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CONSTRUCTION for the Punjab government’s Orange Line metro train project continues relatively unhindered. A recent report in the news states nearly 70pc of the land needed for its route stands acquired. Several billion rupees have been spent in the process. The project’s pace appears to be immune to court orders, environmental protests, and the general anguish of residents and shopkeepers less willing to relocate.
As the government’s second major infrastructure project in Lahore, the attendant politics around its construction raises several questions that remained unasked three years ago.
The most important of these questions is who matters to this government, and who doesn’t. Why do some, ie those who matter, end up being heard in the exercise of governance, and why is it that those who don’t, appear comparatively voiceless
The fractured politics of an unequal city leaves the future of environmental concerns particularly bleak.
When the Orange Line’s construction first triggered alarms concerning material and aesthetic damage to a series of heritage and cultural sites, the response from concerned citizens was relatively swift. A series of protests were organised, the media was mobilised, and the government was forced to pay lip service to the idea of more inclusive administration. The early line was yes, we should hear what everyone has to say. That seems like something one would expect in a democracy.
A few meetings with planners, activists, conservationists, and architects, a series of protests and changed Facebook profile pictures later, the government’s plans continue unchanged. The LDA’s position is that the sites will remain unharmed, any procedural violations to the Heritage Act are merely for the ease of construction, and that the vast majority of Lahore’s citizenry actually supports the way things are done in this city.
Despite standing on technically reasonable grounds, the environmentalists, civic-minded citizens, and cultural enthusiasts of a particular ilk are firmly part of the group that doesn’t matter in the exercise of governance.
This is strange because a large part of their case was being championed by a section of the Anglicised elite and upper middle classes of Lahore. Conventional social movement theory, and the study of governance practices in India, tells us that elites matter more when it comes to administration and policymaking.
They have direct access to decision-makers, they are able to mobilise the media much more effectively, and most of all, by exercising links with national and international actors, they can create reputational concerns for the government. While their votes certainly don’t matter in a country where the median voter is poor, their patronage and buy-in is a valuable asset for a government’s credibility at a bigger stage.
Even in the case of Pakistan, elite influence holds true in other instances. Elite private schools shut themselves down for two days, and the government’s already talking about revising its plans to regulate fee increases. Road infrastructure building, an exercise that directly benefits car-owning households, has long remained this country’s only yardstick for development.
So why did it fail this time around?
Part of the answer is that in matters of urban governance, the ruling party is responsive to a completely different set of elites. Flipping through the metro sections of the Urdu papers around the time of the anti Orange Line protests, one encounters a series of public meetings by traders, Lahore Chamber officials, inner-city politicians, and even religious figures celebrating the project. On one occasion, the Liberty market traders association even carried a counter- protest against the ‘anti-development’ practices of the candlestick mafia.
This is where the politics of the PML-N’s city machine eventually comes into play. A couple of decades ago, the Anglicised elite and the aspirational white-collar middle classes swapped the congestion of inner-city Lahore for the comfort and security of suburban, often gated communities to the right of canal bank road.
Those spaces don’t figure into mass transit infrastructure designs of the city, because according to the Lahore Urban Transport study, nearly half of the households found in those areas own at least one car. This particular fraction of the elite may matter to their own largely homogenous neighbourhoods, but those neighbourhoods matter less in the hard politics of this city.
However, the less affluent areas currently experiencing a concrete apocalypse are managed and run for the party by a shalwar-kameez, gold-Rado-wearing elite that’s still spatially, culturally, and economically grounded within them. They are responsible for mobilising voters during elections, and to borrow a term from sociology, they can generate consent and suppress resentment when it comes to particular steps the government takes. The value of being civic elites for the less privileged, in diverse neighbourhoods, is what they bring to the table for the ruling party, and if — for whatever reason — they see the value of a train ploughing through areas of residence under their control, they’ll make sure the reputational damage incurred in the process is limited.
This fractured politics of a thoroughly unequal city leaves the future of environmental concerns particularly bleak.
To give a flippant analogy, in the late 1940s, when Michigan state government progressives wanted to remove segregation in housing for black veterans in Detroit’s middle-class neighbourhoods, the response was virulent and swift. Through civic homeowner associations and by building a cross-class, intra-race coalition with poorer white residents, the white elite and middle-class mobilised public sentiment against their efforts. For the next 10 years, progressives didn’t see the inside of city hall, as conservative, elite-backed mayors and councilmen won election after election and blocked all efforts at racial desegregation.
The point here isn’t to compare Lahore’s environmentalists and cultural aesthetics with what happened in Detroit. The point is that in undemocratic, majoritarian-minded cities, long-term coalition-building and civic activism beyond suburbia is the only way to impact policy. It’s time for those of us who envision a different city to engage with a larger part of it.
The writer is a freelance columnist.
Twitter: @umairjav
Published in Dawn, March 14th, 2016
