The Right to Be Counted blends rich ethnographic description with in-depth documentary analysis and nuanced theorization to reveal how urban poor residents of Delhi, India practice the tactics of numerical citizenship to make claims on the state. Providing a view into the world of politics as it is actually lived, Sanjeev Routray makes a series of arguments about the mutually entangled relationships between people and their state that together constitute an important intervention in debates over citizenship across Anthropology, Geography, Sociology, South Asian Studies and Urban Studies. At once a fine-grained study of life in three particular settlements in Delhi, and a commentary on the more universal ‘right to the city’, Routray shows us how the knowledge and agency of poor urban citizens in Delhi may in fact offer valuable global lessons for understanding dynamics of power in other global South contexts, and perhaps even the global North as well.

The book is structured in two sections that encapsulate the bidirectional flow of Routray’s argument. Part I, ‘The Politics of Planning’ explores the proverbial top-down machinations of the state. Through the theoretical frameworks of governmentality and structural violence, Chapter 1 and 2 respectively show how the ‘urban poor’ have been both geographically located and socially constructed as such by state-led practices of planning and resettlement.

Part II, ‘The Politics of the Poor’ tracks the bottom-up practices and performances of the poor themselves. Chapter 3 focuses on intermediary figures who bridge the worlds of state and citizen, while Chapter 4 delves into what Routray calls the ‘counter-tactics of enumeration’—perhaps one of the most important themes of the book. Chapter 5 turns to the judiciary as an under-researched element of the state, while Chapter 6 documents the cultural content of resistance as performed, offering a new take on Ranajit Guha’s now classic articulation of subaltern resistance. The chapters are book-ended by an Introduction and Conclusion, both framed around the concept of numerical citizenship, defined as ‘the struggle to be “counted” in order for a political community of the poor to assert its numerical strength’ (p. 2), which provides the organizing logic for the diverse material presented across the book’s sections.

Demonstrating this conscious desire to be counted on the part of his urban poor interlocutors, coupled with the careful description of their well-crafted, intentional use of the tactics needed to be enumerated, is Routray’s primary agenda. His arguments provide a much-needed counterpoint to dominant frameworks for theorizing citizen-state relationships in recent decades: both the Foucauldian notion of the state in which biopolitics is a diffuse form of power that can only ever disenfranchise people, and James Scott’s vision of marginalized people who intentionally seek to remain ‘ungovernable’ and apart from the state by hiding themselves from its view.

Instead, Routray emphasizes the will—indeed the right—to be counted that people seek as a form of empowerment, through agency and negotiation with states and other power holders (NGOs and other civil society organizations, for instance) on their own terms. From this perspective, the equation of active citizenship with the ability to secure access to services is not a misunderstanding of the liberal citizenship paradigm, or evidence of poor people acting in bad faith, manipulating or lying their way into entitlements. Rather it is evidence of a sophisticated understanding of the way things actually work, and the ability to act with consciousness and clarity in a very difficult environment in which the poor have few resources except their own astute reading of the situation. All of this is well-documented in Routray’s careful and creative use of various documentary sources that often fall outside the ethnographic purview, including documents from Delhi planning offices, activist organizations, and residents themselves.

Reading The Right to Be Counted as a sociocultural anthropologist with long-term ethnographic engagements in Nepal and northeast India, Routray’s emphasis on the political agency of the poor resonates deeply with my own observations. However, I work primarily with rural communities, which leads me to ask what is gained and what is lost by framing the arguments of the book exclusively around the category of the ‘urban poor’. This question is relevant both because many ‘rural poor’ people with whom I and others have worked deploy similar strategies of numerical citizenship to those that Routray describes, and also because, as the author mentions, ‘spatial practices of the poor entail migration from the rural hinterland to the city in search of work and shelter’ (p. 88). In other words, what of the kinship connections and ideological feedback loops that connect rural and urban experiences of the state? Although it is certainly Delhi planning and policy that creates the specific material conditions of resettlement described in this book, how might we situate these vis-à-vis broader experiences of land-owning or not elsewhere, and the overall political economic conjuncture that is bringing people into Delhi and constituting them as ‘urban poor’ in the first place? Taking mobility as a fact of life for ‘the poor’—both urban and rural—might be helpful in understanding the full scope of their engagements with the state at federal, state, and local levels.

Finally, I’d like to suggest that this work offers illuminating paradigms for understanding urban spaces beyond India, and even beyond the global South. What can it tell us about Vancouver, for instance, from where I write and where Routray completed his PhD, which forms the basis for this book? I observe the demographic calculus and enumerative politics of citizens here in this putatively green and resilient city on a day-to-day basis, as affordable housing, education, and health care, among other services, become increasingly difficult to access. Such thought experiments may help demonstrate the full power of Routray’s work to offer insights from Delhi, to bear on experiences of governmentality and citizenship elsewhere, in rural and urban spaces across the global South and global North.

Sara Shneiderman, University of British Columbia

Sanjeev Routray 2022: The Right to Be Counted: The Urban Poor and the Politics of Resettlement. Stanford: Stanford University Press.

Views expressed in this section are independent and do not represent the opinion of the editors.