Producing multiple ‘others’: spatial upheaval and Hindutva politics in urban India

ABSTRACT

This article examines two simultaneous dynamics in contemporary India: the development of new urban spaces, and an intensification of Hindu nationalism (Hindutva). Examining the case of Noida (a township adjacent to Delhi), this article suggests that the entrepreneurial mode of urban development [Harvey 2006. Spaces of Global Capitalism. New York: Verso] has restructured local spaces, which in turn may give rise to rival attempts at group making, seeking to recreate exclusive identities out of choice and resentment to mobilise political action. Such rival attempts may enable Hindutva to entrench itself in local milieus through multiple modes, including the soft mode of ‘neo-Hindutva’. Overall, the article outlines the dynamic association between new urban processes and exclusivist/nativist forms of politics in contemporary India.

KEYWORDS:

• Urban space
• Hindutva
• identity
• Noida
• India

1. Introduction

Two simultaneous dynamics characterise contemporary development politics in India. One, within a well-entrenched capitalist economy, value accumulation through dispossession of rural and peri-urban communities has been apace, and capital thus accrued tends to primarily favour corporate businesses and real estates (Levien 2012, 935). Often developed by a coalition of public and private agencies, new urban centres facilitate the localised reproduction of global capital (Bhattacharya and Sanyal 2011). The middle-class elites’ demand for aesthetically appealing urban spaces helps to close this loop of ‘new towns as the location of a new economy and a new class of producers and consumers’ (Bhattacharya and Sanyal 2011, 42).

Two, the Indian polity has witnessed an ascendance of right-wing politics. The Indian political right has a long history. But since the BJP (Bharatiya Janata Party) led government assumed power in 2014, religious-ethnic divisions have become considerably sharper (Anderson and Jaffrelot 2018). With its roots steeped in the RSS (Rashtriya Swayamsevak Sangh, the Hindu nationalist parent organisation of the BJP), the government has attracted scrutiny amid reports of violence against minorities. Many scholars also point out that a sizeable section of India’s middle-class shares some strands of right-wing ideology in their everyday political practices (Fernandes 2006; Corbridge and Harriss 2000).

The interaction between these two dynamics has received somewhat uneven attention. A major strand of urban sociology has examined emergent middle-class aesthetics, class relationships, and their impact on urban place-making in the post-economic reform era (Fernandes 2006; Atluri 2013; Baviskar 2003). There are also notable works on the rise of Hindu nationalism in metropolitan cities (Desai 2010; Lele 1995). But the entrenchment of this ideology in everyday lives in newer Indian cities has received relatively less attention. Similarly, except for a few works on political-cultural mobilisations in smaller towns (Brass 1997; Simpson 2006; Berti, Jaoul, and Kanungo 2011), the literature on Hindu-right is largely silent on how new urban processes in a neoliberal context mediate its entrenchment at various scales.

This paper brings together the usually separated analytical strands of political economy of urbanisation, class relationships, and cultural entrenchment of Hindu nationalism (Hindutva) into one analytical configuration by examining the case of Noida, a township bordering Delhi, in the state of Uttar Pradesh (UP). It suggests that neoliberal forms of space production and governance, combined with existing class relationships, generate a ‘logic of competitive identity politics’ among different social groups. This logic recreates cultural distinctions to address inter-group conflicts around the control of local spaces. This everyday politics of cultural contestations around places, we argue, enables Hindutva discourses to become entrenched locally. We use a recent labour-dispute case in Noida as an entry point for this argument.

1.1. The Mahagun Moderne incident

In mid-2017, Noida suddenly featured in international headlines for a seemingly local affair. ‘At a luxury high rise in India, the maids are rioting’, reported the Washington Post.¹ On 12th July, a group of migrant domestic workers and labourers barged into a luxury housing enclave called Mahagun Moderne, claiming that a housemaid was being detained by her employers since the previous night. A search of the employers’ residence remained unfruitful, but the maid was found elsewhere inside the complex, having spent the night in hiding after a dispute. Several police complaints were promptly filed charging the crowd with rioting, property destruction, and even attempt to murder; 13 people were subsequently arrested (John, Topo, and Monchari 2017).

Despite the local turmoil, this wasn’t an incident to gain nationwide significance. And yet it attracted considerable attention due to a certain political colour being almost simultaneously imbued to it. Though described by some national media agencies as representing India’s increasing economic inequality, many middle-class inhabitants of Noida framed the dispute in an ethnic-nationalist context by invoking the religious and regional identities of the crowd as purportedly illegal Bangladeshi Muslim immigrants. They saw the incident as a threat to the Indian nation and its Hindu majority; the ‘threat from Bangladeshi rioters’ narrative was scaled up by regional right-wing groups and several vernacular media organisations in turn. John et al. (2017) summarises these developments as follows:

Within hours, an obvious labour issue … was projected as a communal confrontation … identifying the protesting workers and the missing domestic worker as ‘Bangladeshis’ … social media exploded with communal diatribe … The Mahagun residents have also conveniently bracketed Bengali Muslims, and now all workers from [West] Bengal … as ‘Bangladeshi rioters’.

The Washington Post, however, drew attention to the spatial dimension of the event:

Mahagun … [is] a gated, 25-acre complex with swimming pools, a tennis court and landscaped pathways. A short distance away, their household help — mostly migrants from the state of West Bengal — live in tin-roofed huts in a muddy field, bathing from a communal tap.²

John, Topo, and Monchari (2017) elaborates:

[Mahagun] constitutes a ‘new’ way of life- a mini-city … watching a frail domestic worker undergoing a ‘tap down’ by guards … is the first unusual site … Following the footsteps of the domestic workers … one begins to wonder if there is any space for the women to even sit down and rest.

Such spatial features of residential differentiation are neither unique to Mahagun, nor to Noida. However, this incidence gives us a window into the embedded socio-spatial relations in new urban India. Like most new and upcoming Indian cities (Cowan 2015), Noida exhibits a stark spatial differentiation where luxury urban enclaves (comprising of a few hundred to 8000 plus flats) are segregated from semi-urbanised rural settlements and slums/shanties where locals and migrant populations live. We argue that the exclusivist discourses thrown up by relatively small-scale/localised disputes like Mahagun may be understood in the context of a spatial upheaval in which the new middle-class city dwellers are attempting to control their neighbourhoods against rural and migrant inhabitants; a control that is simultaneously animated by the wider ethno-nationalist narratives of the current political regime. In turn, it is a conflict that owes itself to the mode of urban development under an entrepreneurial state (Harvey 2006).³ We develop this argument in five sections of this paper. The next section describes our theoretical framework. Section three explores the nature of ‘spatial upheaval’ in Noida and the production of distinct social spaces/nodes. Section four examines spatial practices in each node and the concomitant entrenchment of Hindutva politics. The concluding section summaries our core argument about the role of space as an enabler of the exclusivist politics.

Methodologically, the article is based on six months’ field research in Noida in 2017–18. We conducted 50 in-depth semi and unstructured interviews with retired bureaucrats (2) and urban planners (2) who were involved with Noida, academics and journalists (4), politicians (5), middle-class residents of the urban enclaves (12), villagers (13), and migrant labourers (12). The last three groups formed the majority of our respondents, as they represent the three prominent communities in Noida both in class and caste terms. The urban residents, members of India’s burgeoning middle-class, are largely upper-caste Hindus. The villagers included traditional landowning elites and landless labourers hailing from the three locally dominant castes of Gurjars, Chauhans and Yadavs, and the schedule castes (SC) respectively. The migrant labourers came from marginal rural families in eastern India (Bihar, Jharkhand, West Bengal), and were primarily SC Hindus and Muslims. We also interviewed academics from the School of Planning and Architecture (New Delhi), and politicians from the BJP/RSS, the Samajwadi Party (SP) and the Bahujan Samaj Party (BSP). The categorisation of the respondents were done to get an overall sense of urban development in Noida, ranging from its history, planning imperatives, current governance/political issues, and finally a detailed exploration of the different resident communities. A significant proportion of the fieldwork also went in collecting archival resources, particularly the older Master Plans of Noida.⁴ Data gathered were mostly in the form of field notes, recorded interviews, and print media articles in English, which were memoed for textual and conceptual analysis. Given the inter-group politics and cultural contestations that form the crux of this study, we have primarily used interview excerpts from the three communities to substantiate our arguments, while the remaining interviews aided in giving us a broad context of the field, pointing to relevant archival sources and potential informants.

2. Space, place, and Hindutva politics in India

Space is a historically configured social relationship (Lefebvre 1991; Massey 1994; Smith 2010). Beyond an independent physical background containing entities, the critical geographical understanding is that ‘social spaces’ are constituted through relationships in physical spaces, with social processes constantly recreating said relationships. Harvey has, for instance, proposed the concept of ‘relative’ space as the space for variable but interdependent relationships among physical entities and social networks (2006, 3–4). Relative spaces are increasingly manifested through global flows of capital and information, interconnecting vast urban and rural geographies, and coinciding with the entrepreneurial state in producing new urban spaces by appropriating new territories and resources (2006, 93). A variant of this relative space is the ‘relationality’ of spaces, capturing social experiences, symbols, and discourses shaping and being shaped by the absolute and relative features of a particular space. The dual concepts of spatial relativity-relationality enable an examination of contested meanings and identities associated with reconfigured urban spaces.

Social spaces also embody certain forms of power that states and markets seek to impose on the ‘lived spaces’ of symbols and social interactions (Lefebvre 1991, 33–42). This space-power interplay necessitates the understanding of social processes at the lower scale of a ‘place’: a particular form of space that ‘emerges in a … bounded territory through a field of meanings and social interactions’ (Hubbard, Kitchin, and Valentine 2004, 6). Yet, being more than just proximate geographies of interactions and meanings, places are also specific configurations of interacting relationships and meanings across geographic scales (Massey 1994). On the space-place continuum, Harvey has accorded global economic processes such a causal primacy that place-based lived spaces become inert and dependent on wider spaces. For instance, he considers neoliberal urban places to be polarised in a way that low-income populations aggregate in localities where they defend spaces as ‘use values’ through segmented communal attachments, while more affluent groups make places by enhancing ‘exchange values’ through high-value consumption choices (1989, 266). Harvey also connects spatial reorganisation under post-industrial capitalism with exclusive identity-based claims to places. As space becomes an ‘abstract commodity’, it elicits politico-cultural reactions that attribute moral-mythical values to places (‘aestheticization of politics’: 1992, 209).

Albeit appealing in determinism, such formulations ignore how historical contingencies attach to places, reconfiguring wider political economic processes regionally and locally (Massey 1994). Massey agrees with Harvey that both new nationalisms and exclusive inner-city enclaves of the middle-classes represent attempts at addressing ‘spatial upheavals’ of the pro-market era. However, she stresses that such attempts entail rival impositions of ‘labels/identity/boundaries’ on places (Massey, 1994, 5), and that place-bound cultural identities are not derived exclusively from the economic category of class (Massey, 1994, 137). Drawing on Massey’s anti-essentialist and dynamic conception of spatial upheavals and associated contestations, we suggest that state mediated commodification of space and the resultant differentiation in Noida has set off new political processes in which rival social groups seek to control space by creating cultural frameworks.

Simultaneously, we also draw on Bourdieu’s work on class formation and social practices to understand local social fields. Bourdieu’s (1985) key contention, that group specific socio-spatial practices emanate from varying ‘habitué’ of perception, rules, and properties, is highly relevant. Habitué/habitus is constituted by the distribution of properties (capitals) among individuals, conferring specific strengths to individuals/groups within interconnected economic, social and symbolic fields. This structuralist model of practice is organised around a ‘logic of difference’, where social agents with shared dispositions pursue spatial, economic, and symbolic distinctions as ‘lifestyles’ to maintain social separation. Our attempt is to demonstrate how the social practices of community making involve the production of new logics of difference among social groups cohabiting in Noida. To summarise, we approach Noida as a state-produced new urban space in which everyday place making is inherently connected to the political need for controlling space, creating group ties against a rival ‘other’ in a search for shared habitus.

Our approach also places us among ethnographic studies of Hindu nationalism in urban settings (Berti, Jaoul, and Kanungo 2011; Brass 1997; Desai 2010). Having remained peripheral for most of twentieth century, Hindu nationalist ideas were mainstreamed through the post-1991 rise and aspiration of the BJP to recast India’s civic nationalism as Hindutva, a political ideology constructing the idea of Indian nationhood through an ‘irreducible and exclusive affinity of Hindu-ness’ (Deshpande 1995, 3220–22). Hindutva justifies Hindu supremacy over an ‘other’ – often a religious minority – seen as threatening the body cultural of a Hindu nation (Corbridge and Harriss 2000). It is therefore committed to a fundamental transformation of India to achieve a ‘Hindu Renaissance’ (Anderson and Longkumer 2018, 371–72).

Recent anthropological scholarship has focused on how Hindutva percolates into various local contexts where social groups interpret and adapt it to further their own ends. Berti, Jaoul, and Kanungo (2011) present a nuanced account of Hindutva seeping through quotidian social and cultural life in multiple ways. Echoing Billig’s (1995) construct of ‘banal nationalism’ (the everyday reproduction of informal nationalistic feelings through routine symbols and speeches), they contend that Hindutva entrenches itself through three cultural trajectories: a top-down ‘mediation’ of the RSS in local issues; by ‘converging’ with non-committed individuals/social groups following Hindu religious associations or spiritual leaders; and via facing ‘resistance’ in local milues. Similarly, Anderson (2015) uses the term ‘neo-Hindutva’ by drawing on Reddy’s idea of Hindutva’s diffused and nebulous logic becoming ‘a mediating discourse in its own right’ (Reddy 2011, 421; 2018). The idea of neo-Hindutva proposes two categories: a hard form explicitly connected to Hindu nationalism, and a soft/diffused form avoiding explicit linkages with majoritarian politics (Anderson 2015). Neo-Hindutva can be seen as ‘a starting-point for thinking about the dynamic and idiosyncratic ways in which Hindu nationalism has evolved … often into increasingly mainstream and normalised … forms of rhetoric and mobilisation’ (Anderson and Longkumer 2018, 373). Additionally, post-2014 coalescence of Hindutva can also be attributed to, first, the BJP’s intense ‘top-down’ social media presence through the ‘Internet Hindu’ or ‘enterprise Hindutva’ (Udupa 2015, 2018; Jaffrelot 2015, 2013). Second, the BJP has managed to pit the ‘people’ – the poor and the newly urbanised middle-classes against a liberal elite who is seen as monopolising power, resources, and pandering to non-Hindu minority groups (Chacko 2018).

3. Noida as a differentiated urban form

Noida of today can be traced back to April 17, 1976 when the UP government notified 36 villages on the eastern periphery of Delhi as the New Okhla Industrial Development Area (Noida). Just on the previous day, the government had enacted the Industrial Area Development Act,⁵ which enabled itself to constitute the ‘New Okhla Industrial Development Authority’ (Authority from hereafter). The Authority comprises of 11 members – of whom 6 are bureaucrats including the CEO, and 5 nominated members – who are responsible to the state government (but no public representation). In its first Master Plan (1978–1992), the Authority envisioned a ‘new industrial town’ where small and medium industries from Delhi will be shifted to; a move to decongest Delhi and regulate its speculative land-market. The Authority soon notified another 45 villages, thereby expanding the entire notified area to 20316 hectares from 81 villages, of which 15280 hectares was proposed for development, the rest being flood prone (Noida Master Plan 2031, 37). Periodic acquisition of notified land continues till date, hence the township registering gradual increase in size (Table 1). Initially planned for 220,000 jobs and a million residents by 1992 (Potter and Kumar 2004), estimates have been revised upwards in every Master Plan. The 2011 census estimated Noida’s population to be 642,381, and the latest Master Plan predicts a net population of 2.5 million by 2031.

Table 1. Changes in the land use pattern of Noida.

Land use category	Area as per successive Master Plans (in hectares)
	1976–1992		2001		2011		2021 (proposed)		2031 (proposed)
	Area	Percentage of Total Developed Area	Area	Percentage of Total Developed Area	Area	Percentage of Total Developed Area	Area	Percentage of Total Developed Area	Area	Percentage of Total Developed Area
Industrial	324	9.8	495	13	985	12.7	3001	20	2806.52	18.37
Residential	1725	52.2	1870	49.2	3672	47.2	5334	35.7	5772.14	37.45
Commercial	134	4.1	230	6.1	431	5.5	564	3.77	581.33	3.8
Public/semi-public spaces	460	13.9	365	9.6	1224	15.7	1219	8.15	1357.97	8.89
Recreational spaces	200	6.1	292	7.7	536	6.8	1513	10.11	2432.82	15.92
Transportation	400	12.1	495	13	941	12.1	2211	14.78	1942.15	12.71
Water bodies/ unusable land	61	1.8	53	1.4	NA	NA	121	0.81	104.5	0.68
Agriculture	NA	NA	NA	NA	NA	NA	1001	6.67	NA	NA
Total	3304	100	3800	100	7789	100	14964	100	15279.9	100

Source: Potter and Kumar (2004), NOIDA Master Plans (2001, 2031).

Divided into 163 ‘sectors’, the city has two primary land-use patterns: industrial and residential,⁶ occupying approximately 18.4% and 37.5% of the total area (Table 1).⁷ While there are several industrial quarters in the city,⁸ Noida has gradually transformed from a low-density industrial township into a city of high-density middle-class residences. An average residential sector measures about 55 hectares with a mixed development of group housings and private residences, though much of the development since mid-2000 has been of the former category. As Table 1 shows, between 2001 and 2011, residential land allocation increased by 96%, and then again by 45% between 2011 and 2021. Persons-per-hectare allocations were also raised by more than 100% in 2008, from 700 to 1650, thereby allowing for densely populated group housings (Master Plan, 2031). What adds to the dominance of these middle-class enclaves is that much of the land allotted for recreational, commercial, and other public purposes – a total of 42% of the city – primarily benefits the residents of these spaces. The commercial zones, public parks, etc. are either embedded within the residential sectors or are within easy access of the residents and befitting their taste and aesthetic sensibilities. In fact, it is not uncommon to witness active opposition to villagers ‘encroaching’ upon a sector’s land by accessing the local parks or by using the sectors’ internal roads as thoroughfares to the villages.

The erstwhile villages, on the other hand, present a contrasting picture. The acquisition of farmlands until 2011 drew on the ‘urgency clause’ of the 1894 Land Acquisition Act, suspending the landowners’ right to raise objections. Yet, the 1978–92 Master Plan hoped that village settlements would ‘be integrated’ via planned civic amenities in such a way that would change ‘their character … to urbanised villages’, although describing the integration as an ‘intractable problem’ (iii–x, 11). At variance with these optimistic visions, the residual rural settlements continue to stand in contrast with the planned neighbourhoods in multiple ways. The village population has growth substantially, and a considerable presence of migrants in the villages were already noted by 1979 (Lall and Suri 2020). As a result, these villages, some of which had very high rates of density even in the 1980s (>3 persons per room; Lall and Suri 2020), are significantly overcrowded now. Though euphemistically described as ‘urban villages’ in the Master Plans, they are ghettoised within the urbanised sectors without any space for expansion despite population growth, which has naturally led to crumbling infrastructure and inadequate civic amenities. Having lost their farmlands, majority of villagers have resorted to renting out low-cost accommodations to migrant workers, small-scale businessmen, and service providers in the middle-class enclaves (housemaids, security guards, drivers, etc.).

This ghettoisation has also entailed considerable politico-administrative costs for the villages. In 2015, invoking a special clause of the Industrial Area Development Act, the then state government decided to abolish the panchayats (village councils). Having lost all recourse to the traditional local governance institution, the villagers since became completely dependent on the Authority for even the most basic civic necessities, which in turn is a process mediated via bureaucratic rigmaroles that they were largely unaccustomed with. Conversely, with a steadily growing middle-class population, dismantling the panchayat system has facilitated the Authority to prioritise the aesthetic and infrastructural requirements of the planned sectors over the villages. For instance, the 2031 Master Plan remarks that ‘a significant proportion of the population growth in the villages due to unplanned growth of the village settlements may create problems for planned development of NOIDA’ (p.15). Because a sizable proportion of villagers are litigating the Authority over the acquisition of their farmlands under the ‘urgency clause’ and limited financial compensation, many characterise the Authority as an ‘encroacher’ and ‘trouble maker’ in their lives and livelihoods.

Beside the planned sectors and the urban villages, the third node in Noida is the unauthorised, unplanned squatter colonies (jhuggis) inhabited by migrant labourers. The steady influx of poor migrants and the formation of jhuggis is not a recent phenomenon. In fact, even as early as 1995, 20% of entire Noida population was living in jhuggi clusters (Master Plan, 2031), and the numbers kept increasing through the 2000s as Noida began to witness a real estate boom (Maitra 2011, 118). In a 2008 survey, the Authority estimated that about 11000 jhuggis are located in the sectors 1–11 alone (Master Plan, 2031). However, Das and Walton (2015, 551) have questioned these figures, saying ‘the number of jhuggis identified were far fewer … the website mentioned 525 jhuggis in Sector 5 whereas our census showed 830 jhuggis in one cluster alone in this sector’. The Authority also failed to furnish details about building alternative accommodation for these settlements or about developing the clusters themselves. Till date, most jhuggi residents do not have legal residential status, routinely face eviction threats from the Authority, and suffer from limited access to the most basic civic and welfare services.

Overall, Noida’s evolution straddles two different moments of urban policy making in post-Independent India. It was conceived during 1970s when the state was concerned with rationalising urban growth through land control, town-planning instruments, and medium/small-scale industrialisation (Shaw 1996). Further, it came into being during the national Emergency when the federal state made certain summary interventions in the urban sector (cf. Frankel 2006, 551–2). But within a decade, the township faced the ‘reformist’ trends of achieving financial self-sufficiency via internal resource mobilisation (Shaw 1996, 227). Adding to the urban restructuring patterns in other states (Anand and Sami 2016), the Authority strategically retained the ‘industrial township’ label that gave them complete command over land-acquisition and governance, but at the same time let the city turn into a residential township with booming real-estatisation. Today, Noida is the largest contributor to UP’s gross-domestic product (GDP),⁹ but it also has a sharply ‘differentiated residential space’ (Harvey 1989, 37) owing to the juxtaposition of planned sectors, rural remnants, and jhuggis. Therefore, Noida’s spatial restructuring evokes Massey’s concept of ‘spatial upheaval’ (1994, 157). Following Massey and Harvey, we think of the three different socio-spatial nodes as relational spaces in terms of the entangled subjectivities and practices of their residents. In the next section, we show how this relationality is expressed through a competitive practice of ‘difference’ in each node and its amenability for Hindutva politics.

4. Competing logics of ‘difference’ and Hindutva politics

4.1. Urban enclaves: homogeneity and threat of outsiders

Social mentalities and practices within the urban enclaves are mostly oriented towards two purposes: maintaining homogeneity and order within the enclaves, and producing ‘differences’ vis-à-vis the outside. As Bourdieu observes (1993, 108), such goals emerge partly because there is already an economy of ‘goods’ in the form of sectors and housing complexes that are represented as being in ‘good taste’ or ‘distinguished’, as opposed to the ‘bad’/‘vulgar’ sectors. The earliest planned, low-density residential sectors have tended to mostly cluster retired civil servants and defence personnel, whereas the post-2000 high-density sectors are inhabited by middle-class professionals in IT, banking and related sectors. Notwithstanding finer distinctions based on economic capital, a considerable overlap in social origins among these two class-fractions has been noted elsewhere (Deshpande 2006): they are likely to be upper-caste Hindus, and their dispositions are often informed by a belief in a merit-based superiority. Additionally, most of these urban enclaves have very few Muslim residents. The preponderance of service sector professionals in the planned sectors, which is reflected in Noida’s share of UP’s GDP, imputes to the sectors relative homogeneity in terms of social divisions of labour and consumption choices. Finally, the burgeoning population in the urban enclaves also means a far bigger and influential voting bloc, strengthening the hold of the urban rich as well as real estate capital in the city.

The perception and practices of social homogeneity in and across these enclaves are predicated on shared ideas about the space outside. At its root, this inside-outside distinction is about the ‘aesthetic of maintaining elective distance from the necessities of social world’ (Bourdieu [1984] 1996, 5). Following gated communities elsewhere (Falzon 2004, 150), housing enclaves in Noida provide amenities such as swimming pools, manicured parks, sports courts, shops and eateries inside their gates. Persuading and looking over residents to maintain this internal order offers the enclaves the everyday means to reproduce the ‘outside’ as both messy and threatening. Security has thus emerged as an interfacing trope for the middle-class aesthetic of self, its boundaries, and its consumption dependent nature. Most enclaves possess uniformed private security guards and elaborate surveillance protocols. Enclave residents regularly use social media platforms – WhatsApp in particular – for monitoring security provisions on their premises. Also, multiple inter-enclave WhatsApp platforms are used for exchanging wider security concerns, coordinating local responses, and for conveying collective demands to the Authority.¹⁰ Yet, as Massey quips (1994, 87), white-collar work and virtual activities, including ‘tweeting and ordering things online’ – as an informant characterised his fellow residents’ disposition – presuppose manual work and workers. The aesthetic challenge, which in turn is also an ethical challenge (Bourdieu [1984] 1996), is therefore to regulate access of the outside without disrupting internal homogeneity and order on an everyday basis.

The most problematic category of outsiders is the housemaids. Shabbily dressed and culturally different, their dispositions barely befit the enclaves’ spatial aesthetics. They come from the jhuggis and villages that are contrasting spatial forms to the planned homogeneity of the sectors. Predictably, the security protocols are elaborate, including police verification, identity/access cards, monitored entry-exit, random checks, separate service elevators, and restricted access to the communal areas even for intermittent resting. These protocols are seldom formally written, but are communicated to the maids (and other service delivery people) by the maintenance staff. Beyond the housemaids, the residents’ common understanding of the villagers and jhuggi residents is that they contain the ‘risks of misalliance’ at best and physical insecurity at worst (Bourdieu [1984] 1996, 374). The refrain that ‘we feel so vulnerable here because everyone is a thief outside’ is rather common. The jhuggis represent illegal spaces that are out of sync with the imagined aesthetics of Noida as a global city, whereas the ghettoised villages are seen as deformed relics from the past.

Despite some contextual differences, such self-perception is illustrative of Hage’s (2003) observation about an institutionalised culture of worrying among privileged and dominant social classes across societies, involving a ‘defensive society’ of ‘citizens who see threats everywhere’ (Hage 2003, 2). Once most pronounced among supporters of the extreme right and anti-immigration movements, it has now become the dominant trope for expressing one's attachment about the nation (Hage 2003 22). The way this culture fuses with Hindu nationalism is that many middle-class residents conflate worrying about their own selves as worrying about their nation. The sense of threat related by middle-class residents of Noida originates in the perception of dangers posed by the ‘others’ to their ‘well-deserved’, ordered social spaces, which projects their understanding of the nation.

4.2. Rural ghettos: reinventing a ‘rural’ identity around loss

In contrast with the occupational/consumption/aesthetic homogeneity of the urban enclaves, the rural ghettos are spaces of heterogeneous caste-based identities. Historically, western UP has had a strong presence of middle-rung proprietary peasant castes of Jats, Gurjars, Yadavs, and Chauhans, interspersed with upper caste Brahmins (Singh 1992). Singh’s observation that local villages were distinguished according to the resident dominant castes rings true even today. For example, Sharfabad, Chhalera and Rohillapur are respectively Yadav, Chauhan/Rajput and Gurjar villages to most locals. Their caste-based membership anchored to parts of a village territory allows them to stake a moral claim to the (home) place of their village. Brijendra Chauhan, an octogenarian in Chhalera, asserts:

I cannot work anymore. But everyone in the village knows me. This is my land, my place, my home.¹¹

Chauhan’s claim of belonging originates in his agnatic relationships (kunba), in the relationship of his kunba with his caste settlement (mohalla) and in inter-caste relations within the village (cf. Chandhoke 1990, 125). Villages continue to be social spaces in which personhood is constituted and recognised through clan and caste relative titles, such as that of the Chauhan, Chaudhari (clan-head of Jat or Gurjar families), Pradhan (head of the village council), or lambardar (intermediary revenue collector). These nested webs of relationships remain salient in local contexts of commensality and clan exogamy even as the overall configuration of castes as a system has transformed.

Yet the engulfment of villages within the city has intensified the fragmentation of these identities at multiple scales. While land acquisition from the villages located in the northern and central parts of the city had almost completed before 2009–2010, those in the southern part continued ceding lands until recently. In a landmark intervention in October 2011, the Allahabad High Court upheld 451 petitions from aggrieved farmers from Noida and Greater Noida (another adjacent township), holding land acquisition under the ‘urgency clause’ to be in violation of due process. The court ordered the Authority to pay additional compensation of 64.7% and return 10% of the ‘developed land’ to the farmers, leaving the decision of extending these benefits to other villagers to the Authority (Gajraj and others vs. State of UP, 2011).¹² Combined with ex ante inequalities in landholdings and assets, this intervention has enabled a class of villagers in the southern villages to receive substantial compensation and ‘developed plots’ for their lands. A class of such beneficiaries is now engaged in profitable ventures including real estate brokering and public works contracts. This class forms a township-wide ‘rural affluent class’ in terms of its income and ostentatious post-peasant consumption choices.

Fellow villagers, especially older ones and those who lost out on revised compensation, often dismiss this group of new parvenus with disdain for their purported lack of attachment to the rural soil and the older lifestyles. Malkan Singh Chauhan, a Chhalera resident, called such persons ‘kal ka badshah’ (kings since yesterday), for having made their riches by selling village lands, a dishonourable act for villagers with izzat (respect) and pechchan (identity).¹³ Put differently, such parvenus are seen to have ‘displaced dispositions’ in the rural space (Bourdieu [1984] 1996, 110). Some of the older village respondents also went beyond such strictures to critique the surrounding forms of urbanism using the frame of ‘sacredness of rural traditions’. Sukhvir Singh, a former army recruit, and now an influential village leader, observes:

We have gained materially, but lost our heritage and property; earlier our food was our own. We led a simple life, respected our elders and lived in joint families. That atmosphere has died out. Even today my identity comes from the village; I respect anyone wearing a dhoti.¹⁴

A more radical criticism of the township as well as the newfound rural affluence comes from the lower castes who remained impoverished throughout this transformation. Lacking in social and economic capital to begin with, many informants that we met are making do on petty jobs. Ashok Ram, a SC resident of Baraula village, comments: ‘Neither I am from the high-caste, nor do I have money. Where do I go? This place was mine, and yet it has left me nowhere’.¹⁵ Unlike Brijendra Chauhan or Malkan Singh Chauhan, Ashok Ram relates to his village through a sense of victimhood and betrayal. Except in a few villages like Mamoora where many SC families have benefitted as homestead owners from the arterial road development, lower castes have benefitted less as a social group in general.

Notwithstanding this deep polarisation, there is also a discourse about ‘belonging to the village’. Omkar Chauhan, a milk distributor in Chhalera, reflected with a sense of pride that ‘there are higher and lower [castes], but when it comes to the village, we all are one. We are from Chhalera, that’s our identity’.¹⁶ Such expressions try to underline a multi-caste rural disposition against the ‘sector’ habitus, but part of this claim to a cohesive rural identity and tradition is a deliberate political response to the consciousness of engulfment by Noida and the need to resist it. Thus, the protests organised by farmers groups against the Authority often used the frame of the ‘lost village’. Begraj Gurjar, an influential leader of the BKU (Bharatiya Kisan Union or Indian Farmers’ Union), sitting in protest against the Authority’s encroachment allegations, elaborates:

We are villagers lost in the city. We don’t know what to do having lost our farmlands. Noida’s farmers are in jail today, and will have to remain so forever. All we can do is unite.¹⁷

The self-representation of loss of villages as a free home-place is also used to distinguish villagers from the ‘outsiders/others’. The ‘other’ here includes anyone who’s not from a village, including the low-income migrant tenants who actually are the pillars of the village rent-economy. This logic of distinction requires villagers to recreate separations between themselves and the migrants while grudgingly accepting the latter as part of their local milieu. While there are instances of mutual engagement between village landlords and tenants within familial spaces, the dominant disposition of villagers is to regulate this engagement to minimise misalliances. Ajit Singh Tomar, a resident of Rohillapur, laments:

They are undeniably our bread and butter, but so many different people are also polluting our village (emphasis added).¹⁸

The enclave residents form the second set of outsiders against whom many villagers have resentment, usually stronger than that shown for the tenants. Lokesh Chauhan, a senior journalist of a local newspaper, traces this sense of distance:

First, the physical disparity; the villages suffer from a lack of the most basic provisions. Second, they have a sense of betrayal due to lack of jobs. Third, they have an emotional connection with ancestral land. Fourth, their complete political marginalisation following the panchayat abolishment.¹⁹

We have already discussed the marked spatial disparities between the enclaves and the villages. The second source of animosity stems from the villagers’ self-perception as deceived losers in the township’s development. Many claim they were promised jobs in the upcoming industries and prioritised school admissions for their children, but none of these have materialised; and there are plenty of anecdotes about active discriminations in the matter of jobs in local industries. The internationally accredited schools cater to the urban elites, and numerous instances are also related about village children being refused admission. Some of these claims about ‘promises made by the Authority’ are difficult to be falsified, but what cannot be overstated is that older farmers struggle to come to terms with the loss of their ancestral lands and to adjust their rural dispositions according to the ‘dictates of market-based utilitarianism’ (Bourdieu, cited in Joas and Knöbl 2009, 381–2). While urban residents base their claim to property in sectors as a ‘fair’ exchange on the market,’ villagers frame this ‘exchange’ as coercion (jabardasti, tanashahi) of the Authority. They continue to treat lost lands to be a constitutive part of their self in a phenomenological sense. Lokesh Chauhan, who grew up in Baraula village, describes his relatives who are still in the village as:

They can’t accept the loss of land, still saying the current owners are outsiders. In fact, they often take others to see a skyscraper, proudly pointing out that it is their land on which it stands. They have had to let go of their land, but not their memories, and continue to live in the past’ ²⁰

The final strand of this new self-consciousness relates to the loss of political representation. Albeit rarely raised outside the villages, but the dismantling of the panchayats has dealt a severe blow to rural political lives. Not only do villagers lack local representation, they are also marginalised in the electoral landscape. The four major parties (BJP, BSP, SP, and Congress) still have their village networks, but in the current political milieu, there is limited incentive for prioritising rural claims that would put one at odds with the imperatives of the urban enclaves, the latter being the primary voting bloc as well as the face of the state’s development efforts.

4.3. Jhuggis: the invisible others

The third node of our tripartite, the jhuggis, stand outside of the urban enclaves and the rural ghettos, with the inhabitants having hardly any control over their everyday conditions. Much of their spatial practices take shape in response to their treatment by the two other nodes. They are the subservient ‘others’ for the city dwellers (housemaids, construction workers) who need to be controlled through a strict security regime minimising any risk to the urban homogeneity, and ‘pollutants’ for the villagers, a threat to their traditional customs and hierarchy. For example, a large jhuggi cluster is located in Sector 76, right amidst several housing enclaves. We estimated around 200 families living there, amounting to almost thousand inhabitants in total.²¹ Almost everyone is a Muslim migrant from West Bengal. The men work as labourers/carpenters/plumbers, while the women are housemaids. The cluster is hard to miss (it’s directly opposite Mahagun), and yet a world away from the glitz of its posh neighbours. Standing on a disputed plot owned by a villager from Baraula, it is an extremely congested place of brick and tin shanties. Each family (4–6 members) occupies one tiny room, with 8–10 families sharing a toilet. There is no public space, education/healthcare facilities, and the dwellers are completely dependent on the landowner²² for even the most basic services. Their electricity connection (unauthorised ‘hooking’) was cut off following the Mahagun incident as a punishment, and we found the residents to be living in darkness for over three months.

What are the spatial practices in the jhuggis? In contrast to the other nodes, there is a clear disassociation from the space they inhabit. Amina Bibi, a lady who has been living in Noida for two decades, emphatically asserts:

We are Bengalis. We have nothing to do with this place. We just work here.²³

This disassociation also produces its own logic of difference, where the residents are equivocal about imbibing any meaning to their space. It is a process that has taken shape through a strong association with their homeland, and years of neglect/disrespect as migrants. The former is clearly evident, as everyone has families elsewhere whom they periodically visit, especially during the farming season and elections. There was a unanimous consensus among everyone we spoke to about going back home to vote. Upon probing further, Amina Bibi responded:

What about the roads and electricity in my village? It is our home that we have to take care of. Where else will we vote?²⁴

This association (with a distant space) is bolstered through their abject living conditions and continuous neglect. In spite of living in Noida for decades, they are completely at the mercy of the landowners and/or the builders on whose projects they work, constantly under the threat of eviction. Furthermore, as migrant labourers, they are actively discriminated against. Masood Alam, a carpenter, explains:

The Authority always treats us differently. I tried to become a voter here.²⁵ But they discouraged me, saying ‘you are from outside, we don’t want you here’. Our condition is like that old proverb: a god in your own land, a dog outside.²⁶

Masood’s comments aptly reflect the residents’ everyday existence enforcing their ‘outsider’ identity: evoking suspicion for speaking a ‘foreign’ language (such as Bengali), with minimal political capital (not voting in local elections), and little claim over the place they inhabit.²⁷ In response, in spite of their crucial role in the city’s socio-economic fabric, they reject any association with the space. It is not their place in the sense of a home, but just a space for work (a feeling also discernible among the children, albeit somewhat subdued. Most of them would have visited their ancestral homes a few times, and can be seen maintaining the distinction between home and Noida even in casual conversations). At the same time, such claims cannot be left entirely uncontested. As Hage shows, arguments about the migrant’s participation in the political processes of the host society fluctuate. ‘They can be portrayed as … too “home”-oriented and thus not participating enough, or … participating … so much that they are feared to be “taking over” [thus fuelling the middle-class paranoia]’ (2003, 1–2). Generally, the argument is that migrants are at best instrumentally interested in their host society institutions, but are not affectively attached to them. And yet, the everyday differentiation between participation as a formal/instrumental process and as an affective relation to society is rarely accounted for, with the formal categories of ‘rights’ and ‘responsibilities’ dominating the mainstream discussions.

4.4. Acquiescing to Hindutva politics

We can now briefly return to the Mahagun case as demonstrative of how the socio-spatial settings of these nodes (particularly the urban enclaves) tacitly lend themselves to Hindutva politics. Brass’s observations in his seminal study Theft of an Idol (1997), that acerbic inter-community relations in contemporary societies can deliberately place any localised violence in wider abstract contexts and engage in the ‘political act’ of producing divergent interpretative frameworks (p.4), is particularly relevant here. Insofar as the incident itself is concerned, it was not a ‘movement’ of any sort by the migrants, coalescing only as an impromptu search party for a missing person (John, Topo, and Monchari 2017). Yet, the enclave residents attempted to seize the interpretive initiative by imposing the wider category of ‘Bangladeshi Muslims’ on them. This category of identification established that the maid was an illegal immigrant,²⁸ and by extension, so was the agitating crowd. Additional layers of scale and affectivity were added to this construction when a known RSS functionary and resident in a nearby enclave interpreted the jhuggi crowd to indulge in ‘mob rioting’ against ‘decent Indians’:

You employ them, they will steal, if you question, they will bring mob and riot. If you earn well, live in a decent society, are secular and think that they won’t harm you … then you are living in an imaginary world.²⁹

This set the stage for BJP leaders to appropriate these constructions for ‘the maintenance of ideological and state authority’ (Brass 1997, 7). Mahesh Sharma, the local MP (a RSS functionary and cabinet minister), observed upon visiting Mahagun: ‘even though we know who they are, we turn a blind eye because of our needs.’³⁰ This series of reiterated constructions, invoking ‘peaceful Hindu community’ and ‘illegal Bangladeshi Muslim immigration’, collapsed the local and regional contexts into an overarching national ‘security threat’. It created justificatory grounds for the subsequent exercise of state authority (police arrests, demolition of several jhuggis), which in turn further reified the distinctions already etched so sharply.

To understand these wider arcs of political interpretation better, attention needs to shift from the incident itself to its socio-spatial setting. Urban enclaves possess the potentiality to interpret disruptions to their distinct habitus – especially one with an ‘outsider’ dimension and originating from the jhuggis that already are marked as spatial aberrations for the middle-class aesthetics – as an existential threat. In Mahagun, turning these outsiders into ‘alien Muslims’ rendered the case ideal for appropriation by both the institutional systems of enclave security and Hindutva organisations. While enclaves in the entire neighbourhood closed ranks on social media on the common plank of ‘security’, some local residents with membership of Hindutva organisations activated communication links with the wider leadership (such as the local MP). Our analysis suggests that the themes of ‘security’ and ‘order’, which otherwise encode exclusivity for affluent class members – many of whom may be non-committed to Hindutva – can and are strategically mobilised by Hindutva activists. Likewise, routine religious-cultural events (Durga Puja, Navaratri etc.) transform the semi-public space inside these enclaves into a benign Hindu space. Though by itself not hard-Hindutva, there still are instances of its strategic politicisation, such as by enforcing non-vegetarianism as a matter of ‘purity’ during these celebrations. Berti, Jaoul, and Kanungo (2011) are right in arguing that not all religiously minded residents may see these practices as an ‘acquiescence’ to Hindutva, but reiteration of a homogenous Hindu identity and the local presence of pro-Hindutva activists can and does enable an ideological mobilisation of agnostic residents.

The presence of two different but overlapping axes of caste and class on one hand, and the outsiders (both the migrants and urban residents) and villagers on the other, complicate the relationship between villages and Hindutva forces. We have noted that a substratum of large farmers from the Rajput, Gurjar, and Yadav castes has managed to minimise its economic losses – or even gained – due to land acquisition. Contrarily, small farmers from these middle castes and SC communities have lagged behind. Culturally, the rural ghettoisation and the inflow of poor and ethnically different migrants have led to a general resentment about identity erosion and its socio-cultural anchoring. These unevenly impacting economic, political, and cultural processes and their relationship to Hindutva become more meaningful in the historical context of political and apolitical mobilisations of village societies in the region. Since 1969, western UP has witnessed the political mobilisation of middle level Jats, Rajputs, and Gurjars, which in turn has popularised and sustained a discursive framework of ‘rural, authentic Bharat’ set against an ‘exploitative urban/bureaucratic India’ (Singh 1992, 98). While this construction emphasised its commitment to ‘vernacular secularism’ and electoral neutrality in the 1980s, by 1991 these claims came under increasing doubt (Singh 1992, 182). Since 1991, the BJP has made inroads locally by placing the Gurjars and other backwards castes at the centre of its political calculations, while local farmer movements have lost strength. Many hyper-local organisations (including the BKU splinter groups) championing the cause of Noida villages commonly depend on the substratum of rich Gurjar, Yadav, and Rajput villagers, while Muslims and SCs are almost completely absent in their ranks. Faced with increased economic differences within villages, and with a need for addressing their local audience meaningfully, village leaders routinely dwell on a distinct rural identity and its traditions within a wider Hindu cosmology. Some strands of this vocabulary go beyond Hindutva politics to the broader nationalist history (drawing upon the region’s involvement in the 1857 mutiny), but others may be used to support Hindutva’s autochthonous claim on local geography (viz., ‘this is the land of Krishna’). Other strands overtly encode the Hindutva theme of ‘minority appeasement’ against the local state (viz., ‘Mosques built on Authority land are not demolished, only our villages are troubled’). We also find continued relevance of Lindberg’s (2020) argument that the presence of Arya Samaj ideology (a nineteenth century Hindu reform movement) in western UP has aided the local entanglements of Hindutva. We came across several affluent pro-BJP village leaders who professed to be Arya Samajis. They located the Authority’s discrimination against the villages in the ‘weakness/fracturing of the body social of the Hindu village’, which necessitated the promotion of a virile form of collective masculinity in the villages.³¹

5. Conclusion

Employing Massey’s concept of ‘spatial upheaval’, we have described how erstwhile rural settlements were reshaped by a reformist state, creating a predominantly residential, consumption driven city. Noida also illustrates Harvey’s (1985) thesis about a ‘discriminatory consumption’ oriented urbanisation propped up by a class-coalition of property owners, developers, affluent middle-class consumers, and urban governments. At the local level, this spatial upheaval has engendered new relationships due to certain specific historical contingencies. The Authority has promoted highly profitable but high density vertical growth, thereby allowing large group-housing enclaves to have become the city’s face. The same entrepreneurial process has, however, enabled the residual urban villages to recreate a sense of socio-spatial identity out of their lived experiences of economic and political marginalisation. Contrary to Harvey’s thesis about the polarised nature of class-relative claims on space, this identity accommodates its ‘rentier capitalist’ dimension by emphasising the loss of agricultural livelihoods while underlining its fight as ‘justice to the farmer’. Finally, this entrepreneurialism has also attracted a significant migrant population to the city, yet kept them perpetually alienated. Noida neighbourhoods have thus become ‘difficult spots’ (Bourdieu 1999, 4–5), in the sense that urban enclaves, villagers and slum dwellers are jostling to interpret and command relativities of space on an everyday basis. Following Massey (1994), Bourdieu (1984) 1996, and Hage (2003), we have suggested that besides class, caste and ethnicity are implicated in the experience and practices of this differentiated space.

Further, we suggest that this spatial differentiation creates parallel modalities for the entrenchment of Hindutva. Affluent middle-class residents continually worry about disruptions to their ordered ‘aesthetics’ as a ‘security threat’. These are tropes not directly linked to Hindutva, but in the face of a perceived threat from ‘Muslim outsiders’, they can be appropriated as forms of soft-Hindutva premised on ‘majority victimhood’. Here, agreeing with Brass’s emphasis on the role of ‘institutional converters’ (1997, 17), we think that the presence of Hindutva organisations’ members as local residents aid such appropriation. This dynamic finds a parallel in the villages where attempts to forge a political community against the sectors, Authority and the migrant ‘others’ use a broad interpretive framework of the ‘loss of rural/village/Bharat’. Specific parts of this framework are liable to be re-appropriated by sections of the locally dominant castes under the banner of ‘Hindu nativism’ or ‘Muslim appeasement’. But, does this suggest that there are areas of ideological agreement between the middle-classes and villagers on the core tenets of Hindutva, taking shape particularly against the migrants?³² Ideas related to the Indian nationhood in terms of its Hindu homogeneity and of one’s duty to remove ‘threats’ to this nation are indeed expressed openly among both elite villagers and enclave residents. But the fractured socio-spatial existence between the villagers and urban residents (the latter also being an ‘other’ for the former), and the migrants’ crucial role in the rural rent-economy prevents any ideological convergence. The overall upshot being, on the one hand, elite upper caste villagers who are largely aligned with Hindutva ideologies tend to use the Authority vs. village and/or villagers vs. outsiders (urbanites and migrants) cleavages in their narratives of a distinctive self-identity. On the other hand, enclave residents who are also ideologically sympathetic to Hindutva, nevertheless acknowledge the cultural difficulties in interacting with elite villagers, let alone the ‘lumpenized elements’ from both the villages and jhuggis. An ideological congruence between these different groups therefore remains rhetorical at best, the cultural distinctions being determinant in their politics.

Given such structural and multi-dimensional challenges, Hindutva’s proliferation in Noida – despite its wider appeal – remains dependent on a patchwork of ideological interventions from the top as well as pragmatic strategies at the grassroots. It continues to build networks of committed local activists in each of the three nodes that join with wider political organisations in turn, a strategy that Berti, Jaoul, and Kanungo (2011) classifies as ‘mediation’ while Brass (1997) calls it ‘conversion’. A consistent focus on the Muslim ‘threat’ is maintained through this mediation. But Hindutva activists also share spaces horizontally with grassroots organisations working on ‘local’ issues in villages and jhuggis. It is a ‘convenient’ strategy (Lele 1995, 192) that has been adopted commonly by Hindutva organisations elsewhere. Our study of Noida suggests that the multifarious contestations between the ‘people’ and the ‘others’ that is at the heart of many popular exclusivist movements including Hindutva, may be enabled by spatial configurations in which social groups vie to preserve material, cultural, and moral interests they think are endangered. Space shapes politics, becoming political in the process.

Acknowledgements

We would like to thank the International Institute of Social Studies (The Hague, Netherlands) for a research grant awarded as part of the Emancipatory Rural Politics Initiative that allowed us to conduct the first phase of fieldwork for this project. We would also like to thank Dr. Shipra Basu for her help with curating the data, and the two anonymous reviewers for their comments on earlier drafts of the paper.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).

Additional information

Funding

This work was supported by International Institute of Social Studies, Hague, Netherlands [ERPI (Emancipatory Rural Politics Initiative) Smal].

Notes on contributors

Ritanjan Das

Ritanjan Das is Senior Lecturer at the University of Portsmouth, UK. His current research focuses on the political economy of development in the global South, exploring the role of local actors, networks and agencies from an anthropological perspective. He received a PhD in Development Studies from the London School of Economics for his study on the politics of policy transition in the state of West Bengal. His book Neoliberalism and the Transforming Left in India: A Contradictory Manifesto was published by Routledge in 2018. His second book Illiberal Spaces, Illiberal Cities (co-authored with Dr. Kumar) is forthcoming in 2022.

Nilotpal Kumar

Nilotpal Kumar is an Associate Professor at the School of Development, Azim Premji University (Bangalore). His current research explores the interaction between horticultural restructuring in semi-arid regions of Andhra Pradesh and emerging forms of local authority and cultural identity. He received a PhD in Development Studies from the London School of Economics for his ethnographic study of the phenomenon of farmers’ suicides in post-reform India. His book Unravelling Farmer Suicides in India: Egoism and Masculinity in Peasant Life was published by Oxford University Press in 2017. His second book Illiberal Spaces, Illiberal Cities (co-authored with Dr. Das) is forthcoming in 2022.

Praveen Priyadarshi

Praveen Kumar Priyadarshi is an Assistant Professor of Politics at IIIT, Delhi. His interest lies at the intersections of the categories of digital and social spaces, institutions and policies. He brings these categories to bear upon the conceptualisation of everyday politics in the cities of the global South. A PhD in Development Studies from the London School of Economics, he has been an Associate at the Crisis States Research Centre, LSE, and the Developing Countries Research Centre (DCRC), University of Delhi. He was also the Tata PhD Fellow at the Asia Research Centre (ARC), LSE.

Notes

1 Washington Post, 13th July 2017; https://www.washingtonpost.com/world/asia_pacific/maids-riot-at-luxury-high-rise-exposes-class-divide-in-india/2017/07/12/f126b9e0-4f02-49c5-b8c3-f2ebf8d51ab6_story.html?utm_term=.431d2f9ee01e.

2 Washington Post, 13th July 2017; https://www.washingtonpost.com/world/asia_pacific/maids-riot-atluxury-high-rise-exposes-class-divide-in-india/2017/07/12/f126b9e0-4f02-49c5-b8c3-f2ebf8d51ab6_story.html?utm_term=.431d2f9ee01e.

3 Harvey describes the entrepreneurial state as being increasingly preoccupied with new ways to foster local development and employment growth, in contrast to the managerial practices of earlier decades which primarily focused on the local provision of services to urban populations.

4 Only 2021 and 2031 versions are publicly available.

5 The Act derived from Article 243Q of the 74th Constitutional amendment. It provided for an exclusionary category of industrial townships that were to be developed and managed by Regional Development Authorities (RDAs), responsible only to state governments rather than elected local bodies (Anand and Sami 2016; the article has been invoked by multiple state governments to develop Special Economic Zones).

6 The interspersed rural settlements are separate from the residential land. Jhuggis (see below), however, are usually found on land earmarked for other purposes.

7 See https://noidaauthorityonline.in/en/article/noida-master-plan-map for a map of the city.

8 Sectors 1–11 (small scale manufacturing units); sectors 80-81, 83-85, 87 and 90 (IT companies and an export-processing zone); sectors 57–60 (financial hub); sectors 145-147, 155-157, and 164–166 (SEZ). Sectors 63-65, 67-68, 88-89, and 138–140 have also been planned for future industrial usage.

9 ‘Noida Tops Uttar Pradesh GDP’, Times of India, March 13, 2020; https://timesofindia.indiatimes.com/city/lucknow/noida-tops-state-gdp-per-capita-income-again-lucknow-is-second/articleshow/74602571.cms#:~:text=Noida%20retains%20first%20position%20among,than%2040%25%20of%20Noida's%20figures.

10 Most urban enclaves have elected Apartment Owners’ Associations (AoAs) that employ firms for maintenance and security services, and closely liaise with the Authority on civic issues.

11 Interview; Chhalera, 20th Dec.

12 Available at https://indiankanoon.org/doc/195081303/

13 Interview; Chhalera, 19th December.

14 Interview: 13 June, 2019.

15 Interview; Noida City Magistrates Court, 19th December.

16 Interview; Chhalera, 20th December.

17 Interview; Noida Authority Office, 14th September.

18 Interview; Rohillapur, 17th December.

19 Interview; Sector 61, Noida, 7th September.

20 Interview; Sector 61, Noida, 7th September.

21 jhuggi residents are mostly migrants from West Bengal, Bihar, Jharkhand, Chhattisgarh and eastern UP. Among the Bengali migrants we interviewed, everybody described their villages and families in districts like Malda, Musrshidabad, Midnapore etc. There is, however, anecdotal evidence that some might have originally migrated from Bangladesh. Even if true (the West Bengal-Bangladesh boundary is notoriously porous; see Shamshad 2017), everybody possesses legal documentation (voter id, aadhar card). Employers also conduct regular police verifications. Reports of illegal immigrants being identified in the city are extremely rare.

22 The plots on which this and similar jhuggis stand are usually embroiled in legal disputes between the original owners and the Authority, and the former usually construct jhuggis and rent them out in the meantime.

23 Interview; sector 76, 20th September.

24 Interview; sector 76, 20th September.

25 ‘Being a voter’ indicates transferring electoral registration from his village constituency to Noida. While a legal right, bureaucratic discrimination in such matters is common, especially if the residential status is unclear.

26 Interview; sector 76, 20th September.

27 Such perpetual conditions of neglect is evocative of Vigh’s description ‘crisis as context’, forcing people to live permanently in fragmented, volatile worlds (2008, 8).

28 Because she was Muslim and spoke Bengali - the language of Bangladesh. But so it is of West Bengal, a distinction conveniently overlooked in India’s Hindi heartland. The ‘illegal Bangladeshi’ also is a strategic element within the Hindutva discourse (Shamshad 2017). As indicated earlier, there is no legal basis of labelling them Bangladeshis.

29 https://www.facebook.com/jshubh/posts/10155995219010656.

30 https://scroll.in/article/844166/in-the-class-conflict-unfolding-in-Noida-union-minister-makes-it-clear-he-stands-with-flat-owners.

31 While BJP has a strong presence in the older, industrial zone jhuggis, there is limited evidence of them proliferating the residential sector jhuggis, possibly due to electoral irrelevance.

32 As in 1970s’ Bombay (Lele 1995, 199).