Between violence and desire: space,

power, and identity in the making of

metropolitan Delhi*

Amita Baviskar

Introduction affluent residents of the area who paid to have a wall

constructed between the dirty, unsightly jhuggis and
Delhi, on the morning of January 30, 1995, was their own homes. The wall was soon breached, as
waking up to another winter day. In the well- much to allow the traffic of domestic workers who
todo colony of Ashok Vihar, early risers were lived in the jhuggis but worked to clean the homes
setting off on morning walks, some accompanied and cars of the rich, wash their clothes, and mind
by their pet dogs. As one of these residents walked their children, as to offer access to the delinquent
into the neighbourhood ‘‘park’’, the only open defecators.
area in the locality, he saw a Dilip’s death was thus the cul-
young man, poorly clad, walk- mination of a long-standing
Amita Baviskar is a sociologist at the
ing away with an empty bottle University of Delhi, India. Her research
battle over a contested space
in hand. Incensed, he caught addresses the cultural politics of environ- that, to one set of resi-
the man, called his neighbours ment and development. Her publications dents, embodied their sense
and the police. A group of include the book In the Belly of the River: of gracious urban living, a
enraged houseowners and two Tribal Conflicts over Development in the place of trees and grass
Narmada Valley, Oxford University Press,
police constables descended 1995. devoted to leisure and recre-
on the youth and, within ation, and that to another set
minutes, beat him to death. of residents, was the only
The young man was 18-year-old Dilip, a visi- available space that could be used as a toilet. If he
tor to Delhi, who had come to watch the Republic had known this history of simmering conflict, Dilip
Day parade in the capital. He was staying with his would probably have been more wary and would
uncle in a jhuggi (shanty house) along the railway have run away when challenged, and perhaps he
tracks bordering Ashok Vihar. His uncle worked would still be alive.1
as a labourer in an industrial estate nearby which, This incident made a profound impression on
like all other planned industrial zones in Delhi, me. During my research in central India, the site
had no provision for workers’ housing. The jhuggi of struggles over displacement due to dams and
cluster with more than 10,000 households shared forestry projects as well as the more gradual but no
three public toilets, each one with eight latrines, less compelling processes of impoverishment due to
effectively one toilet per 2083 persons. For most insecure land tenure, I had witnessed only too often
residents, then, any large open space, under cover state violence that tried to crush the aspirations of
of dark, became a place to defecate. Their use poor people striving to craft basic subsistence and
of the ‘‘park’’ brought them up against the more dignity (Baviskar 2001). Now I was watching a
similar contestation over space unfold in my own
back yard. I had previously analysed struggles over
∗ This article is reprinted from International Social Science
Journal, 2003; 55: 89–98
the environment in rural India; now my attention

ISSJ 227–228 
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200 Amita Baviskar

was directed towards how, in an urban context, monopoly of transforming these spaces into zones
the varied meanings at stake in struggles over the appropriate for a modern capital: commercial
environment were negotiated through different centres, institutional areas, sports complexes,
projects and practices. This concern has been green areas, housing colonies, and industrial
strengthened over the last 2 years by two sets of estates. Lending urgency to their ambitions was
processes, each an extraordinarily powerful attempt the presence of around 450,000 Hindu and Sikh
to remake the urban landscape of Delhi. Through refugees4 who had flooded the city from what had
a series of judicial orders, the Supreme Court of become Pakistan, and who had been settled on the
India has initiated the closure of all polluting and periphery of the city in housing colonies, but whose
nonconforming industries in the city, throwing out sewage had contaminated the city’s water supply,
of work an estimated 2 million people employed leading to 700 deaths from jaundice in 1955 (Saajha
in and around 98,000 industrial units. At the same Manch 2001: 5). Concerns about the physical and
time, the Delhi High Court has ordered the removal social welfare of concentrated human populations
and relocation of all jhuggi squatter settlements were thus channelled into the desire for a planned
on public lands, an order that will demolish the city, where they converged with the high nationalist
homes of more than 3 million people. In a city of fervour for modernisation. Fulfilling this desire
12 million people, the enormity of these changes seemed to be pre-eminently a responsibility of the
is mind-boggling. Both these processes, which state:5 the legitimacy of a national government that
were set in motion by the filing of public interest had the prestige of fighting for freedom added fresh
litigation by environmentalists and consumer rights power to an older development regime established
groups, indicate that bourgeois2 environmentalism by colonial capitalism (Ludden 1992) that gave
has emerged as an organised force in Delhi, and the state primacy in the mission of Civilisation and
upper-class concerns around aesthetics, leisure, Improvement.
safety, and health have come significantly to shape
the disposition of urban spaces. The logic of the planned city
This bourgeois environmentalism converges
with the disciplining zeal of the state and its interest The land that the Delhi Development Authority
in creating legible spaces and docile subjects (Scott surveyed was no empty space, but already vivid
1998). According to Alonso (1994: 382), ‘‘modern with embodied practices. There was the presence of
forms of state surveillance and control of popula- the two imperial Delhis still extant cheek-byjowl:
tions as well as of capitalist organisation and work Shahjehanabad and New Delhi (Gupta 1981), and
discipline have depended on the homogenising, the new ‘‘urban villages’’ whose lands had been
rationalising and partitioning of space’’. Delhi’s acquired by the DDA. Shahjehanabad, the Mughal
special status and visibility as national capital has walled city built and rebuilt from the sixteenth
made state anxieties around the management of century onwards, was a mosaic of mixed use
urban spaces all the more acute: Delhi matters practices, where homes, work places, shops, places
because very important people live and visit there; of worship and government were piled on top of
its image reflects the image of the nation-state. As each other in untidy profusion. To colonial eyes,
an embodiment of India’s modernist ambitions, this apparent anarchy had to be regulated in order
the capital has been diligently planned since 1962 to prevent the spawning of seditious thought and
when the first Master Plan was produced with the action. After the Mutiny/ First War of Independence
help of American expertise supplied by the Ford in 1857, the colonial state demolished large parts
Foundation. The Master Plan would order Delhi’s of Shahjehanabad, laying down railway tracks that
landscape in the ideal of Nehruvian socialism, and tore through its heart. The city was depopulated
enlightened state control would engineer functional and ethnically reconstituted in 1947 when its large
separation, leaving a sanitised slot for history in Muslim population fled to the new state of Pakistan
the form of protection for monuments deemed at the time of Partition. To the south of Shah-
archaeologically important (Khilnani 1997). Huge jehanabad and looking down upon it, the British
tracts of agricultural land were acquired from the had built New Delhi in 1918, shifting the locus of
villages close to the city and vested with the Delhi empire on the subcontinent from Calcutta to Delhi.
Development Authority (DDA)3 which had the The cartography of colonial power was visible in


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Space, power and identity in the making of metropolitan Delhi 201

the city’s spatial design. There was the Central ing, tax collection, labour and pollution inspection,
Vista where the Viceroy’s Palace surmounted the and so on attempted to keep tabs on a burgeoning
Parliament House, the Secretariat, and the palaces economy.
of the Native rulers. New Delhi’s wide avenues Delhi’s Master Plan envisaged a model city,
segregated the white rulers from the brown babus in prosperous, hygienic, and orderly, but failed to
a finely calibrated hierarchy of status, made visible recognise that this construction could only be
through bungalow size, while also creating sites realised by the labours of large numbers of the
such as offices and shopping areas where rulers working poor, for whom no provision had been
and natives could transact business in a regulated made in the plans. Thus the building of planned
fashion. The building of New Delhi had entailed Delhi was mirrored in the simultaneous mush-
the displacement of Untouchable castes who had rooming of unplanned Delhi. In the interstices of
lived south of Shahjehanabad and who were now the Master Plan’s zones, the liminal spaces along
banished to the western periphery of the new city.6 railway tracks and barren lands acquired by the
Thus the building of the capital of independent India DDA, grew the shanty towns built by construction
began by encompassing both Shahjehanabad and workers, petty vendors, and artisans, and a whole
New Delhi, as well as appropriating the lands of host of workers whose ugly existence had been
numerous villages around the city. The presence ignored in the plans. The development of slums
of these urban villages, with their unplanned res- was, then, not a violation of the Plan; it was an
idential settlements and their suspended rights to essential accompaniment to it, its Siamese twin. The
dispose of their agricultural lands, continues to be ‘‘legal geography’’ (Sundar 2001) created by the
an anomaly that actively contradicts the logic of the Plan criminalised vast sections of the city’s working
planned city. class, adding another layer of vulnerability to their
From the beginning, the process of planning existence. At the same time, the existence of the
had to contend with multiple ways of imagining the slums over time was enabled by a series of on-
city. There was the model of Shahjehanabad, which going transactions: the periodic payment of bribes
based itself on encouraging mixed land use, recog- to municipal officials, and the intervention of local
nising and adapting to the complexity of a multi- politicians. Planners’ attempts to map inflexible
ethnic, multi-class society with spatially overlap- legal geographies became a resource by which state
ping functions. A stream of opinion within the urban officials and political entrepreneurs could profit,
planning movement, represented by Patrick Geddes as they brokered deals that allowed slums to stay.
who had travelled widely in India and had designed Planners lamented the absence of ‘‘political will’’,
plans for several Indian towns, espoused this model the apparent impotence of the municipal authorities
of the planned city (Geddes 1915). Then there to enforce the law, but failed to recognise their
was the modernist model of spatial segregation of own complicity in creating a situation where illegal
populations and functions. Planners did not weigh practices could flourish. Erasing (through crimi-
the pros and cons of these and other models in nalising) the necessary presence of the working
order judiciously to choose the one ‘‘best’’ suited class was thus not an oversight but rather intrinsic
to Delhi’s projected needs. While ostensibly a to the project of producing and reproducing pow-
scientific-rational process that is free from politics, erful inequalities. This misrecognition was wilful
urban planning has always been about the exercise and systematic, an institutionally organised and
of power. In the case of Delhi’s Master Plan too, guaranteed strategy of devising ‘‘sincere fictions’’
the disciplinary aspects of creating and controlling with the aim of reproducing relations of power
subjects and spaces shaped the process of boundary- between the state, spaces, and subjects (Bourdieu
making. Crucial for the project of effective control 1977: 171). The presence of this pool of cheap
was the generation of information: the enumeration labour enabled the planned city to grow, even as
of populations though the decennial census was its proximity raised the spectre of dirt, disease, and
supplemented by their classification into various crime, a monster threatening the body civic that the
economic categories. These were then mapped onto state has since then been trying unsuccessfully to
separated zones partitioning work and residence, leash.
industry and commerce, education, administration The project of disciplining the poor was thus
and recreation. Regulatory systems such as licens- shaped by contradictory processes as planners,


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202 Amita Baviskar

politicians, and municipal officials brought But in the late 1980s, when newly instituted
different agendas to bear upon the issue. Particular economic liberalisation policies threatened to end
historical circumstances created conditions for its monopoly, the DDA began to imagine a new role
negotiation and accommodation as well as repres- for itself in partnership with private builders. One
sion and violence. A conjuncture that permitted the of the steps towards this was the transfer of land
playing out of the totalitarian ambitions of planners on lease to cooperative group housing societies,
was the State of Emergency (1975–77) where Prime usually of urban professionals, who constructed
Minister Indira Gandhi’s government suspended their own apartment complexes, in east and north-
civil liberties in order to remain in power.7 With the west Delhi. More affluent families shifted to the new
active involvement of Gandhi’s son, Sanjay Gandhi suburbs being developed on the south-western edge
(the unconstitutional power beside the throne), Jag- of the city by private real estate firms. The unsatis-
mohan, the Lieutenant-Governor of Delhi,8 planned fied demand for housing and spaces for commerce
and supervised the demolition of slums from the and recreation (and the two were fused in the idea of
heart of the walled city and their relocation on the shopping as a leisure activity) by this class, drove
swampy eastern edge of Delhi. Emma Tarlo’s study up the value of real estate in the city, pressuring
of Seelampuri (2002), one such resettlement colony, the DDA and the Delhi government to accelerate
locates the Emergency as a ‘‘critical event’’ (Das their mission of urban development so that they
1995) that revealed the structural violence tying could enjoy higher profits (legal and illegal). The
control over sexualised, communalised subjects to hurry to develop the land for commercial ends
space. and gigantic urban projects – highways, flyovers,
The strong public opposition to these excesses river-front development – necessitates the removal
in the aftermath of the Emergency meant that of the jhuggi settlements that encroach on public
disciplinary desires lay dormant for the next two land.
decades. In the late 1970s, there was a spurt of Once again, the DDA’s Master Plan seeks to
construction in the capital with the immediate goal orchestrate a transformation that will make Delhi an
of building facilities for the Asian Games to be ideal urban space governed by the project of rule:
held in Delhi in 1982. This project, represented as the national Capital, in both material and symbolic
one where national prestige was at stake, provided terms. But the planners’ desire to effect a con-
the grounds for the DDA to violate its own Master trolled and orderly manipulation of change has been
Plan and suspend procedural rules in order to enter continuously thwarted by the inherent unruliness
into dubious contracts with construction firms. The of people and places. The limitations of modern
building of flyovers, sports facilities and luxury techniques of power crucial for the planning enter-
apartments (to house participating athletes, which prise soon became evident. Accurate numerical
have since become homes for senior bureaucrats), data essential for modern policy initiatives such as
brought to the city an estimated one million labour- present and projected estimates of populations and
ers from other states. Once the construction was their production and consumption patterns, proved
over, these labourers stayed on, often in shanty impossible to generate because of the magnitude,
settlements in the shadow of the concrete structures dynamism and complexity of the reality they sought
they had built, seeking other employment. In the to capture. Appadurai (1993: 317) has described
early 1980s, their presence was tolerated and even how practices of enumeration were central to ‘‘the
encouraged by local politicians who secured for illusion of bureaucratic control and a key to a
them water taps and ration cards for subsidised colonial imaginary in which countable abstractions,
provisions. The populist governments at the Centre of people and resources at every imaginable level
were willing to allow the migrants some recogni- and for every conceivable purpose, created the sense
tion, albeit of a limited nature. While their concern of a controllable indigenous reality’’. While being
did not extend to the provision of low-cost housing armed with data remains an important technique
or civic amenities such as sanitation, electricity, for justifying intervention, its dubious accuracy
schools, and health clinics, it did give workers a and failure to yield expected outcomes constantly
temporary reprieve in the battle to create homes rendered it open to challenge. Thus, for exam-
around their places of work. ple, not only was the Delhi government recently


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Space, power and identity in the making of metropolitan Delhi 203

reprimanded in the Supreme Court for supplying political authority, partly a consequence of Delhi
multiple and contradictory estimates of industrial being not just a city but the capital of India, help to
units in Delhi and being unable to provide precise create ambiguous spaces and irregular practices –
information about their production processes, but its jurisdictional twilight zones – where the buck can
inability to regulate these units was also manifested be passed to a bewildering number of authorities
by the continued presence of high levels of air and and no action taken.
water pollution in the city. As expected from a heterogeneous group,
Just as economic activities spill over and out the responses from the owners of industrial units
of the taxonomies created by the state to regu- in the city have been diverse. For a few large
late urban populations (for instance, ‘‘household industrialists, those who owned factories in the
industry’’ involves a combination of family labour centre of the city, this crisis is an opportunity
and hired workers – with varying skills and terms to convert land to more profitable commercial or
of employment), the mapping of functionally spe- office space. Others have moved to a new periphery,
cific land-use zones is obliterated by a spectrum the industrial estates in nearby Rajasthan, where
of unauthorised practices: workers without shelter they will probably continue to pollute without
(and unable to afford commuting costs) who crowd check. Many owners of small firms assert that
around their places of work; a land mafia that bro- the installation of pollution control equipment,
kers deals between municipal authorities and those or the switch to non-polluting technologies, will
with the capital to acquire and use land illegally; render their operations economically unviable. That
and political leaders who encourage encroachments is, their profits depend on exploiting the envi-
with an eye towards cultivating vote banks among ronment. It is quite likely that some producers
insecure squatter settlers. and small-scale production will simply go out of
business, making way for more capital-intensive
Negotiating contradictions technologies.
The ability to weather displacement varies
From the interdependence between squatters and with the material and symbolic capital at one’s
their political patrons, profiteering property bro- command. The Supreme Court issued directions
kers and those looking for land, and lowerlevel about compensating factory owners as well as their
bureaucrats who benefit through turning a blind eye employees. However, workers’ entitlements are
to violations, there emerge powerful collaborations conditional upon their being recognised as employ-
that undermine the bourgeois dream of re-making ees, their eligibility dependent on officially being on
the city. The state’s Master Plan is undone through the rolls. Yet the same logic of keeping costs down
resistance both internal and external. The displace- that makes factory-owners resist the enforcement
ment that the creation of a clean and green Delhi of pollution laws operates to keep workers off
entails has been held in check by the delicate politi- the rolls. The intricacies of contracting and sub-
cal equations on which state legitimacy hinges. The contracting labour, designed to keep labour costs
orderly manipulation of people and places cannot low and capitalists in control, prevent most workers
rely on brute force alone, even though there have from being recognised as displaced and liable for
been several violent encounters in the process of compensation from specific firms. Workers depen-
enforcing the Supreme Court directives. Politicians dent on daily wages, with no job security and
across the party divide in the city recognise that who are the most vulnerable of the city’s poor are
their electoral fortunes depend on the support both rendered completely destitute by this process of
of financiers and of the numerically important restructuring the urban economy. The insecure, con-
poor. Negotiating the contradictions between these stantly changing conditions of work that prevented
disparate constituencies, the city administration’s their political organisation also make invisible the
responses to judicial orders have been heteroge- violence done to these workers. ‘‘Free’’ in Marx’s
neous: playing for time, pleading to change the doubly ironic sense to sell their labour wherever
rules, placating the judges with new plans, even they please, without owning any capital, much of
as it hastens to assure threatened groups that it Delhi’s working class experiences displacement as
would protect their interests. The fractures within a constant fact of life.


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204 Amita Baviskar

The trade unions that represent the minority of through mass demonstrations.9 Their arguments
officially recognised industrial workers have been represent environmental concerns as antithetical
protesting against the closure of industrial units to workers’ interests. A common accusation is
and the displacement of workers in the courts and that: shahar ko sundar banane ke liye ameer log


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Space, power and identity in the making of metropolitan Delhi 205

mazdoor ke pet par laat maar rahe hain (to make only possible option. While the bourgeois gaze
the city beautiful, the rich are kicking workers in regards these encroachments as disfiguring the
their belly). But this is only a partial account of the landscape, for their residents the jhuggis represent
complex politics leading to displacement in which a tremendous investment in terms of the capital and
bourgeois environmentalism and Master Plans con- labour that has gone into making a habitable place:
verge with other processes of capitalist restructuring coordinating with other builders, laying out plots
and real-estate development. Nor is environmental- and lanes, putting in drains, improving building
ism an agenda that is antagonistic to working-class materials, negotiating with the municipal authori-
interests. Those most vulnerable to environmentally ties, petitioning for toilets, schools, and healthcare.
hazardous living and working conditions are most The visible difference between relatively new and
often the working-class. The economic compulsion old jhuggi settlements makes clear the incremental
of working in hazardous conditions and the efforts that go into the making of homes and
political powerlessness of being unorganised, habitable neighbourhoods. With the passage of
combined with the state’s failure to implement time, plastic sheets and bamboo thatch shacks are
labour and environmental regulations, structure the replaced with more sturdy plaster and brick, roads
conflict in terms of a perceived opposition between and drains are laid out, the tentative hope of perma-
jobs and the environment. Delhi is a city where nence signified also by the carefully cultivated rose
the majority scrabble to find a precarious foothold and sacred basil plants in recycled plastic containers
in the race for space and work, their housing that are lined beside front doors.
concerns focused on getting access to sanitation, The hope of permanence is not a foolhardy
water, and electricity in squalid settlements. fantasy. Slum-dwellers know that if they endure the
For them, the sheer uncertainty of employment hardship and hazard of being illegal residents, the
makes unimaginable the asking of questions fait accompli of encroachment can be a powerful
about conditions of work, wages, security, and argument for recognition and legal status. Over
environmental hazard. Workers’ organisations have time, the claims of jhuggi-dwellers to be regularised
generally been ineffective in pointing out that a become stronger, with the state either legalising
safe and clean working and living environment is their settlement or granting them alternative sites
equally a priority for workers. As Ravindran (2000: in resettlement colonies on the edge of the city.
116) observes: ‘‘Four decades of urban planning in Having learnt to anticipate this sequence of con-
Delhi, which progressively marginalised both the flict and compromise, the poor and their political
urban environment and the poor, is now faking an patrons willingly collaborate in the enterprise of
encounter between the two.’’ encroachment, negotiating the risk of displacement
in the hope of securing future recognition and per-
Environment for whom? manent tenure. The slums, like the nonconforming
and polluting industries that in the eyes of the
Bourgeois desires for a clean and green Delhi have Supreme Court are a violation of law, are for their
combined with commercial capital and the state residents the manifestation of years of compromise
to deny the poor their rights to the environment. in which law enforcement agencies have been
Although the environment is seen as a luxury fully complicit. Preying upon working class hopes
for those who can barely carve out a livelihood, and dreams of a better future, these relations of
attending to the struggles for work and home allows conflict and compromise are embedded in profound
us to appreciate what the environment means across structural violence. The collective efforts of slum-
time to different groups as they are reconfigured dwellers who mobilise to improve and defend
by the contestations around place-making. The their modest homes, confronting demolition crews
proliferation of deplorable squatter settlements, and and doggedly rebuilding after the destruction, are
the criminalisation of the working poor who live sabotaged by the state’s promise of limited housing
in them, is a direct consequence of processes of sites in resettlement colonies. Driven by the desire
displacement written into the Master Plan. State to secure legal housing and a stable foothold in
monopoly over urban land, combined with the the uncertain economy of the city, slum-dwellers
state’s failure to build or facilitate the construc- abandon their collective struggle for individual
tion of legal low-cost housing, makes slums the gain. When the municipal trucks arrive to take


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206 Amita Baviskar

people to the bleak resettlement sites on the city’s Conclusion: Reform or

outskirts, and the municipal officials begin handing transform Delhi?
out the slips of paper that promise a plot in these
wastelands, there is a scramble to dismantle the In Delhi, the poor have responded to such disci-
homes painstakingly built brick by brick over the plining attempts by adopting varied strategies of
years, to be the first to board the trucks. Arriving enterprise, compromise, and resistance. They have
at the resettlement sites, bare tracts of land without exercised their franchise as citizens (the ‘‘vote
any services, the poor tackle once again the arduous banks’’ that the bourgeoisie holds in contempt),
challenge of imagining and crafting liveable places. used kinship networks, entered into unequal bar-
The civilising and improving mission of the state is gains with politicians and employers, mobilised
thus realised by the labours of the poor, their sweat collectively through neighbourhood associations,
and blood and dreams. and most recently, attempted to create a coalition
The making of Delhi’s working class is also of slum-dwellers’ organisa tions, trade unions, and
bound to the perpetuation of their identity as NGOs. This coalition, called Saajha Manch (Joint
migrants. A migrant identity, with its implication Forum), has over the last three years created a
of belonging elsewhere, keeps the poor from being powerful critique of Delhi’s Master Plan, pointing
recognised as full residents of Delhi entitled to to the absence of participatory processes in its
the full complement of civic rights and social formulation and highlighting the sharp inequalities
opportunities. Despite Delhi’s history as a city of in the consumption of urban resources. These mul-
migrants, where the overwhelming majority of the tiple practices, simultaneously social and spatial,
population consists of first or second-generation attempt to democratise urban development even
migrants, the fact of migration is selectively used to as they challenge dominant modes of framing the
stigmatise certain social groups. While attempts by environment-development question.
the bourgeoisie to construct a genealogy explaining This paper has shown that planned urban
its presence in Delhi are granted legitimacy, similar development, like other modes of state-making,
strategies are denied to the property-less. Perceiving attempts to transform the relations between popu-
the poor as migrants and as newly arrived interlop- lations and spaces, in the process displacing and
ers on the urban scene is a strategy to disenfranchise impoverishing large sections of the citizenry. In
them from civic citizenship. This treatment is also the case of Delhi, state-making is not only about
inflected by communal identifications. When the reproducing the state nationally and internationally
Hindu nationalist party, the BJP, was in power both and securing resources for capitalist restructuring,
at the Centre and the Delhi state government during but it also includes interven tions aimed at improv-
1996–99, the names of thousands of Muslim slum- ing the environmental quality of life for Delhi’s
dwellers were deleted from the electoral rolls, on the bourgeoisie. For the bourgeoisie as well as for poor
grounds that they were illegal Bangladeshi immi- migrants, processes of place-making are marked
grants. The presence of Bengali-speaking Muslims by both violence and desire (Malkki 1992: 24), as
(assumed to be from Bangladesh) was used to strip displacement collides with dreams of a better life.
all Muslims of their right to vote, in a context where These subjects’ strategies to craft work and home,
there is no firm proof of national identity. The BJP the central axes of social being and identity, are
has been keen to institute a system of surveillance grounded in the negotiation of multiple and shifting
based on identity cards as a mechanism for keeping fields of power (Moore 1998). Rather than seeing
Delhi from being swamped with migrants. Such place-making as a project of rule, I have attempted
a system could well become a way of dispensing to direct attention toward the accomplishment of
patronage to certain social groups while excluding rule (Li 1999), the contradictions and compro-
and stigmatising other cultural identities. These mises that radically transform this project. Such
gate-keeping systems play upon bourgeois anxieties an analysis seeks to identify and understand the
around the breakdown of urban infrastructure, complexities in the exercise of agency by subaltern
their apprehensions about the scarcity of water and subjects, as they attempt to intervene in the unequal
electricity, the increase in crime and disease, and processes of creating spaces and identities that are
the proliferation of unruly places and peoples. intrinsic to the project of urban development.


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Space, power and identity in the making of metropolitan Delhi 207

Notes

1. The violence did not end there. extent, as shown by the from which position he continued
When a group of people from the correspondence between Nehru and the urban cleansing projects that he
jhuggis gathered to protest against Gandhi about centralised planning had initiated during the Emergency.
this killing, the police opened fire and state-led industrialisation versus It was during Jagmohan’s tenure
and killed four more people (PUDR agrarian populism. that the judicial orders about closing
1995). down industries and relocating
6. Even today, the west Delhi slums were vigorously pursued.
2. I am using the terms parliamentary constituency of Karol While he gained the applause of the
‘‘bourgeois’’ and ‘‘upper-class’’ to Bagh is reserved for Scheduled bourgeoisie, BJP politicians in
refer to the group that is instantly Caste candidates since they continue Delhi who were concerned about
recognisable in Delhi by dress, to be numerically significant in this the fallout from Jagmohan’s zeal on
deportment, and language: the area. their electoral fortunes succeeded in
padhe-likhe (educated) and the getting him transferred from the
propertied, white-collar 7. Gandhi’s election as a Member
of Parliament had been overturned Urban Development ministry in
professionals, and those engaged in September 2001.
business: the owners of material and by the Allahabad High Court on
symbolic capital. grounds of procedural irregularities, 9. They have been constrained by
and her government faced a rising the highly regulated nature of
3. The Delhi Development tide of opposition from the labour Delhi’s public spaces. For several
Authority (DDA) was constituted in and student movements. years, no protest events have been
1957 by an Act of Parliament ‘‘to allowed within a certain radius of
check the haphazard and unplanned 8. After a period of exile when the
Congress was thrown out of power the Parliament and in parts of the
growth of Delhi’’. city where they can actually intrude
at the end of the Emergency,
4. In 1941, the population of the Jagmohan’s political career revived on public consciousness.
city had been 917,000. By 1951, the with his appointment as Governor of Incarcerated within ‘‘permitted’’
city had grown more than 50% Jammu and Kashmir during the venues such as the grounds behind
because of the refugee influx. height of insurgency in that state. the Red Fort, massed bodies of
He changed sides and, having joined protestors have limited impact in
5. While state intervention was the BJP, was appointed Union terms of making their cause visible
taken as a given, the nature of the Minister for Urban Development, and audible.
intervention was debated to some

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