Urban as the New Political, How India’s Cities are Redefining Democracy, Power, and Citizenship
The twentieth anniversary of the Jawaharlal Nehru National Urban Renewal Mission (JNNURM) passed with little fanfare, a stark contrast to the cacophonous, personality-driven spectacle of recent municipal elections in Mumbai. This disparity reveals a profound and consequential truth about contemporary India: while we remain fixated on the theater of electoral politics, we are neglecting the deeper, more transformative political revolution unfolding silently beneath our feet—the revolution of urbanization. India is undergoing a dramatic reorientation from a “nation of villages” to a nation of cities. With over 500 million urban dwellers today, projected to reach 40% of the population by 2030, the urban is no longer just a demographic or economic reality; it has become the dominant political paradigm, reshaping national consciousness, social contracts, and the very meaning of democracy. To understand India’s future, one must look past the ballot box and into the rapidly evolving morphology of its cities.
From JNNURM to Smart Cities: The Evolution of an Urban Vision
The journey of India’s formal urban policy, from the Megacities scheme of 1993 to JNNURM, AMRUT, and the Smart Cities Mission, is not merely a chronicle of infrastructure projects. It is the narrative of a state grappling with, and attempting to direct, a colossal societal shift. These missions, often prodded by global financial institutions like the World Bank, signify a transition from viewing cities as chaotic, unplanned growth centers to seeing them as strategic engines of national economic growth. However, this evolution has carried with it a fundamental shift in political philosophy.
The Nehruvian vision, for all its critiques, was rooted in a state-led, industrial-modernist ideal—dams, steel plants, and public sector townships, often built at great social cost, but framed within a narrative of national self-reliance and socialist development. Post-liberalization, the urban vision has decisively pivoted. The contemporary ideal, as the article astutely observes, is singularly focused on “attracting global capital, either as investment or as circulating capital from mobile populations.”
This has birthed a homogenized urban model replicated from Gurugram to Gujarat: glittering glass-tower financial districts, gated enclaves for the elite, expansive expressways that prioritize private vehicles, large-scale urban beautification and riverfront projects, and curated cultural festivals aimed at a global audience. This is the city as a corporate-friendly product, designed for efficiency, consumption, and spectacle, rather than as an organic, inclusive ecosystem for living.
The Political Consensus of the “Market-Led City”
The true political power of this urban shift lies not in its physical infrastructure but in the ideological consensus it forges. The project of urbanizing India is, at its core, a project of entrenching a new political economy. It privileges market-led development as the unquestioned gospel of progress. This consensus reshuffles societal priorities with profound implications:
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The Citizen as Consumer: The relationship between the individual and the state is redefined. The ideal urban citizen is no longer the rights-bearing claimant of welfare or the participant in local governance, but a consumer of services—a buyer of real estate, a user of app-based utilities, a beneficiary of efficient “municipal corporations” run like businesses. Political agency is increasingly expressed through purchasing power and digital ratings, rather than through collective civic action.
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The Erosion of the Commons: The drive for capital-friendly development accelerates the enclosure of public spaces and natural resources. The agitations against the commercial exploitation of the Aravallis, or the deep ecological concerns over the Great Nicobar Island project, are not isolated environmental protests. They are political battles against the logic of a development model that treats forests, hills, coastlines, and water bodies as real estate or logistical assets to be monetized, displacing and disenfranchising local communities in the process.
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The New Fault Lines of Inequality: The “glass tower-and-highway” model creates stark, visible geographies of inequality. It fosters cities with world-class amenities for the affluent in privileged enclaves, juxtaposed against vast peripheries of informal settlements, inadequate infrastructure, and precarity. This spatial segregation hardens social divides, creating what urban theorist Mike Davis calls “a planet of slums” adjacent to “fortified cells of affluent society.” The fault line is no longer just rural-urban; it is internal to the city itself, between the globally connected elite and the servile underclass that sustains them.
The Gig Economy: The Urban Political Subject Par Excellence
Nowhere is this new urban political reality more vividly embodied than in the figure of the gig worker—the delivery person, the ride-hail driver, the home-service provider. Their recent protests over poor pay, algorithmic exploitation, and safety risks are not mere labor disputes. They are the quintessential political struggle of the 21st-century city.
The gig worker exists at the violent intersection of the urban-as-market. They are hyper-visible on the city’s streets and digital platforms, yet politically and legally invisible, denied the protections of traditional employment. They are essential for the smooth functioning of the consumerist city, yet treated as disposable by the algorithms of service aggregators. Their plight exposes the dark underbelly of the “smart,” efficient urban facade: a regime of precarity normalized by the very market logic the city celebrates. Their agitation is a direct challenge to the political consensus, demanding a redefinition of rights, accountability, and justice in the digital-urban age.
Communal Violence and the Morphology of the City
The article provocatively links urbanization to phenomena like communal violence, and rightly so. The modern Indian city, with its dense, mixed, yet often segregated neighborhoods, has become a prime theatre for identity-based conflict. Urban space is politicized and partitioned along communal lines, often with the tacit or active involvement of political actors. Riots are not random eruptions but are frequently tied to urban issues—competition over resources (land, water, trade), political mobilization around local territorial control, and the manipulation of demographic anxieties in rapidly changing urban landscapes. The city, in its tension-filled diversity, amplifies both the possibilities of cosmopolitan coexistence and the triggers for polarized violence.
Beyond Electoral Hoopla: Reclaiming the Political City
The “predictable hoopla” of municipal elections, while important, often reduces urban politics to a simplistic game of party tallies and personality clashes. It fails to engage with the substantive politics of urban form. The real political questions are:
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Who is the city for? Is it for global capital and the affluent, or for all its residents?
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Who decides its shape? Is it a top-down, consultant-driven process, or a participatory, democratic one?
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What values does it enshrine? Efficiency and GDP growth, or equity, sustainability, and justice?
The urban is the new political because it is the primary site where these questions are answered through concrete action—through zoning laws, housing policies, transport plans, and environmental regulations. The pushback from citizens’ groups against unsustainable projects, the fight of slum dwellers for tenure security, the demand of informal workers for social security, and the advocacy for pedestrian-friendly streets over car-centric highways—these are the vital, grassroots political engagements that are shaping India’s future far more consequentially than many parliamentary debates.
Conclusion: Towards an Urban Democracy of Substance
The quiet passing of JNNURM’s anniversary is a metaphor for our failure to grasp the profundity of the urban turn. India’s future will be forged in its cities. But the kind of future it will be depends on the kind of politics we practice there. Will we accept an urban politics that is merely an extension of the market, producing fractured, unequal, and environmentally vulnerable metropolises? Or will we cultivate a robust, substantive urban democracy—one that reclaims the city as a space of citizenship, common good, and collective flourishing?
This demands moving beyond the spectacle of elections to the hard, unglamorous work of building inclusive institutions, protecting ecological commons, recognizing the rights of all urban inhabitants (especially the most vulnerable), and designing cities for people, not just for profit and capital flow. The urban is indeed the new political. Recognizing this is the first, essential step toward ensuring that India’s urban century is also a democratic and just one.
Q&A on Urbanization as the New Political Paradigm in India
Q1: What does it mean to say “the urban is the new political”?
A1: This phrase means that the most significant and transformative political battles, social changes, and redefinitions of citizenship in contemporary India are no longer primarily occurring in the realm of traditional party politics or rural settings. Instead, they are happening within and about cities. Urbanization is reshaping national priorities, creating new forms of inequality (like spatial segregation), redefining the citizen-state relationship (towards a consumer-service provider model), and generating new social conflicts (over resources, environment, gig work). Understanding power in India now requires analyzing urban form, policy, and lived experience.
Q2: How has the vision for Indian cities changed from the Nehruvian era to the present day?
A2:
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Nehruvian Era (Mid-20th Century): The vision was state-led, industrial-modernist. Cities and new towns were often built around large public-sector industries (steel plants, dams). The goal was national self-reliance and heavy industrial development, albeit with significant social displacement.
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Post-Liberalization / Present Day: The vision is market-led and global capital-focused. Cities are seen as engines for attracting foreign investment and catering to a mobile global elite. The model prioritizes financial districts, expressways, gated communities, beautification projects, and “smart” tech-infrastructure to enhance efficiency and livability for the affluent, often at the cost of equity and ecological sustainability.
Q3: What are the key social and political consequences of the “market-led” urban development model?
A3: Key consequences include:
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Citizenship as Consumption: Political agency is diluted into consumer choice.
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Spatial Inequality: Creation of stark divides between elite enclaves and impoverished peripheries.
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Erosion of Commons: Privatization and commercial exploitation of public spaces and natural resources (e.g., Aravallis, coastal areas).
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Precarity of Labor: Rise of a vast, unprotected gig workforce essential to the city’s function but denied basic rights.
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Top-Down Governance: Democratic planning is often bypassed by consultant-driven, rapid-execution projects that favor corporate interests.
Q4: Why are the protests of gig workers considered a central political issue of the new urban India?
A4: Gig workers symbolize the central contradiction of the market-led city. They are:
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Structurally Essential: They enable the on-demand, hyper-efficient consumer economy (deliveries, transport).
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Politically Marginalized: They are classified as “partners” not employees, denied minimum wage, job security, and social safety nets.
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Algorithmically Managed: Their work and pay are controlled by opaque digital platforms, representing a new form of exploitative control.
Their protests are a direct challenge to the prevailing urban political consensus, demanding that rights and protections be updated for the digital-urban age, making their struggle emblematic of the fight for justice in the contemporary city.
Q5: How can urban politics move beyond the “hoopla” of elections to address these deeper issues?
A5: Moving beyond electoral spectacle requires:
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Focusing on Substantive Urban Policy: Shifting public debate to the politics of housing policy, public transport, environmental regulations, and zoning laws.
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Strengthening Participatory Governance: Empowering area sabhas, citizen committees, and ensuring genuine public consultation in urban planning.
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Recognizing New Political Actors: Legitimizing the role of resident welfare associations, housing rights groups, environmental collectives, and gig worker unions in the political process.
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Reframing Success Metrics: Evaluating city leadership not just by infrastructure built but by metrics of inclusion, reduction of inequality, environmental sustainability, and protection of labor rights.
