Routray, S., 2022. The right to be counted: The urban poor and the politics of resettlement in Delhi. Stanford University Press.  
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he Right to Be Counted: The Urban Poor and The Politics of Resettlement in Delhi (Stanford University Press) by Sanjeev Routray offers a compelling analysis of citizenship struggles of the urban poor in contemporary times. Located in Delhi, the book is an important contribution towards contemporary scholarship querying the politics of urban transformation through democratic processes spanning disciplines of urban studies, planning, housing studies, anthropology, geography, and political science. Evident in the title, the Right to be Counted, is centrally focussed on the various registers of numerical legibility in securing urban citizenship and in doing so it makes contributions to “scholarly and public debates on the contradictions between state governmentality, and citizenship projects of the poor” (p. 1).  Its attention to planning and its role in creating developmental subjects through the provision and denial of welfare entitlements and housing status on one hand and counter-calculations of resistance of the poor on the other provide fresh insights to the urban developmental scholarship on cities, not just in the global south but on a planetary scale.  

The book’s organisation is straightforward that has divided the politics of urban formations into the politics of the state vs the politics of the urban poor. Yet the deep ethnography evidenced throughout provide a highly nuanced understanding of the blurring of state-society relations. The first part of the book is a commentary on the politics of planning read through the political economy of urban planning and its calculative rationalities and structural violence, and social suffering of the poor experienced through the planning of demolition and resettlement. The second, and more expansive, part of the book highlights the role of various non-state urban actors in shaping the politics of the poor to resist the prohibitive state practices.   

The ethnography presented in the book deserves special mention. It evidences a deep and sustained engagement with the field to understand distinctive mode of urban politics that differs from Western framing of subaltern agency. Through twenty five months of field research in three sites of Delhi: Gautam Nagar, Sitapuri Transit Camp, and Azad Resettlement Colony, embroiled in the continuous processes of demolition and resettlement, the ethnography involved participant observation in social spaces such as courtrooms and public meetings, detailed interactions with 140 residents, interactions and interviews in government offices, drawing on a range of historical documents and self-embedded methodological insights. The ethnography concerned querying the depoliticization of planning, incremental and innovative politics of the urban poor, contradictions of state governmentality understood through the politics of enumeration and the contradictions in law.   

The book makes several crucial contributions to scholarship, policy, practice and methodologies of analysing contemporary urban processes. First, it speaks to seminal scholarly works on the post-colonial statecraft (Auyero 2000; Hansen and Stepputat, 2001; Ferguson, 2006; Legg, 2008; Gupta, 2012) with close attention to the tentativeness, adhocism and class-specific logics of both demolition and resettlement. Second, it unsettles the totalitarian and monolithic understanding of the state by showing that despite various levels of depoliticization of state techniques (such quantification) it yields to the demands of the poor.  Third, the analysis of statecraft and calculative rationality in the book is placed in conjunction with an analysis of the agency of the poor. It engages with critical scholarly works in arguing that the poor are not passive victims of statecraft, rather they systematically contest arbitrary processes of exclusion. It directly engages with historical works of Manor (2000) and Reddy and Haragopal (1985) and potentially speaks to more recent works on subaltern urban politics shaped by gender, caste and class based identities (James 2011; Koster 2014; Sud 2014; Banerji, 2024). Yet the book’s attention to rannitis, is a pioneering conceptual contribution of the ethnography that departs from the works as it goes beyond vote bank politics and the exercise of political agency to account for the more pervasive unrecognised, invisible and illegible politics of the poor. By focussing on the micro-workings of rannitis, the book questions the theorising of density based politics and argues that contextual and contingent factors shape citizenship claims in post-colonial societies.  

Fourth, it argues the poor are not homogenous and that they inhabit and reproduce different social spaces. These contributions are underscored through detailed empirical reflections on productions of space, such as the links between precarity and evolving legalities of neighbourhoods that the poor inhabit. Thus responding to the ”schematic” binaries of postcolonial state formations the ethnography provides a more nuanced account of “local practices” to highlight how universal (as opposed to normative) theories of citizenship are challenged by the poor. In that sense, this book departs from scholarly works (Fernandes, 2006; Baviskar and Sundar, 2008; Chatterjee, 2008; Lemanksi and Lama-Rewal 2013) that examines the “political activities of the urban poor within larger structures of power, including contemporary advanced capitalism, structures of class, caste, community, and gender; the hegemony of party politics; neighbourhood dynamics” (Routray2022, p.16). Finally,  the book broadens the analysis of subaltern resistance in mega cities by going beyond the framing of urban populism (Appadurai, 2001; Benjamin, 2008; Holston, 2008; Bayat 2012). By foregrounding Delhi as a site of empirical analysis, it highlights the contingent forms of citizenship struggles that do not neatly fold into patron-clientelism. It does so by drawing on “cultural repertoires of protests and a shared history of political mobilisations” (Routray 2002, p.233) in Delhi along with readings of resistance embedded in the hegemonic forms of exclusion. The incisive reading of ‘law’ that is rendered as a “site of conflict and struggle” (p.232) for the poor to make citizenship claims, rather viewing it as an malicious machinery deployed by the state to dispossess people is worth noting in this work.  

Part 1 of the book, titled “The Politics of Planning” is a thorough examination of the evolution of planning in the Indian context with specific focus on land-use and housing. The planning ideology of the Indian state read through the varying regimes is critically analysed in conjunction with the politics of participatory practices within planning and developmentalism. Highlighting the politics of resettlement and demolition the book excels in the foregrounding of the contingent politics of the poor. It draws on important works on elite informality (Roy, 2009) in arguing that planning machinery is highly subjective and the planning regime is produced through state informality,  adhocism, and class-difference.  Part 2 of the book expands the analysis of the planning regime and state practices in relation to the politics of the poor. Presented through rich ethnographic reflections of three in Gautam Nagar (a jhuggi jhopri settlement), Sitapuri Transit Camp and a Azad Resettlement Colony (a new resettlement colony), the book compares the techniques of state’s calculative governance and varying degrees and demands (my emphasis) of political mobilisation of the poor. Particularly incisive is the detailing of the role that three  ‘intermediaries’ – pradhans (chiefs), samaj sevaks (social workers), and sarkari karmacharis (government workers) play in social spaces of numerical citizenship struggles. The ethnography shows that rather than existing in neatly delineated spaces, these urban actors move in and out of state and non-state spaces of participation. The social status of intermediaries who belong to “impoverished niches of the city” (p.155) provides the key impetus for negotiating and challenging unjust redistribution of resources.  

The pradhans, organically linked to a settlement, are actors who solve local problems levering their own political capital. Pradhans carefully craft their self-images of toughness, indispensability and benevolence and often create deliberate distance from NGOs and activists. Samaj Sevaks are upper-caste brokers, fixers, and mediators who possess the literacy to negotiate with activists, lawyers, politicians, government officials and people of influence.  The third category of local mediators are the sarkari karmacharis who are employees in the lower rung of the state. Possessing more bureaucratic capital than the other two intermediaries, they play important role in solving local problems related to water supply, electricity connections, garbage distribution and the legal system. For me this ethnographic attention in the book felt really important and I consider it to be a crucial contribution in advancing the framing of fragmented urban politics in the global south. As abundantly evidenced in the book although participation in political spaces expands citizenship entitlements for the poor, but the domain of political society itself comprise unfreedoms along gender, caste, religious and class lines. Thus responding to seminal works on the political mobilisations (Chatterjee, 2008), the book reminds urban populism has not necessarily succeeded in converting “tenuous access into secure and permanent right to the city” (Roy, 2008, xxxv in Routray 2022, p.160). Although varying in degrees of power and capacity to negotiate and inherently competitive with each other, these intermediaries play a very important part in ensuring that the poor are able to participate in citizenship struggles.  

Attention to state practices of enumeration forms a key focus of the book. In the final chapters, the ethnography wonderfully details the politics around ‘documents’, surveys and forms of enumeration that shape the legitimacy of the poor in the city. The ethnography draws attention to the ways the state ‘s strategy of inclusion and exclusion from welfare entitlements (such as relocation) is predicated on the politics of visibility in documents. Under-enumeration is often deliberate and “emotion, compassion, and vengefulness are integral to these state practices” (p.167). Thus enumeration are social sites where the morality of surveyors often dictate the power relations. Referring to the caste census in India, the book makes a crucial counter-argument to scholarly works on the panoptic powers of the state (Scott, Tehranian, and Mathias, 2002). It argues that state recognition is imperative to address systemic injustice and inequality and to link social disadvantages with public policy: “the struggles involving a parade of numbers in claims-making also constitute sites of citizenship struggles among subalterns and activists” (Routray 2022, p.182). The poor thus are not passive victims of under-enumeration and they deploy persistent counter-tactics to counter exclusions through documents responding to the material and cultural constraints. Self surveys and recourse to the Right to Information Act (RTI) serve as vital means to resist deflated state numbers and provide data for court battles.  

The book is extremely relevant to current political context of India as it was published shortly after the  government passed the draconian Citizenship Amendment Act (CAA) in 2019. Thus, although the book offers limited space in articulating the impacts of such totalitarian efforts to thwart incrementally built collective solidarity to resist oppression, it provides very important lessons for understanding the history of citizenship struggles. The function of enumeration detailed in the book becomes particularly important in reading into the far-right politics of the Indian state in rendering people stateless through creations of national population databases (for example the National Population Register and National Register of Citizens in Assam). In socio-political conditions where enumeration is being deployed for the fulfilment of fascist projects such as the establishing of a Hindu Rashtra (nation), such incisive analysis of counter-tactics becomes even more valuable in resisting rising totalitarianisms.  

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Banerji, S., 2024. Fixing Bhim Nagar: a new metonym for subaltern urbanism. City, 28(1-2), pp.24-43. 

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Paroj Bannerjee is a lecturer in the Bartlett Development Planning Unit at University College London. She is an urban ethnographer researching, teaching and writing about home, belonging, and everyday responses to marginalisation and spatial precarity.