Sanjeev Routray. <i>The Right to be Counted. The Urban Poor and the Politics of Resettlement in Delhi</i> . [South Asia in Motion.] Stanford University Press, Stanford (CA) 2022. xviii, 347 pp. Ill. $90.00. (Paper, E-book: $30.00.)

This is an empirically grounded study of the political manoeuvrings of marginalized urban dwellers in Delhi, who inhabit informal or semi-formal settlements.Life in these settlements is precarious due to their unclear legal status and lack of regular access to basic services such as waste disposal, running water, and electricity.To improve their living conditions, the urban poor lobby local leaders, invest in relationships with social activists, organize public protests, take legal action against the state, and make themselves visible to the bureaucracy by creating archives, collecting documents, and keeping lists.By providing a comprehensive review of the most important tactics and techniques employed by the urban poor, the author offers a valuable resource for those interested in urban India.Routray's detailed study challenges ideal-type distinctions such as those between civil and political society, as proposed by Partha Chatterjee. 1 The former refers to the bourgeois public, who can enlist the support of the administration, while the latter refers to the poor, who mobilize democratic leaders to enforce their rights.While this rough distinction captures general trends, it is not a useful tool for understanding the diverse methods of grassroot mobilization.The book's focus on lived practice wonderfully illustrates the advantages of an approach that takes seriously the idea of the intertwining of state and society.The state is not a separate entity, but emerges performatively through acts of exercising authority or the deployment of techniques of governance. 2 Through an in-depth exploration of subtle negotiations, informal arrangements, and the role of networks, the book demonstrates how the urban poor negotiate in a grey zone between the formal and the informal to establish themselves in the global city, despite the prevailing anti-poor atmosphere.Ironically, the structure of the book, which neatly distinguishes between top-down planning and bottom-up politics, as well as the argumentation in the first part, "The Politics of Planning", which treats its subject as a mostly abstract process, somewhat counteracts the book's main argument.In Chapter One, through an extensive literature review Routray provides a broad overview of the planning logics that have driven different phases of post-colonial urban planning in Delhi.While it offers a useful introduction, the tendency to treat the state as a unified and reified entity limits its insight into the subtle contradictions between planning ideals and the various ways 1 Partha Chatterjee, The Politics of the Governed: Reflections on Popular Politics in Most of the World (New York,