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243 Conclusion Infra-structure I began this book with a citation of “change” in postliberalization India and the effects of structural adjustments in cities of the global south. While I bring this work belatedly to a conclusion,popular revolutions are rocking the Middle East. The people have taken to the streets to protest ruling elites that have perpetuated , in collusion with capital, governments that are fundamentally nondemocratic . What we are witnessing is the populous as a revolutionary force claiming power—the right to political action—that belongs to them proper. There is a sense of incredulity in the Western response to these mass movements, both as what could be the sustaining source of these protests and what could be the dynamics that sustain it. How did they manage to mobilize the masses (without any apparent central organizing structure), given the prohibitions against gathering in public spaces and the censorship of the news and electronic media ? How does the desire for freedom and political action survive in a society in which the apparatus of bourgeois civil society has been truncated? There is the attendant fear that those forces within the popular mobilization, for example , the Muslim Brotherhood in Egypt, might introduce forms of political society that are at odds with liberal democracy and the concomitant desire for a (neo)liberal state. There is also relief in that the dynamics of the revolution did not allow the Muslim Brotherhood to hijack the revolution to its own vision of state and society.1 This must be a “miracle” because no sociopolitical logic could account for it! The concerns persist. The popular, whether in Egypt or in other parts of the world, is by definition heterogeneous and exceeds the bounds of both 244 Conclusion bourgeois civil society and the domain of subalternity. Thus there is no guarantee that a popular democracy would be or become a liberal democracy or that it needs to be. Sympathetic observers worry that the lack of the organs of civil society and a vigorous system of party politics—no one person or party stood out as the leader of the opposition in Egypt—might result in the inability to form and sustain a stable government in the aftermath of revolution. There is concern over the lack of a nucleus and suggestions that the protest of this magnitude requires a charismatic leader who could organize and shape the myriad voices into a single “national” one that would have the power of sustenance in the long run.2 This is Gramsci’s desire for the subaltern to be transformed into a force that can seize and keep power. While Tahrir Square became a battleground ,“experts” on television commented on the need for the protestors to move out from the open square into the streets and alleys where they would have a more conducive spatial architectonics for maneuvering. The exposure of the square would not lend the protestors tactical advantage. That no single charismatic leader emerged, and the rebellion successfully deposed an authoritarian regime, gives lie to the centrality of the party, the state, and civil society in the struggle for freedom and social justice. The effort to describe the rebellion with the vocabulary of liberal democracy and state showed up the impoverished imagination of political theory. While the kind of organizational and social structures that made the rebellion successful would be debated for a long time to come, contemporary discussions focusing on the physical infrastructure of the city and its relation to political infrastructure have brought to the fore the ubiquity of infrastructure as a first principle of governance . With this, allow me to return as a way of conclusion to the Indian context and infrastructure’s relation to popular culture. By infrastructure we commonly mean the physical channels that connect one space with another, enabling the passage of people and goods: the “technical systems of transport,telecommunications,urban planning,energy,and water that create the skeleton of urban life.”3 In India and elsewhere this notion of institutionalized infrastructure, put in place by state and municipal authorities or corporate powers, has come to be understood as an unquestioned good. I described the symptoms of the desire for infrastructural overhaul in chapter 1. This conventional understanding of infrastructure has a distinct modernist connotation and stands in as the sign of the modern. The idea that modern infrastructure development is absolutely necessary for the viability of the Indian economy has become a matter of popular and scholarly prejudice. Any resistance or opposition...

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