7. My new essay argues that if the city is the scale at which most of us now live our politics, it also has to become the scale at which democracy is rebuilt.

thirdworldecon.substack.com/p/cities-wit...

This pic is so appropriate. And painful.

8. Hope isn’t naive. It’s what makes politics possible.

Mamdani’s win in New York matters because it reminds us that city government can still be government.

The question is whether ours, in India, or anywhere, still can.

7. My new essay argues that if the city is the scale at which most of us now live our politics, it also has to become the scale at which democracy is rebuilt.

thirdworldecon.substack.com/p/cities-wit...

6. The losers are the same everywhere, the people who make cities work: workers, tenants, migrants, those priced out of housing but indispensable to the economy.

5. In both places, local democracy is being replaced by project management: metro corporations, “smart city” companies, public-private boards.

They deliver infrastructure but can’t represent anyone.

4. The result feels familiar to anyone who studies US cities:

• States preempt local laws
• Federal grants come with strings
• Cities depend on regressive property taxes
• Public services are privatised in the name of efficiency

Different context, same pattern of urban disempowerment.

3. It wasn’t supposed to be this way.

A 1992 constitutional reform promised India a “third tier” of government, urban local bodies with their own finances and staff.

Three decades later, cities are still treated as administrative branches of the state, not political spaces in their own right.

2. Indian cities simply don’t have the power to do what Mamdani promises.

Mayors here can’t set housing policy, control transport, or raise local taxes. Those powers belong to state governments.

(6/6) We don't lack arguments. We lack a shared language of trust.

Full essay on Substack.

🔗 Why We No Longer Argue: Expertise, Resentment, and the Collapse of Public Debate

substack.com/home/post/p-...

(5/6) When knowledge itself becomes suspect, distrust turns into a way of knowing.

To distrust the expert becomes a moral stance. To question power is seen as betrayal.

Suspicion becomes the language of survival. An economy that governs universities, medias, and public debate alike.

(4/6) Beneath the noise lies something deeper, a shared wound.

That India is still a site of knowledge, not its source. That we're still being studied, not heard.

The liberal sees this as a crisis of democracy, the nationalist as a crisis of dignity. Both are right. They both talk past each other.

(3/6) Today's ideological divides are really epistemic divides. The expert appeals to method & rigour. The nationalist appeals to rootedness & lived belonging. Each believes they're defending truth. What was once an argument about ideas has become a competition between moral grammars.

(2/6) When a British scholar of Hindi literature was denied entry to India, one side cried censorship, the other called it decolonisation.

But the fight wasn’t about visas.
It was about authority, who has the right to interpret India, to produce knowledge about it, to name what counts as truth.