Review Article
Mumbai’s Development Mafia’s: Globalization, Organized Crime and Land Development

Jordan Morrison
209148123
ENVS 4225: Urban Sustainability
November 17, 2010
Mumbai’s Development Mafia’s: Globalization ,Organized Crime and Land Development
LIZA WEINSTIEN International Journal of Urban and Regional Research
Volume 32, Issue 1, pages 22-39, March 2008
Abstract
For over a decade, researchers have analyzed the effects of liberalization and globalization on urban development, considering the local political implications of shifts at the national and global scales. Taking the case of Mumbai, this article examines how the past 15 years of political reforms in India have reshaped property markets and the politics of land development. Among the newly empowered actors, local criminal syndicates, often with global connections, have seized political opportunities created by these shifts to gain influence over land development. The rise of Mumbai's organized criminal activity in the 1950s was closely linked to India's macroeconomic policies, with strict regulation of imports fuelling the growth of black market smuggling. Liberalization and deregulation since the early 1990s have diminished demand for smuggled consumer goods and criminal syndicates have since diversified their operations. With skyrocketing real estate prices in the 1990s, bolstered by global land speculation, the mafia began investing in property development. Supported by an illicit nexus of politicians, bureaucrats and the police, the mafia has emerged as a central figure in Mumbai's land development politics. The article examines the structural shifts that facilitated the criminalization of land development and the implications of mafia involvement in local politics.

The efforts of this article were to examine informal governance structures in conjunction with criminal activity on the urban property development and their markets in a rapidly globalizing city. The author chooses Mumbai; an appropriate choice considering the recent industrialization, urbanization, development and various governmental changes in regulation and policy that is associated with such growth. The article focuses more directly with the criminal activity in Mumbai than informal governance structures and national policy that supplement their activity. By doing so, the analysis of the paper becomes more of a historical account of the prevalence of organized crime in Mumbai and its eventual shaping of urban development and land use rather than a more complete analysis of interactive processes of globalization and land development with the rise of organized criminal activity in relation to these processes. It is in this neglect that the author does not achieve complete compatibility with the title; the positioning of globalization, a contentious word, in front of organized crime and land development assumes that this global process affects organized crime operations and subsequently land development. While this is true and is evident in the article to an extent, “globalization” is limited in this paper to strictly the extending global reach and influence of organized crime networks and deregulation and liberalization policies of trade and commerce at the national level. This is a rather restricted view of globalization that does not give context to the larger procedures at hand that also might be influencing government policy, criminal activity and land development. To the author’s credit, following a brief contextualization of Mumbai’s rising property development market and the expansion of mafia organizations, she is explicit in the overall terms of the analysis: “This article examines the conditions that enabled Mumbai's large, well-financed mafia organizations to move into land development, joining the throngs of financiers and developers who have invested in the city's lucrative property markets and construction industry since the mid-1990s.” The three main points that augment her examination and are present throughout the paper are relatively clear to the reader; the structure of the paragraph stating the objectives follows a logical thought process that outlines at basic level, how mafia groups in Mumbai have come to be major players in recent urban development in Mumbai. Although there is a good amount of clarity on what the article sets out to reveal through its analysis, it does not prepare the reader for the extensive accounts and descriptions of the origins of the conditions from which the article draws its analysis. A significant portion of the paper contains a description of the origins and historical evolution of dynamics Mumbai mafias, an overview of the informality of urban property relations in relation to the political structure of the Indian government. While this is necessary in order to understand the situation of the articles examination, it initially is placed as almost an afterthought in the statement of objectives, which in a way distorts the perception of the nature of the paper. A more active inclusion of this background information in the introductory body of the paper would be useful. The article’s strength is its logical structure, clear analytical progression and reaffirmation of its argument. From the outset, it provides a solid backdrop and good informational basis that supplements the substance of the paper nicely. By having an understanding of the origins of criminal activity, the informal governance structures and political ramifications of the development of Mumbai, the following examination of the prevalence and implications of Mumbai criminal organization on urban development is easy to digest. Rather than delve straight into conditions affecting land use and development, this primer of information although at times extensive is undoubtedly useful and is congruent with the logical structure of the paper; meaning that in its analysis of organized criminal activity it goes from small-scale community urban development and expands to full-scale government initiatives in relation of global processes. The author does not attempt to congregate the progression and evolution of factors contributing to the conditions central to her argument into a web of interconnectedness, what makes the argument in the paper strong is the structural separation of the economic, criminal, political and global factors. Each has its own niche within the article and follows the same narrative style that allows the reader to follow the analytical and logical basis for the paper’s objective. This narrative style progression can be seen when Weinstein describes the emergence of criminal organizations in Mumbai’s political structures: “The links between the political parties and the OCGs also grew stronger in this period, with the right-wing Shiv Sena accumulating power through local neighborhood and criminal networks.” This is eventually progresses to: “Extended now from the Persian Gulf to Malaysia, and with linkages identified in London, Johannesburg, and New York, the strength of the city's large OCGs resulted not only from their ties to political parties and embeddedness in antagonistic religious communities, but also in their increasingly global reach.”