In this article the politics of place considered, is the one over productive land in city of Bangalore (India) –the world’s IT hub. A variety of actors compete over this scarce resource: The municipality, wealthy persons and global corporations in pursuit of a financial asset and the urban poor as a means to assure an access to a “right to the city”. Within such a constellation, what chance do social movement organisations (SMOs) have that claim adequate housing for the urban poor? What are the conditions for mobilising on the issue of land?
The theoretical framework for this inquiry is informed by social movement theory, postcolonial and Indian studies, urban and corruption studies, formulated in an neo-institutional perspective. It declines itself around intersections of the linkages macro-meso and formal-informal and includes the cultural-discursive dimension.
This article will attempt map out the conditions for the (non-)/emergence of collective action in contexts drenched with subtle forms of political violence. Through the analysis of two social movement organisations (SMOs) asserting a hold over productive land, the case studies will demonstrate how informal circuits of corruption foster informal repression. Such repression as a form of political violence leads to silencing the claimants. Political violence will be defined as restricting or preventing the ability of certain groups to take part in the political life of a society (Davenport 2007).
The interventions of the SMOs were located in slums, in which ambiguous public housing scheme was underway, delivered through post-colonial systems of governmentality. The analysis of this policy reveals that albeit using a most inclusive language towards the urban poor beneficiaries, its formal inconsistencies were a fertile breeding ground for corrupt practices that fostered informal repression in forms of physical threats and denial of urban space –hence a reproduction of space that reifies society’s power structures.
