Environment and Urbanization 2009 Bhan

127Environment & Urbanization Copyright © 2009 International Institute for Environment and Development (IIED).Vol 21(1): 127–142. DOI: 10.1177/0956247809103009 www.sagepublications.com

“This is no longer the city I once knew”. Evictions, the urban poor and the right to the city in millennial Delhi

GAUTAM BHAN

ABSTRACT Millennial Delhi is changing rapidly. Between 1990 and 2003, 51,461 houses were demolished in Delhi under “slum clearance” schemes. Between 2004 and 2007 alone, however, at least 45,000 homes were demolished, and since the beginning of 2007, eviction notices have been served on at least three other large settlements. Fewer than 25 per cent of the households evicted in this latter time period have received any alternative resettlement sites. These evictions represent a shift not just in degree but also in kind. They were not ordered by the city’s planning agency, its municipal bodies or by the city government. Instead, each was the result of a judicial ruling. What has this emergence of the judiciary into urban planning and government meant for the urban poor? This paper analyzes the dictums of verdicts on evictions in the Delhi High Court and the Supreme Court of India from 1985 to 2006. Using these judgments, it explores the “misrecognition” of the poor that became dramatically apparent in the early 1990s and that underlies and justifi es evictions. This shift is then located in the larger political, economic and aesthetic transformations that are re-confi guring the politics of public interest in Indian cities.

KEYWORDS evictions / Delhi / India / judiciary / public interest / slums / urban poverty

“This is no longer the city I once knew.”*

I. INTRODUCTION

Scrap dealer Ashok says this is business as usual for politicians before elections:

“Wait and watch, I will vote here again in the next general elections, fi ve years later.” (Frontline Magazine, 12 January 2004)

Ashok was wrong. In January 2003, the Ministry of Tourism of the govern-ment of India announced its plan to redevelop a 100-acre strip of publicly owned land on the banks of the Yamuna River into a riverside promenade meant to be a major new tourist attraction. At the time, the riverbank was home to a string of settlements (colloquially and collectively called Pushta)(1) that housed around 35,000 families – more than 150,000 people. Ashok was one of the residents. Researchers and activists(2) confi rm that the majority of residents were daily wage workers – construction workers,

Gautam Bhan studies the politics of poverty in urban India. He is based in Delhi and at the University of California, Berkeley. He is co-author of Swept Off the Map: Surviving Eviction and Resettlement in Delhi, Yoda Press (2005), New Delhi.

Address: Department of City and Regional Planning, University of California, Berkeley, California, USA; e-mail: [email protected]

*Raja Kumar, a Pushta resident – personal communication with the author.

1. “Pushta” in Hindi and Urdu means riverbank.

2. For a review of activist reports and fact-fi nding studies, see Bhan, Gautam and Kalyani Menon-Sen (2007), Swept off the Map: Surviving Eviction and Resettlement in Delhi, Yoda Press, New Delhi, 150 pages.

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rickshaw pullers, domestic workers and ragpickers or recyclers – who had migrated to Delhi(3) starting in the early 1970s.(4) A signifi cant proportion had been brought to Delhi by contractors to build the necessary infra-structure for the Asian Games in 1982. Many families in the area tell the story of fi lling in the vacant marshy embankment, considered “too soft” to build on, with leftover sand and brick from construction sites, slowly turning it into a habitable settlement. In February and April 2004, over several 24-hour long operations involving hundreds of armed police offi cers and bulldozer crews, all the homes and community buildings in Pushta were razed to the ground (Photos 1a and 1b).

Pushta was the fi rst casualty in a series of informal settlement evictions that have reconfi gured the face of millennial Delhi. Between 1990 and 2003, 51,461 houses were demolished in Delhi under “slum clearance” schemes.(5) However, between 2004 and 2007 alone, at least 45,000 homes were demolished, and in late 2007, eviction notices were served on at least three other large settlements. Fewer than 25 per cent of the households evicted in this latter time period received any alternative resettlement sites.(6)

These evictions were not the result of planning directives or actions initiated by either municipal or city level state authorities. They were instead the fi nal result of several public interest litigations (PILs) fi led in Delhi courts by non-poor resident welfare and trade associations. It was the Delhi High Court that ordered Ashok’s displacement, ruling against the appeals of the Visthapan Virodhi Andolan (anti-displacement campaign) and arguing that Delhi “…is a show window to the world of our culture, heritage, traditions and way of life. It cannot be allowed to degenerate and decay.”(7) Outside the courtroom, the city government remained silent, saying simply that it would respect the court’s rulings. A protest outside the president’s house by nearly 500 children asking that the evictions be postponed until after their school year exams failed to illicit even an acknowledgement. At the same time, a leading national daily, the Times of India, started their “Walled City to World City” campaign and hailed the decision as a “return to order” and “good governance” in an emerging “world class city”. In the weeks before and after the evictions, digital renderings of the promenade to be built in place of the settlements were constantly shown on the newspaper’s pages. The evictions themselves, and the lack of any resettlement options for those displaced, got little coverage, and in a matter of months the land was cleared.

Informal settlements are not new to Delhi and neither are evictions. Yet post-millennial evictions are different, not just in degree but in kind, from evictions in the past. It is not just the increased frequency and intensity of evictions, or the lack of resettlement/compensation that marks them as different, but the involvement of the courts rather than the state, the use of altered defi nitions of “public interest”, the silence of the city government and the lack of empathy within the media and the public – all parts of a changing urban politics within which evictions must be located and understood.

A set of questions emerges from this changing politics: How were evictions successfully framed as just, ethical and markers of “good governance”? How were the rights of so many citizens denied within a framework of democratic and electoral accountability and in the name of “public interest”? Why did urban social movements fail to successfully mobilize support and public opinion against the evictions? Finally, and

3. Although technically the National Capital Territory is called New Delhi, it is known colloquially simply as Delhi. The terms are interchangeable. I will use Delhi throughout this paper.

4. An oft-told local tale of the “fi rst resident” dates the fi rst house in Pushta to 1972. Its owner, Dr Jamal, went on to become a local leader for many decades before his death in 2002.

7. Pitampura Sudhar Samiti vs. Government of National Capital Territory of Delhi (CWP 4215/1995).

5. Government of Delhi (2004), Economic Survey of Delhi 2002–2003, Government of Delhi, New Delhi.

6. See reference 2; also Hazards Centre (2003), A Report on Slum Evictions in Delhi, Hazards Centre, New Delhi; and Hazards Centre (2005), Dilli Kiski Hai?, Hazards Centre, New Delhi.



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perhaps most importantly, what do post-millennial evictions tell us about urban government, citizenship and claims to urban space in contemporary Indian cities?

Contemporary urban India exists in a moment that is framed by mul-tiple transformations: liberal market reforms initiated in 1991 that have led to a profound economic and social restructuring; the emerging notion of “world class cities” at a time of increasing global interaction and a media explosion; and a changing aspirational and economic landscape for the non-poor.(8) Within these transformations and as part of them, this paper argues that the evictions are markers of the urban poor are markers of a larger critical shift in urban politics and, particularly, in how the urban poor in India are represented, governed and judged. It is this shift that explains and underlies both the increased occurrence of evictions as well as their reception. What is this shift? I identify three main components:

• increasingly altered understandings of poverty and inequality based on a “misrecognition”(9) of the poor that become the ethical basis of the disavowal of their rights;

• a changing discourse on the ideas of government rooted in the slow demise of the nationalist development state and the rise of neoliberal ideologies of self-government and market participation; and

• an increasing “aestheticization” of poverty and city space that alters how the poor are represented and visualized within the city.

This paper looks at how each of these components manifests itself specifi cally in the city of Delhi and, in turn, how each enables evictions to be understood as acts of governance rather than violation. Such a situated analysis recognizes that the mechanisms, institutions and spaces through which broader trends exert themselves are determined by locally specifi c political, economic and sociospatial characteristics. In Delhi, for example, our inquiry into settlements evicted ostensibly for violating zoning regulations of the master plan will lead us away from planning and city authorities to the courts, to changing notions and practices of government, and to the media. First, a brief history of urban settlement in Delhi is needed.

II. PARADIGM SHIFTS: HISTORICAL URBAN SETTLEMENT IN DELHI AND POST-MILLENNIAL EVICTIONS

In 2003, the Economic Survey of Delhi(10) mapped the types of habitation in the National Capital Territory of Delhi. The results are summarized in Table 1. Using data from 2000, the table shows that at most, 23.7 per cent of Delhi’s population lives in planned colonies that met all conditions of legality at the time of their establishment, and followed the classic plan–build–service–occupy order that urban planners preach. Just over 19 per cent of the city lives in unplanned but legal settlements characterized by economic poverty and physical fragility. These settlements are legal due to their notifi cation as “slums” under the 1956 Slum Areas Act, which made them eligible for improvements and ensured them protection from eviction without resettlement. The last settlement to be identifi ed as a “slum” under this Act, however, was notifi ed in 1973.

Settlements that share the physical fragility and poverty of the slums but that are not notifi ed under the Slum Areas Act are called JJ clusters

8. See also Nigam, Aditya and Nivedita Menon (2008), Power and Contestation: India since1989, Zed Books, London, 240 pages.

9. I borrow the term from Etienne Balibar. See, among others, Balibar, E (1991), “Is there a neo-racism?”, in E Balibar and I Wallerstein (editors), Race, Nation and Class, Verso, London, pages 17–28.

10. See reference 5.




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(14.8 per cent). A signifi cant 5.3 per cent of the city lives in “unauthorized colonies”, which are distinguished from JJ clusters not because one is more legal than the other, but because JJ clusters represent poor settlements, while “unauthorized colonies” tend to be non-poor settlements.(11)

The other categories represent settlements that were illegal on inception but that have since been regularized. In the 1970s and 1980s, compensation and resettlement were common practice even for areas not notifi ed under the Slum Areas Act. When JJ clusters were demolished, their residents were resettled into new and legal, albeit peripheral, resettlement colonies called JJ resettlement colonies (12.7 per cent). This is precisely what Ashok hoped for should he be evicted: a post-facto regularization. When non-poor settlements were regularized, it was almost always in situ, and these were termed “regularized–unauthorized colonies” (12.7 per cent). Thus, even within the statistics, a difference between the illegality of the non-poor and the illegality of the poor was maintained.

I cite these facts to illustrate a simple point: like most Indian mega-cities, the planned city of Delhi is only a small part of the city as a whole, and historically it has always been so. At its most benign, this means that the peripheral construction and the “wait and watch” game of post-facto regularization has, in fact, been the means by which much of the urban space of the city has been organized. Building his house on public land, our scrap dealer Ashok rightly expected to get, were he to survive in the settlement long enough, either a tenured resettlement site or the post-facto regularization of his self-constructed house. A mix of claims based on rights, needs and perceived entitlements from the state ensured

TABLE 1Types of habitation in the National Capital Territory of Delhi

Type of settlement

Estimated population in 2000(‘000,000s)

Percentage of total population

JJ clusters(a) 20.72 14.8Slum-designated areas 26.64 19.1Unauthorized colonies 7.40 5.3JJ resettlement colonies 17.76 12.7Rural villages 7.40 5.3Regularized–unauthorized colonies 17.76 12.7Urban villages 8.88 6.4Planned colonies 33.08 23.7Total 139.64 100.0

NOTE: It is important to note that these statistics only represent those who were counted. Many of the city’s most vulnerable poor live in makeshift shacks or simply sleep on the street and are mobile on almost a daily or weekly basis. It is safe to assume signifi cant under-reporting of the numbers of the city’s poor in this data. It is nonetheless used because such under-reporting would only strengthen the point that is being made.(a) JJ stands for the Hindi words jhuggi jhopdi, a colloquial term for the shacks of the poor.

SOURCE: Government of Delhi (2004), Economic Survey of Delhi 2002–2003, Government of Delhi, New Delhi.

11. Sainik Farms is the most notorious of these non-poor informal settlements. The settlement consists of elite mansions with private roads, water and electricity, as the municipal corporation refused to provide public services, citing the illegality of the site. Repeated attempts to demolish the structures have failed. See The Hindu, “Illegal construction at Sainik Farms alleged”, accessed 8 March 2008 at http://www.hinduonnet.com/2006/08/09/stories/2006080917620400.htm.




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this expectation, public opinion endorsed it and the courts protected it.(12) Ashok had, in other words, a certain set of expectations of the state based on what James Holston has called a “…hybrid mix of special treatment rights, text-based rights and contributor rights.”(13) The fi rst followed from his poverty, or need; the second from his legal citizenship; and the third from his contribution to and work within the city. The increasing frequency, ethical acceptability and apparent inevitability of evictions without resettlement in millennial Delhi mark the rupture of precisely this set of claims that defi ned the right of the poor to the city.

The expectations that Ashok has of the state are important. Informality, Roy reminds us, is not just that which is outside the planned/formal, as some kind of neatly bound residual order that lies beyond the state and formal planning. The informal, in fact, is “produced by the state itself”. It represents a deliberate suspension of formal norms, and it is the state (and in the case of Delhi, other forms of authority like the courts) that has the “…power to determine when to enact this suspension, to determine what is informal and what is not, and to determine what forms of informality will thrive and what will not.”(14) How have those in power in Delhi exercised this discretionary power: by what logic, to what ends and in whose interest? It is here that we turn to the courts.

III. THE COURTS AND THE PUBLIC INTEREST

In India, regional high courts and the Supreme Court of India are per-ceived as institutions that protect the rights of ordinary citizens from an executive that inspires a far lower degree of trust in the public and that is often accused of being corrupt, politically motivated and, importantly, deeply ineffi cient.(15) In the late 1970s and early 1980s, a series of judicial innovations further cemented the court’s positioning of itself as a site for justice for the poor and marginalized. In a landmark case, S P Gupta vs. Union of India (1985), Justice Bhagwati eased the rules of locus standi, i.e. the rules that governed who could appear before a court, specifi cally for the regional high courts and the Supreme Court of India. He did so to enable those in a “socially and economically disadvantaged position” who were “unable to approach the court for relief” to access justice through the highest courts of the land. Requirements for the fi ling process were eased to the point that it was commonly said that “…the court treated even a simple letter as a litigation…”(16) and took upon itself the burden of gathering information and evidence. The era of the “public interest litigation”, or PIL, was born.

PILs opened up the door to “ordinary citizens” to approach the highest courts of the land in matters of public interest either to “…espouse the cause of the poor and oppressed (representative standing) or to (seek) enforce(ment) (of) performance of public duties (citizen standing).”(17)

While the PIL revolution is pervasive across urban India, nowhere has its impact been more pronounced than in Delhi. PIL decisions emerging from the courts have been responsible for most of the major changes to the city’s urban systems in the past decade. To mention a few:

• the closure and relocation of medium and large urban industries to outside the city limits;(18)

• the conversion of all public transport and private commercial trans-port to the use of compressed natural gas (CNG);(19)

12. See reference 8; also Chatterjee, Partha (2003), The Politics of the Governed, Columbia University Press, New York, 173 pages.

13. Holston, James (2008) Insurgent Citizenship, Princeton University Press, Princeton, page 256.

14. Roy, Ananya (2005), “Urban informality: towards an epistemology of planning”, Journal of the American Planning Association Vol 71, No 2, page 149.

15. See Rajamani, L (2007), “Public interest environmental litigation in India: exploring issues of access, participation, equity, effectiveness and sustainability”, Journal of Environmental Law Vol 20, No 2, pages 334–336; also Baxi, Upendra (2000), “The avatars of Indian judicial activism: explorations in the geography of (in)justice”, in S K Verma and S K Kusum (editors), Fifty Years of the Supreme Court of India: Its Grasp and Reach, Oxford University Press, New Delhi, pages 156–209; and Ramanathan, Usha (2004), Illegality and Exclusion: Law in the Lives of Slum Dwellers, Working Paper 2, International Environmental Law Resource Centre, Geneva.

16. Letters to the Supreme Court were indeed treated as PILs in both Bandhua Mukti Morcha vs. Union of India (1984) 3SCC161 and Nav Kiran Singh vs. State of Punjab (1995) 4 SCC 591.

17. See reference 15, Rajamani (2007), page 1.

18. M C Mehta vs. Union of India, Petition No 13381 (1984).

19. M C Mehta vs. Union of India, Petition No 13029 (1985).




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• decisions on municipal solid waste disposal;(20)

• the “sealing” of unauthorized commercial units in residential neighbourhoods in violation of the city master plan;(21) and

• evictions from informal settlements and JJ clusters at multiple sites in the city.

As Rajmani(22) argues, the courts’ involvement does not stop at its orders but is, in each of these cases, extended further into implementation, oversight and administration, all fi elds ideally under the purview of the executive.

The examples cited above are illustrative of the signifi cant presence of the Delhi High Court and the Supreme Court of India in urban planning in the capital, unlike that in any other Indian city.(23) Any analysis of urban processes in the city, therefore, must account for the court not only as an arbiter of justice but also as a parallel administrative and executive body. In all of the recent eviction drives mentioned at the beginning of this paper, it was orders within ongoing PILs that ultimately cleared the way for evictions to take place. The evictions in Pushta, for example, were the result of the judgment of the courts in three related PILs, one con-cerned with solid waste management and two with the enforcement of the master plan.(24) It is important to note that these judgments are not claims to the protection of privately held property, nor are they cases of rights violations of any individual party – Pushta was (and remains) public land. How could a judgment delivered in the “public interest” order the eviction of nearly 150,000 people? To understand this, we must look fi rst at the changing fortunes of the urban poor within the courts since the mid-1980s and then to the contemporary political moment, in which the judges are ruling against the poor.

IV. (UN)SETTLING THE LAND: CASE LAW ON INFORMALITY FROM 1985 TO 2006

In 1985, the Supreme Court of India issued a landmark judgment that was to hold precedent over cases regarding evictions and resettlement in cities.(25) In Olga Tellis vs. Bombay Municipal Corporation (1985), the Supreme Court ruled that “…the right to livelihood is an important facet of the right to life.” In effect, the court argued that “…the eviction of the (pavement dwellers) will lead to deprivation of their livelihood and consequently to the deprivation of life.” It argued that the urban poor do not “…claim the right to dwell on pavements or in slums for the purpose of pursuing any activity which is illegal, immoral or contrary to public interest. Many of them pursue occupations which are humble but honourable.” Importantly, the court also acknowledged that it was the state’s non-implementation of the master plans of cities that had caused the problem in the fi rst place.(26)

It is important to read the judgment in this case clearly. Although the court did not stop demolitions, the text of the judgment betrays em-pathy for the plight of “pavement dwellers”, a desire to minimize harm caused during the process of resettlement and an acknowledgment of the planning failures of the state. Further, it instructed the government to resettle those who (implicitly) it had failed to house. There were other cases at this time that echoed a similar empathy. In K Chandru vs. State of Tamil Nadu (1985), the court argued that alternative accommodation

20. Almitra Patel vs. Union of India, WP 888 (1996).

21. Delhi Pradesh Citizen’s Council vs. Union of India (CWP 263, 264 and 266 of 2006).

22. See reference 15, Rajamani (2007).

23. I don’t have the space to fully articulate this argument here, but would suggest that two explanations could be offered for this disproportionate involvement. First, the location of the Supreme Court and the central government in the city. Second, and perhaps more importantly, is the city’s indeterminate political and administrative status as a “National Capital Territory”, that is, partly ruled by central government and partly run as a city-state by the locally elected state government and chief minister. An example of this divide can be seen in the Delhi Development Authority (DDA), which is both the originator of the city’s master plan and its largest landowner, and it is responsible not to the locally elected state government but, rather, to the centrally administered Ministry of Urban Development. Perhaps it is because multiple institutions stake a claim to govern that the courts are a signifi cant presence as agents not only of policy formulation but also of execution in Delhi. The courts are often the only sites where the different tiers of jurisdiction, executive in-fi ghting and multi-site accountability can be resolved, especially from the perspective of the citizen.

24. Okhla Factory Owner’s Association vs. Government of National Capital Territory of Delhi (CWP 4441/1994); also see reference 7; and Wazirpur Bartan Nirmata Sangh vs. Union of India (CWP 2112/2002). In its judgment, however, the Court combined 63 “similar” petitions and held the principles of the verdict to hold for all.

25. Verdicts by the Supreme Court of India act as precedent




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must be provided before evictions can take place. The judges further hoped that “…the government will continue to evince the same dynamic interest in the welfare of pavement dwellers and slum dwellers.”

In 1989, the Supreme Court went a step further and stated that “…reasonable residence is an indispensable necessity” for human development and the fulfi llment of the “right to life”.(27) In another case, the court held that the “…right to life guaranteed in any civilized society implies the right to food, water, decent environment, education, medical care and shelter.”(28) It went even further a year later and ruled: “Article 19(1)(e) (of the Indian Constitution) accords right to residence and settlement in any part of India as a fundamental right. Article 25(1) of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights declares that everyone has the right to a standard of living adequate for the health and well-being of himself and his family; it includes food, clothing, housing, medical care and necessary social services.”(29)

Then the tone changed, both suddenly and dramatically.(30) In Almitra Patel vs. the Union of India (2000), the court opined that Delhi should be the “…showpiece of the country” yet “…no effective initiative of any kind” has been taken for “…cleaning up the city”. Rather than see them as the last resort for shelter, “…slums” the court said, were “…large areas of public land, usurped for private use free of cost.” The slum dweller was named an “encroacher” and the resettlement that had hitherto been mandatory became, suddenly, a matter of injustice, “…rewarding an encroacher on public land with an alternative free site is like giving a reward to a pickpocket for stealing.”

During the 2000s, the courts continued to refuse to hold the govern-ment responsible for its failure to provide low-income housing and to erode the right to resettlement. When they did acknowledge state failure, they no longer interpreted it to mean that resettlement was therefore due. In Okhla Factory Owners vs. GNATCD (2002), even as the court said that it was the “…duty of the government to provide shelter for the under-privileged”, it simultaneously argued that the failure to do so does not mean that the state should “…take up an arbitrary system of providing alternative sites and land to encroachers on public land.”

The very citizenship of the urban poor began to be called into question. In Dhar vs. Government of Delhi (2002), the court differentiated between the justice deserved by slum dwellers who are “unscrupulous citizens” and the “honest citizens who have to pay for land or a fl at”. In Hem Raj vs. Commissioner of Police (1999), the rights of “unscrupulous citizens” were summarily dismissed: “When you are occupying illegal land, you have no legal right, what of talk of fundamental right, to stay there a minute longer.” This was done in the name of order: “If encroachments on public land are to be allowed, there will be anarchy.”

In its latest order for demolitions in 2006, the Delhi High Court refused to stop demolitions even though most households in the settlement had no alternative resettlement sites. No more delays were permissible, the judges argued, because the land has “…uses that cannot be denied”, and the more settlements are removed, the “…more they come.” Using language that was suggestive of epidemics and pathology, the judges argued that “…their” numbers were “…growing and growing” and that steps must be taken to “…deal with the problem.” When asked where the poor were meant to reside in the city if not in informal settlements, the judge said: “If they cannot afford to live in Delhi, let them not come to Delhi.”

for rulings by all lower courts in the country and are thus relevant even to our analysis of Delhi.

26. A recent report by the National Planning Commission found that 90 per cent of the shortfall in public housing units to be built under the Delhi master plan was in low-income housing targets. See also Association of Urban Management and Development Authorities (2003), Land Policy for Development in the National Capital Territory of Delhi, Delhi Development Authority, New Delhi.

27. Shantistar Builders vs. Naryan Khimalal Totome and others (1990).

28. Chameli Singh vs. State of Uttar Pradesh (1996).

29. Ahmedabad Municipal Corporation, Appellant vs. Nawab Khan Gulab Khan and Others (1997).

30. It is clear that the reasons underlying this shift are at the heart of the change in urban politics that I am describing. The focus in this paper is to outline the shift itself. At present, I do not have suffi cient data to be able to offer an adequate explanation of the underlying causes, although I hope to address precisely this question as my research continues. Possible answers include the views of a particular generation of judges, or the infl uence of a changing economic and political climate on judicial decisions. All of these urgently require focused and analytical inquiry.




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Pushta wasn’t hidden from either public view or the state. A com-munity of nearly 150,000 people with public services and an expansive built environment cannot, by any stretch of the imagination, be covert. It is not that the illegality of the settlement suddenly became apparent but, rather, that the terms by which it – and those who lived within it – were represented and recognized changed. Why did this shift occur? What explains the changing language of the courts? We now turn to the fi rst of the components of the shift in urban politics that I argue explains the changing political circumstances of Delhi post-1991, namely altered understandings of (in)equality, urban government and citizenship.

V. INEQUALITY, RISK AND RESPONSIBILITY

In the decades of heady nationalism and state-planned growth after Inde-pendence, a nationalist “developmentalism” dominated Indian political economy. The welfare state led a centralized, planned, “socialist” and inward-looking economy where the state (at least conceptually) provided all services and the private sector was deeply restricted. Faith in the devel-opment project of the state united elite and poor alike. Indeed, until the1960s, Ramanathan(31) reminds us, there was no talk of “displacement” because even those moved by large infrastructure projects considered it an inevitable part of a larger development enterprise that would ultimately benefi t them by sheer virtue of their citizenship and participation in the national project. The country, its industry, its cities, its housing, its local, urban and public transport, higher education and even consumption were all managed, if not directly produced, by the state.

By the 1970s and 1980s, faith in state-led development and growth had been shattered by poor economic growth rates, the slow decline of poverty and barely any improvement in the quality of life. After a dom-estic economic crisis led to the adoption of liberalization and economic reforms in 1991, the story changed. Growing at rates of between 7 and 9 per cent consistently since the late 1990s, the Indian economy has expanded rapidly, just as lowered restrictions have opened up its markets and its people to an incredible infl ux of consumer goods and services, media and images of the world. The “licensing Raj” has given way in urban India to a rapidly growing service and consumption-centric economy, intent on claiming its place on a global stage.

What has this economic transition meant for the urban poor in Delhi? Two representative indicators arguably capture the changing political economy of the poor in the capital. The 61st round of the National Sample Survey shows the fi rst fall in real wages for the poorest quintile of Delhi’s population since Independence.(32) The reasons for the fall, the survey authors opine, are the rising cost and increasing use of non-state (and therefore non-subsidized) services and a simultaneous shift away from regular, waged work to insecure and casual labour that has increased uncertainty for the poor.

As an example of the dramatic suddenness of this shift, Table 2 shows changes in access to subsidized food supplies from the state Public Distribution System(33) and changes in type of employment for Delhi in just the past fi ve years. The left-hand side shows how the poor increas-ingly buy even essential food from the market place rather than through state provision, and how dramatic this change has been for staples such

31. See reference 15, Ramanathan (2004).

32. Government of India (2006), Employment and Unemployment Situation among Social Groups in India, 61st Round, Department of Statistics, New Delhi.

33. The Public Distribution System entitles families to subsidized government food supplies, including staples such as rice and wheat as well as kerosene or cooking gas and sugar. Different rates apply to families below and above the poverty line. Public Distribution System shops are overwhelmingly accessed by the poorest of the poor as well as lower-income classes and are nearly universally accessed in poor settlements. See reference 2.




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as rice and wheat. This trend is paralleled in health care, education, electricity and water provision.(34) The right-hand side of the table shows the shift away from wage/salaried work to self-employment and casual labour, employment situations where workers must take on a certain element of risk within the open market that, although not new at least for informal sector workers, is re-confi gured by the shrinking of the security net of state-subsidized services. Our interest here is to explore how this risk changes expectations of government. Government is defi ned here, following the Foucaultian approach outlined in the work of Nikolas Rose, as an assemblage of strategies of political rule that entail the “…invention and assemblage of particular apparatuses and devices for exercising power and intervening in particular problems” based on “…emergence of regimes of truth concerning the conduct of conduct.”(35) The question is to see what kind of a problem the poor have been understood to be, so that evictions can appear to be the solution of a just government, especially in the economic context outlined above. Furthermore, Ong’s understanding of neoliberal governmentality as the “…government of free individuals who are then induced to self-manage according to market principles of discipline, effi ciency and competitiveness”(36) is used here. It is not my contention that the Indian state is prey to “Neoliberalism writ large”, as Ong calls it. However, I argue that the state in India does selectively use technologies of neoliberal governmentality, and that Ong’s description of an “…infi ltration of market logic into politics”strongly holds true for post-1991 India.(37)

How has market logic infi ltrated understandings of government in India, and how have the poor been understood within this logic? The court judgments against the poor are stark markers that the welfare, nation-alist and development state that stressed cohesion and the inclusion of the poor in the national economic mission is no longer the dominant ethical model of contemporary India. These judgments align with and are reinforced by a growing conception (and as the data above show, increasingly the reality) of self-government through market participation that has replaced the notion of state patrimony. Citizens are increasingly “freed” of the state and able to provide for themselves and optimize their market participation to increase their wealth and their consumption. On the fl ip side, they must also now negotiate access to services and work without state patrimony. This is what Rose calls “self-responsibilization”.(38) For the non-poor, this is a welcome freedom from what they perceive as a

TABLE 2Changes in access to the Public Distribution System

Percentage of people in Delhi buying essentials from the Public Distribution System Occupational breakdown for Delhi (%)

1999–2000 2004–2005 1999–2000 2004–2005

Rice 32.8 3.5 Wage/salaried 58.9 52.7Wheat 25.4 2.7 Self-employed 33.5 40.4 Sugar 15.2 3.6Kerosene oil 46.9 29.0

SOURCE: Government of India (2006), Employment and Unemployment Situation among Social Groups in India, 61st Round, Department of Statistics, New Delhi.

34. At the time of writing, a controversial World Bank proposal to privatize water supply and distribution had just been defeated in Delhi. Electricity supply is still being privatized gradually and distribution has already been so. A wealth of literature charts the increasing privatization of education at primary and middle school levels among the poor, and another body of work shows that the poor overwhelmingly access private, local, unregulated sources of health. For details of access to health services in resettlement colonies in Delhi, see reference 2; and for trends in the health sector in general, see Iyer, A and Gita Sen (2000), “Health sector changes and health equity in the 1990s in India”, in S Roghuram (editors), Health and Equity: Technical Report Series, HIVOS, Bangalore, pages 15–55.

35. Rose, Nikolas (1999), Powers of Freedom: Reframing Political Thought, Cambridge University Press, Cambridge, page 19.

36. Ong, Aihwa (2006), Neoliberalism as Exception, Duke University Press, Durham, North Carolina, page 6.

37. See reference 36, page 6.

38. See reference 35.




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bureaucratic and ineffi cient state. For the poor, it is the placing of a new burden of responsibility upon them, but with little or no change in their capacity to bear it.

As Caldeira has argued in the case of Brazil, inequality must no longer be hidden, justifi ed or apologized for, nor can it be excused as a transitional phase in the longer story of the nationalist ideal of equality and dignity for all.(39) As we accept “self-responsibilization”, the responsibility of en-suring housing and access to services becomes not the responsibility of the state or the elite but of the poor themselves, and the only pathway to it is through the market. Able to gate their communities, privatize their services and imagine themselves as global citizens and consumers, the elite no longer feel obliged to belong to the same imagined city as the poor. Inequality is, therefore, naturalized as an inevitable part of any (market) society. It is no longer understood as a problem of what the poor lack but instead, one of what they have been unable to do. The possible conceptions of a solution are based on the management of the poor either by their own participation in the market (microfi nance, self-help) or through the voluntary associations of civil society (NGOs). In this conception of gov-ernment, the role of the state therefore changes from being the bearer of the nationalist development engine to being the enabler of “growth”.

The logics of growth, within the court, are intertwined with the mech-anisms of law, order and master planning, to become received realities for policy makers, the media and judges alike. Within this logic, Pushta residents do indeed “keep the land from other uses that cannot be denied”, for the land’s value as a site for housing for the poor is not equal to its value as part of the city as a growth machine. The “moral” citizen becomes re-defi ned in terms of a particular kind of economic productivity. There-fore, in the courts, “honest citizens” become those who “pay for a fl at”, as judges use what Ong calls “...an economic logic in defi ning, evaluating and protecting certain categories of subjects and not others.”(40) Chatterjee has described this as the dominance of “corporate capital”, a formulation he relates to his earlier conception of civil society.(41) He argues that corporate capital, representing the interests of the middle and elite classes within the formal economy, today holds a “…moral–political hegemony – the capitalist class has acquired a position to set the terms to which other political formations can only respond.”(42) Within and outside the courts, the use of PILs by middle-class associations to seek eviction of the urban poor rep-resents what Chatterjee calls corporate capital’s “increasing intolerance” towards the informal. Conversely, it is the moral–political hegemony of the idea of growth that allows this intolerance to be considered both just and ethical.

This hegemony is not just created by the market alone, however. It is reinforced by a more broadly changing conception of citizenship and altered representations of the fi gure of the poor. It is to these discursive and aesthetic changes that I now turn.

VI. PERSONIFYING THE ENCROACHER: THE CRIMINALIZATION OF THE POOR

Speaking of segregation in São Paulo, following what she calls the “talk of crime”, Caldeira shows how nordestino migrants from the northeastern parts of Brazil are implicitly “othered” and then blamed for any increase


39. Caldeira, Teresa (2000), City of Walls, University of California Press, Berkeley, 486 pages.

41. See reference 12, Chatterjee (2003); also Chatterjee, Partha (2008), “Democracy and economic transformation in India”, Economic and Political Weekly Vol 43, No 16, April 19–25, pages 53–62.

42. See reference 41, Chatterjee (2008), page 56.




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in crime and changes in the neighbourhood. The stereotypes that abound about them are essentially categories that are “simplistic and caricatured” but, she says, “...this doesn’t mean that they do not affect social relations.”(43) She argues further that “...categories are not meant to describe the world accurately but to organize and classify it symbolically.”(44) Following Caldeira, my emphasis in what follows is not to defend or agree with the notions of the poor as “encroachers” or “pickpockets”. Instead, I wish to show how the language of the courtroom travels beyond it to erode the legitimacy of the rights and needs of the poor within public opinion, and how legal judgments issued in the name of “public interest” work to deny the citizenship of the poor and allow corporate capital’s moral–political hegemony to defi ne urban politics.

As Ramanathan has argued, “encroachment”, a term that begins to appear in the late 1990s in legal judgments, is a term “loaded with illegality”. An encroacher is “akin to a trespasser”, one who “...usurps the right to possession and use of land that belongs elsewhere.”(45) The fi gure of the encroacher establishes a foundation on the basis of which the poor can be seen as unworthy of legal and constitutional protection. As national citizens, they cannot, under any argument, be denied a claim to constitutionally enshrined rights. Indeed, this has been the basis for demands of equity and inclusion articulated by social movements since Indian Independence. Therefore, in order, ethically, to justify denying a national citizen his text-based rights, it becomes necessary to make the informal settler into an “improper” citizen. Through the act of naming and categorizing residents of informal settlements as encroachers and thieves, the courts are performing just this task.

Other discursive shifts further add to this erosion. During the demo-lition hearings, the residents of Pushta were constantly accused of polluting the Yamuna River, both in court and by the media. The poor have always been targeted as carriers of disease and creators of unsanitary living conditions but, in the past, these attributions were also used as mobilizing strategies by activists and the media alike to highlight the vulnerability of the poor and their heightened need for state services. In other words, public health concerns were just as much about the lack of access of the poor to good health as they were about the dangers these realities posed for the rest of society. In contemporary representation, however, the poor are held to be largely, actively and disproportionately responsible for threats to the environment and public health, in what Baviskar has compellingly termed “bourgeoisie environmentalism”.(46)

VII. AESTHETIC DEVELOPMENT: THE HYPERVISIBILITY AND INVISIBILITY OF THE POOR

How then do the poor appear within cities? Looking at informal settle-ments in Bangalore, Benjamin has argued that the “poor” have been reduced to “slums”.(47) This focus on an image of the built environment – the literal physical architecture of the slum and the land it is built on – is part of what Roy and others have called an “aestheticization of poverty”. Roy defi nes “aestheticization” as a simplifi cation that changes the relationship between the “viewer and the viewed” to one of “aesthetics rather than politics”.(48) An aesthetic representation of the slum reduces it to its built environment, one characterized by poverty, fi lth and fragility.

43. See reference 39, page 31


45. See reference 15, Ramanathan (2004), page 11.

46. Baviskar, Amita (2004), “Between violence and desire: space, power and identity in the making of metropolitan Delhi”, International Social Science Journal Vol 55, Issue 175, pages 89–98.

47. Benjamin, Solomon (2000), “Governance, economic settings and poverty in Bangalore”, Environment and Urbanization Vol 12, No 1, April, pages 35–56.

48. See Roy, Ananya (2004), “Transnational trespassing:




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It becomes an image of all that is unwanted. The politics behind the creation of the slum – the failure of the state to build low-income housing, or the productivity, community and work that also characterize the slum – are all eclipsed. The slum is understood or, put another way, consumed as an image: fl at, without history, without structure and emptied of those who live within it.

This reduction of the slum to a fl at image without history has to be seen in conjunction with the emergence of the discourse of the “world class city” in millennial Delhi. Just as reducing the impoverishment of the poor to the aesthetics of their built environment leads to a singular representation both of “the poor” and “the slum”, the city where this slum is located is itself being turned into an image, a commodity called a “world class city”.

We are seeing a shift in how a “problem” comes to be articulated and in the “solutions” that emerge in direct response to such an articulation. Speaking of the poor only as the residents of slums – images of which proliferate within the media and globally through texts such as Davis’s Planet of Slums (49) – allows an erasure of their particular structural exclusion and economic marginalization, and the fl attening, as it were, of their lives into the image of a slum. An object is thus created, re-coded with shades of criminality, a lack of entrepreneurialism and accusations of a lack of hygiene. Thus reduced, evictions and resettlement become not tales of the destruction of individual people’s lives and livelihoods, but simply the erasure of an image of a slum, emptied of the people who live within it.

This erasure, in turn, is necessary to transform the city’s appearance into a “world class city”. It is not just poverty that is “aestheticized”, but city space itself. Since Delhi won the bid to host the Commonwealth Games in 2010, the city has seen the launch of sustained massive media campaigns by leading newspapers and by the city government, speaking of Delhi’s arrival as a “world class city”. The Games have made visible the aestheticization of city space and the vital importance of how the city is seen and consumed by a global audience. The removal of the slums from the city’s central areas is only one of many policies that are, arguably, part of transforming its aesthetic to bring it into line with the image of a “world class city”;(50) private developers increasingly fi ght height restric-tions in the city and promote upper-class residential enclaves, and the city has also recently announced a ban on rickshaws in the walled old city of Shahjahanbad in north Delhi and a ban on street food vendors and hawkers on major south Delhi roads.

At this juncture, it is telling to see what use the land reclaimed from the Pushta settlements has been put to. The land remains public – it has not realized its “market” value by being put to alternative, rent-generating uses. It is in the process of being transformed into a riverside promenade. The uses that the “land was being kept from” according to the courts, therefore, are not simply explained by freeing land to generate maximum rent – an equal value is attached to the perceived need to build a riverside promenade. Its symbolism and aesthetic seek to re-order Delhi as an upper-class city of leisure, where a new economically emboldened ideal citizen can walk by the river. Indeed, the promenade’s location near to the site of the Commonwealth Games village, which is intended to house the incoming athletes, is far from accidental. As the city prepares for its moment on the global stage, the images of the slum and the city actively begin to shape the literal space of the city.

the geopolitics of urban informality”, in Ananya Roy and Nezar Al-Sayyad (editors), Urban Informality. Transnational Perspectives from the Middle East, Latin America and South Asia, Lexington Books, Boulder, CO, USA, 338 pages.

49. Davis, Mike (2004), “Planet of slums”, New Left Review 26, March–April, pages 5–34.

50. For a representative example, see the Challo Dilli (“Let’s Go Delhi”) campaign led by the Times of India, one of the nation’s largest English dailies. The tagline read: “From walled city to world city”, accessed 3 March 2008 at http://chalodilli.indiatimes.com/articlelist/1393834.cms.




141

VIII. A NEW SOCIOSPATIAL URBAN ORDER?

For the urban poor in India, the right to the city, not the right to property or the rights attained as property owners, has been the basis of a claim to urban residency and citizenship. This right has always strongly derived from national citizenship and been legitimized by recognition of the working migrant poor – as (“humble”) workers, providers of services, (vulnerable) citizens of the state and subjects of the national development ideal. It is this recognition that has been steadily eroded in the fi rst decade of the new millennium.

The erosion of the claim of the poor to be legitimate urban citizens, and the simultaneous erasure of their presence in the city, is made possible in a democratic society through a changing urban political landscape, one characterized by a shift in the representation of the poor in a context of changing expectations of government and an increasing aestheticization of poverty and urban space. This shift is based on representations of the poor as economically unviable, environmentally harmful and criminal, as they are recreated as a homogenous category inseparable from the built environments of the illegal “slums” that they inhabit. It is made possible by invoking a particular set of values – hygiene, environment, progress and growth-centric government, market participation, planning and order, aesthetics, notions of a “world class city” and leisure. These are the values that non-poor associations have brought to the courts in repeated PILs. As Rajamani argues, Justice Bhagwati’s innovative mechanism to articulate the interests of the marginalized has become “…not the end point of citizen mobilization but, rather, points of entry for those with a distinct view based on particular sensibilities.”(51) It is these “sensibilities” that increasingly defi ne the right to the city and urban citizenship in contemporary Indian cities, and they are, I suggest, representative of a new ideal citizen-subject in the making: an aspirational middle-class consumer citizen, ideally primed to live in a “world class city”.

The specifi c manifestations of these trends in particular cities must be seen in their intersections with a city’s particular local dynamics. In Delhi, the emergence of the courts as particular and infl uential spaces of government, and an impending date with the Commonwealth Games are two city-specifi c mechanisms through which broader urban trends take form. The former explains why electoral strategies based on pressuring locally elected leaders are increasingly less effective in Delhi, and shifts the focus from the ballot box, municipal offi ces and parliament to the court-room. A shifting urban politics both shapes and is shaped by the courts. Much more research needs to be done to understand the full impact of the emergence of the courts as primary sites of urban planning and government. The Commonwealth Games indicate a new site of struggle: the need to challenge the circulation and consumption of particular images of the poor – spurred by the Games and “world class city” media campaigns – that act as the foundation on which their marginalization can be framed as ethical. The poor and their advocates must fi nd appropriate articulations – legal, political and cultural – that will adequately respond to these changing logics of exclusion and be seen as legitimate in the new sites of struggle. Any inclusive politics must begin here, though un-doubtedly numerous challenges remain. Furthermore, to be successful, these articulations must respond both to local specifi cities as well as larger urban trends. It is only then that resistance will not just be impassioned but also effective.

51. See reference 15, Rajamani (2007), page 306.



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