Ambivalent Governance and Slow Violence in Mumbai's Mithi River

Abstract

We argue that state agencies in Mumbai involved in urban environmental governance, specifically river governance, have made real estate and property urbanism more durable amidst the crisis of rising waters through the performance of ambivalent governance. This 'ambivalencing' entails government agencies enacting differential practices selectively across and within two interfaces which characterize the governance of flood threat: environmental protection and real estate development (protection vs. development) on the one hand; and informality (elite informalities vs. survival informalities) on the other. We show how ambivalencing as a modality of political power distributes socio-material and discursive harm by being strong in real estate development and slum displacement and weak in protecting the environment and the city's poor. Ambivalent governance regimes draw on new political logics, where we see the language of protection serve the motive of growth on the one hand, while replaying older inequities by serving as an instrument of dispossession on the other. State-led informalities--facilitated through formal plans and laws alongside informal agreements to suspend laws or tolerate violations--are central to this governance regime. We conclude with a reflection on the need to grasp the modalities of ambivalent governance and assemble a counter-politics to reclaim environmental protection by anchoring it to notions of justice for the vulnerable, both human and non-human.

ENDURING HARM: Unlikely Comparisons, Slow Violence and the Administration of Urban Injustice

“…The temporal dispersion of slow violence often impedes our ability to mobilize and act until there is a spectacular disaster—an event that is explosive, erupting into sensational visibility. For example, the oil refinery explosion in Philadelphia in 2019 (Wiggin, 2022, this issue) or Mumbai's deluge of 2005 (Kamath and Tiwari, 2022, this issue) serve both as moments of crisis and of possibility for changing the public and official discourse and imagination of threat: how threat is distributed and how it is governed.…”

AFTER THE RIGHT TO WATER: Rethinking the State and Justice in Mumbai

“…On 10 January 2017 the MCGM issued a circular offering group water connections, subject to the issuance of NOCs by the relevant central government departments and the availability of a sufficient pipe network and pressure in the pipes. At the same time, the circular excludes settlements on private lands, the seashore, roads and footpaths, and particularly Coastal Regulation Zones (see Kamath and Tiwari, 2022, this issue), as well as other lands prohibited by the High Court in previous orders and settlements affected by infrastructure projects. Despite these exclusions, PHS has submitted more than 1,500 applications for water connections, of which the municipal authorities had processed a pitiful 15 by the time this research ended in 2019.…”

TOXICITY 1: On Ambiguity and Sewage in Mumbai's Urban Sea

“…For example, in their essay, Deekshit and Sumbre (this issue) show how access to water is denied through the political and legal production of ambiguity in Mumbai, emerging out of the same High Court order that insists that water be made available to all. Also in Mumbai, ambiguity around the material and legal status of the Mithi River, as described by Kamath and Tiwari (2022, this issue), is a necessary condition for the production of ambivalence; what they describe as the alternately weak and strong government of its flows (see also Burte and Kamath, 2017). And in Philadelphia, ambiguity around what precisely is safe water is key to both the possibility of data deserts around the lower Schuylkill River (Wiggin, 2022, this issue) and also the reproduction of harm visited by its lead water lines (Bhatia, this issue).…”