Zainab Bawa: Poltics of Land

Zainab Bawa works as an independent researcher on issues of urbanism, governance and impact of technology on political practices and institutions. She is collaborating with Servelots to assess how communities can participate in creating and using information and communication technologies.

Zainab is also a Research Fellow with the Centre for Internet and Society (CIS) in Bangalore. Here, she is analyzing why and how the Internet has become a crucial space for enforcing transparency in politics. In the past, Zainab has collaborated with Sarai-CSDS (New Delhi) to study emerging issues in urbanism in India, with Praja Foundation (Mumbai) on developing a handbook for citizens on urban governance in Mumbai and with CASUMM (Bangalore) to study the impact of urban reforms and restructuring on poverty. Zainab is pursuing her Ph.D. from the Centre for the Study of Culture and Society (CSCS) in Bangalore. Here, she is working on how the creation of property and the spate of land acquisitions in Indian cities is impacting political and economic practices and social networks that existed around land and locality. In the past, Zainab has traveled extensively and has worked collaboratively with researchers in Kashmir and in Bangladesh on issues of space, conflict, violence and their impact on society.

In her PhD research Zainab Bawa takes the standpoint that ‘land’ is a very physical and material entity, and yet there are so many levels of relationships that evolve around land: political relationships, social relationships, and cultural relationships.

These relationships keep on influencing the way in which the land is seen by various kinds of entities like governments, like the people appropriating the land, middle class citizens, people in business and industry. Bawa looks at all these complexities to argue that the construction of property, which has become the keystone of modern citizenship, actually does not work the way it has been thought of in the past. These complicated relationships actually produce a lot of avenues to negotiate and this is what keeps politics going. When a literal situation around land changes, when people move, also social economical and political relations change as well as structures of empowerment and emotional ties.

Social relations, architecture and the environment around shape an individual when growing up. However, it seems that when people are involved in conflict, and feelings of discomfort, anger and resentment determine how one is capable of relating to others, all sense of space disappears.

Even a large house can offer no space in such a case. Especially during adolescence, youngsters are in conflict with their parents; they have to find their own way and at the same time social rules as well as religion tell people to respect and obey their parents. Bawa was part of a research project in Srinagar in Kashmir that focused on youth, violence and conflict, looking at personal space as well. Based on the experiences she had in Srinagar, she concluded that when relationships and the social and emotional space are dominated by religion, that this adds more violence to the conflict. In such a case young people seem to have two ways of responding to these conflicts. Some decide to turn completely inward and shut of the rest of the world, which is a kind of violence that you choose to commit on yourself. Others decide to rebel, which is also a form of violence one is subjecting one self to, because this involves a lot of emotional and personal conflict.

As one witnesses another human being, one also judges the other human being. And this is again even more so when religion has a strong impact on social and public life. Being an independent woman in Kashmir Bawa found that judging and witnessing seem to be parallel processes.

Only through conversations in which trust grows between human beings, judging may turn into understanding. Also when working in a slum situation Bawa found that there are so many complicated dynamics at work, there is witnessing, there is judging, there is trust and there is distrust. There are moments of crises and moments in which something is in danger or some opportunity is there. And in those moments trust can change into distrust and vice versa.

When transposing the issue of witnessed presence to the online world Bawa talks about her experience with the blog she wrote in which she presented her ethnographic research on the squatter communities in Bombay.

To Bawa it was important to give a voice to the squatters. Even though she narrated the story in the third voice, a few times her own emotions could be heard in the report and some middle class readers of the blog started to comment that their concerns of security were not taken into account, that they were labelled in certain ways and the reactions were very emotional. Bawa solved the issues by organizing a meeting in real life and subsequently started offering other perspectives in her blog as well.

In another project Bawa was involved in, the government wanted to offer civic services through an online system.

This was the Online Complaint Management System (OCMS) which was a centralized complaint management system that allowed citizens to lodge their complaints through phone, fax, personal letters, visits, etc. and all of these were entered into a centralized complaints system, despatched to relevant officers/departments responsible for resolving them. This, in turn, helped to better civic services. The team Bawa was working with was thinking of the online space as the space of democracy, citizenship and negotiation. It turns out that this is not as straightforward as it was imagined to be. There are so many stakeholders – citizens who hate their neighbour, politicians in need for attention, administrators not doing anything effectively and more - trying to use the online space to make their own claim, negotiate in their own way and to escalate a conflict and so. Among other things, this shows that the relation between land and space and the online world, between the real and the virtual, is not dichotomous, argues Bawa. It all flows into each other.

The effect of this flow between different realities became very clear for Bawa when the state of emergency was called in Kashmir and the Indian government decided to shut down Internet completely.

In December 2001, following the attack on the Parliament in New Delhi, the Indian government decided to shut down Internet in Kashmir because apparently, the attackers were from Kashmir and they had sent emails to each other. This happened before Bawa first visited Kashmir. When she went there in March 2002, the Internet was still shut down, cyber cafes were operating surreptitiously and this was a great source of agitation for youngsters.

How citizens witness the state and the state witnesses its citizens through these technologies shapes the relationship that the citizen has with the state and that the state has with its citizens. Therefore online platforms etcetera are part of that witnessing and judging in a certain way. The Internet has become one of the mediating spaces of the relationship of the citizen with space and when the governments shutting of that avenue, it aggravate citizens more Bawa found. Where the state treats Internet as a medium, for citizens it is actually a utility, and above all a space, a window to the world one really needs in times of hardship.

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Hereunder the transcript in text.