Untitled - Rebel Studies Library

56 PLANET OF SLUMS
in the violent aftermaths of 1948 (Partition), 1964 (Indo-Pakistani
War), and 1971 (secession of Bangladesh).17 Bombay's population -
growing at less than 2 percent per annum during the last decades of the
Raj - almost doubled in the late 1940s and early 1950s with the influx of
pauperized refugees from Pakistan and the concomitant (although
slower) expansion of the textile industry.IS Half of the 1950s populations
of Karachi and Hyderabad, meanwhile, were "Muhajirs", Muslim
refugees from the eastern Punjab. They were joined later in the 1970s by
hundreds of thousands of impoverished Biharis: Muslim peasants and
"double migrants" who fled first to East Pakistan, then, after the secession
of Bangladesh, to Pakistan.19 From the beginning, these slum-based
refugee populations were heavily dependent upon political benefactors
and corrupt party machines. In both India and Pakistan, as a result, slum
development became famously synchronized to election cycles: in
\ Karachi land invasions and pirate subdivisions typically increase in
\ election years, while in India elections provide squatters with leverage to
\ seek legalization or improvement of their bustees.2o
In South Vietnam, forced urbanization (described with unconscious
Orwellian irony as "modernization") was an integral part of US military
strategy. Since the Vietcong, according to war strategist Samuel
Huntington, constituted "a powerful force which cannot be dislodged
from its constituency so long as the constituency continues to exist,"
he and other hawks argued for abolishing the "constituency." American
terror bombing provided the force "on such a massive scale as to
produce a massive migration from countryside to city [so that] the basic
assumptions underlying the Maoist doctrine of revolutionary war no
longer operates [sic]. The Maoist inspired rural revolution is undercut
by the American-sponsored urban revolution."21 Over the course of
17 Frederic Thomas, Calcutta Poor: Elegies on a City Above Pretense, Armonk (NY)
1997, p. 41.
18 Sujata Patel, "Bombay's Urban Predicament," in Patel and Alice Thorner (eds),
Bombay: Metaphor for Modern India, Delhi 1996, p. xvi.
19 Oskar Verkaaik, Migrants and Militants: Fun and Urban Violence in Pakistan,
Princeton 2004, p. 64.
20 Robert-Jan Baken and Jan van der Linden, Land Delivery for Low Income Groups
in Third Warld Cities, Aldershot 1992, p. 31.
21 Samuel Huntington, "The Bases of Accommodation," ForeiJ!!1AjJairs 46:4 (July
1968), pp. 650-53.
THE TREASON OF T-HE STATE 57
the war, as historian Marilyn Young points out, the urban share of
South Vietnam's population soared from 15 percent to 65 percent, with
five million displaced peasants turned into slum-dwellers or inhabitants
of refugee camps.22
Seven years of ruthless colonial warfare in Algeria (1954-61)
likewise displaced half of the rural population. After independence in
1962, this uprooted mass poured into the cities. Algiers tripled its population
in less than two years as poor immigrants crowded into
corrugated bidonvilles or, preferentially, occupied the apartments left
vacant by the flight of 900,000 colons. The new regime's initial emphasis
on Soviet-bloc-style heavy industrialization and its relative neglect of
subsistence agriculture reinforced the exodus from the countryside.
Very quickly Algiers became acutely overcrowded, with much of the
population crammed into dangerously deteriorated older housing.
Scores of ancient houses in the qasbah simply collapsed, often kilJing
the residents. Meanwhile, "socialist" bidonvilles continued to expand on
the urban outskirts and along the principal highways.23
In postwar Turkey, meanwhile, migration to the cities was stimulated
by Marshall Plan aid, the modernization of agriculture, and the growth
of import-substitution manufacture. But the Kemalist state, as the
Marxist sociologist C;:aglar Keyder observes, was prepared neither to
build public housing nor to alienate state land to private-sector development
- instead "the vast inertia of populist clientelism prevailed."
Anatolian migrants were forced to construct their own shanty cities on
the outskirts of Ankara and Istanbul in negotiation with local officials,
and so the decade 1955-65 became the heroic age of squatting, as the
gecekondu population soared from 5 percent (250,000 people) to 23
percent (2.2 million) of the total urban population (a percentage that has
not shifted significantly since).24 Atleastin this early period, the gecekondus
synergistically abetted the political system that had made them the
primary mode of popular housing. "Politicians," continues Keyder,
"generally preferred to retain the privilege of arbitrary allocation to
22 Marilyn Young, The Vietnam Wars: 1945-1990, New York 1991, p. 177.
23 Djaffar Lesbet, "Algeria," in Mathey, Housing Policies in the Socialist Third World,
pp. 252-63.
24 Keyder, Istanbul, p. 147; H. Tarik $engul, "On the Trajectory of Urbanization
in Turkey," International Development Planning Review 25:2 (2003), p. 160.