Poverty, Informality and Politics in India: In Conversation with Tariq Thachil

Slums are home to 850 million people worldwide, making them prime territory for distributive politics. In this episode of the Governance Podcast, Tariq Thachil (Vanderbilt University) sits down with Irena Schneider (King’s College London) to discuss the counterintuitive ways in which governance emerges amidst poverty and informality in Indian cities. Subscribe on iTunes and Spotify

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The Guest

Tariq Thachil is an Associate Professor of Political Science at Vanderbilt University. His research focuses on political parties and political behavior, social movements, and ethnic politics, with a regional focus on South Asia.

His first book examines how elite parties can use social services to win mass support, through a study of Hindu nationalism in India, and was published by Cambridge University Press (Studies in Comparative Politics) in 2014. This project has won numerous awards, including the 2015 Gregory Luebbert Award for best book in comparative politics, the 2015 Leon Epstein Award for best book on political parties, and 2010 Gabriel Almond Award for best dissertation in comparative politics, all from the American Political Science Association. It also won the 2010 Sardar Patel Prize for best dissertation on modern India in the humanities and social sciences.

His current research focuses on the political consequences of urbanization, and draws on extensive qualitative and quantitative research among poor migrants in Indian cities. An article from this project, coauthored with Adam Auerbach, received the 2018 Heinz I. Eulau Award for the best article published in the American Political Science Review in the previous calendar year.

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00:58: As a political scientist, what prompted you to take an interest in the politics of Indian slums?

1:53: You talk a lot about machine politics in India—It’s a core element of your book. Historically when we think about machine politics, you also mention in your book that the big examples are US democratic party machines in New York and Chicago which emerged in the 19th century by giving out material benefits to poor European immigrants in exchange for political support. We’re seeing similar trends happening across the developing world today. Masses of migrants are flooding to cities, living in slums, and end up being governed by powerful machines. But you’re observing something uniquely different about how politics emerges within Indian slums. Quite specifically, you’re noticing that the process is a lot more democratic than we thought. What have you been observing? What’s counterintuitive? 

7:56: That’s really interesting because it really has to do with this unique competitive environment. Why is it so competitive? Why is no one able to take over and become a boss in some of these Indian slums?

11:23: You argue that slum residents don’t really choose leaders on the basis of petty gifts or cash. Clientelism doesn’t boil down to something so simple. What criteria do residents really use to choose their leaders? 

14:13: The picture you’re painting is that slum residents are much more empowered to choose among competing brokers rather than being passive or manipulated rule takers. How much power do they really have over their local brokers and local politicians? Can they really hold their brokers accountable in ways that would mimic what would happen under a formal democratic institution?

18:54: One of your most interesting findings is that when people are choosing their slum leaders and brokers, they’re not necessarily using the basis of caste or ethnicity—and a lot of what really matters is things like education. Talk a little more about that. Are we seeing a crowding out of forms of choice based on old kinds of hierarchy?

23:16: I want to talk a little more about the brokers themselves. They’re intermediaries between the slum dwellers and the state. You’re finding interesting mechanisms that keep brokers honest. As intermediaries, there’s always the concern that they will take state resources for themselves rather than distributing them back to the population. You find that they’re not actually pocketing the resources. What incentive to do they have to be honest?

26:56: Do you see these informal institutions as a healthy phenomenon in Indian democracy? Are they effectively a really benign form of bottom up self-governance that fills in the vacuum of the formal state?

29:58: What does this kind of competitive local governance mean for Indian political development in the long term? Do you see political machines in the global south eventually declining in the same way they did in the US in the early 20th century? 

35:20: Tying that into questions of economic development in India, as these slums develop over time and residents, having gotten used to a somewhat deliberative process and being somewhat involved in getting public service provision, do you think that will put a long term pressure on the formal system of governance?

37:48: This is a one country example. There is often the question in social science about external generalizability. What lessons are pertinent for the study of political development and urbanization around the world? 

41:28: What are the future paths in your research program? 

43:00: On a more methodological point, you’ve been using different kinds of methods, from ethnography to experimentation and survey work. Talk a little bit about the challenges of doing that ethnographic work. What have you been finding most rewarding and challenging? Any advice for young scholars trying to do this kind of fieldwork?