Democracy in Motion: Livelihoods, Politics, and Small Transport Operators in Delhi, India
Date of Award
Fall 2023
Document Type
Dissertation
Degree Name
Doctor of Philosophy (PhD)
Department
Anthropology
First Advisor
Sivaramakrishnan, Kalyanakrishnan
Abstract
This dissertation uses the ethnographic case study of the small transport sector in Delhi to explore a central question: how does the political action of the migrant working poor shape democracy in the postcolonial megacity? In Delhi, small transport operators – the auto-rickshaw drivers, cycle-rickshaw pullers, electric rickshaw drivers, and erstwhile horse carriage drivers – have always been critical to the city’s economy. Across the world, and particularly in the global South, the informal economy remains a defining feature of cities, yet it remains understudied. While less understood, vulnerable migrant informal workers are a powerful political force. The small transport sector in Delhi is one of the city’s prime informal employers, comprising over 1.5 million operators. Observing the efforts of these small transport operators as they file court cases, send bureaucratic petitions, and negotiate with electoral parties and their leaders, I analyze citizen-state relationships and closely study the disaggregated State. This research offers insight into the workings of democracy as institutions intertwined with politics across different agencies, actors, and venues through the struggles of small transport operators in India’s capital city from the late nineteenth century to the present. In this way, it ethnographically shows how the sphere of politics and law has created opportunities for the working poor, who comprise most of India’s urban population. Ultimately, I focus on democracy in South Asia as a daily lived experience from the perspective of the urban working classes, who constitute over 60% of the urban population in the global South. This study is based on twenty-four months of fieldwork in Delhi across the fields of street, bureaucracy, court, and electoral politics, with union leaders and operators, activist lawyers, bureaucrats, clerks, party strategists, and middle-class actors. The study also develops several months of archival research across collections in the UK, US, and India to show the development of city laws. The dissertation is divided into two parts. Part I lays out the anxieties of small transporting livelihoods in the context of the broader architecture of laws and the planning arrangements around Delhi. Here, I illustrate how planning arrangements and urban anxiety feed into each other. Alongside, Part I takes a long historical view of the development of colonial town planning and the slow legalization of urban life. It shows how contemporary urban issues and State-society dynamic has long historical roots, beginning with the accretive changes in city laws. In Part II, I systematically investigate the domains where citizen action and institutional processes interact with each other. Part II first studies the regulatory process in the bureaucratic domain. Next, it turns to the domain of street politics and broadly analyses the various modes of activism across time and class. Finally, Part II brings the different threads of state, street, and society together and turns to the domain of the courtroom, where in a wide-ranging public interest litigation, the constitutional right to work is measured and balanced against infrastructural possibilities in the constitutional courtroom as it reworks physical infrastructures and rights to allow the actualization of small transporting livelihoods in the city. In that process, it brings together several stakeholders, including the government, the middle class, as well as small transport operators, and facilitates deliberative democracy.
Recommended Citation
Mullick, Souvanik, "Democracy in Motion: Livelihoods, Politics, and Small Transport Operators in Delhi, India" (2023). Yale Graduate School of Arts and Sciences Dissertations. 1172.
https://elischolar.library.yale.edu/gsas_dissertations/1172
