Are Indian cities now cradles of hate?

Kolkata, Chennai and Mumbai have emerged as the last bastions against hate and polarisation

Great cities are not static, they constantly change and take the world along with them, so writes Ed Glaeser, Harvard economist, a renowned scholar on the growth of cities, their associated agglomeration economies and contribution to national and global economic growth.

But cities in India may have a different story to tell considering the recent events with Namaz disruption or Christmas vandalism in the last few weeks and months.

Not only are they crucibles of internal migration, eye-popping demonstrations of inequality (remember that Antilla versus Dharavi analogy), laboratories of air or water pollution, or urban planning gone awry in the guise of getting smart or clean, today they seem to be also smouldering as cradles of hate.

It is a tragedy since that was not what India's planning experience envisioned post-independence for its cities.

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A pole position here is occupied by first movers in this space, cities like Ahmedabad or Nagpur, where ghettos for Muslims are duly legitimised over many years of segregation and delimitation. Or non-vegetarian sellers are stigmatised with gay abandon. 2022 being the 20th anniversary of the Gujarat pogrom, one can easily match and surmise how it has all had a punctuated but thoughtfully calibrated genesis. To add to this, there is also overt discrimination in the rental apartment market, for example, or clusterisation within cities of India's smug gated elites aloof from what is happening to the rest of the local urban conurbation. In short, to quote Harsh Mander, there is a curious within-city phenomenon of looking the other way.

But here, there are also subsequent movers like today's Gurgaon, Bengaluru, Pune or Hyderabad, where surveillance, polarisation and hate is increasingly a prestigious dog-whistling troika even among technology spin doctors in town. The more you can do it in real or in social media, as Tejaswi Surya showed in Bengaluru recently, the more is the likelihood for you as a society's political elite to gain eminence, power and supremacy.

Amidst this, thankfully, there are still some renegade cities, though their numbers are dwindling by the day. It is now well known that in the last couple of years, many free speech, justice and human rights minded civil society individuals are congregating in Kolkata, Chennai or Mumbai, the last bastions against hate and polarisation as these old colonial hubs intriguingly offer pushback against India's unfettered wave of hate last few years. They are also somewhat of a contrast to India's post-liberalisation and post-2002 glorified urban new conglomerations. Bengaluru or Bangalore, of course, is an interesting puzzle here, but we will have to wait and watch its final (and what will not be frictionless) denouement.

Unsurprisingly, this separating equilibrium in the character of Indian cities also has a resonance with more long term history. For that, we have to turn to Nazi Germany, where for example, between 1933 and 1939, many cities received honorific titles.

Linz was Patenstadt des Führers, Patronage City of the Führer; Nuremberg was Stadt der Reichsparteitage City of the Reich Party Conventions; Stuttgart was Stadt der Auslandsdeutschen, City of the Germans Abroad; Graz was Stadt der Volkserhebung or city of the Popular Uprising; Munich was Capital of the Movement and Capital of the Art, or Hauptstadt der Bewegung und Hauptstadt der deutschen Kunst while Leipzig was Reichsmessestadt or Hauptstadt des deutschen Handels, Reich Fair City or Capital of German Trade. There was also Salzburg, Stadt der Lebensforschung, the City of Life Sciences but we will leave it to the reader's imagination which Indian city today fits which title to resonate with Nazi Germany of the early 1930s.

Meanwhile, it is time to remind ourselves how Ed Glaeser, in some other work, has also noted that "An economist's definition of hatred is the willingness to pay a price to inflict harm on others." India seems to be at an inflexion point on this matter. The world is watching how its cities evolve heterogeneously over time in that willingness to pay. Hopefully, the equilibrium here will be locally, and globally welfare enhancing.

(The author is a health economist, a Reader in Economics of Innovation at SPRU-Sussex, University of Sussex, Visiting Fellow at Hoover Institution, Stanford University & Visiting Adjunct Professor in Economics at IIM-Ahmedabad, India)

Disclaimer: The views expressed above are the author's own. They do not necessarily reflect the views of DH.