Mumbai’s contemporary political economy is largely a result of two critical events: the collapse of the organized textile industry in the late 1970s and the economic liberalization policies enacted and actively backed by the Indian State since 1991. The resultant replacement of blue-collar employment in the organized sector with jobs in the informal sector has led to increased employment insecurity among the former proletariat, the numerically far greater class of workers now best described by the term ‘toilers’ (Pendse, 1995). The absence of organized employment has also meant an absence of organized activism amongst the former proletariat. Hence political movements in neoliberal Mumbai have been forced to make up for the lack of organized activism through the formation of unlikely partnerships –between the State, corporations, and the former proletariat (Appadurai, 2002).
The main beneficiaries of liberalization have been a section of the middle class in the city, whose growing economic clout has led to increased political power and the middle class exhibiting characteristics of a bourgeois class. Their growing clout has resulted in a definition of claims on urban space through a rejection of socialist policies followed before 1991 (Mahadevia, 2008) and an aspiration to be a ‘world-class city’ that is visually and socially a reflection of their economic growth(Fernandes, 2004). Aided by local and regional governments, this aspiration has translated into a politics of exclusion of the poor from the city– one that the tactical partnerships generated by toiler political movements described by Appadurai have found hard to counter.