‘Party in the street’: The partisan politics of space

Introduction

In this paper, our focus is on the purported democratic functions of public space. Where most contemporary theories of these functions focus on public space as a node rooted exclusively within the public sphere and civil society, we argue important arenas of public space exist at the neglected intersection between civil society and the state. To this end, we explore the potential role political parties can perform as catalysing institutions capable of rendering public space more explicitly political. Drawing on the ‘spatial-politics’ of the Communist Party of India (Marxist)’s (hereon CPIM) in the Indian state of Kerala, we argue that ‘partisan interventions’ in public space bring large-scale political processes, and the institutions within which they operate, closer to the spaces citizens share with each other. This paper thus explores the ways in which cultivating political public space can both structure and improve citizens’ democratic engagement.

In the first section, we consider the ways public space, as an arena of the public sphere within which citizens engage in face-to-face encounters with one another, connects to the wider purposes served by the public sphere. Typical accounts of encounters in public space emphasise the following functions: first, citizens must perceive each other as minimally trustworthy within such spaces; second, citizens must treat one another with a degree of civility; and, finally, citizens must experience these public arenas as sites of openness, within which their community’s complex diversity is expressed and acknowledged. These different criteria generate an evaluative framework that captures important dimensions of the democratic comportments citizens learn through interaction with one another, but, we argue, fails to articulate how this relates public space to the broader public sphere’s purported role as a counter-balance to state power, as a site where state power is confronted and controlled. In the next section, we correct for this failure by using the CPIM’s ‘spatial practices’ and ‘partisan interventions’ in public space to demonstrate how parties’ location at the intersection of the state and civil society has the potential to explicitly connect public space to these functions of confrontation and control: political parties – and their partisans – act to both confront and challenge the uses of state power, and compete to wield it. By staking its claims to legitimacy within a history of popular struggle and resistance that is cultivated within public space, the CPIM maintains an important critical distance from the state, while still aspiring to win the power it affords. In conclusion, we describe some of the possible precedents and advantages, as well as limitations and challenges, that emerge from the partisan politicisation of shared space, and outline its implications for democratic practice in contexts markedly different from Kerala.

The purposes of public space

Shared public space is only the most (straightforwardly) concrete node of the public sphere. Jane Mansbridge (et al.) provide a summary of other nodes that form part of the ‘deliberative systems’ at work in democracies:

‘Political parties and factions within those parties…; Schools; universities with their departments, fields, and disciplinary associations; unions, interest groups, voluntary associations and non-governmental organizations (NGOs) both ad hoc and long-standing; social movements with both their enclaves and their broader participation; the media including the internet, blogs, social media, interactive media, books, magazines, newspapers, film, and television; informal talk among politically active or less active individuals whether powerful or marginalized; forms of subjugated and local knowledge that rarely surface for access by others without some opening in the deliberative system (Mansbridge J, Bohman J, Chambers S, et al., 2012).

However, in order to understand the role of actual public space in connection with the public sphere’s ‘mediating (role) between state and society’, and specifically its role facilitating this overarching conversation, it is important to register the largely metaphorical treatment accorded to such space within many discussions of the public sphere. This results in overlooking the different levels of mediation that characterize the wide variety of arenas constituting the nodes of the public sphere. What and how ‘matters of common interest’ get communicated in print media, or within those associational forms Mansbridge mentions, differs from modes of communication appropriate to the common spaces of streets, plazas, malls or other venues of physically shared public space. While acknowledging that these different realms intercommunicate with one another is important, it is equally important to focus on the specific role of physical space in furthering formulations of the ‘common mind’. In what follows, we limit our use of the term ‘public space’ to the literal, physical, concrete spaces of streets squares, plazas etc.

Some scholars have grappled more explicitly with this issue of the concreteness of public space, as a node of the public sphere. Even though there is considerable disagreement on the precise functions public space performs within the public sphere, it remains possible to connect these different accounts within a single evaluative framework, constituted by different criteria, which can be organized hierarchically. First, and most minimally, there is a threshold of trust: citizens must feel safe with one another in public space. Secondly, this basis of trust can develop in a variety of ways, ranging from ‘indifference’ to ‘ambient sociability’, a range captured by the concept of ‘civility’. Third, while indifference has important, positive consequences for developing more democratic forms of citizenship, it is ‘ambient sociability’ which can nourish possibilities for more active forms of encounter between citizens. The highest stage in the evaluative framework thus assesses public space in terms of the ‘openness’ and ‘attention orientation’ it enables between citizens.

Different understandings of public space’s functions generate different understandings of how much of the relevant criteria have been met. For more minimal accounts, trust and civility might be considered sufficient, whereas more maximalist accounts, those which posit openness between citizens as the relevant democratic ambition, inevitably make more demands of citizens.

Partisan interventions in space

To be clear, we are sympathetic not only to the general idea that public space has political functions, but also to the idea that these functions relate to trust, civility and openness. Consequently, while our vision of partisan intervention exists in some tension with the above evaluative framework, the ‘differentiated topography of public space’ we outline preserves broad compatibility between a range of spatial imperatives. This compatibility notwithstanding, we challenge a number of shortcomings, which apply across the approaches considered thus far.

First, there is a disjunction between the functions performed by public space, as described above, and another function, typically regarded as central to the public sphere, that it must ‘in some way take effect on or control government’ (Taylor, 1992: 221). To be sure, there need be no expectation that participants in public space will unanimously agree with one another, just as no unanimity can be expected of the public sphere more generally. But whatever disagreements remain, the ‘common mind’ and ‘public opinion’ which develop must, most generally, ‘concern objects connected with the practice of the state’ and, more specifically, relate to the ‘functions of criticism and control of organized state authority’ (Habermas and Seidman, 1989: 231). While the public sphere should be protected from the incursions of state and corporate power, it is not merely a domain of ‘autonomous opinion formation’, but is also tasked with activities of effective oversight and confrontation, which goes missing from much of the above framework (Fraser, 1990: 76). Second, the ideals of citizenship underlying the above evaluative framework imagines citizens encountering one another in ideally ‘free’ public spaces i.e. space unconstrained by private property-rights, untrammelled by the imperatives of commerce and unmarked by exclusionary practices of caste, race and gender. But public spaces are not merely ‘free’ sites where citizens trained in democratic virtue arrive to encounter one another. Rather, citizens can, usually in concert with others, appropriate and act on public space for their political purposes, as well as encounter others within it. But this requires that public space be intentionally cultivated into political space, and this cultivation needs an account of agents well situated to perform that work. Finally, as we have seen, there are marginalized groups of citizens for whom even minimal conditions of trust are not yet established, such that they can feel safe in public space. Alongside ideal specifications of citizenry comportment in well-functioning democracies, there is the need, both practically and theoretically, to account for the struggles, both historical and ongoing, which marginalized citizens either have made or must make, to gain secure access to public space against the backgrounds of flawed, ‘actually existing democracies’ (Fraser, 1990: 64–65).

It is precisely because of political parties’ institutional position at the intersection of state and society, their (at least purported) commitment to the ‘intellectual and political empowerment’ of marginalized citizens, and their role in organizing state authority in ways that can be justified to a political community, that enables them to respond to such shortcomings in the current theorizing of public space (White and Ypi, 2015: 78). Our argument is that political parties are well positioned to cultivate public space into explicitly political space and citizens into effective political actors; to respond, in and through space, to the competitive dimension of political life as these pertain to questions of state power; and to contribute to the task of transforming public space into an arena where marginalized communities have true stake and power. While this approach is not without its risks – discussed below – parties and partisan activity can considerably enrich the democratic life of a community’s public spaces.

Parties are acknowledged parts of the public sphere. Indeed, Nancy Rosenblum praises political parties precisely because they offer spaces within the public sphere where deliberation is formally organized, in contrast to those arguments, perhaps typified in the above framework, where ‘the actual setting for deliberation is left ambiguous; the often invoked ‘“public sphere” (being) everywhere and nowhere’ (Rosenblum, 2008: 157). Similarly, Lea Ypi and Jonathan White argue in favour of ‘partisan forums’ because they help socialize ‘their members into political, economic, and legal affairs, thus acting as effective vehicles of civic education and epistemic empowerment’ (White and Ypi, 2015: 91). Parties are also capable of producing forms of associational life that exist at the intersections of the public sphere and the state, with one face turned towards civic society, and the other to more formal institutions of government. Investigating these forms corrects for simplistic understandings of the public sphere and public space, which tend to confine attention to associations operating exclusively within the public sphere (Fraser, 1990: 76). Moreover, in contrast to the ‘romanticization of urban encounter’, which reproduces the naïve assumption that just any kind of ‘contact with ‘others’ translates into respect for difference’ (Valentine, 2008: 325), political parties – however imperfectly – offer sites where political contact and discussions are baked into the basic organizational structures. However, defences of partisan politics have not yet been used to consider the ways parties can relate – and have related – to concrete public space as a site within which partisans relate to one another, to other partisans, and to non-partisans.

This is not surprising. Although partisan interventions in public space are, as we show below, not without precedent in western contexts, the cultivation, appropriation and even simple use of public space, is no longer a prominent feature of partisans’ activities. In contrast, the ways in which political parties and movements understand their roles with respect to public space in the Indian context represents – contrary to the once dominant narratives of ‘deficiency’ of the Indian public (Rajagopal, 2009: 8) – something of an advance on contemporary western partisan practice. To demonstrate this advance, we explore the way the CPIM intervenes in public space, rejuvenating streets as sites of political engagement and commitment. Here, the assumption that public space free from commercial trammelling and the constraints of private property is already sufficiently political is challenged. CPIM partisans actively work on space in the course of pursuing their political goals: advancing their claims to legitimacy as agents interested in gaining state power, responding to challenges of those claims and that legacy, and more generally promoting their efficacy as political actors, in the past, the present and the future. To do this, CPIM partisans appropriate public space in order to influence the ideational backgrounds against which they operate. Public space is not an empty public stage onto which political actors enter, but is an historically constituted site through which the party builds and expresses its legacy, embeds its histories and traditions, and presents to the public as part of its claims to legitimacy. Rather than confining themselves to spurts of activism during elections, partisans use public space to communicate with voters through visible, long-term, grass-root construction of their party’s past achievements, current values, and future aspirations.

Taken together, these aspects represent a dramatic shift in the politics of public space. In contrast to the approaches examined above, which evaluate public space according to how well they facilitate trust, civility and openness between citizens, our approach draws on a plural and differentiated spatial topography, in which space is put to more varied and complex political uses. Whatever other functions public space performs, it can also stage the formal, competitive dimensions of a political life, that are inescapably shaped by the presence of state power. In order to make these points less abstract, we turn now to what we describe as the CPIM’s ‘partisan interventions’ in the public spaces of northern Kerala, situating these within the broader context of India’s electoral democracy.

Weighing the risks

Whether it be deliberative democrats, theorists of public reason, advocates of social movements or proponents of multicultural identity groups, few contemporary political theorists have made political parties the focus of their concerns (cf. Dean, 2015; Muirhead, 2014; Rosenblum, 2008; White and Ypi, 2015). Even when parties are celebrated for their power to ‘crystallize, coagulate, synthesize, smooth down, and mold’ (Rosenblum, 2008: 7), connections between the party and public space have received much less commentary. This is largely the result of public space’s marginal role in the current life of political parties, and vice versa, especially in the industrialised west. Despite this lack of commentary, political parties are well-placed to expand the use of public space in more explicitly political directions, more openly geared towards mediating the nodes of the public sphere with state and other powerful institutions, and thus potentially capable of developing more vibrant democratic polities.

Advocates of what Nancy Rosenblum describes as an ‘antiparty tradition’ would baulk at the idea of bringing political parties into public space. If the best reason we have for allowing parties to structure our democracy is a concession to the pragmatics of power, then letting these parties run amok in our streets misunderstands that compromise. The public sphere, as Craig Calhoun has it, is to be ‘marked off from material exercise of political power.’ He goes on to bundle parties together with large corporations, trade unions and, more generally, with ‘family, faction and friendship’, all of which are to be understood as distorting the proper functioning of a disinterested and independent public sphere (Calhoun, 2010: 323). For Taylor, similarly, the functions of the public sphere are understood as an aspect of their ‘extrapolitical status, and this is not just defined negatively, as a lack of power. It is also seen positively: just because public opinion is not an exercise of power, it can be ideally disengaged from partisan spirit’ (Taylor, 1992: 232). If so, then parties – as primary sites of commitment for their partisans – seem to be excluded not just from the streets, but from large parts of public sphere as a whole and, thus, inevitably from theorising about the functions that sphere serves (cf. Rosenblum, 2008: 147–148).

Moreover, it might be thought there are other political actors who have demonstrated a capacity to do this job without the risks incumbent on letting parties, with their feet in both state and non-state space, into arenas that should be reserved exclusively for non-state actors. In particular, the various ‘occupations’ that have erupted across the globe might be thought to politicise public space. Moreover, in contrast to the above evaluative framework, occupations are explicitly directed toward confrontations with state and corporate power: Occupations transform public space from ‘blank’ spaces of impersonal encounter into overtly political stages of contest. Judith Butler describes the value of occupation in its redeployment of ‘an already established space permeated by existing power,’ a ‘theater … unproblematically housed in public space’, in ways that contest and ‘negate existing forms of political legitimacy’ (Butler, 2015: 85). By ‘intervening in the spatial organization of power’, occupations shift popular discourse toward issues of power, representation and equality.

Inherent to these spatial practices is a form of politics more confrontational than is usually enacted in those typical urban encounters described above, one which takes seriously Nancy Rosenblum’s suggestion that ‘politics exists only when the fact of pluralism is accepted and there is latitude for open agitation of groups with rival interests and opinions’ (Rosenblum, 2008: 6). In addition, occupations perform important educative functions, similar to those performed by parties, characterized as they are by participants’ efforts to use direct, ‘horizontal’ democracy to organize and make decisions within occupied space. They thus represent something different to the usual public assembly in which most people are conceived primarily as an audience either to other people’s speeches or simply to each other’s amassed presence (Graeber, 2014: 24–26).

Nevertheless, whatever the benefits of occupation, there are significant limitations. Jodi Dean accuses advocates of occupation for evading both the realities of state power and the fact that ‘people get tired. Some want a little predictability, reliable food sources, shelter and medical care’ (Dean, 2015: 142). While an occupation might, following Jacques Rancière, ‘make visible what had no business being seen, and makes heard a discourse where once there was only place for noise’ it can do so for only short spaces of time (Rancière, 1999: 33). Most people lack the resources and inclination to ‘occupy’ for long periods of time. An obvious problem is thus how to preserve the ‘performative dimensions’ of these spaces once everyone goes home. Consequently, whatever large-scale occupations have added to the arsenal of social-movement techniques, however effectively the concerns they raised continue to be part of public conversations, it will only ever be a tool useful during exceptional moments of disruption. During ‘in-between’ times, different approaches to the politics of space – and the politicising of the encounters occurring there – are needed. Advocating for occupation as the sole or even best means of politicizing public space, exemplifies an understanding of the role of public spaces which captures values of sociability and openness, but fails to connect such values to a realistic assessment of its efficacy in controlling state authority.

It is precisely because of occupations’ short duration, however theatrical, that political parties remain a primary institution through which democratic engagement can be organized in sustainable ways. While we lack the space to more thoroughly defend partisanship as a legitimate form of political engagement, the centrality of political parties to the organization of democratic life means, as things stand, citizenry engagement with parties must go beyond the infrequent casting of ballots. To argue otherwise puts large parts of democratic political life as currently conducted outside of popular involvement and control. ⁴ Rather than accept ‘the distinction between the apparatuses of the state … and public arenas of citizen discourse and association’ as a fixed and hard line, partisan interventions in public space allows for the associational values of partisanship to play out within those arenas of more general citizenry activity (Fraser, 1990: 56). In this way, the connections between public space and the critical functions of the public sphere can be re-invigorated.

Nevertheless, we accept that allowing partisanship into spaces used for a multiplicity of purposes, only some of which are political, comes with risks. Inviting the party to intervene in shared spaces, to bring its influence to bear into this particular realm of public interaction, risks corrupting the functions of the public sphere. ⁵ As well as being an intensely political place, north Kerala has continued to see violence between partisans of political parties – most notably between the CPIM and the BJP. ⁶ There are also the occasional hartals partisans wage, which effectively shut down the state. ⁷ Nevertheless, if we are interested in rejuvenating both the politics of the streets and the public sphere more generally, then an understanding of politics that more readily recognizes the presence of antagonism and disagreement must be allowed to take root in those streets. At the very least, there is a question to be answered: as things stand, are appeals to ‘the street’ as a training ground for cultivating ‘openness’ between citizens sufficient? Can streets, and public space more generally, be used as a training ground for other political competencies, skills and virtues? In light of consistently low electoral participation in western democracies, citizens’ apathy and inaction with respect to democratic processes, and disconnect between citizens and their representatives, there are good reasons to regard public spaces as resources in need of more active cultivation (Hay, 2007, 1--60).

Moreover, the competitive dimension supplied by elections is central to mediating these risks. Because the CPIM is less dominant in urban public spaces, the way it deploys such space must also compete with other parties, mostly notably the Hindu-right Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) and the centrist Indian National Congress (INC). Indeed, both the BJP and the INC have appropriated these commemorative rituals of martyrdom for those of its members who have suffered violence, adorning local party offices, bus stations and community wells, with their own party imagery. Precisely because such partisan interventions occur against the backdrop of a competitive electoral system, in which no one party entirely appropriates all public space, other parties are capable of waging their own interpretations of the region’s history and tying their own political programs, contributions and legacies to both a shared public space and a shared public memory. As a result of the competitive background, partisan interventions in much Keralan public space preserve, to a considerable extent, what Teresa Hoskyns calls the ‘empty place’, which ‘separates democratic public space from spaces of identity’: The “CPIM-Booked”/”INC-Booked”/“BJP-Booked” wall-chalkings, which appear in increasing frequency during the run-up to elections across Kerala, vouches for the ‘empty placeness’ of public space. Where competition continues, space can be ‘appropriated but not dominated… (it) contains different identities, but none that identify with it’ (Hoskyns, 2014: 14). Within this competitive environment, partisans compete to invest space with their party’s principles, values and its role within the history of Kerala, and so public space remains a public thing: Parks, streets and road-side tea shops can be used as forums for commerce and sociability, just as in western urban spaces. It is just that, as well as being spaces of encounter, they are also ‘polemical spaces’ and sites of contestation, and are thus explicitly political things (Dikeç, 2012: 674). ⁸ Indeed, part of what citizens in public space are being open and attentive to, are these important contests between agents – political parties – which, as part of their very raison d'etre, turn their faces toward both civil society and state institutions.

What the CPIM does in Kerala is very different to what the Soviet Union, Italian fascists or the Nazis did with monumental public art in their respective countries (Sudjic, 2011: 15–63). The CPIM participates in a political game where its case is made against opponents, rather than enemies deserving of eradication. This does not mean it sacrifices its hegemony in places like Kayyur for the sake of that competition, but such hegemony develops in ways that are constrained by the demands of democratic legitimacy. As a political party the CPIM offers reasons to the electorate that are ‘oriented to generalizable principles and aims’ which thereby ‘preserve(s) the ideal of justified and collective self-rule’ (White and Ypi, 2015: 60). But parties remain within their rights to lay claim to particular histories, to particular interpretations of their role in forming local and wider contexts, and to use presentations of this as evidence of their legitimacy and claims to rule. There are other parties who are also within their rights to challenge those interpretations, to lay claim to their own histories and victories. As with other parts of the public sphere, this is to be understood as part of an ongoing conversation.

Importantly, sustained partisan interventions in public spaces are not without precedent in the west: For the International Workers of the World (‘Wobblies’), the ‘streets and parks of American cities were (their) most important organizing ground’ during the early part of the 20th century (Kohn, 2004: 18–35; Mitchell, 2003: 56). The Wobblies might not have been a political party, but for the disenfranchised groups they claimed to represent, the Wobblies argued that ‘street speaking was the only way that groups could build solidarity and political power’ (Kohn, 2004: 24.) Through street-level conversations, solidarity could be built and larger political fights staged: ‘The goal of the street-speaking fights was not victory in the courtroom but rather the diffusion of popular rights consciousness among citizens and local government officials’. It provided the only space where working-class people could ‘speak, meet, argue, and organize’ (Kohn, 2004: 25–27).

Similarly, the Communist agit-prop theatre that developed in American and European streets around the same time was also guided by a desire to inform working-class people and to galvanize them into a collective force. In parts of the British industrial heartlands, such theatres were significant fixtures of public life. In Edinburgh, for example, during a 1931 election, 25,000 people turned out to watch a performance – satirising the bureaucracy of contemporary welfare provision – that was staged with the aim of supporting local communist candidates (Samuel et al., 1985: 92–93). Indeed, a whole working-class and communist dramaturgy developed: by using lightweight, limited or no props, ‘propertyless theatre for the propertyless class’ enabled actors’ quick retreats when police break ups did occur (Samuel et al., 1985: 89). There was also the partisan activity of ‘chalking’ slogans onto public property, which branches of the Communist Party of Great Britain took seriously enough to elect Chalking Secretaries, tasked with ensuring ‘chalkings’ were done to message and remained neat and disciplined (Samuel 2017: 130).

In the cases of communist theatre and Wobblies’ street-speaking the streets were employed as a way of educating, recruiting and directing grievances toward a common cause and against a perceived opponent. While these are important precedents, and suggest partisan interventions in public space are not entirely foreign to western political cultures, the scale of the CPIM interventions are of a different order altogether. While the Workers’ Theatre Movement and the Wobblies had affiliations to, and made interventions on behalf of, (mostly marginal) political parties, they themselves were not parties. Moreover, the CPGB was never more than a minor electoral force, only gaining any kind of ascendancy in the Clyde, the Welsh valleys and London’s Jewish communities, which only ever translated into minimal electoral presence (Samuel 2017).

However, we end with another example of memorialization, to indicate the risks attendant to forms of spatial practice that render history apolitical, neglecting history’s contemporary resonances in favour of commercial imperatives. The Civil Rights Trail in the United States has over 100 locations across 15 states. These include memorials to the 1960 lunch counter sit-ins in Greensboro, North Carolina; the site of Medgar Evers’ assassination in 1963, Jackson, Mississippi; and the 16th Street Baptist Church, Birmingham, Alabama where four girls attending Sunday school were killed by white supremacists in 1963. These memorials were not created by any political party. On the contrary, the Trail partners state tourist boards with Travel South USA, a marketing organization for the Southern State Tourism Offices, that are together tasked with generating tourism from the Trail’s memorialization. The interpretive framework thus requires that the stories of these events are told in ways that are compatible with this intention. For sure, there is no sense in which the Ku Klux Klan is regarded as anything other than a villain and the heroism of those engaged in fights for civil rights is clear. In addition, in contrast to the CPIM, it is not at all clear which party in the US context could claim any clear inheritance of the movement’s legacy. Partisans, of any stripe, were not the relevant agents. Rather, what was at stake were groups like the Southern Christian Leadership, Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee and Congress of Racial Equality confronting both state institutions and major parties. Nevertheless, there is no attempt to link the histories of these places, to, for example, Black Lives Matter, to struggles against continuing housing segregation, racialized incarceration or police brutality, and for obvious reasons: Drawing attention to continuing racial divides and ongoing struggles might stifle rather than boost trade.

In these memorials, aesthetics guided by the realities of confrontation, that might perform some political-educative function regarding the present, is not even attempted. In contrast to Kerala, where history is brought into the present through the active cultivation of public space, here the commodification of history disconnects it from contemporary political relevance. Public space, as part of the ‘background resources, contexts, and dimensions of social action’ that make up a community’s lifeworld, has been hijacked for the functions of the market (Habermas and Seidman, 1989: 102–103). In contrast, the rituals the CPIM employs, and the way it connects these rituals to a wider partisan cultivation of public space, politicises local history, and as a result protects spaces from the insidious domination of commercializing imperatives. Public space becomes a stage upon which the party – in competition with other parties – stakes its claim to historical struggles it waged on behalf of the people and region as a whole, constantly redeploying a narrative of commitment and sacrifice, in order to articulate and historically ground a set of ideological and political commitments. These partisan interventions thereby demonstrate the ongoing relevance of the connections between politics, space and conflict.

Conclusion

In thinking about the consequences of our arguments for theorizing connections between public space and the wider public sphere, it is important to recognize the advanced starting point the CPIM enjoys with regards to what we have described as partisan interventions in public space. Both before and after its emergence from a factional dispute with the CPI in 1964, the CPIM has enjoyed considerable power at Kerala’s state level, occupying state government as it does today as part of the Left Democratic Front coalition despite the party’s national decline in recent years. Along with these electoral successes, it has maintained strong links between members and elected officials, and used its time both in power and out to sustain its presence in Kerala. Progressive political parties of the west, and their partisans, are not currently in a position to do the same.

Of course, the rituals we have described are rooted in the specific history of Kerala. In other settings there might not be the same violent histories for parties to draw on. When partisans intervene, they will need to approach their own public spaces with an appreciation of local circumstances. Partisans will need to think about the interventions they wish to make in the ideational background of a particular location, the traditions and past actions they wish to lay claim to on behalf of their party, the contributions in which it has played its part. There are certain resources we have pointed to in the histories of left-wing movements and parties that could be rejuvenated.

Our wider argument is that the virtues of public space must be expanded to go beyond the evaluative framework underpinning contemporary appraisals of public space. This is not to undervalue the freedom that urban public spaces in particular have offered to countless numbers of people, but only to argue that the politics of public space should refer to more than these values. In keeping with the idea of a differentiated topography we have developed in this paper, public space also needs to develop spaces within which citizens can effectively engage with agonistic, competitive and state-oriented dimensions of politics.

Although we have not argued that ‘partisan interventions’ in space are the only means by which these agonistic dimensions can be handled, we submit that given parties’ typically larger resources and position at the intersection between the state and civil society, they are well placed to perform and sustain this function. Overall, it has been by reflecting on ‘partisan interventions’ in space that we have described a process through which citizens can come closer to processes of electoral contestation, and in which political associations can gain space to articulate their positions, traditions and other ideational resources in competitive dialogue with others. This will improve the prospect for parties both to shape, and be shaped by, a democratic will. Of course, a politics with a large role for parties supplying active, militant bases comes with risks. Nevertheless, in light of the public sphere’s general role in confronting state power, public space’s complex imbrication with that power is better acknowledged and confronted than ignored.