Shifting terrains of communities and community organization: reflections on organizing for housing rights in Mumbai

Mumbai has historically been a home to several struggles of urban underprivileged groups. The city assured spaces to slums in the past, albeit grudgingly. Cases of displacement were few and intensely contested. However, the last decade has witnessed a considerable expansion of the nature and scale of threats to the existence of slum-dwellers in the city. Attempts to organize slum communities began in the 1960s following a trajectory of locality development and then housing rights. The earlier vision of broad-based development and struggles of urban poor has given way to fragmented, issue-based and localized struggles. Intense politicization and competition for valuable resources and opportunities have fractured this potent constituency comprising about 60 percent of city dwellers. The paper traces the slippery and challenging terrain of organizing slum communities around their rights and raises questions about the location and nature of community practice.