Forced Evictions and Factory Closures

Abstract

The direct and systematic assault on people's lives and livelihood in the context of slum demolitions and forcible evictions form part of a continuing drive to restructure the economy as well as the city. The ‘cleansing and beautification’ of the city has drastically changed the lives and livelihood resources of the working class. The urban poor are not only continually relocated to the margins of the city, but are also subjected to loss of dignity and exploitative labour for survival. Labelled outsiders by the judiciary, media and policy makers, and being pushed out of the electoral process, the question of citizenship becomes poignantly questionable for evicted slum dwellers. The impact on both housing and livelihood affects women in multifarious ways, including repression by the state machinery and constant police surveillance, increasing their vulnerability. This article is an attempt to re-examine settled notions of citizenship and rights as they unfold in the context of a metropolis like Delhi, focusing specifically on the manner in which citizenship for the working class is experienced in terms of continual ‘relocation’ to the margins of the city.1 While examining the processes of this relocation, the article shows how the institutions of state, including the judiciary, the police, as well as political representatives, construe the working poor as anomalous to what the city signifies, namely, beauty and civility. The construction of the working class as citizen-outsiders is imbued with a strange paradox. While the city requires them to sustain and reproduce itself in a manifestation of what has been termed as the masked nature of modern citizenship, it also pushes them out, physically and metaphorically, as incongruous and inconsistent with the life that the city promises—of sprawling malls and gated communities.