increase in general levels of income in the country. Our findings at Chandola suggest otherwise. Those parts of society that have not benefited from the ‘Gujarat economic miracle’ do not appear to have become more peaceful because of growing prosperity. In fact, their economic marginalization is likely to grow further as income
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disparities in the state widen. The re-direction of hostility towards Bangla migrants is one such avenue for potential re-directed violence, and speaks to the need for a corresponding widened explanatory framework.
In addition, the push–pull factors of migration reflect how in-group/out-group dynamics are useful indicators of communal tensions and potential violence, and also the importance that group and individual agency play in the construction of micro-conflict in communities. Many of the Chandola Banglas mentioned a lack of food or other basic necessities of life; these needs will con-tinue to pressure Indian cities as macro-events like climate change increase push factors to leave both Bangladesh and rural parts of India (Miklian and Hoelscher, 2013). Individual agency and mobility are intertwined for the Banglas, despite their utter lack of political agency in either their homeland or their new cities of residence. Beyond any ‘poverty–conflict’ nexus, Chandola illus-trates how sometimes even the most vulnerable communities have the ability to extricate them-selves from dangerous situations. Whether they elect to make those calculations, however, requires additional understandings of agency that are explained in more detail below.
3) The Indian waste scene is corrupt but not anarchic.
Corruption is an essential issue to engage with when understanding the dynamics of Indian society. Since 40%–50% of the Indian economy takes place on the black market, it becomes evident that any understanding of the informal economy rests on its inevitable entanglement with the formal sector. In fact, the public, ‘white’ economy that constitutes the ‘emerging power’ narrative perpetu-ated by the Global North and Indian elites fundamentally relies on bribery and grafts for its opera-tional efficiency (Miklian and Carney, 2013). This holds true in the context of the Chandola landfill. Here, waste pickers, though plying an illegal/informal trade, contribute in a crucial way to the effectiveness of the waste management industry. Landfill Supervisor Atul Patel conveys how the AMC tacitly approves of the informal settlements and the work they perform:
We know they are there but as long as they don’t create a ruckus, we let them be. As supervisors, all we care for is how many trucks go up, where they put the dump and that they leave back. Who does what up is not our concern. I go to the top once a month and observe if there are any technical problems we can have. Otherwise, we don’t bother what happens.18
According to Patel, 3500 tons of garbage are offloaded at the landfill daily, raising the pile by 10 feet each year. The AMC relies on the communities that live and work in Chandola as their near-bursting landfills grow less rapidly when people pick them, despite the illegality of this trade. AMC supervisor Prem alerts us to the inter-connectedness of the ingrained corruption:
At any given point there are at least 150–200 people picking here. Most of them are not on our payroll but the sheer number makes us responsible for them.19
While the World Bank considers corruption in the waste industry in India as a problem of effi-ciency (Zhu et al., 2008), the effects of what we consider ‘corrupt practices’ are more complex. One study conducted in nearby Pune concluded that these types of activities amounted to the equivalent of US$5 of free labor per day, per person – far above the actual take-home pay of the collectors (Chikarmane, 2012). The findings mesh with econometric studies that find the efficiency of informal trash/recycling activity to be efficient across the Global South (Cave, 2014). Ahmedabad is also unique in that it sub-contracts much of the door-to-door waste collection activities to local NGOs, who presumably do not have an interest in paying for contracts (Zhu et al., 2008). That said,
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the same source (Zhu et al., 2008: 116) claims that the city is one of the few in India with ‘sanitary landfill facilities’. Our four field visits to landfill sites do not support this conclusion.
Still, the normative value of corruption is intimately linked to privilege, leaving well-connected individuals, businesses and politicians with the material and social resources to maneuver the sys-tem with ease (Miklian and Carney, 2013). For the average Indian citizen, however, corruption remains a painful reminder of the failed promise of democracy. In Chandola, the waste manage-ment industry profits from the precarious living situation of the informal settlements, leaving little agency for a community that on paper is not allowed to be there in the first place.
4) ‘Othering’ is a predictor for violence, and is influenced by limitations upon social mobility as well as physical mobility.
The ‘othering’ of the most vulnerable is both a real action in Chandola and constitutes a high-risk marker for current and future communal violence. Much of the existing literature on processes of ‘othering’ in Indian society has tended to focus on Hindu–Muslim communal tensions, caste-based violence, as well as structural, enabling factors such as economic liberalization (Miklian and Kolås, 2013). Hindu nationalist ideas of nation, as an example, rests on a series of exclusions that seeks to sustain a feeling of imminent threat to the Self – the ‘in’ group. In Chandola, these processes of ‘othering’ reflect the varied forms of physical, social and emotional violence that the disadvan-taged suffer. In particular, violence takes on gendered connotations in its reliance on masculinist discourses of protection and honor (Montoya, 2013). As supported by Hindutva ideology, women’s bodies are instrumentalized as demarcators of community, and the threat to Hindu women of a Muslim aggressive, predatory sexuality can be used to show how models of ‘othering’ are essential for mechanisms of violence in such settings (Das, 2006).
The arrival in Chandola of the Muslim community in 2002 and 2003 did not create the expected patterns of Hindu–Muslim ‘othering’. The congruous inter-group relationship that resulted did not, however, mean a definite end to concepts of violent exclusion and ‘othering’ on the landfill. The even more marginalized group of Bangladeshi migrants has become the new target of low-level conflicts, as reflected in interview comments on language, culture and customs with the residents of Chandola, illustrating a re-direction of both physical and societal violence in the community. Despite the fact that Hindu–Muslim violence has not ‘trickled down’ to these communities lowest on society’s ladder, new processes of ‘othering’ now take place between self-identified Gujaratis and Banglas. This is reflected in Bharat’s earlier statement, emphasizing that ‘local people stick together’. With ‘othering’ instituting a key element of inter-community relations in Chandola today, these processes of alienation and exclusion constitute a risk marker for current and future communal violence on the landfill. In the context of Hindu–Muslim conflict, Brass (2003) refers to how a discourse of ‘public good and evil’ is internalized and reproduced in people’s behavior, creating resilient mentalities of difference. Similar dynamics are at work after the entrance of Bangla migrants to Chandola.
Despite their relative ‘normalized’ status, physical as well as social mobility for disadvantaged communities in Chandola remains limited. In India, Dalits and Muslims rank low on most socio-economic indicators, including education, access to health services and the justice system. Despite being the country’s largest minority, constituting about 14% of the population, Muslims are under-represented in regular, salaried employment. Most work in the informal sector or are self-employed (Kumar et al., 2002; Robinson, 2007). The Muslim community in Chandola, while not being the primary target of communal violence in the local area, is still disproportionally disenfranchised in the larger, Hindu-dominated society of Ahmedabad. In Chandola, geographical mobility is a function of social mobility, keeping Muslims from leaving the area, either for their old pre-2002 neighborhoods or for somewhere else in now nearly totally segregated Ahmedabad.
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5) Discrimination and vulnerability can be inter-related drivers of conflict, and are often exac-erbated by local government incapacity.
What all the residents of Chandola have in common is that their choice of occupation as informal waste pickers is caused by discrimination in larger society. Their marginalization has different causes; either as a result of famines and loss of livelihoods in subsistence farming (as is often the case of the Bangladeshi migrants), internal displacement because of conflict and communal riots (as with the Gujarati Muslims) or more general economic and social marginalization (as with Chandola Hindus). Yet what unites them is that they all perform dangerous work because of a lack of alternatives.
The Bangla community of Chandola is exceptionally vulnerable due to its lack of legal status, language barriers and numerical inferiority, which makes it prone to exploitation. This is manifest in the way Bangladeshi migrants are targeted by predatory ‘microloan’ agents who institutionalize debt servitude through high-interest loans taken against future recycled goods (Shristi, 2002). This system of economic exploitation and de facto bonded labor adds to the general vulnerability of being scapegoated by self-identified ‘indigenous’ Gujaratis. Further, Chandola power structures place government employees on the top of the chain, but they are municipal workers, not agents of Ahmedabad’s formidable political or legal machineries.
Chandola’s social dynamics are framed and constrained by the degree of involvement by the local municipal government. In a local economy dominated by widespread corruption and economic privatization, local government capacity is constrained. This incapacity can carry long-term conse-quences in the political, judicial as well as communal realm. Access to the city’s justice system is largely a question of resources, leaving Chandola residents to settle their disputes through extra-judicial, informal institutions. This again leaves the Bangla community in a precarious situation. While the AMC occasionally steps in to mediate conflicts, many of its employees share the same biases against the Bangla minority that the Gujarati Hindu and Muslim communities have.20 India’s ‘judicial corruption’, largely a symptom of the judicial branch’s failure to provide services – or lack of existence in marginalized communities (Miklian, 2011, 2012) – leaves the Bangla community with few alternatives for protection or justice in times of heightened communal tension. While AMC leadership has deep ties to political elites in the city, we did not get the impression that Prem, Atul or any other AMC employee at Chandola had any such connections or allegiances to leverage.
The marginalization of Bangladeshi migrants is also a function of their lack of political clout. The community’s disenfranchised position as illegal migrants with no voting rights is beneficial to local government, as they provide labor but are unable to draw benefits or present an electoral force. With NGO outreach programs in the city largely administered along communal or religious lines, civil society is also closed off for Bangla migrants. Added to this is the extreme spatial seg-regation of the city, with 99% of some neighborhoods divided along communal lines. The situation of inter-communal relations in Ahmedabad at present is one of structural deadlock: the social as well as spatial segregation of the city works as a de facto peacekeeping tool, yet the largely Hindu-dominated state apparatus also effectively seals off any chance for institutional mediation in con-flicts not anticipated by the standard Hindu–Muslim dichotomy. While local government has an opportunity to play a more positive role in preventing communal riots and providing spaces and structural frameworks for more harmonious communal relations, this opportunity has not been seized, either in Ahmedabad in general or at the Chandola landfill in particular. Chandola also illustrates the dangers of seeing the waste-picking community as a homogenous entity to be ana-lyzed purely through an economic or political lens focusing on abstract poverty reduction. The internal dynamics of social ‘othering’ and complex systems of exclusion among the Muslims, Hindus and Banglas (as well as other categories of identification) living on the landfill illustrate the importance of understanding the inter-play between poverty, conflict and social stratification.
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Taken together, these five elements illustrate how the dynamics of conflict in Chandola both rein-force and challenge understandings of discrimination, poverty and violence in India. Most impor-tantly, being the object of a self-reinforcing dynamic of discrimination and vulnerability makes the Bangla waste-picking community a target for small-scale violence outbreaks and may signify a community at added risk of large-scale rioting. This ‘other’ community of Banglas is perceived as a threat to the local Gujarati groups, as shown in Prem’s belief of the ‘more aggressive’ nature of Bangladeshis. This perception of being threatened results in a more pragmatic logic of cross-cul-tural, local cooperation premised on the existence of an ‘outsider’ community to target. Bharat’s assertion that ‘there are differences between us [local Hindus and Muslims], but we have to stay in the same locality and stay united’ underlines this. Should a situation escalate into violence, the vulnerability of the Bangla community, being easily distinguishable by language and other spatial markers, is multiplied by both its inability to move within the city and the lack of local government or civil society allies, leaving it with few avenues for help. Coupled with the dual pressures of rural–urban migration and South Asian migration from Bangladesh and Nepal to Indian urban centers like Ahmedabad, garbage slums are an area of increasing concern as potential flashpoints for the new logics and constructions of communal and ethnic violence in India.
In Ahmedabad, deaths related to the waste-picking industry have far exceeded those of the 2002 riots. While the former is seen as a somewhat unavoidable side-effect of India’s quest to economic superpower status, the latter has established itself in the public realm as a powerful explanatory tool connecting identity markers with conceptualizations of violence and belonging. The influx of Muslims to the Chandola landfill after the 2002 riots left local Hindus in the area completely out-numbered. Constituting what in Hindutva terminology would be seen as an ‘invasion’, the social dynamics of the landfill did not turn violent. While these observations are reflective of the chang-ing dynamics of traditional categories of social analysis (and provide yet another piece of evidence against Hindutva claims), they also highlight which lives straddling which demarcations of mar-ginalization are counted and recorded by larger society.
This research provides an opportunity to expand beyond the Hindu–Muslim dichotomy of urban violence and its causes. While more research is needed to determine if these findings hold in other disadvantaged parts of India – or even in other slums of Ahmedabad itself – we hazard that, given the similar socio-economic and demographic backgrounds of many Indian metropolis slum areas, paral-lel findings elsewhere may be possible. In addition to the clear value of future studies that would explore different cities of India (or different landfills of Ahmedabad), there is significant scope for a finer grain of analysis at the community level. In particular, devising criteria to better disaggregate and explain differences between the creation and perpetuation of ‘routine violence’ as of the type seen in Chandola and the more visible (and rarer) riots is of particular importance. Household survey data that combines material from the 2011 Indian census with long-form qualitative findings from several ongoing projects will be released beginning in 2016.21 This material will enable scholars to more systematically study the relationship between communities at the ultra-poor level to better understand how and why religious cleavages can erode and become more fluid in high-migrant environments.
Acknowledgements
The authors deeply thank Sangeeta Rane for her invaluable research assistance.
Funding
This research was supported by the Research Council of Norway and Royal Norwegian Embassy, New Delhi.
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1. These comments take on added weight when reflecting upon how Indian media has begun to high-light differing birth rates between Muslim and Hindu communities per recent census figures. The gaps become negligible when accounting for household wealth and location factors.
2. Author interviews, 2014/2015, Ahmedabad. 3. It is not our intention to reduce these propositions to uniform positions agreed across varied scholarly
disciplines such as political science and peace and conflict studies. Rather, we show the varying degrees of value that these often disparate scholarly offerings have in order to understand the causes of Hindu–Muslim antagonism within the changing dynamics of conflict in Ahmedabad.
4. While informal trash/recycling collectors and sorters have traditionally been called ‘ragpickers’, this is a pejorative term that has been diminished in favor of more neutral equivalents. We use ‘informal collec-tion’ as a baseline term.
5. Author observation, September 2014. The nearest house was twenty feet away. 6. Author observation, September 2014. 7. Author interview, August 2015. 8. Author interview, August 2015. 9. Author interview, August 2015.10. Author interview, July 2015.11. Author interview, August 2015.12. Of course, assigning a singular identity to any community or individual in India is an inherently prob-
lematic affair. However, religious divisions of identity and belonging appear to be much more concisely drawn in this community than we have experienced in other regions of India. This may have to do with the small overall size of the community coupled with a large proportion of the community being composed of recent migrants, which could influence desires of belonging in the short term over identity cleavages. We have presented material in this section in support of this projection, and believe that it is worthy of follow-up study.
13. Author interview, July 2015.14. Author interview, July 2015.15. Author interview, August 2015.16. Author interview, July 2015.17. Again, a pejorative (but oft-used) term. For extended examples of the struggles facing these commu-
nities, including forced labor and gender discrimination, see Eswaran and Hameeda (2013) and Soni (2014).
18. Author interview, July 2015.19. Author interview, August 2015.20. Author interviews, July/August 2015. The AMC also has a reputation for strong-arming vulnerable com-
munities to claim land for projects (Johnston, 2014).21. This includes research from the PRIO-Observer Research Foundation’s ‘Urbanizing India’ project, with
findings scheduled to be released in February of 2016.
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