Smart Cities, Surveillance and Speed in Imphal, Manipur

Common across India’s Smart Cities Mission (SCM) projects are ‘smart’ components added to existing surveillance infrastructure, termed surveillant assemblages here. Surveillant assemblages resonate powerfully in Northeast cities where surveillance has been woven into the urban fabric for decades. Using Imphal, Manipur, I explore the following proposition: despite decades of crushing surveillance, enhanced surveillant assemblages under the SCM resonate (unevenly) as promises for a more ‘developed’ city. Enhanced surveillance means different things to different groups, but none are overtly anti-surveillance. Rather analysing different surveillant assemblages draws attention to harmonies and tensions between ideas about the future of the city and the SCM more broadly. I explore surveillant assemblages from the perspective of three groups. First, for civilian authorities enhanced surveillance is a promise of future law and order and a tool to speed up the city, making it more ‘developed’. Second, for the military and paramilitary, enhanced surveillance brings more of the city under their gaze while simultaneously eroding the power of counter-insurgent infrastructure based on slowing the city down. Third, enhanced surveillance appeals to citizens to track foreign bodies through horizontal relations; variously non-local, non-citizen (including refugees), and ethnic ‘others’ in articulating rights to the city based on exclusion.