Bhan, G. (2009) - "This Is No Longer The City I Once Knew". Evictions, The Urban Poor and The Right To The City in Millennial Delhi.E&U

Environment and Urbanization
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"This is no longer the city I once knew". Evictions, the urban poor and the right
to the city in millennial Delhi
Gautam Bhan
Environment and Urbanization 2009; 21; 127
DOI: 10.1177/0956247809103009
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This is no longer the city I once

knew. Evictions, the urban poor and
the right to the city in millennial Delhi
GAUTAM BHAN
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: gbhan@berkeley.edu
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 citys 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
justifies evictions. This shift is then located in the larger political, economic and
aesthetic transformations that are re-configuring the politics of public interest in
Indian cities.
KEYWORDS evictions / Delhi / India / judiciary / public interest / slums / urban
poverty
*Raja Kumar, a Pushta

resident personal
communication with the
author.
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,
five years later. (Frontline Magazine, 12 January 2004)
1. Pushta in Hindi and Urdu

means riverbank.
2. For a review of activist
reports and fact-finding 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.
Ashok was wrong. In January 2003, the Ministry of Tourism of the government 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) confirm that
the majority of residents were daily wage workers construction workers,
Environment & Urbanization Copyright 2009 International Institute for Environment and Development (IIED).
Vol 21(1): 127142. DOI: 10.1177/0956247809103009
www.sagepublications.com
127
E N V I R O N M E N T & U R B A N I Z AT I O N
rickshaw pullers, domestic workers and ragpickers or recyclers who had

migrated to Delhi(3) starting in the early 1970s.(4) A significant proportion
had been brought to Delhi by contractors to build the necessary infrastructure for the Asian Games in 1982. Many families in the area tell the
story of filling 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
officers and bulldozer crews, all the homes and community buildings in
Pushta were razed to the ground (Photos 1a and 1b).
Pushta was the first casualty in a series of informal settlement
evictions that have reconfigured 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 final result of several public interest litigations (PILs) filed in
Delhi courts by non-poor resident welfare and trade associations. It was the
Delhi High Court that ordered Ashoks 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 courts rulings. A protest outside
the presidents 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 newspapers 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 definitions 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
128
Vol 21 No 1 April 2009

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
first resident dates the first
house in Pushta to 1972. Its
owner, Dr Jamal, went on to
become a local leader for many
decades before his death in
2002.
5. Government of Delhi (2004),

Economic Survey of Delhi
20022003, 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.
7. Pitampura Sudhar Samiti vs.

Government of National
Capital Territory of Delhi
(CWP 4215/1995).
PHOTO 1A
Pushta settlements, 2003 Google Earth
E V I C T I O N S, T H E U R B A N P O O R A N D T H E R I G H T T O T H E C I T Y: D E L H I
129
PHOTO 1B
130
Pushta settlements, 2005 Google Earth
8. See also Nigam, Aditya

and Nivedita Menon (2008),
Power and Contestation: India
since1989, Zed Books, London,
240 pages.
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 multiple 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:
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 1728.
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

specifically 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
specific 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
10. See reference 5.
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 Delhis population lives in planned colonies that met all conditions of
legality at the time of their establishment, and followed the classic plan
buildserviceoccupy 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 notification 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 identified as a
slum under this Act, however, was notified in 1973.
Settlements that share the physical fragility and poverty of the slums
but that are not notified under the Slum Areas Act are called JJ clusters
131
TA B L E 1
Types 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)
Slum-designated areas
Unauthorized colonies
JJ resettlement colonies
Rural villages
Regularizedunauthorized colonies
Urban villages
Planned colonies
Total
20.72
26.64
7.40
17.76
7.40
17.76
8.88
33.08
139.64
14.8
19.1
5.3
12.7
5.3
12.7
6.4
23.7
100.0
NOTE: It is important to note that these statistics only represent those who
were counted. Many of the citys 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 significant under-reporting of the numbers of the citys
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 20022003,
Government of Delhi, New Delhi.
(14.8 per cent). A significant 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
notified 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 regularizedunauthorized 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 megacities, 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 postfacto 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
132
11. Sainik Farms is the most

notorious of these nonpoor 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.
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.
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 first 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 defined 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

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 334336; 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 156209; 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.
In India, regional high courts and the Supreme Court of India are perceived 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 inefficient.(15) In the late 1970s and early 1980s, a series of judicial
innovations further cemented the courts 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, specifically 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 filing 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 citys urban systems in the past decade. To mention a few:
18. M C Mehta vs. Union of

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

India, Petition No 13029 (1985).
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 transport to the use of compressed natural gas (CNG);(19)
133
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 fields ideally under the purview of the
executive.
The examples cited above are illustrative of the significant 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 concerned 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 first 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 states non-implementation of the master
plans of cities that had caused the problem in the first 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 empathy 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
134

20. Almitra Patel vs. Union of
India, WP 888 (1996).
21. Delhi Pradesh Citizens
Council vs. Union of India (CWP
263, 264 and 266 of 2006).
(2007).
23. I dont 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 citys
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 citys 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 significant
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-fighting and
multi-site accountability can be
resolved, especially from the
perspective of the citizen.
24. Okhla Factory Owners
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
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
sufficient 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 influence of a changing
economic and political climate
on judicial decisions. All of
these urgently require focused
and analytical inquiry.
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 fulfillment 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 government 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 underprivileged, 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 flat. 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.
135
Pushta wasnt hidden from either public view or the state. A community 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
first 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 Independence, 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 development 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
benefit 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 domestic 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 influx 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 first fall in real wages for the poorest quintile of Delhis
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 five years. The left-hand side shows how the poor increasingly buy even essential food from the market place rather than through
state provision, and how dramatic this change has been for staples such
136
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.
TA B L E 2
Changes in access to the Public Distribution System
Percentage of people in Delhi buying essentials
from the Public Distribution System
Rice
Wheat
Sugar
Kerosene oil
19992000
20042005
32.8
25.4
15.2
46.9
3.5
2.7
3.6
29.0
Occupational breakdown for Delhi (%)
Wage/salaried
Self-employed
19992000
20042005
58.9
33.5
52.7
40.4
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
1555.
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.
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-configured 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 defined 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, Ongs understanding of neoliberal
governmentality as the government of free individuals who are then
induced to self-manage according to market principles of discipline, efficiency
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 Ongs description of an infiltration of market
logic into politicsstrongly holds true for post-1991 India.(37)
How has market logic infiltrated 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, nationalist 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 flip 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
137
bureaucratic and inefficient 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, justified 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 ensuring 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 (microfinance, self-help) or through the
voluntary associations of civil society (NGOs). In this conception of government, 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 mechanisms 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 lands 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-defined in terms of a particular kind of economic productivity. Therefore, in the courts, honest citizens become those who pay for a flat,
as judges use what Ong calls ...an economic logic in defining, 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 moralpolitical 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 represents what Chatterjee calls corporate capitals increasing intolerance
towards the informal. Conversely, it is the moralpolitical 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 figure 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 So 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
138
39. Caldeira, Teresa (2000), City

of Walls, University of California
Press, Berkeley, 486 pages.

Chatterjee (2003); also
Chatterjee, Partha (2008),
Democracy and economic
transformation in India,
Economic and Political Weekly
Vol 43, No 16, April 1925,
pages 5362.
Chatterjee (2008), page 56.
43. See reference 39, page 31


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 8998.
47. Benjamin, Solomon (2000),

Governance, economic
settings and poverty in
Bangalore, Environment and
Urbanization Vol 12, No 1, April,
pages 3556.
48. See Roy, Ananya (2004),
Transnational trespassing:
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 doesnt 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 capitals moralpolitical
hegemony to define 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 figure 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 demolition 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 settlements 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 defines aestheticization as a simplification 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, filth and fragility.
139
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: flat, without history, without structure and emptied of those
who live within it.
This reduction of the slum to a flat 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 Daviss
Planet of Slums (49) allows an erasure of their particular structural exclusion
and economic marginalization, and the flattening, 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 peoples 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 citys 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 Delhis 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 citys 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 fight height restrictions 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 upperclass city of leisure, where a new economically emboldened ideal citizen
can walk by the river. Indeed, the promenades 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.
140

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,
MarchApril, pages 534.
50. For a representative

example, see the Challo Dilli
(Lets Go Delhi) campaign
led by the Times of India, one
of the nations largest English
dailies. The tagline read: From
walled city to world city,
accessed 3 March 2008 at
http://chalodilli.indiatimes.
com/articlelist/1393834.cms.
VIII. A NEW SOCIOSPATIAL URBAN ORDER?

(2007), page 306.
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 first 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 Bhagwatis 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 define
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 specific manifestations of these trends in particular cities must
be seen in their intersections with a citys particular local dynamics. In
Delhi, the emergence of the courts as particular and influential spaces of
government, and an impending date with the Commonwealth Games are
two city-specific 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 offices and parliament to the courtroom. 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 find 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 undoubtedly numerous challenges remain. Furthermore, to be successful,
these articulations must respond both to local specificities as well as larger
urban trends. It is only then that resistance will not just be impassioned
but also effective.
141
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Okhla Factory Owners Association vs. Government
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142

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This is no longer the city I once

Gautam Bhan studies the

*Raja Kumar, a Pushta

This is no longer the city I once knew.*

1. Pushta in Hindi and Urdu

rickshaw pullers, domestic workers and ragpickers or recyclers who had

Vol 21 No 1 April 2009

5. Government of Delhi (2004),

7. Pitampura Sudhar Samiti vs.

Pushta settlements, 2003 Google Earth

Vol 21 No 1 April 2009

Pushta settlements, 2005 Google Earth

8. See also Nigam, Aditya

perhaps most importantly, what do post-millennial evictions tell us about

9. I borrow the term from

increasingly altered understandings of poverty and inequality based

This paper looks at how each of these components manifests itself

II. PARADIGM SHIFTS: HISTORICAL URBAN SETTLEMENT IN

In 2003, the Economic Survey of Delhi(10) mapped the types of habitation

Vol 21 No 1 April 2009

11. Sainik Farms is the most

14. Roy, Ananya (2005),

III. THE COURTS AND THE PUBLIC INTEREST

18. M C Mehta vs. Union of

19. M C Mehta vs. Union of

the closure and relocation of medium and large urban industries to

decisions on municipal solid waste disposal;(20)

As Rajmani(22) argues, the courts involvement does not stop at its

IV. (UN)SETTLING THE LAND: CASE LAW ON INFORMALITY

Vol 21 No 1 April 2009

23. I dont have the space to

Vol 21 No 1 April 2009

V. INEQUALITY, RISK AND RESPONSIBILITY

31. See reference 15,

32. Government of India

Occupational breakdown for Delhi (%)

34. At the time of writing,

38. See reference 35.

as rice and wheat. This trend is paralleled in health care, education,

VI. PERSONIFYING THE ENCROACHER: THE CRIMINALIZATION

Vol 21 No 1 April 2009

39. Caldeira, Teresa (2000), City

40. See reference 36, page 16.

43. See reference 39, page 31

45. See reference 15,

46. Baviskar, Amita (2004),

47. Benjamin, Solomon (2000),

in crime and changes in the neighbourhood. The stereotypes that abound

VII. AESTHETIC DEVELOPMENT: THE HYPERVISIBILITY AND

It becomes an image of all that is unwanted. The politics behind the

Vol 21 No 1 April 2009

49. Davis, Mike (2004), Planet

50. For a representative

VIII. A NEW SOCIOSPATIAL URBAN ORDER?

51. See reference 15, Rajamani

Vol 21 No 1 April 2009

Holston, James (2008) Insurgent Citizenship, Princeton

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