A renowned Indian TV channel called the year 2010 the year of corruption and stated the state of Karnataka as the shining example. During the last trimester of 2010 fieldwork in the city of Bangalore (Karnataka) was conducted to investigate, what the outcomes of contentious politics are -within a political environment that is drenched with informal practices such corruption, clientelism and informal problem-solving networks among the poor. More specifically it sought to differentiate the outcomes of such a political environment on the action repertoires of two types of social movement organizations characterized with differential resources, within the same political institutional field. The triggering thoughts to this enquiry arouse from the observation that there was no mobilization to be witnessed on the issue of adequate housing for the urban poor in the city of Bangalore. The qualitative data gathered during fieldwork though, depict a more nuanced picture of what kind of mechanism are at play between organizational agents that are endowed with differential amounts of resources and the political opportunity structure, comprising of formal and informal dimensions, facilitating mobilization in some and hindering it in other ways. The resource differential is constituted in terms of economic and social (including caste) inequalities. Some preliminary findings will be discussed in this paper against a theoretical background of post-colonial theories and a neo-institutional approach to explain interactions between formal and informal institutions and how they impact mobilization. The vast majority of social movement concepts having been developed for the analysis of western societies, this paper calls for the need to further develop concepts that embrace post-colonial realities.
