Development through paper deals: space and politics of value in peri-urban India

Abstract

The article looks at contestations over space in peri-urban India. It studies the acrimonious responses in defense of a local marketplace that occupied public land against the sovereign project of highway expansion in peri-urban West Bengal. It posits an opposition between two aspects of state governance—rational–legal and magical—that shape the contentions. In the rational–legal mode, the expansion of the highways represents the official development goals of progress. The magical aspects of the state engender the circulation of officially approved illegal chits that give occupying migrant villagers’ claim to the space around the highway. The ethnography looks at the affective economy of illegal chits that political parties and local bureaucracies use to bring migrating villagers within their ambit. It explores how illegal chits embody the state’s legible presence in the villagers’ everyday lives, their kinnetworks, communities and transform individual affective orientations toward space. In these new modes of simultaneous “space” and “place” making, public land is understood less as commons, but more as a stretch that could be divided among individuals and households aspiring to be “developed” or upwardly mobile by excluding others. The essay contends that emergence of the “right to the city” as a collective right requires a double-edged critique. A simple celebration of the subversive potential of the magical aspect of the state vis-a-vis its rational–legal mode may not be helpful for a politics of value that seeks to challenge the idea of value (or what makes life worth living) embedded in the wider neoliberal development discourse.