WHOSE CITY? INTERSECTIONS OF GENDER, CLASS, AND (IL)LEGITIMATE BELONGING IN D JHUGGI JHOPRIS  By  Meskerem Zikru Glegziabher      A DISSERTATION Submitted to Michigan State University in partial fulfillment of the requirements for the degree of  AnthropologyDoctor of Philosophy  2016  ABSTRACT  WHOSE CITY? INTERSECTIONS OF GENDER, CLASS, AND (IL)LEGITIMATE 1 By Meskerem Zikru Glegziabher with high-rise buildings, multiplexes, and massive highways. This trend has reinvigorated already embedded popular discourses and government policies that characterize the makeshift and unauthorized housing structures of the urban poor as problems to be solved, primarily through their demolition and the removal of their residents to peripheries of the city. This is in stark contrast to many lavish elite neighborhoods, also built illegally and utilizing public resources, which do not face similar concerns of demolition and removal. Instead, spatial precariousness remains largely a dilemma of the poor.  spaces to be consumed and enjoyed by distinctly masculine bodies (Hansen 2001; Lukose 2009). In contrast, women in urban public spaces must often move in primarily circumscribed ways. rape in 2012, there has been an increasing                                                            1 Jhuggi jhopri is the term used for slums in Delhi. While the term is in Hindi, it should be noted that not all Hindi    -class women, failing to address the experiences and ongoing struggles of poor women living in slums. Meanwhile, slum resident women must constantly negotiate their rights to both public and private spaces of the city as they balance movement between the instabiliThis dissertation aims to examine the intersectional marginalization (Crenshaw 1991) of poor women in Delhi as they navigate an urban space that is hostile to both female and impoverished persons but seldom provides modes of organized resistance that holistically or effectively incorporate both of these identities.                               Copyright by MESKEREM ZIKRU GLEGZIABHER 2016    v                     For our mothers, grandmothers, and sisters whose stories are too often silenced in favor of the stories of men. FHagoi, and all those whose families have been ripped apart by war, politics, and arbitrary borders. Finally, for all those who continue to struggle and fight for social justice despite the seeming futility of their efforts.                         vi ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS   Like most things in life, the dissertation process is not an individual effort but rather dependent on the guidance and assistance of many people along the way. It would be impossible to name all of those who have contributed in various ways to my own journey in this endeavor. Notwithstanding, I would be remiss if I did not acknowledge certain individuals who were instrumental to my success in graduate school and the completion of this project. My first thanks goes to all of my research participants for their willingness to participate in my study and the generosity with which they shared their time and knowledge. women of Aradhaknagar, Kalandar Colony, and Geeta Colony for welcoming me into their communities and homes, being patient with my imperfect Hindi, and entrusting me with their stories. I hope my analysis is consistent with your truths.  I would also like to thank all of the people who facilitated my research in various ways and without whom my study would not have been possible. Particularly, S.K. Bharati and Deepraj Gahatraj of the USIEF Delhi office for helping me secure lodging and find a research assistant; Professors N. Sridharan and P.S.N Rao of the School of Planning and Architecture for helping me shape my research trajectory and helping me to establish important contacts both in local government agencies and within the local NGO sector; Lalita and Shashi-ji of CURE who introduced me to the women of Aradhaknagar and Kalandar colony; and Kanika Gupta who was a wonderful research assistant and a vital help in transcribing and translating Hindi interviews and documents. I would also like to thank Shahana Sheik and Subhadra Banda of the Centre for Policy Research who allowed me to accompany them on several occasions during their ongoing field research within JJ communities throughout Delhi. Their vast knowledge of the intricacies of the bureaucracy and government policies targeting slum and JJ residents which they generously shared   vii with me was invaluable. Similarlyfinancial support for this research. A Fulbright-Hays Doctoral Dissertation Research Abroad (DDRA) award funded my dissertation field research. My pre-dissertation research was funded -dissertation Travel Award as well as research and travel awards by the MSU Department of Anthropology. Additionally, I was able to study Hindi both at MSU and through an immersion program in Jaipur, Rajasthan with AIIS     I am also exceedingly grateful to my doctoral guidance committee for their years of unwavering guidance and support. In all of our interactions my advisor, Elizabeth Drexler, somehow managed to always leave me with a feeling of confidence and peace of mind while simultaneously holding me to her high standards of scholarship and intellectual labor. In addition to her keen academic guidance, Anne Ferguson also gave me a job that I loved as the managing editor of the Gendered Perspectives on International Development Resource Bulletin for three years at GenCen in what remains the most empowering and revitalizing worked; and for that I will forever be indebted to her. Karin Zitzewitz, with her passion for and Our meetings always turned into productive brain-storming sessions which left me energized and excited to tackle various aspects of my research, and her constructive criticism and advice helped me to find my own voice and writing style. Lastly, in an institutional context which can often be isolating, particularly for people of color, Najib Hourani provided me with a rare kind of holistic mentorship that took into account not only my academic progress, but also my mental and physical health. His genuine concern about the emotional and psychological trauma I experienced at repeated and widely publicized instances of violence with impunity against people of color in   viii America and around the world, his willingness to process those emotions with me, and his suggestions on how to incorporate those feelings of frustration and helplessness into my research were vital to my ability to complete this dissertation and for that I am grateful.   In addition to these professional relationships, I would also like to recognize the numerous friendships and personal relationships that have been essential to my growth as a woman and a scholar throughout the years, and critical to my surviving graduate school and the dissertation process. As the oft quoted My sister-circleAyida Abate, Mimo Tesfaye, Sonya Davenport, Linda Gordon, Tiffany Waddell-Tate, and Terri Young McGuiretogether form an international network of brilliant, strong, and accomplished women who are always there with a hug and encouraging word when I need to vent, cry, or yell and are always cheering me on through all of my ventures including writing this dissertation. My one and only biological sister Hibest Zikru was my very first friend and remains the fiercest champion of all that I do. She taught me the importance of a strong work ethic, creative expression, loyalty, and a passion for justice. My mother Hagosa Mehreteab is the living embodiment of survival and perseverance me so much of the world and at a young age planted in me a love of languages and cultures that led me to Anthropology. My father Zikru Gebreegziabher planted in me a love of learning and politics, and taught me that my ideas and opinions mattered, even as a little girl growing up in a patriarchal world. capabilities has never wavered and continues to give me confidence and motivates me to strive to achieve the excellence they see in me. My family in Nashvilleespecially my aunts Elizabeth Gebreegziabher and Mihret Desta, and my uncle Merha Gebreegziabhertook me in when I immigrated to the U.S. at the age of thirteen and gave me so much love and support that I barely felt the loss of living so far away from my parents. I feel so lucky that they are mine. I also want   ix to acknowledge all of my family members through the generations who have stood up and fought against tyranny and injustice, especially my aunt Asghedet Mehreteab who left home at the age of nineteen to join a struggle for liberation. Their bravery and passion for justice runs through my blood and informs the woman I strive to be. In addition to my blood family, I also want to acknowledge my family-in-love, the Howards and the McGuires, who embraced me with open arms and who mourn my losses and celebrate my successes as though they were their own. I am incredibly grateful for all of them. Finally, I want to thank my husband and partner on life Keon McGuire, who is the keeper of my smile. He shows me every day what it means to be a thoughtful and caring human being, and a truly supportive and equal partner. This dissertation may have never come to fruition without the countless hours he spent with me talking through approaches, analyses, and theory and giving me feedback on drafts. I hope to one day reach his level of dedication to social justice, community, and scholarship.        x TABLE OF CONTENTS  LIST OF TABLES                xiii LIST OF FIGURES                xiv KEY TO ABBREVIATIONS                xv Chapter 1: Introduction                   1 Framing the Project                   1 Cross-Cutting Theoretical Concepts & Review of Relevant Literature          11   Rights to the City & Legitimate Belonging             11   Gendered Space & Proper Womanhood                     19   Nirbhaya &              19   Women &              22 Outline of Chapters                 26 Important Notes about Local Bureaucratic Structures and Legal Terminology         27  Policy & Legislation                28  Terminology & Jurisdiction               30  Chapter 2: Research Methodology                 33 Research Routes and Trajectories               33 Research Sites                  38 Delhi                  38 Aradhaknagar and Kalandar Colony             40 Participant Populations                44 Jhuggi Jhopri Resident Women              45 NGO Workers                 46 Bureaucrats & Planners               46 Research Methods                 48  Interviews                 48  Focus Groups                 50  Document Analysis                51   Archival Data                51   Print Media                51  Participant Observation               52 Positionalities and Challenges in the Field              53               55                59                 62  The Elephant in the Room: Addressing Religion among Participants         63     xi Chapter 3: Intersections of Class and Womanhood             66 Who is the Delhi Woman?                67 d as Shared Experiences           82  Gender, Violence, & the Postcolonial Indian State             88   Gender and Poverty within a Bureaucratic Matrix     92 The City after Nirbhaya                95  Securing Women                96    Surveillance as Security            105  Politicizing Rape and the Will to Empower           108   Circumscription and Self-Defense as Empowerment         112   Towards a More Inclusive and Substantive Discourse on     Rights             114 Conclusion                118  Chapter 4: Legitimate Belonging and Rights to the City            120  Whose City?                120   Of Migrants and Delhiites             122   JJCs as Hubs of Crime and Pollution            128   Producers or Parasites?             133   -             140  Claims-Making through Alternating Approaches           145   The Language of Suffering and Appeals to Conscience         147   A Rights-Based Approach             152   The Unique Case of Kathputli Colony           159  Conclusion                172  Chapter 5: Politics and the Rise of the Aam Aadmi           174  Corruption, Bureaucratic Opacity, & Being Heard           174   The Power to Exploit              175   Navigating an Opaque Bureaucracy            181   A Sense of Being Unheard             187  Politics         190             194    Appropriating Symbols and Depoliticizing Governance        196    Nayak: Kejriwal as the Anti-politician & Defender of the Poor       205   The Aam Aurat & Politics             211  Conclusion                216  Chapter 6: Conclusions               219  Key Findings                219   Circumscribed Citizenship             219   Discourse and the Hegemonic Domain of Power          221   Bureaucracy and the Structural Domain of Power          221   Claims-Making in the Margins            222            223   Voting as Cynical Pragmatism            224   xii  Scholarly Contributions              226  Final Thoughts               230  APPENDICES                232  Appendix A: to Sheila Dixit        233  Appendix B: Copy of Aradhaknagar Demolition Notice          234  REFERENCES                235     xiii LIST OF TABLES  Table 1: Timeline of selected government policies and schemes impacting slums and JJs       29 Table 2:           31     xiv LIST OF FIGURES  Figure 1: Map of India                 39 Figure 2: Map of Delhi NCR                 40 Figure 3: View of Kalandar Colony JJC from platform of Dilshad Garden Metro Station         43 Figure 4: Poster at SPA PBBC workshop               53 Figure 5: Partial v          168 Figure 6: Partial view of           169 Figure 7: Resident addresses audience after acrobatic performanvent 169 Figure 8:             233 Figure 9: PWD demolition notice 2009              234    xv KEY TO ABBREVIATIONS  AAP     Aam Aadmi Party AIWPA     ASJ     Additional Session Judge BJP     Bharatiya Janata Party CURE     Center for Urban and Regional Excellence CM     Chief Minister (of a given city) CrPC     Criminal Procedure Code (of India) DDA     Delhi Development Authority DJB     Delhi Jal Board DUSIB    Delhi Urban Shelter Improvement Board DMRC     Delhi Metro Rail Corporation FAR     Floor Area Ratio FIR     First Incident Report (filed by police)  FTC     Fast Track Court GONGO    Government Organized Non-Government Organization HC     High Court (state level apex court) INTACH    Indian National Trust for Art and Cultural Heritage IPC     Indian Penal Code JJC     Jhuggi Jhopri Colony/ Cluster JNNURM    Jawaharlal Nehru National Urban Renewal Mission  MCD     Municipal Corporation of Delhi MLA     Member of the Legislative Assembly MP     Member of Parliament  MWCD    Ministry of Women and Child Development NCT     National Capital Territory NCW     National Commission of Women   xvi NIUA     National Institute for Urban Affairs PPP     Public Private Partnership  PRIA     Society for Participatory Research in Asia PWD     Public Works Department RAY     Rajiv Awas Yojna RTI     Right to Information Act 2005 SEWA      TOI     Times of India Newspaper UIDAI     Unique Identification Authority of India  1 Chapter 1: Introduction Framing the Project Two hours after leaving Central Delhi one morning in December 2013, I arrived at Savda Ghevra on a charter bus full of urban planners from around South and Southeast Asia.2 was a jhuggi jhopri3 resettlement colony established4 seven years prior in the outer northwest peripheries of the city. Indeed, as I stepped off the bus, my cellphone notified me that it had empty rural land less than a decade prior until the Delhi Government had allocated small plots of it to eligible5 JJ residents whose homes had been demolished to make way for infrastructural projects in preparation for the 2010 Commonwealth Games.6 In contrast, there was no built infrastructure awaiting the new residents when they arrived; simply empty plots of land upon which they would have to build their new homes. While connections to various utilities and services had gradually followed in the years since their arrival, these remained sporadic and incomplete.  As the day progressed, Dr. Renu Khosladirector of the local NGO Center for Urban and Regional Excellence (CURE)led our group of about twenty people around the colony and                                                            2 The visit was part of a two-  3 Jhuggi Jhopri is the colloquial Hindi term used in Delhi for the semi-permanent unauthorized homes of poor often referred to, both colloquially and in government documents, as JJ colonies/ clusters or JJCs for short. JJCs are also commonly called bastis-impoverished areas. See brief note at the end of this chapter about the technical/legal differentiation between slums and JJCs.  4 ere loosely, as the government did little more that assign plots to the residents.  5 Former DDA Commissioner of Planning, A.K. Jain notes that during any given resettlement drive, only an average of 40% of JJ and slum residents meet all eligibility requirements and are thus simply displaced.  6 The Commonwealth Games are a series of sporting events (similar to the Olympic Games) held every four years in which athletes from nations and territories formerly colonized by the British Empire (known together as the  various sports. In 2010, it was hosted by India in Delhi during the month of October.    2 tated by her organization. We stopped next to a large hole dug in the middle of a field separating groups of jhuggis to observe a sewage tank which had recently been installed therein. While Dr. Khosla explained that it was part of a joint project between the NGO and colony residents to facilitate the construction of safe in-home toilets, a group of resident women approached to talk to us. By far the most engaged in the conversation was a middle-aged woman named Champa dressed entirely in saffron colored clothes7sari, sweater, and heavy shawl. She told us she was part of the original group who had initiated the sewage project.  Champa was formerly from Bihar, and had been living in Lakshmi Nagar near Central to Savda Ghevra seven years prior. She said that in find new work since there were virtually no job opportunities in the new area. She added, their home unattended. Our old community had been completely dispersed and no-one knew their work either, her two grown sons earn a living for the family. They both work in Delhi, one in Okhla,8 so their daily commute was 2.5 hours each way. They devery night and must sometimes find a place to sleep in the city during the week to avoid the long commute. A few feet to my right, I heard another women tell one of the planners that they have                                                            7 I later learned that in the lead-up to the recently completed Local Assembly elections, the BJP had come to the colony and recruited several resident women to campaign for the party among their neighbors by offering them her Hindu nationalist parties.  8 Okhla is located in the far southeast, and essentially at the opposite end of the city from Savda Ghevra.    3 water from bore-wells, but si  As the conversation continued, I noticed yet another woman who appeared to be in her mid-forties dressed in a gray floral sari and sweater. She had been standing slightly behind the other group of residents, quietly observing. I and one of the planners approached her and introduce ourselves. She tells us her name is Nargis and that she too had lived in Lakshmi Nagar prior to the resettlement. Leading up to the evictions, someone had set fire to her jhuggias they had to several othersto force her family to leave. She had lost everything she owned in the fire. While she had managed to get a plot allocated in Savda, years later it remained vacant with the exception of a short brick foundation because she had been unable to save enough money to build a home there. She is a widow raising her only child, a teenage daughter. Her only source of income was her late-single-built in Savda and return to Lakshmi Nagar. They were now renting another jhuggi in Central the  Later, as the planners and I boarded the bus to head to another resettlement colony, we saw several young children and a few adults carrying and rushing to fill different sized buckets and containers with water from a temporarily parked DJB tanker. As the tanker drove off, a young boy, who appeared to be no more than 8yrs old, clung to a metal rod attached to the back of the   4 tanker and jumped onto itcontinuing to fill his small bucket even as the tanker drove ahead. Eventually, the boy jumped off with his water when the driver noticed him and stopped the tanker.  Seven years after being displaced to Savda Ghevra under the banner of city development ,9with accessing basic resources and services as they had while living in JJCs in the heart of Delhi. could not had been forced into even more tenuous housing arrangements then that which had been 10their previous locations, they all had to start over again. These issues were compounded by the lack of income opportunities in the area, and acutely articulated in the lives of women for whom domestic responsibilities and toward whom the ongoing hostility of the city eliminated the possibility of long commutes into the city for work. Women like Nargis, who also lacked the social adult sons11 provided supplemental income (as with Champa), are even more vulnerable within an already precarious existence.                                                            9 Slum and JJ resettlement projects are often (at least partially) framed by agencies like the DDA or DUSIB as a settlements.  10 -used to indicate a house constructed with permanent/stable materials such as brick -permanent materials such as tarp ecurity, specifically when JJ residents request protection from   11 While adult unmarried daughters who work certainly contribute towards the financial security of their birth families, once married, any such contribution would be expected to go toward the household of their husband and his extended family.    5 all, former DDA Commissioner of Planning A.K. Jain once told me that during any given resettlement drive, only an average of 40% of JJ and slum residents meet all eligibility requirements. The rest are simply rendered homeless until they are able to secure alternative housing. Why, thenconsidering this looming specter of demolition, the improbability of resettlement coloniesare JJCs and their residents popularly characterized in terms of  government hand-outs within middle-class discourses? And where do JJ empowerment? Perhaps because my arrival in Delhi in September 2013 coincided with the ubiquitous fervor of political campaigning for both the upcoming Delhi Local Assembly Elections in December of that year, and the National General Elections the subsequent Spring; it quickly litical discussion and debate belied the substantive marginalization of JJ residents and women in general. In other words, middle-thwarted cosmopolitanism caused by the poor and the potential destruction of their  -visible as discursively constructed categories (as were their correlating   6 particularly JJ resident womenwere invisible within the  As a corrective, this dissertation offers an ethnographic study of the intersectional resources, and services. Towards this end, I entered the field with these overarching questions: 1. How do understandings of broader notions of gender and Indian womanhood bear upon public public policies in Delhi? 2. How are notions of urban citizenship and legitimate belonging constructed within public and political discourse, and how do these conceptions contour claims of rights to the city and negotiations for access to public space and basic resources? 3. How have perceptions and experiences of state opacity, bureaucracy, and corruption shaped the ways in which JJ resident women interact with governmental institutions and engage in political activity?  In my attempts to address these questions, I found that an amalgamation or layering of aspects of different theorizations on social locations and identities, citizenship, belonging, and the state provided a more useful interpretive framework for analyses, rather than relying wholly on one or two fully articulated theoretical frameworks. First, theorizations of intersectionality by scholars like Kimberlé Crenshaw (1989), Patricia Hill Collins (2000), Nira Yuval-Davis (2006a), and others allow for the articulation of otherwise marginalized identitiessuch as JJ resident womenthrough the foundational understanding that all identities are constituted by the intersections of multiple social divisions and the varying levels of power and oppression those social divisions entail. Particularly, their assertions that the various intersecting social divisionot be thought of as additive but as constitutive and inextricable are useful in understanding that JJ resident women do not experience certain   7 l-narratives often reflect hegemonic discourses of identity politics that render invisible experiences  This is particularly useful in understanding the ways in recent years erase the experiences of poor and JJ resident women by focusing only on gender as the axis of digroup. Rather, the various modes of oppression ought to be understood as experienced at the particular (and thus varied) intersections of identity embodied by individual (and groups of) women.  articulated. Collins describes the various domain manages it. The hegemonic domain justifies oppression, and the interpersonal domain influences everyday lived eWithin the context of this dissertation, I particularly conceptualize the various bureaucratic processes and government policies as tentatively mapping onto what Collins describes as the structural domain, while the dominant discourses of proper womanhood and the pernicious narratives of JJ narratives circulated by the media and middle-class maps on to what she describes as the hegemonic domain. Also, the interpersonal domain is useful in thinking about the interactions of women occupying different social positions in Delhisuch as domestic worker and   8 middle-class employerand the ways in which oppression is articulated within those relationships. -Homo Sacer -Gupta (2012), together offer a useful analytical framework through which to examine the relationship between the state and JJ resident women, and the ways in which it is contoured by  we apprehend or, indeed, fail to apprehend the lives of others as lost or injured (lose-able or the precariousness of all life within the context of contemcondition of precariousness leads not to reciprocal recognition, but to a specific exploitation of (Ibid:30). She argues thawhich constructs them as already outside that which is recognized as life or living; and also because their death is framed as necessary for the protection of those who are recognized as part of/within even death remains unrecognized and ungrievable within dominant discourses. This is particularly city, which are framed in dominant middle-class discourses as necessary for the development of -class women, their   9 experiences of violence, injury, or loss are neither grievable nor recognizable within discourses of  -12 such scholars as Das & Poole (2004), Fitzpatrick (2001), and Gupta (2012) becomes useful in examining the relationship of the Indian state with JJ resident citizens. While all the authors agree -can be taken by anyone without being characterized as a homicideessentially killable bodiesFitzpatrick (2001) argues in contrast to Agamben (1998) that bare-life is not outside the boundaries of the law, but rather actively constituted through complex legal processes. Similarly, Das & Poole (2004) assert that indeed, the -life is constituted and persists, can be exception, differences between membership and inclusion, or figures both inside and outside the law, do not make their appearance as ghostly spectral presences from the past but rather as le, they point to the power of the lawas well as the illegibility of the state which incites the replication and negotiation of its practices in the margins. These reformulations of bare-life provide a framework through which to analyze the routine and                                                            12 I must note that Butler distinguishes her concept of epistemological frames of recognition from the concept of bare-life (2009:29). However, her predicates her distinction between the two concepts on the exclusion of bare-life coercion. As such, I would argue that the re-formulations of bare-life included here which similarly argue that it is indeed constituted by legal processes and state institutions erase the distinction asserted by Butler.     10 ambiguously legal negotiations between JJ residents and local pradhans, bureaucrats, and police officers. Similarl-life places it securely within the whom he frames as bare-lifeare not n its active inclusion of them in various bureaucratic interventions directed at ameliorating their poverty (6-7). However, he asserts that it is the nature of this very intervention, first through its normalization the indifference and arbitrariness of bureaucratic practices (meant to ameliorate the conditions of poverty), that produces the poor as bare-life (Ibid). The structural violence of these bureaucratic the poor. For Gupta, extreme poverty and the preventable death of the poor can in fact be theorized f the state, and thus as biopolitics. Particularly, his conceptualization of bureaucratic practicesof poor populationsas the production of bare-life expands the framework discussed above for analyzing allows us to understand how (women) JJ residents can simultaneously be the explicit target of government intervention and resource (subsidy) allocation, while also being excluded from  Drawing on these theories as analytic frameworks through which to interpret my ethnographic data, I argue that widely-held understandings of what constitutes womanhood and legitimate belonging   11 protections and entitlements emanating from the state. Particularly, I find that dominant middle-class discourses which narrowly define proper Indian womanhood and employ negative characterizations of JJ residents often become embedded in government policies and institutions, working to contour the relationship between the state and JJ resident women. Nevertheless, I also argue that JJ residents actively resist narratives which seek to de-legitimize their claims as Delhiites and often deploy rhetorical devices such as storytelling and testimony to garner support from various audiences and bolster their claims-making. Conversely, I find that shared experiences attempting to meet their basic needs often engenders a general mistrust of institutions of power and informs routine preemptive strategies aimed at avoiding, minimizing, or circumventing exploitation by such institutions and individuals therein. Additionally, these experiences allow JJ residents to construct a narrative of institutions of power as sites of insidiousness and venality which in-turn serves as a resistive counter-narrative to dominant characterizations of JJ residents as criminal and morally corrupt. In the following section, I expand on some cross-cutting theoretical concepts that were important to my ethnographic analyses and offer a review of some corresponding relevant literature.  Cross-Cutting Theoretical Concepts & Review of Relevant Literature  Rights to the City & Legitimate Belonging On the morning of November 13, 2013, residents of the Campa Cola compound located in the affluent South Mumbai locale of Worli prepared for another day of protesting the impending demolition of their illegally built high-rise flats by the Birhanmumbai Municipal Corporation (BMC). As they had the previous day, they blocked the gates by parking their cars in a maze and forming human chains to prevent bulldozers from advancing and to restrict the movement of the   12 police who were on-site to facilitate the Supreme Court sanctioned demolition. Just as confrontations between residents and authorities were heating up, word arrived that Supreme Court Justices Singhvi and Gowda had just granted a stay to halt the impending demolitions. When interviewed about his decisi(Qtd in Dhananjay 2013) Apparently, media coverage of the ongoing protests and confrontations between Campa Cola residents and BMC officials had made the justices sympathetic to the plight of the residents. Meanwhile, across town in central Mumbai, residents of Ganesh Kripa Society (a long standing JJ colony) continue to live in the ruins of their homes following yet another in a series of ongoing demolition drives by Cola case, Prabhangi, a Ganesus into police vans. How come they can violate the Supreme Court ruling but we have to abide by (Qtd in Sunavala 2013)   While the events described above occurred in Mumbai, they are nonetheless reflective of enforcement as well the plight of the Campa Cola residents is particularly telling when juxtaposed with the growing trend of court rulings in favor of slum and JJ demolitions in recent years in what Bhan (2009) calls interventions in JJ demolitions along with the antagonism and fragmentation that persists among ween poor residents and the emerging   13 middle-class, over appropriate norms for public space and forms of city aesthetics are predicated on underlying conceptions of who can legitimately make claims on the city and its spaces (Rajagopal (2001); Baviskar (2003); Tarlo (2003); Fernandes (2004); Anjaria (2011) Bhan (2009 &2014); Ghertner (2011)).  Indeed, legality is only one layer of a multilayered narrative that allows for the rticularly within a city comprised of mostly unauthorized housing (Bhan 2009: 131). Baviskar (2003) argues that 13 they are in fact inextricable accompaniments to the formal plan because it offers no provisions of housing for the large numbers of the working poor who are needed to construct the city and its expansions as intrinsic to the project of producing deep inequalities (Ibid). Correspondingly, Fernandes (2004) discusses how marginalized social groups, such as urban poor residents, are actively rendered invisible within the dominant national political culture of post-Liberalization India through a political--class to discursively construct itself as the citizenry through active exclusion and spatial purification wherein urban public spaces become middle-class spaces (2416).  This narrative is, of course, is not passively accepted but rather challenged through various political mobilizations of marginalized groups creating an ongoing struggle between recognition                                                            13 A comprehensive and long term dlays out a trajectory for its overall architectural and infrastructural development. The first Master Plan was published in 1962 with the help of the Ford Foundation. It is revised and amended with new projection every 20 years. Copies of the Master Plan are available on the DDA website. << https://dda.org.in/planning/mpd-1962.htm>>    14 14 Anjaria (2011) and Rajagopal (2001) each examine the understandings of their legal rights as citizens and middle-class business and acceptable use of public space are continually in confrontation during routine raids hawkers and public interest litigations (discussed further below). Anjaria (2011) notes that as middle-class consumer culture grows in Mumbai and this population begins to imagine themselves ty which inevitably includes the removal of street hawkers and other signs of  Similarly, Rajagopal (2001) illustrates how city dwellers ranging from journalists to local storeownthe city such as slum dwellers as they commonly refer to the presence of these sectors as otable considering that the housing and businesses of middle and upper-class residents of the city are themselves often established and bolstered by various bureaucratic processes and practices that might generously --leto poor slum and JJ residents is rather indicative of underlying notions which link socio-economic  These contestations over rights to the city in India are perhaps most evident in the emergence of so-called public interest litigations (PILs) wherein middle-class city residents have                                                            14 Contesting Neoliberalism: Urban Frontiers offers some explorations of active resistance to such dominant neoliberal narratives and contestations around similar issues of governance and various forms of marginalization within other geographical contexts including cities in North America, Europe, and Africa.     15 used narratives of environmental pollution, visual blight, and blanket characterizations of danger and criminality to induce eviction and demolition orders from the courts. Interestingly, while PILs economically disadvantaged pos15 they have grown into a powerful tool of middle-class groups to shape the city and its spaces (Bhan 2009: 133). PIL court orders have resulted in a range of impacts on the city landscape including the shutting down and removal commercial enterprises in residential areas, and of course the evictions and removals of several informal settlements and JJ clusters throughout the city (Ibid). Indeed, Ghertner (2011) points to the 2007 demolition of a multi-neighboring middle-class residential neighborhood based on no more investigation of the so-called nuisance causing activiJJC (279-280). In addition to their tangible material effects, the success of PILs brought by middle-class groups (i.e. resident welfare associations, common interest groups) has also had the effect of reifying the exclusionary middle-class centered narrative of urban citizenship and belonging. In contrast to certain judicial rulings of the 1980s, such as that of Olga Tellis v. Bombay Municipal Corporation (1985) wherein justices used arguments that demolition of JJCs and displacement of residents amounted to infringement of their right to a livelihood and therefore their right to life as guaranteed by Article 21 of the Indian Constitution (Ramanathan 2005: 2909); court rulings in                                                            15 In the 1985 landmark case S.P. Gupta vs. Union of India, Justice Bhagwati eased the rules of locus standi, which governed who may appear before the regional high courts and the Supreme Court of India, allowing ordinary (Bhan 2009: 133).     16 resettlement housing to rewarding said thievery16 (Bhan 2009: 135). In similar court rulings, JJ 17 and 18 while the JJCs themselves were said to be ever-19 if allowed to remain (Ibid). As these negative characterizations of JJCs and their residents permeate public discourse aided by popular media as well as judicial rulings and commentary, it is no longer only their actions (illegally building on public lands) or the residential habitat (lack of sanitation, . As Bhan (2014) asserts, the aforementioned narratives become characterizations of their personhood in dominant discourse and are in-turn utilized to negate their claims on the city and the state (552).  Thus, rights to the city and legitimate belonging serve as cross-cutting theoretical concepts through which to examine urban marginality and contestations of space in this dissertation. In the rights to the city, and their consequent rediscovery by American scholars, there has been a proliferation of new schof social movements and organizations adopting the concept as a rights based approach to dealing with challenges of urbanization (Anjaria (2011); Harvey (2003 & 2012); Lefebvre (1991 & 1995);                                                            16 In the Almitra Patel vs. Union of India   17 Okhla Factory Owners vs. GNCTD (2002)  18 Dhar vs Government of Delhi (2002)  19 Hem Raj vs. Commissioner of Police (1999)   17 Purcell (2002); Zérah et al (2011)). In this much theorized work, Henri Lefebvre (1995) argues labels the right to the city. Harvey (2003 & 2012) and other Neo-Marxist scholars extend and apply socially just and ecologically sane ways, as well as become the focus for anti-capitalist resistance. This interpretation of the right to the city focuses on the right to shape and transform the city and its spaces, and is predicated on stronger democratic control and wide participation and mobilization to reshape the city. In contrast, Parnell and Pieterse (2010) offer a more reformist the developmental state, and see it as a crucial component of urban poverty reduction (159).  In this dissertation, I examine both the pragmatic aspects of rights to the city at the intersection of formal and substantive rights (i.e. legal as well as practicable and accessible), and u-legality often deployed by scholars when characterizing JJs, slums, and urban poor populations (Appadurai 2001; Chakrabarty 1992; Davis 2006; Rajagopal 2001; Sundaram 2004). Additionally, I note that belonging and particularly legitimate belonging are themselves broadly theorized concepts, particularly in migration studies and psychology. However, my use of the term here more accurately aligns with what Nira Yuval- The politics of belonging includes [] struggles around the determination of what is involved in belonging, in being a member of a community, and of what roles specific social locations and specific narratives of identity play in this. As such, it encompasses contestations both in the relation to the participatory dimension of   18 citizenship as well as in relation to the issues of the status and entitlements such membership entails. [Emphasis added] (2006: 205) The citizenship aspect of belonging utilized in this dissertation is primarily that which scholars (2014not (2011) clarify that unlike citizenship in relation to the nation, urban citizenship is less about legality than legitimacy those people whose presence is legitimate in the city and others Moreover, while urban citizenship may not inherently grant formal rights (as with national citizenship), claims of urban citizenship and legitimate belonging are deeply political and can be f public interest litigations by middle-narrowly defined as that of said middle-class groups whose urban citizenship and legitimate belonging is reified through court orders and published court opinions. Accordingly, I use the above formulations of legitimate belonging and urban citizenship poor residents in popular media, interviews of NGO and government staff, urban planners, and JJ residents themselves, to explore how in-migration, political participation, economic productivity, and documentation are all utilized to assert and question their legitimate belonging in the city and thus their right to entitlements and claims on space and resources.         19 Gendered Space & Proper Womanhood [A girl alone is like an open vault/treasure chest!] Jab we met (2007) Dialogue from popular Bollywood film Nirbhaya &   On the evening of Sunday, December 12, 2012, a twenty-three year old woman named Jyoti Singh and her male friend Awindra Pratap Pandey boarded an off-duty charter bus to head home after watching a movie at a posh South Delhi mall. At the Munirka bus stop, following their unsuccessful attempts to catch a city bus or to hire an auto-rickshaw, they had been persuaded by a young man on the aforementioned charter bus who had assured them that it was also heading to their destination and would take them as paying passengers. Also on the bus were four other men, as well as the boy who approached them and the driver, who all appear to be friends. When Pandey notices that the bus is heading in the wrong direction and questions the driver, the six men including the driver taunt the couple about being out alone at night. The argument turns into a physical altercation wherein Pandey is bound and beaten, and Singh is brutally gang-raped by the men. Afterwards, the men throw Pandey and Singh off the bus naked and leave them on the side of the road. Seventeen days later, in a hospital in Singapore where she had been transferred by the Indian government, Jyoti Singh died from complications due to the injuries sustained during the violent attack.20  This attack proved to be a watershed moment in public discourses about sexual assault, particularly in Delhi. As I discuss in the following chapter, this attack was neither the first nor the last incidence of violent sexual assault in Delhi. Indeed, the city had long since garnered the eerie                                                            20 The details of this incident have been widely circulated through both Indian and international media outlets. For a compiled timeline and discussion of the attack, the corresponding criminal trial, and the social and political events Courting Injustice: the Nirbhaya Case and its Aftermath.      20 is particular attack incited widespread and sustained outrage and public outcry. Soon after the attack, its news became widely publicized both in local and international media. Due to a law in the Indian Penal Code,21 news outlets were prevented from disclosing the name of the victim, so they gave her various symbolic pseudonyms Bollywood film in which a woman fights for justice after witnessing a sexual assault.22 Ultimately, -event marker l assault, and associated policy and legislative   outcry while others before or since have not. Immediately after news broke of the attack, massive protests, both in Delhi and throughout India, emerged condemning sexual violence and calling for justice in that case as well as more stringent laws and implementation in general. These protests drew thousands of participants in Delhi and included clashes with police and the shutting down of various metro stations near the capital in attempts to control crowds. However, certain details about the social positions of both the attackers and the victims may offer some insight into the particular Nirbhaya was a physical therapy student, born and raised in Delhi to working class parents who had immigrated from the                                                            21 Section 228A of the Indian Penal Code, prohibits the disclosure of the identity of victims of particular crimes, particu-disclosure is necessary to prosecute the  crime or is approved by the victim or their family, the offence is punishable by both a fine and up to two years in prison.   22 Interestingly, while the sexual assault which serves as the catalyst for the films social justice narrative was that of a poor maid, the story nevertheless centers a middle--in-law.   21 neighboring state of Utter Pradesh in search of better opportunities. While she was far from privileged, she was characterized in the media as a respectable, hard-working, girl-next-door trying to make something of herself. In contrast, her attackers were all poor young men, four of whom charter bus not licensed to pick up public passengers or even operate within Delhi -class imaginary.  her behalf, the all-too-familiar victim-blaming narratives questioning why she was out at night and who her male companion was quickly emerged. Indeed, Manohar Lal Sharma, the defense lawyer for the attackers publically proclaimed that the attack was in fact entirely the fault of Singh for for failing to protect her. He wen Even an underworld don would not like to touch a girl statements were neither uncommon nor unique. As I illustrate in Chapter 3, the common response from the government, mainstream media, and within families to ensuring the safety of women in the city was not to make the city safer or more accessible to them, but rather to attempt to circumscribe their movements and increase their surveillance. As I discuss below, this is primarily domain of women, and thus their presence within public spaces of the city is seen as neither of women in public space is at best characterized as a necessary evil if considered within the   22 context of travel to work or school, and at worst an antithesis to proper Indian womanhood and respectability.  Women &  Every little girl is brought up to know that she must walk a straight line between home and school, home and office,  Shilpa Phadke, Sameera Khan, & Shilpa Ranade (2011: vii)  Understandings of who can legitimately claim and consume public space in contemporary Indian cities (and beyond) not only have socio-economic dimensions but gendered ones as well. Indeed, scholars of both historical and contemporary India (Chakrabarty (1992); Kaviraj (1997); Phadke et al (2011); Hansen (2001); Lukose (2009)) assert that public spaces in Indian cities are locations where embodied gender and political citizenship are performed. Indeed, Phadke et al point to pervasiveness of this gendered socialization to space in the above quote. Similarly, such spaces are also sites at which legitimacy and entitlement are often, at times violently and aggressively, contested. Chakrabarty (1992) and Kaviraj (1997) each present an Indian (largely Hindu) notion of inside/outside or ghar/bhaire which predates European colonization and in which outside is defined through its conceptual and spacial opposition to the auspicious, pure, and orderly inside. Accordingly, they both point to an intimate connection 1992:542).  In contrast, Chakrabarty -market, the street and the mela [fair/festival] which serves as a site for social interaction, economic activity and recreation (543). The bazaar/ outside offers a distinct place of entertainment through   23 ghumna-phirna), interact with strangers, and openly pee (Ibdanger and pleasure, is a distinctly gendered masculine space to which most women do not have (legitimate) access.   Similarly, Lukose (2009), in the context of post-liberalization Kerala, identifies a dominant males. She chetu style epitomized by the activity of karangan characterized by its aimless quality (66-69). There is a clear correspondence between this notion of karangan and the notion of ghumna-phirna discussed by Chakarbarty (1992) that illustrates masculine bodies. Lukose (2009) asserts the sto this aimless wandering that characterizes chetu body enables a young woman to enter the public, but in ways that circumscribe her movements. She must be goal-oriented and contained as she traverses a public that is also occupied by young men, whose movements and trajectories are different--- femininity in public retains its interiority, which is what allows it to enter the public in the first  It is this notion of proper Indian womanhood necessitating circumscribed public introductory quote of this section. They problematize this notion of proper Indian womanhood and   24 access full urban citizenship (Phadke et al (2011:70-71). They point to the disproportionate focus and characterization of public spaces as inherently dangerous to women, despite the very real violence of domestic spaces wherein dowry violence, intimate-partner violence, honor killings, is in fact merely an extension of the narrative that inscribes the honor and purity of the community and nation (Phadke et al 2011: 29&53). In particular, they non-fear/removal -life instances of sexual violence in public spaces work to normalize the absence of women from urban public spaces, particularly after dark.  Elizabeth Stanko (1990) offers a comparable argument in the context of the UK and the  to authorize legitimate spaces wherein feminine respectability is equated with domestication and constrained mobility. Similarly, Hanmer and Saunders (1984) assert that, secure an delegitimizing and criminalizing the presence of poor JJ residents in the city discussed above s for JJ resident women who fit neither the idealized norms of Indian Womanhood which center on middle-class women, nor the increasingly   25 exclusionary parameters of urban citizenship and belonging that paints JJCs and their inhabitants as antithetical to th-class city.  the stereo-typproblematic characterizations of immigrant and JJ resident men, this rhetoric of course completely -class women such as those alluded to by Manohar Lal Sharma above, whose very respectability through domesticity  In contrast, this notion of domesticity-as-security, even if we were to accept it as effective or desirable, becomes impossible for JJ resident women who live with and work in close proximity Within this context, theorizations of intersectionality which argue that power and oppression do not exist in static dichotomous oppositions in which one group is always the oppressor while another is always the oppressed prove valuable. They offer the insight that people occupy shifting roles of privilege and oppression depending on different contexts and in relation to different people poor JJ resident women can be conceptualized as JJ resident men share many of the social and economic oppressions experienced by women living   26 in similar communities, their ability to occupy and traverse public space is distinct from their female counterparts.               Outline of Chapters   This dissertation consists of six chapters, four of which present my methodological approaches and data analysis. In thcontextualize the processes through which my study was designed and conducted. I present an overview of my field sites, research participants, and data collection methods as well as provide reasonings for how I came to choose them. Furthermore, with the aim of being as transparent as possible about the various social, political, and logistical variables that helped to shape this study, I expound upon my entry into the field site, the major social and political events and discourses on the ground during the duration of my fieldwork, and examine certain aspects of my intersecting social identities and how they emerged as salient during various ethnographic encounters and further point to limitations of my study.   -notions of gender and Indian womanhood bear upon the relationship of the state with its women citizens. Particularly, I explore how these constructions of Indian womanhood and narratives of policies in Delhi more broadly, and illustrate the ways in which they fail to address the needs and experiences of poor JJ resident women.  ted within public and political discourse, and the ways in which these conceptions contour claims of rights to the city and negotiations for access   27 to public space and basic resources. In particular, I look at the ways in which the media and research participants occupying different social identities position themselves vis-à-vis the state, the city, and other Delhi residents by accessing particular narratives about themselves and the  I further explore the ways in which JJ residents and their allies alternatively utilize appeals to conscience and rights-based approaches to negotiate for secure housing and access to basic resources and services.   Common Manand experiences of state opacity, bureaucracy, and corruption have shaped the ways in which JJ residents have tended to interact with governmental institutions and engage in political activity. I also look at how the recent emergence of the Aam Aadmi Party (which transl-economically classed imagery, its claims of representing -landscape of Delhi. I further problematizwithin the broader context of gendered political participation and the intersectional identities of women JJ residents. In the final chapter of this dissertation, I highlight some of my key findings and arguments and offer some reflections . Important Notes about Local Bureaucratic Structures and Legal Terminology  The bureaucratic landscape of India, and in particular that of the Delhi National Capital Territory (NCT) is vast, complex, and ever-changing. Indeed, the profusion of poverty alleviation and slum/JJ intervention schemes, the repeated jurisdictional changes, and constant shifts in eligibility criteria for access to resources and benefits are a few examples of what make the state   28 general overview of some important policies slums, JJCs, and their residents. I follow that with a brief of clarification of certain pertinent legal terms as well as the local government bodies involved in the governance of slums and JJs and the implementation of various state interventions in those areas.  Policy & Legislation In 1956 Parliament passed the Slum Areas (Improvement and Clearance) Act which defines habitation; or (b) are by reason of dilapidation, overcrowding, faulty arrangement and design of such buildings, narrowness or faulty arrangement of streets, lack of ventilation, light or sanitation 23 It declare it a slum through the local gazette and then determine whether the proper course of action is structural/infrastructural improvement or demolition and reconstruction. It is important to note here that the initial purpose of the act was to provide protections for the tenants of privately owned -settled into the mes of poor urban residents built on government owned land and thus offers them no legal protection or guarantee of resettlement. Nevertheless, this act and its corresponding addenda have provided the statutory basis and guidelines adopted by most states as the primary legislation for slum interventions until the 1990s24 (Ramanathan 2005: 2908). In 1990,                                                            23 The entire text of the parliamentary act and subsequent addenda is available online here: https://indiankanoon.org/doc/839084/     24 in its 138th Report (Ramanathan 2005: 2908-2809). While the recommendations of this report were not directly implemented, since then there have been several policies that call for the protection of slum residents such as the   29 the government of Delhi adopted a new slum policy that emphasized a three-pronged approach including in-situ (on-site) upgradation, relocation, and environmental improvement of existing slums and JJCs. This policy remains the general reference frame for the various slum and JJ interventions that have emerged since that time. However, the dominant strategy utilized on the ground has remained demolition and concriteria (DuPont 2008: 80). For a timeline of relevant slum and JJ initiatives and legislation since 1956, see Table 1 below. Table 1: Timeline of selected government policies and schemes impacting slums and JJs Important Regulatory and Administrative Policies Impacting Slums & JJCs Socio-Economic and Environmental  Slum Areas (Improvement & Clearance) Act, 1956 (n)25 Environmental Improvement of Urban Slums (EIUS] scheme, 1972 (n)      *initial local implementation in Delhi via Urban Basic Services (UBS) & later via the revised Urban Basic Services for the Poor (UBSP), 1990 Establishment of Slum & JJ Department in MCD, 1962 (s) Nehru Rozgar Yojna (NRY) targeting unemployment and underemployment of urban poor), 1989 (n) JJ Recognition through city-wide survey and issuance of V.P. Singh Tokens, 1989-1990 (s) Eradication Program (PMIUPEP), 1995 (n) 138th Law Commission of India Report pavement dwellers), 1990 (n) National Urban Livelihoods Mission (NULM) focusing on employment through entrepreneurship, 1997 (n) National Housing Policy, 1994 (n) Jawaharlal Nehru National Urban Renewal Mission (JNNURM) which had specific programs to improve access to basic services and housing for slum & JJ residents, 2005 (n) National Housing & Habitat Policy, 1998 (n) Rajiv Awas Yojana (RAY) a low-cost housing scheme as pa-objective, 2011 (n)  DUSIB Act (establishing the Delhi Urban Shelter Improvement Board), 2010 (s) Rajiv Rinn Yojana (RRY) aimed at increasing homeownership among poor urban residents by extending them lines of credit, 2013 (n)                                                             National Housing Policy (1994); The National Housing and Habitat Policy (1998); The Eighth (1992-1997) and Ninth (1997-2002) Five Year Plans; JNNURM; and RAY (see Banerjee 2012)   25    30 Terminology & Jurisdiction While both are unauthorized homes of the poor built on public lands and share similar living environments often characterized by the lack of basic services such as clean water and adequate DDA through the Slum Areas Act of 1956. This official recognition gives residents of those areas legal entitlement to basic services and guarantees due process and notice (and tentatively resettlement) if their slum is demolished (Sheik and Banda 2015: 75). While large swaths of Delhi, namely the entire walled city of Old Delhi have been notified as slums, most areas that fit the n area in Delhi was officially notified as a slum was in 1994 (Ibid). Accordingly, both of my primary field sites were technically Jhuggi Jhopri colonies since they had ticularly (2009) asserts that under twenty-five percent of existing housing in 2003 met all the conditions of legality at the time they were constructed (131). For a list of the various categories of within the      31 Table 2:  housing in Delhi NCT Type of Housing Settlement Description of Settlement Type Jhuggi Jhopri Cluster/ Colony (JJC) Housing clusters of the poor built on public lands without the authorization of the land-owning government agency. Characterized by economic poverty & infrastructural fragilityparticularly the lack of basic services such as clean water and adequate sanitation Slum-Designated Area  Housing and commercial settlements of the poor characterized by economic poverty & infrastructural fragility similar to JJCs. Unlike JJCs, these settlements are legal due to their Areas Act.  Unauthorized Colony Middle or upper-class housing settlements built illegally often built on private land which has been split into plots and sold off by owners and developers in violation to the building norms. Despite illegality, these infrastructure and have access to all the basic services (water, sewage, electricity). Regularized-Unauthorized Colony Middle or upper-class housing settlements which were illegally constructed and thus recognition/ authorization through a series of (legally ambiguous) bureaucratic processesoften, years after their construction.   Finally, I note that there have been multiple shifts in local governmental jurisdiction over slum areas and JJs resulting in truncated projects, gaps in oversight, and redundant or conflicting criteria for housing eligibility. In 1962 the Slum and JJ Department was established within the Municipal Corporation of Delhi (MCD) and was tasked with implementing the Slum Areas Act of 1956. Then, in 1967 the department was transferred over to the Delhi Development Authority (DDA). Between 1974 and 1980, the department moved between the MCD and the DDA several   32 times during which it continued to implement the Slum Areas Act of 1956, as well as the Jhuggi sterilization drives of the Emergency period of the mid-1970s. The department settled back within the MCD in 1992 and stayed there until 2010 when the Legislative Assembly of the National Capital Territory of Delhi passed the Delhi Urban Shelter Improvement Board (DUSIB) Act wherein a free-standing unit called DUSIB under the purview of the Government of the National JJ areas by providing basic resources, and of course to demolish and resettle slum and JJ areas where it deems it appropriate.26 Nevertheless, because DUSIB is not a land owning agency and it must work in conjunction with those land owning agencies in order to proceed with projects on their lands (Sheik and Banda 2015: 75).                                                                                26 Brief history of the Slum Department and its various iterations is available on the DUSIB website.  << http://delhishelterboard.in/main/?page_id=148>>   33 Chapter 2: Research Methodology Research Routes and Trajectories Unlike research conducted in laboratories, ethnographic field research has a tendency to stretch beyond and transform the parameters we set as researchers. Beyond the initial issues of -changing variable impacted by local and international politics and trends as well as individual and institutional actors. Thus, it is important for proposed ethnographic projects to be flexible and responsive to emerging issues within the field. In the case of my own project, there were circumstances ranging from bureaucratic hurdles to the unexpected rise and early success of a new political party that ultimately helped to shape the focus and trajectory of my research. In the following section I aim to provide a brief description of my entrance into the field and the processes through which my research foci shifted in subtle but important ways. I present this account with the assertion that all knowledge is situated and that understanding the contexts within which research was produced can only enrich our understanding of the research findings (Collins (1991); Harding (1991); Haraway (1988)). Moreover, I follow Christopher Bondy (2012) in arguing that accessing field sites is an ongoing process of negotiation that can reflect important social and political conditions of a given research context and as such can itself provide interesting ethnographic insight (579).   During the academic summer breaks of 2011 and 2012, I conducted preliminary research -dissertation Travel Fellowship. In addition to helping me formulate research questions for my dissertation through interviews with NGO staff and local scholars, this pilot study was also designed to help me identify particular field sites, establish affiliations with relevant institutions, and build connections with potential dissertation   34 research participants. At the conclusion of my preliminary research, I had identified the Govindpuri/ Kalkaji jhuggi jhopri cluster in South Delhi as my primary research site. It is one of the largest JJ clusters in Delhi and had recently been chosen by the newly established Delhi Urban -in which new homes for eligible residents would be built near their existing JJCs instead of being displaced to the peripheries of the city27. Moreover, the Govindpuri/ Kalkaji area has an established history of NGO presence, including one NGO which had been active in the community for twenty years and had several ongoing income- initiatives. Furthermore, the assistant director of said NGO had agreed to give me access to their activities for my research. Finally, Govindpuri/ Kalkaji is situated in close proximity to more affluent residential and commercial areas which made it an ideal site to examine issues of legitimate belonging and rights to the city. During that time, I was also able to establish an institutional affiliation28 with the Delhi School of Planning and Architecture (SPA) which gave me access to scholars and urban planners, many of whom had worked with the various government development agencies in introduced me to several government officials within the DDA, MCD, and DUSIB who agreed to become my research participants, but to whom I would not otherwise have had access. While accessing government officials in general can be difficult for any independent researcher, it was even more difficult during the period I was conducting my dissertation research due to the election                                                            27 The guidelines for Rajiv Awas Yojna (RAY), an initiative launched by the Indian Central Government in June -situ rehabilitations and upgradations as two out of 3 possible slum interventions in which residents can stay in their existing location in order to maintain livelihoods and networks. << http://mhupa.gov.in/writereaddata/RAYGuidelines.pdf>>  28 As a prerequisite for issuing a research visa, the Indian Embassy requires a formal letter of affiliation from an Indian school, research institution, or registered NGO on behalf of the researcher, which must then be re-certified    35 season (which I will discuss later in this section). It is only through the personal references of the scholars at SPA, and in some cases by acquiring the personal contact information of the officials from my SPA contacts that I was able to access and recruit them to participate in my study.    Unfortunately, upon my return to conduct my dissertation research in the fall of 2013, I encountered several road blocks that prevented me from conducting my study in Govindpuri/ Kalkaji and with the NGO that I had originally planned. First, despite the initial traction of the --still amidst the uncertainty of the local elections and their potential to change all the political players and thus determine the fate of any ongoing or planned development projects. Secondly, and perhaps more with had expanded, re-go29 previous contacts were no longer working at the NGO which made accessing the staff and their various projects exceedingly difficult despite initial indications of their continued willingness to work with me. Ultimately, I was forced to find another NGO more open to being included in my research which in turn shifted my JJ research site since the NGO staff would be integral in helping me establish contacts among the residents of the JJ clusters in which they were active.                                                             29 While it is unclear what the specific impetus was for this shift, it does bring to mind the struggles of shifting priorities faced by small grassroots organizations when they attempt to scale-up. When I returned in 2013, the local government administrators and international donors alike. As a result the NGO had been tasked with implementing its teaching methods and practices to 300 MCD government schools and 50 slums. This seems to have left little space for the relatively small localized initiatives they had in Govindpuri organizing JJ resident women for livelihoods training and advocating for access to basic resources and services from the government.     36 As with accessing government officials, my contacts at SPA proved to be the most effective avenue through which to establish a connection with a new NGO that would assent to participating in my study. During a conversation about participatory planning and various urban poverty reduction initiatives in India, Ms. Banashree Banerjee, an experienced urban planner and visiting faculty member at SPA, invited me to attend an international workshop she was co-organizing in Delhi on behalf of the Institute for Housing and Urban Development Studies, Rotterdam (IHS) titled A Rights Based Approach to Resettlement, (Inter)national Standards and Local Practices.30 Designed as a refresher course for urban planners coming from South Asian countries, this course incorporated case studies of slum resettlement primarily from Delhi and Mumbai and included various presentations by NGO workers, researchers from the TATA institute and the Center for Policy Research in Delhi, as well as several agents from the DDA and DUSIB. Aside from being a valuable site for participant observation among individuals actively involved in the decision making surrounding the demolition of slums and the construction of resettlement housing, it also became an important networking event. While there, I was able to establish connections with several DDA and DUSIB officials who would participate in my study and with the director of CURE, an NGO implementing various livelihoods, sanitation, and health initiatives on the ground in several JJ colonies in eastern Delhi as well as in Savda Ghevra, a JJ resettlement colony on the north western periphery of the city. After two site visits and a meeting with Dr. Khosla (the director of CURE) to discuss my research interests and the work that the NGO was doing in various JJ colonies, she agreed to let me observe the organizations activities in two neighboring and long-standing JJ communities in East Delhi and to introduce me to some residents in those communities. These two locales, Aradhaknagar and Kalandar Colony became my primary field sites. In addition                                                            30 The IHS refresher course/ workshop took place December 9-20, 2013 at the Human Settlements Management Institute, HUDCO House in New Delhi, India.   37 to the fact that these JJCs were accessible to me, I also chose these sites because, similar to the Govindpuri/ Kalkaji JJCs, they had emerged decades ago and were firmly embedded among the more affluent and commercial areas around them. And while they had not yet been targeted by the new RAY initiative for intervention, there had been many infrastructural projects undertaken in their area in recent years, including a highway and metro expansion project that had already resulted in the demolition and displacement of a section of the Aradhaknagar colony.     As I alluded earlier, my arrival in Delhi in September 2013 also coincided with the intense and ubiquitous political campaigns in the final months leading up to the local elections which took place on December 4th. These elections and the flurry of political activity surrounding them proved to be an important component of my project. Considering the explorations of legitimate belonging, citizenship, and rights to the city which are at the heart of my research, it is not surprising that contemporary political rhetoric and mobilization would provide significant sites of data production for me. However, it was the unexpected emergence of a viable and competitive third political party, in a political system which had historically been dominated by the Congress Party and in more recent years Hindu nationalist opposition parties (or coalitions of parties) like the BJP,31 which offered new and interesting avenues of inquiry for my project. The fact that this was a party which 32 including those living in JJ colonies, provided an opportunity                                                            31 This characteristic of the Indian political party system in the mid-nance and rise of new opposition parties in different states, the last two decades have shown the continued salience of the Congress party and the emergence of BJP/VHP Hindutva right wing as the EPW Asian Survey     32 Following the Delhi local elections, many media outlets reported that the unprecedented success of AAP candidates was due in large part to poor voters. One Times Of India   38 for me to examine shifting narratives of citizenship, rights, and belonging along with formal political engagement at a unique historical moment. Research Sites Delhi According to the 2011 Indian Census, the National Capital Territory (NCT) of Delhi has a population of sixteen million, an estimated fifty-two percent of whom are identified as living in areas designated as Slums or Jhuggi Jhopri Clusters (JJC). While the total population living in slums appears to have decreased since the 2001 census, the document states that the wide ranging slum removal schemes between 2001 and 2011, including the intensified period leading up to the Commonwealth Games of 2010, have resulted in the un-enumerated displacement of a large portion of the previous slum population throughout the city (2011 Census: 49). As discussed in Chapter 1, the demolition of slums and the displacement of slum residents has a long and sordid history in Delhi. In particular, there have been three major waves of slum/JJ clearance and resettlement in the city that occurred in the 1960s, 1970s, and more recently between 1990 and 2007 (Banda et al 2014). While these periods of increased government intervention have often coincided with broader policy shifts infrastructure, the pattern of ongoing jurisdictional shifts in terms of governing agencies for slums and JJCs, new and conflicting policies and schemes for resettlement,33 and the overall opacity of demolition in Delhi.                                                             resettl 33 -separate national level Slum/JJC interventions (IHSDP; RAY; PMAY) and countless local level schemes with often redundant and at times conflicting agendas.       39 Correspondingly, promises of protection from eviction or guarantees of resettlement field site for my study often expanded beyond the boundaries of the JJCs to include places like coffee shops, train stations, and the dinner table of my landlord where discussions and debates hostility of public spaces for women and settings I inhabited across socio-economic strata.             Figure 1:  Map of India34                                                                                 34 Image from https://www.cia.gov/library/publications/the-world-factbook/geos/in.html   40     Figure 2: Map of Delhi NCR35   Aradhaknagar and Kalandar Colony  As indicated earlier in this chapter, most of my research data among JJ residents comes from Aradhaknagar and Kalandar colony which are located in the Shahadara district of East Delhi. nfirms when these settlements first emerged or the overall socio-cultural make-residents. However, the local consensus among residents, NGO workers, and planners is that they are at least thirty years old. One petition letter submitted resettlement housing on behalf of residents displaced from Aradhaknagar in 2009 claims that the colony has been in existence since as early as 1961.36 According to the official list of JJ clusters37                                                            35 Image from Google Maps available at : https://www.google.com/maps/place/Delhi+Metropolitan+Area/@28.5088579,76.0996165,8z/data=!3m1!4b1!4m5!3m4!1s0x390ce19466e19ae1:0x45ceeb565fd5de6c!8m2!3d28.6139485!4d77.209031  36 This letter and its contents are discussed in depth at the end of chapter 4. See Appendix A for a copy of the original letter in Hindi.    37 demand resettlement housing (pending acceptable documentation of residency) in the event of demolition.    41 in Delhi released in 2011, there are 365 households living on 17,315 square meters of land in Aradhaknagar and 3,500 households living on 25,023 square meters of land in Kalandar Colony (2011: 14). Note the disproportionate ratio of households to land area, particularly in Kalandar Colony wherein a household (which can sometimes have a dozen members) appears to reside on an average of around 7 square meters of land according to these figures. I also note that official tallies of households are consistently lower than those offered by residents which may indicate that households are living in even less space.  These JJ colonies are nestled among mixed income residences as well as commercial buildings and are within short walking distance from the Dilshad Garden metro station, the easternmost stop on the red line which runs through central Delhi to parts of the northwest. Aradhaknagar sits adjacent to the intersection of two large highways, GT Road and Aradhak Marg, the 2009 expansion of which led to the above mentioned eviction and demolition38 of a segment of that colony. Some of those displaced residents now live in tents and makeshift shanties in what used to be a public park within the colony. With the exception of the aforementioned new tents and shanties in the park, all the homes within these colonies were constructed using brick or other permanent materials often times reclaimed by the residents from old ruins or demolition sites. The sturdiness of the structures attests to their age, with many homes having multiple stories built as income levels and other socio-economic factors. For instance, there are some who can only afford to rent single room jhuggis from other residents or non-resident landlords while others have managed to convert their homes into multi-use spaces where they ran commercial enterprises from the ground floor while living in the above stories. Conversations with residents and NGO staff                                                            38 See Appendix B for a copy of the notice given to residents prior to demolition and eviction.   42 indicated that while the earliest inhabitants of Kalandar colony had come mostly from Bihar and Eastern Uttar Pradesh, more recent inhabitants came from a variety of places including Rajasthan and the Nepal border.   While Aradhaknagar is relatively smaller, both of these colonies are densely populated and have an intricate network of narrow streets and alleys running through them. Because the jhuggis serve as both residence and work-space for many residents, the colonies are bustling with activity during the daytime. Walking through the JJ clusters, I often saw young children playing, small groups of women sitting inside jhuggis sewing together for local garment factories, residents -homes using bicycle-pulled wagons, and mobile food-stalls set up near the main streets. And while residents had to collect water from communal taps located in different places throughout the colony, there was a dense network of wires running across the tops of the jhuggis connecting the jhuggis directly to electric power provided by a private company.  Kalandar colony has a relatively new communal toilet complex built with concrete and high walls that houses a handful of stalls each for men and women. The toilets are maintained by a non-resident care-taker who commutes to the colony every day. He in turn charges male residents a rupee to use the facilities and the money he collects is his salary. While the women in Kalandar acilities, a CURE staff member mentioned that this is not true for community toilets in all JJ colonies. Since the caretaker is not a resident, the facility closes when he charge for men at times result in residents having to resort to open defecation. Nevertheless, these toilets are utilized by around 70% of the colony, while the other 30% have managed to build in-home e network is not connected to the colony, so while   43 the waste coming from the in-home toilets simply spills out into the gutters lining the narrow streets in front of the jhuggis within the colony, the refuse from the community toilets is collected inside a large septic tank and periodically pumped into a nala (an open sewage dump) nearby. Separating the rear border of Kalandar Colony from several factories where many residents of the colony work is a low wall and a small field full of trash and stagnant water from which emanates an overwhelmingly putrid chemical smell which I later discovered is caused by run off from the factories.  Figure 3: View of Kalandar Colony JJC from platform of Dilshad Garden Metro Station39  While the above described were my primary JJ field sites, I also made visits to several other JJ colonies including Geeta Colony and Jhilmil also in East Delhi where I conducted participant observation of CURE run workshops and community meetings. Additionally, I accompanied Subhadra Banda and Shahana Sheik, researchers from the Center for Policy Research Delhi, on                                                            39 Photo taken by author in January 2014   44 perceptions on the proposed in-situ rehabilitation. I also visited Kathputli Colony, an old and much contested JJ colony in central Delhi, during a series of protests following the unexpected DDA announcement of impending evictions and demolitions of the colony along with a transfer of an as-yet unspecified segment of residents deemed eligible to a nearby transit camp.  Aside from the JJ colonies, I also conducted interviews of government agents, NGO workers, and planners often inside their offices. These institutional settings were themselves important field sites providing a material context and positioning for said participants and their work. While the interiors of those spaces offered insights into the ideological perspectives of each institution through displays of posters and mission statements and could thus provide either a welcoming or hostile space for particular visitors; the physical accessibility (or lack thereof) of the office buildings by public transportation, the presence of guards, and the degree of difficulty entailed in accessing certain offices and individuals once at the gate also offered insight into who can and is expected to access these institutions and their services. Participant Populations While designing my project, my goal was to conduct research among various populations that had varying interests and involvements with jhuggi jhopris, their daily operations, their regulation, their demolition, and their transformation in Delhi. My desire to incorporate these different populations, whom development professionals call stakeholders, stemmed from my desire to produce a more rounded ethnography that holds in tension the understandings and conceptions of poverty, belonging, gender, and citizenship held by the various participant groups that in turn contour their strategies in the complex negotiations for rights to the city.        45 Jhuggi Jhopri Resident Women  While I wanted to center the lived experiences of women living in the JJ colonies, I had also hoped to recruit some male residents to participate in my study so as to get an understanding of the gender dynamics within particular colonies. However, due to various reasons which I discuss below in the Positionalities and Challenges in the Field work schedules and their lack of interest, I was unable to directly include JJ resident men. However, through my informal visits to Kalandar Colony and Aradhaknagar accompanied by CURE staff and presence during various workshops and community meetings I was able to recruit a total of seventeen women living in those communities. While most of the women were introduced to me by CURE staff, particularly Lalita whose family had lived in Kalandar colony for decades, some women grew curious after seeing me during previous visits and came to introduce themselves and ask about my research. During all of my interactions with the women, I was intentional about speaking in Hindi in an attempt to minimize as much as possible the social and linguistic power differential between them and myself. They were incredibly patient with my imperfect Hindi, for which they offered corrections, and seemed amused by the sight of a foreigner speaking Hindi.40 Indeed, I believe this negotiation of language helped me to build rapport with my participants. In addition to the seventeen participants, I also had several informal conversations with and conducted participant observation among women residing in other JJ colonies as indicated in the previous section.                                                                 40 Some of my interviews and all focus groups in Hindi were co-facilitated, translated, and transcribed by my research assistant Kanika Gupta, who is fluent in English and a native Hindi speaker. I was introduced to her through the USIEF (Fulbright) office in Delhi.     46 NGO Workers  The second research population group for my study included NGO staff working with JJ communities in Delhi. Because I worked most closely with CURE, I was able to recruit staff the ground inside particular JJ communities handling the daily activities of the organization, proximity, as well as the director of the organization. The Center for Urban Regional Excellence (CURE) is a development NGO working primarily in Delhi and Agra with poor urban communities to improve their access to basic resources, services, and livelihoods. Often, the NGO functions as a liaison between particular JJ communities and local government.41 Additionally, I was able to conduct interviews with administrators at the Society for Participatory Research in Asia (PRIA), an NGO based in Delhi and working throughout India which uses participatory research, knowledge dissemination, and advocacy as primary tools 42 While the overarching mission of this NGO is very broad, some of their initiatives were of particular interest to this study, specifically those projects addressing issues of safety for women and girls as well as access to basic resources and services. In total, I was able to recruit five NGO workers as research participants.         Bureaucrats & Planners The final research population group for this study included officials working for the three major government agencies currently involved in the administration and regulation of JJ colonies, the Delhi Development Authority (DDA), the Municipal Corporation of Delhi (MCD), and the recently established Delhi Urban Shelter Improvement Board (DUSIB); as well as urban planners                                                            41 <www.cureindia.org> 42 <www.pria.org>   47 either presently or historically involved in government initiatives to revitalize or resettle jhuggi jhopris. In addition to interviewing five government officials and planners, I was also able to have informal conversations and conduct participant observation among planners and officials during a two-week workshop on slum resettlement discussed previously in this chapter. I also conducted participant observation at an event sponsored by the School of Planning and Architecture (SPA) titled People Building Better Cities: Understanding Urban Informality in which urban planners and NGO workers shared and analyzed international examples of initiatives that had successfully incorporated the needs and perceptions of urban poor populations into city planning.43   must also note that the distinctions were messier in real life. There were NGO workers who were also JJ residents, NGO workers who had previously been government bureaucrats, government officials who were also urban planners, and a few JJ residents who were employed by the DDA. And while particular aspects of their identities may have had more salience in particular contexts and times such as participating in my study; it is important to remember that they are informed by all aspects of their identities and experiences. Additionally, I note that while I offered all participants the option to appear under pseudonyms, all chose to be identified by their real names. Several JJ women in particular were adamant about being accurately identified and insisted they Similarly, while I offered my participants the option to meet away from their institutions or JJCs in order to ensure privacy, none were interested in doing so. Indeed, most of my research participants seemed either confused by or dismissive of my concerns around privacy and preferred to meet in the convenience of their offices or homes.                                                                43 Forum took place on October 4, 2013 as the opening event for a twelve day showing of an international traveling exhibit of the same name on the main SPA campus in New Delhi, India   48 Research Methods Knowledge emerges out of a complex interplay of social, cognitive, cultural, institutional and situational elements. It is, therefore, always essentially provisional, partial and contextual in nature, and people work with a multiplicity of understandings, beliefs and commitments.      Norman Long (2004:15) My research questions44 and methods were designed to explore what it means to legitimately belong in Delhi, particularly as a poor woman living in perpetual precariousness. As such, I attempted to put into conversation narratives and understandings of citizenship, Indian womanhood, and belonging presented by bureaucrats, urban planners, and NGO workers, with that of JJ resident women through examinations of formal interactions, mundane activities, and -oriented analysis of hich the researcher must understand the world-views, knowledge bases, and intentions of the various actors in a given development intervention and analyze the various points rspectives and interests are negotiated and contested and in-turn shape how an intervention or policy manifests in practice (2004: 15-16). Through the use of well-established methodologies including individual and small-group interviews, focus groups, and participant observation, along with analyses of archival records and contemporary print media, I attempted to answer my overarching research questions.  Interviews I conducted ten individual semi-structured interviews with government bureaucrats, city planners, and NGO workers that lasted between 45 minutes and two hours each. These interviews were designed to gather both institutional approaches on JJ residents and JJC interventions as well                                                            44 For an explicit articulation of my overarching research questions, see chapter 1.   49 as personal perspectives on the same. They incorporated discussions of particular projects and organizational goals along with the career and personal histories of the participants and their approaches to JJ communities. The majority of my interviews with bureaucrats and planners were ffice or living room over cups of chai. In contrast, interviews with NGO field staff were conducted in transit, often while walking through JJ clusters or from one JJ colony to another. During these walking interviews, participants sometimes stopped to point out particular resources in a community such as water taps or community toilets or particular problem areas such as clogged sewage drains or nalas. I also conducted five informal small group interviews that lasted between one and one-and-a-half hours wirather than by design. In each instance, I arrived at the JJC around 10am to meet with particular women who had indicated they were available to be interviewed after their morning chores. The women then invited me to sit with them either in front of their home or on the rooftop terrace, often while they dried their hair in the morning sun. Soon after we began our interviews, the women would stop to call over a neighbor women or two who were walking by or themselves drying their hair and ask them to join the conversation. In this manner, what were initially designed to be individual interviews became small group interviews often consisting of 2 or 3 women. Russell Bernard (2013) notes that it is common in close knit communities for other members to an insistence on privacy from the researcher might be taken negatively by the participants (198). Correspondingly, I did not insist on privacy since it was always the participant who had invited her neighbors and clearly wanted to include them in the discussion. Moreover, these small group   50 settings proved particularly useful in observing the natural discourse among the neighbor women on the various issues they faced as residents of a particular JJC.  Focus Groups  I also conducted three focus groups among women residents in Kalandar Colony and Aradhaknagar consisting of six to eight members and lasting about ninety minutes each. Similar to the small group interviews discussed above, focus groups remove the pressure of a one-on-one interview and allow participants to share perceptions of common experiences (Krueger & Casey 2000:4). Indeed, many of the focus group participants were also part of the small group interviews. However, unlike within the small group interview setting, while the women participating in my focus groups all lived in the same JJCs, they were not all friends and at times disagreed strongly on what they considered the most important issues they faced or how they should be handled. Moreover, the focus group setting seemed to allow the women to freely criticize certain aspects of previous and ongoing NGO projects in their communities and some took that opportunity to question an NGO staff member who had accompanied me about what they felt were the co-facilitator for the focus groups due to concerns of power differentials and potentially hindering open and honest discussions about the NGO in her presence. However, ultimately the fact that she is also a resident of Kalandar Colony, younger than most of the participants, and my observations of the ways other resident women interacted with her led to my decision to include her as her presence did not appear to hinder the active participation of the focus group participants.          51 Document Analysis Archival Data  I employed this method primarily in the examination of publically available government records, particularly those documents outlining various policies and initiatives directed at slums and JJCs. rchival research helped to establish a broad timeline of the major policy shifts and state interventions as well as to keep track of jurisdictional shifts over slums and JJCs between government agencies such as the DDA, MCD, and DUSIB. Moreover, I used a historical examination of these policy documents to outline the shifting characterizations of both JJCs and their residents and a corresponding shift in the policies themselves. To a lesser extent, I examined narratives about slum and JJ communities presented by local NGOs through their websites and published reports.     Print Media  Upon moving in to my flat in Delhi, I subscribed to the Times of India, an English language newspaper which was delivered to my door daily. In addition to the fact that my landlord was a lifetime subscriber of the newspaper and thus could conveniently facilitate my subscription, I chose the TOI because it has been in publication for over 150 years and has one of the highest circulations for a daily newspaper in India (Encyclopedia Britannica 2016). Moreover, while it is a national paper, it is published in Delhi and contains a dedicated section titled the Delhi Times. And while most middle-class people I met in India had strong generational loyalties to specific newspapers, the TOI seemed to have a general reputation as a serious and intelligent publication, if not a particularly radical or critical one. All of these aspects made it a good avenue to explore popular rhetoric surrounding JJ rehabilitation and demolition, as well as  To this end, I read the   52 paper every day and clipped relevant articles which I then sorted and analyzed for theme, content, and tone. I identified both overt discuperformance as well as more implicit signaling of the same particularly in articles about JJ recurring narratives.         Participant Observation  Finally, as with most ethnographies, participant observation was an essential component of my research. As indicated in previous sections of this chapter, I was able to conduct participant observation among urban planners during a two week workshop on resettlement, through attending a city planner and NGO panel on building inclusive cities, as well as attending various NGO led workshops for JJ residents on sanitation, maternal health, and education. I was also able to join NGO staff on routine visits to JJ communities, attend protests against the demolition of Kathputli colony, and converse with JJ resident women while they completed their morning chores. Gatherings of planners and NGO workers illustrated the ways in which those groups tend to talk to each other about JJ residents and urban poor populations through their use of jargon and short-hand to signal shared understandings of the lives of JJ residents and the common issues they face. Alternatively, attending NGO led workshops and anti-demolition protests allowed me to observe f said people, and each of their understandings of citizenship and rights were expressed and at times contested on the ground. For instance, attendance of NGO led training workshops allowed me to observe how the struggles faced by JJ residents are narrativized and presented by NGO workers back to JJ residents as problems to be   53 tackled through individual effort and collective action. In addition to these specific instances of participant observation, were of course the ongoing observations and insights I gleaned from using various forms of public transportation, shopping in local bazaars, eating and drinking at roadside dhabas and chai stalls, and generally living in Delhi particularly in the months surrounding the 2013 local elections.   Figure 4: Poster at SPA PBBC workshop  Positionalities and Challenges in the Field Beyond the technical details of my research methods, the various bureaucratic and political realities that helped determine my research sites and access to particular social networks and populations for research, and the ways in which my research questions emerged and transformed throughout my pre-dissertation and dissertation fieldwork; there were also particular aspects of my   54 identity and social positioning that played a significant role in both the ways in which I approached and conducted my study as well as in the ways that research participants perceived and engaged with me. As many feminist and post-structural scholars have asserted, there is an essential need to acknowledge the subjective and embodied nature of all research and data production (Collins (1991); Harding (1991); Haraway (1988)). Both as researchers and research participants, our identities and social positions are multi-faceted and intersectional (Crenshaw 1991). Moreover, various aspects of our identities and social positions have more salience in particular times and contexts, even when interacting with the same people.  As such, it is difficult for me to reduce my position to a particular set of identities that would encompass all of my fieldwork. While I cannot discount the general position of power and privilege I occupied as a Fulbright funded ethnographer from America, and as a researcher who interpret the data I collected; the fact that several of my research participants occupied positions of political and institutional power or were senior scholars, meant that within the context of those interactions the position of power was held by my participants. Similarly, as a relatively young and unmarried woman within the cultural context of India, my interactions with older participants across social and economic strata, and gender always included an expectation of deference on my part and at times mimicked the communication patterns of youth with family elders or older mentors. I will note however, that when interacting with older JJ resident women participants, there was often a reciprocal deference for my level of education and seeming independence as they compared me to their own daughters and the aspirations they had for them, which was not present in my interactions with other older participants. While I give the above examples to briefly point to the individual variation within the broader narra  55 conducting research in the global south; below I will offer some illustrative examples of instances in which particular aspects of my identity and social positioning emerged to shape certain ethnographic encounters and my overall ways of being and moving within the field.    working on a research paper titled in Contemporary India for an advanced Hindi language course I was taking in Jaipur, Rajasthan. my instwas surprised to find that they were all very familiar with the moniker. This also held true for colleagues and other scholars of India whom I spoke with once I returned to the U.S. Upon further research, I found that national crime statistics have indeed consistently shown that reported incidences of rape and other violent crimes against women in Delhi far outnumber those in other Indian cities (National Crime Records Bureau 2010 & 2013). It was thus with full awareness of this disproportional violence against women in Delhi, and in part troubled and moved by it, that I chose Delhi as the location of my study. Nevertheless, in January of 2013, as I prepared for my comprehensive exams in anticipation of beginning my fieldwork the following summer, the story -rape a month prior in Delhi and the accompanying public outcry had become major international news. Upon hearing about my impending fieldwork, everyone from casual acquaintances to close family and friends would invariably ask some iteration of the sexual assaults in Delhi or other parts of India, and I found myself downplaying the danger of moving to Delhi alone as a young woman in conversations with various people. The truth of the   56 of the preceding three years living in India, two of those months living alone in Delhi and having been aware of the sexual assault rates long before the Nirbhaya attack, I felt I knew how to minimize my risk of assault as much as possible. Looking back, I think this was a defense problematic it is to place the onus of rape prevention on the victim instead of the assailant.  Nevertheless, the following September, armed with law-enforcement grade pepper spray and a list of rules that included never travelling alone or on public transportation after dark, I moved to Delhi.          Once I arrived in Delhi, with the help of the local Fulbright office, I found a one bedroom apartment in the upper-middle class neighborhood of GKI in South Delhi. My apartment was the top floor of a small three-story residential building. The floor below me was occupied by Mr. Nehru, a retired employee of the U.S. India Educational Foundation (USIEF, which houses the local Fulbright program) and his wife. The ground floor was occupied by their daughter and her family. This set-up was important to my sense of security because it gave me the sense of living and being associated with a respected family that had been living in the neighborhood for decades. And while my separate apartment entrance provided me with independence, I quickly became residential complex were gated and had a guard hired by the Resident Welfare Association to walk around late at night and keep watch. All of these things added to my feeling of security, even while I critiqued the growing trend of gated communities in Indian cities and the exclusionary and criminalizing effects that they often have on poorer residents of the city.   57  Despite the almost daily news reports of sexual assault, I moved around Delhi with a general feeling of security. Nevertheless, I was acutely aware of the need to be cautious due to the collection was on this particular subject. As such, I made sure to schedule all of my interviews and visits to JJ clusters during the daytime and traveled primarily via metro exclusively utilizing the freedom to choose particular modes of transportation gave me the unique privilege of avoiding places and contexts that I felt were physically dangerous, unlike most of the women who participated in my study. Yet, while limiting my time in the field provided me a certain level of security, it also restricted my access to particular segments of research populations and thus impacted the data I was able to collect. For instance, while I had hoped to include JJ resident men in my study to gain a richer insight into gender dynamics within a given cluster as well as within particular households, I was unable to do so because the vast majority of men living within the communities I visited left early in the morning for work and did not return until late in the evening. Similarly, many of the JJ resident women who were domestic workers left around sunrise to make imeant that the JJ residents who participated in my study were almost entirely women who either worked from home doing piecemeal sewing and handicraft work for area factories, worked within the JJ cluster, or had grown children who provided the household income and thus did not leave home to work. The few men who were around the JJ clusters during the daytime, with the exception of one elderly Pradhan, were uninterested in participating once they realized I had little to offer in    58 -way through my fieldwork that I actually experienced the feeling of physical insecurity and fear. In mid-January, I got lost on my way to an event featuring Gloria rule of never traveling alone after dark. After several attempts to figure out the exact location of the bookstore venue based on my written directions, I began asking directions from people on the street. Following half an hour of conflicting directions and walking around in circles, I was frustrated and on the verge of tears when I realized that I had started to draw a crowd consisting of several young men offering me directions. At this point it was fully dark with the exception of  benevolent as they implied, I jumped into the first auto-rickshaw I saw. Thankfully the driver, who was a grey bearded Sikh gentleman, recognized the bookstore I was looking for and graciously accepted me as a fare despite the fact that the bookstore was less than a kilometer away and thus a trip that most autowallahs would refuse. I think he must have seen how flustered and upset I was.  and fear set-in. On the fgang-had been lost and asking for directions when some men pushed her off the road and took turns raping her for three hours. This had started two hours before I arrived on that same street, also lost and asking for directions merely two blocks away. In fact, she was still being assaulted while I was walking around in circles and being approacexpress how terrified I was reading that article and realizing how easily that could have been me. I locked myself in my apartment for the rest of the day alternating between tears and feelings of   59 intense rage and frustration. Sara Ahmed (2004), while discussing the affective politics of fear, vulnerability, and thus works to limit their mobility within public space and pushes them instead to occupy enclosed or private space (70). This is perhaps the most apt description of my visceral response to hide in my apartment following the attack of the un-named Danish woman. Moreover, it became an important way for me to understand the impact of the ongoing narrative of feminine vulnerability in public space on the women who had to navigate that space daily.    Although I was born in Addis Ababa, Ethiopia to an Eritrean mother and an Ethiopian father; outside the context of East Africa, people throughout my life have often had a hard time identifying my ethnicity. While it seems clear that I am a woman of color, to be Afro-Latina or South Asian both by people of those ethnicities as well as people of other ethnicities. This apparent ambiguity of my ethnic background to certain people became significant within the context of my fieldwork and in terms of living in India in general. At some point during my initial conversations with people in India, including research participants, I would inevitably face value after mentioning that they had thought I was Indian, others would ask about the details of my family history insisting that I had to have some South Asian heritage in my background.  During my initial visits to India for language training and predissertation research, I wore my growing Hindi language skills often led people I encountered to assume that I was a non-resident Indian, or NRI for short. Indeed, many people even saw my wider nose with a right-sided   60 nose-ring and thicker hair as apparently more Dravidian, and specifically asked if I was Malayali or Tamil. While I was always honest about my background with anyone I met and conversed with personally or professionally, the assumption that I was of Indian descent often helped me in my daily interactions with autowallahs and store keepers in bazaars. Moreover, I had the convenience of inconspicuousness. While my identifiably non-Indian friends and colleagues in India often got -rickshaw rides; I got no more attention than other young Indian women in those same spaces. This was less notable in the particularly cosmopolitan spaces of Delhi such as Khan Market or Connaught Place, but helpful when visiting JJ clusters, resettlement sites in the peripheries of the city, or traveling via public transportation. By the time I moved to Delhi in 2013 to begin my dissertation fieldwork, I had stopped preclude most people I spoke with from still assuming I was of Indian descent. It did, however, draw a lot more attention than I was used to; and in fact I had multiple conversations, often with middle-aged men I encountered in public, on how I got my hair to stay in two-strand twists. One of these conversations was notably an extensive discussion on the technical details of hair twisting with an armed guard at the gate of the Taj Mahal in Agra. The women I encountered often just stared at my hair and whispered amongst themselves. In an attempt to minimize the attention I was receiving, I regularly wore my hair hidden under a snood or dupatta while conducting research.  However, perhaps what was more important to my experience of living in Delhi was not who most people perceived me to be but rather who they perceive me to be: African. It became clear early in my fieldwork that there was a popular narrative that characterized Nigerians in particular, and Africans in general who were living in Indian cities as engaged in drug trafficking   61 Nigerian drug gangs in the country as well as particular stories in the media of Nigerians being apprehended while transporting large quantities of drugs (Unnithan & Vij-Aurora (2013); NDTV (2013); Zee News (2013)). Not only did this cast a shadow of criminality upon the large Nigerian community living throughout India, but also upon other Africans in India who were seldom differentiated by their country of origin.  In early 2014, during the now infamous forty-nine day Aam Aadmi Party control of Delhi Government after the historic December 2013 elections, the newly elected Law Minister Somnath Bharti led a late-night vigilante raid into the apartment of four Ugandan women living in the Khirki Extension neighborhood of South Delhi (where many Africans live) accusing them of running a drug and sex-Indian) of the neighborhood had come to him after their previous complaints to various law-enforcement and government branches alleging drug and sex traffbeen ignored. When the police officers he had called refused to conduct the raid, later saying they had no evidence of the crimes alleged and thus no legal justification to enter, Bharti and the assembled crowd of local complainants (seemingly all men) took it upon themselves to conduct the raid. The four Ugandan woman later described being grabbed and verbally threatened by the mob, and being taken to a nearby hospital where Bharti and his companions insisted the women be given a drug test. While the exact incidents of the evening remain under contention from both sides, the xenophobic narratives of criminal and immoral foreigners infiltrating the neighborhoods of decent middle-class Indians and corrupting and endangering their families became a common refrain both on the part of the Law Minister as well as within debates in the media and public discourse. In fact,   62 during a visit to a JJ colony in Northeast Delhi, I heard one of the resident women bringing up the incident and cpolitical parties) just trying to remove AAP members like Bharti from power who were only ading and hearing accounts of the consistent harassment and discrimination experienced by fellow Africans living in Delhi made me realize my uniquely positive experience as an African in the city. I also recognized that my perceived ethnic ambiguity, and more importantly my perceived non-African identity had shielded me from xenophobic attacks and quite possibly given me access to participants and spaces that I might not have had were I identifiably African in India.   Finally, I would be remiss if I did not examine my position as an outsider and a researcher within the specific context of JJ clusters and in relation to JJ residents. In contrast to the other participant populations in my study, JJ residents have a unique history of being targets of outside intervention in the forms of enumeration and study by government agencies and academics, as well as being the objects of various governmental and NGO schemes and projects designed to transform their lives in different ways. As a result, I was only the latest in a long line of outsiders coming to their communities asking questions about their daily lives and experiences. This in turn shaped our ethnographic encounters in several ways. Having been repeatedly asked questions about problems they faced living in a JJ colony, for instance, many had a common batch of complaints to list off and had preconceived ideas about what they thought I was interested in hearing about or seeing. I often had to ask about mundane details several times before they were convinced I actually wanted to hear about them.    63  But perhaps more important to examine is the power dynamics at play during their interactions with outsiders such as myself. While what is at stake during said interactions varies depending on the particular social or political power held by the outsider, ultimately it is always the JJ residents who are at risk of being exploited or worse, losing their homes. For instance, -termine eligibility received with learned skepticism. They wanted to know what I was going to do for them if they shared their stories with me. Once they realized I had no institutional resources, like that of an NGO, to invest in their communities, some residents asked how I was any different from the researchers and government surveyors who had come before me. I answered as honestly as I could and told them there was very little I could do for them in terms of improving their living conditions or securing land tenure. And while I could not speak for the researchers who came before me, I hoped to incorporate their perspectives as much I could through my research and the resulting with ultimately chose to participate. The Elephant in the Room: Addressing Religion among Participants    As illustrated in Chapter 1, the significance of religion and caste on contemporary social relations in India cannot be overstated. Aside from the periodic recurrence of violent events such as 1984 Sultanpuri riots, the 1992-3 Babri Masjid riots, and the 2002 Ahmedabad riots, there remain ongoing popular debates about caste reservations45 and the recent ascension of the BJP on                                                            45 In 1980 the Mandal Commission, a government appointed commission, released a report that recommended the universities in an attempt to redress caste discrimination. Following attempts by Prime Minister (at the time) V.P. Singh to implement these recommendations in 1989, there were widespread debates and protests against the proposed policies. Although certain aspects of the reservation recommendation have been implemented, they remain a widely debated issue. (See Srinavas (1996) for further discussions).    64 the national political stage46 and its Hindu nationalist rhetoric make religion and religious identity clearly relevant in the contemporary Indian context. In Kalandar Colony and during my brief visits were in the courtyards attached to the Hindu temples built by residents. As a result, casual meetings between residents and NGO staff were by default held in these courtyards. While my NGO contacts assured me that everyone was aware that the location was due to necessity and that the NGO meetings were secular, I wondered how non-Hindu residents perceived these meetings and if their location impacted the participation of said residents. Indeed, the majority of the JJ residents in my primary field sites were Hindu, as were the women who participated in my study, so I was unable to ask these questions myself. However, my attempts at discussing the impacts of religious identity with my JJ resident participants on their daily lives was repeatedly dismissed in favor of conversations about the impacts of material poverty instead. While my research participants at times casually referred to celebrations of certain religious festivals within their JJCs and occasionally used references to Hindu gods or religious stories as allegories of experiences in their own lives, they were not interested in discussing their own religious identities with me. Interestingly, I had found in my routine social interactions outside of the JJCs that discussions of religion were generally not uncommon or avoided as they might be in the United States. Yet, this was not the case in the context of my research with JJ residents. I imagine my identity as a foreigner was relevant in this regard, as were ongoing governmental efforts to disavow the impacts of caste                                                            46 During the 2014 General Elections held April-May, the BJP and its allied groups won the majority of votes and replaced the Indian National Congress Party at the Helm. As a result, Narandra Modi, former Chief Minister of Gujarat and member of the Rashtriya Swayamsevak Sang (RSS) who was implicated in the 2002 religious riots in Ahmedabad, became the 15th Prime Minister of India.      65 participants in discussions of religious identity meant that primary data based discussions on this topic are very limited in this dissertation.          66 Chapter 3: Intersections of Class and Womanhood In this chapter, I examine how dominant middle-class discoursbroader notions of gender and Indian womanhood bear upon the relationship of the state with its women citizens. Particularly, I explore how these constructions of Indian womanhood and narratives of safety inform the structure of ingendered public policies in Delhi more broadly, and illustrate the ways in which they fail to address the needs and experiences of poor JJ resident women. To this end, I first analyze the narrative constructiexploration of conceptualizations of womanhood, and the function of these notions within a  of gendered claims on the state for protections. I then shift towards a historically situated discussion of acute versus structural violence to distinguish between the spectacle of rape for the middle-class centered by the state and the everyday forms of constraint and coercion that characterize the lives of JJ resident wExpanding on the latter, I analyze the ways in which the lived experiences of poor women living in jhuggi jhopris are shaped by their intersecting gender and socio-economic identities within a bureaucratic matrix. Finally, I turn towards an analysis of the transformational effects of the 2012 Nirbhaya Attack on the social and political landscape of the city, highlighting certain changes in government policy and legislation as well as prominent themes in public discourse and mainstream media. I do so to highlight the general condition of precariousness shared by all women in Delhi,   67 landscape continue to marginalize JJ resident women.  Who is the Delhi Woman? Throughout my stay in Delhi, Times of India ran two recurring and at times simultaneous alternatively chronicled instances of sexual violence and harassment experienced by women in India and profiles of successful (chiefly corporate) Indian women who were apparently breaking --equitable work force. While each section nonetheless both centered primarily on the experiences of middle-class women living in cities. Other segments of the TOI, noticeably lacking either of the above headings, chronicled the recurring violence experienced by domestic workers at the hands of their (often middle-class women) employers as well as the few instances of JJ resident women running for local political office. While university students and other young middle-class women in the city were organizing to reclaim their rights to occupy public spaces at any hour; JJ resident women I spoke with told me of their frustrations with the lack of safe and adequate public toilets for their daughters, the skyrocketing food prices, and having to sleep in makeshift tents in a park after their home was demolished by the government. I present these seemingly disparate struggles experienced by those occupying different socio-economic positions not to establish a hierarchy of problems or to diminish the importance of some, but rather to explore the questions of who is recognized as the   68 definitions are significant because they inform which women are able to successfully make claims on the state to address what issues.   led by the publication Navbharat Times47 and sponsored by popular scooter and motorcycle brands simultaneously in thirteen cities across India including Delhi, Mumbai, Bangalore, and Kolkata. In the days leading up to the rally, the TOI ran a full page advertisement for the event featuring two young Indian women dressed in fitted jeans torn at the knees, tank tops, and aviator sunglasses. One of the women also wore a leather jacket, and each woman sat astride a scooterone a Hero Xtreme Sports model, and the other a Hchanged as the day of the event neared. On March 7, the day before the rally it read as follows:  The Indian woman is not the same anymore. Today she is her own boss who makes her own choices and carves her own path. And in celebration of that spirit, NBT on your bike and participate, or just join in and cheer on. Be there.  On the day of the rally, March 8, it read as follows:  oday! determination, time to change things truly, Now no one will get in your way, or slow down your pace, Now no shackle, chain or bond will hold you back, When your engine roars and you take on the road,                                                              47 Navbharat times is one of the largest circulating Hindi language newspapers in Mumbai and Delhi and is published by Bennett Coleman & Co. Ltd, the parent company that also published the Times of India, The Economic Times, and Maharashtra Times.    69 In the bottom corner, next to the times and locations of the rally by city,48 was a graphic logo of a woman riding on a motorcycle beneath an arched banner that read All Women Bike Rally, with the Hero Pleasure and NBT logos bordering the graphic above and below respectively. Beneath -capital letters. The narrative of the contemporary Indian woman in these ads is clear. Shwesternized], middle or upper class, able bodied, independent, and free to do as she pleases. She has her own mode of transportation, perhaps a career, and can presumably traverse public space dressed in fitted and torn jeans and a tank top without fear of consequence. While certain resemblance to the vast majority of women one encounters in Delhi. Certainly, there are many students and working women who use scooters to travel throughout Delhi, but they are rarely wearing revealing clothing, more likely donning salwar suits or the more westernized kurta and jeans combo, along with the ubiquitous dupattathe widely recognized symbol of modesty and izzat [honor]. Similarly, the women who choose to wear tight fitting or revealing clothes are often those privileged with private cars that can transport them from their homes to the relative safety of guarded a--end pubs and restaurants. Indeed, they would never come to the public bazaars of Old Delhi and Sarojini Nagar, or utilize the city bus dressed thusly.                                                              48 Interestingly, the Delhi rally kicked off at the DLF Saket Mall, the same shopping complex where Jyoti Singh (a.k.a Nirbhaya) and her friend went to watch a movie and afterwards had trouble finding public transportation resulting in their boarding an off-duty private charter bus with their would-be assailants the night of the now infamous attack.    70 women. Yet even if we take this narrative presented by the ads as an aspirational ideal, similar to the images presented in Bollywood moviesthat draws on, yet exaggerates the lives of real women to offer a potential reality with expanded freedoms or takes a cycle rickshaw to work every morning. Indeed, despite the ongoing public discourse about the growing empowerment of women in Delhi, the women I spoke with living in the Aradhaknagar JJC dismissed such claims as the grumblings of men. During a group discussion with several women, a long-time resident of the JJC in her mid-sixties named Krishna-ji49 chuckled shakti [power]woman today has a lot of power. In every house men say that. And what power has she  Nevertheless, the New Indian Woman narrative persisted and tdiscourse. A shining example of this was the TOI which spotlighted the stories of various successful Indian women predominately working in the corporate sector. These were consistently stories of triumph wherein the women were able to overcome obstacles through sheer determination, confidence, and hard work. The headlines, which read like platitudes, were direct quotes taken from the women being interviewed, and included the                                                            49 -en added to names when addressing elders or other individuals to denote respect. While the age of the women who participated in my study varied, there were certain older individuals ubiquitously addressed using this suffix throughout the community, such as Krishna-ji. While I addressed all individuals who were my elders using this honorific during my personal interactions, for the purpose of this dissertation, I only use the suffix when referencing those individuals whom I never heard addressed without it.     71 til you behave careers after taking time off to have children or point to policy changes in their companies that have made balancing work and family easier, the second largest mortgage lending company insists that hard work alone guarantees success claiming e when I was not treated equally as a woman. On the contrary people ). Similarly, ability is gender neutral. It will be recognized and rewarded. The first few times you will have to prove yourself, and then your reputation prece). Conversely, those who recognize that women face particular challenges in the corporate workplace or that certain jobs or positions have been inaccessible to women nevertheless tended to either minimize the challenges or historicize them as issues which no longer exist. One stock -term and last until you can mentally overcoZachariah 2014cis assessed on their perf); and the vice-chairman of a Swiss rcoming preconceived biases is a gradual ).  Yet, perhaps more damaging than the persistent illusion of gender-blind meritocracy is the consistent shifting of responsibility for unequal treatment or the inaccessibility of upward mobility   72 for women to the women themselves, reminiscent of the victim blaming characteristic of global mothers for sacrificing time with their children for their cthe race to maintain a [work-life] balance, women often go through self-inflicted guilt. All you emphasis added] (VK & Zachariah 2014d). Similarly, one COO around will change. Men are happy to treat you as equals till [sic] you behave lK & Zachariah 2014g). Such statements problematically imply that women either manufacture  Notably, while all of these articles eschew any real discussions of institutional sexism and highlighted emerged from privileged economic and educational backgrounds and many launched their careers within family companies. Thus, while the stories of success presented in these articles are true, the individual articles along with the series as a whole constructs a partial narrative about the overall experiences of women working in corporate settings by downplaying the very real structures that make such success generally inaccessible to most women. Moreover, by the experiences of women working in non-corporate settings and the so-called new Indian womanparticularly illuminating instance, the same investment bank vice-chairman who declared   73 at [my in-laws] place in the morning and pick them up after work. This helped me focus my energies towar). In this narrative, the maid is presented not as a ce--ceilings but more often consists of exhaustive physical labor in an attempt to secure enough income to pay for basic necessities, are thus erased from the dominant narrative of the Delhi woman.  Indeed, even in articles where domestic workers and their mistreatment are the seeming subjects, they are still marginalized as (albeit victimized) migrant others while their middle-class employers are once again centered. In the autumn of 2013, the media reported on several instances wherein it was revealed that domestic workers in Delhi, mostly young women, were being severely physically and psychologically abused by their middle-class employers. While news of the scandals spread across the city, conversations and media coverage quickly turned to focus on middle-TOI  The myth that psychopaths and sociopaths are out there in slums, ghettos, and mental asylums stands shattered by the frequent reports of brutal torture of maids and domestic servants in middle-class homes. It turns out that the manager next door, the air-hostess in the flat above, or even the doctor across the road could be griti; Vandana Dhir, the senior executive who tortured the Santhal girl in the Vasant Kunj case; Bira Thoibi, the air-hostess who locked up her 12-year old maid; and Aarti Jain of Mayur Vihar, who used to assault her maid, as monsters belonging to another species. It is more painful to acknowledge human potentiality for murderous fury in each of us. [Emphasis added] (Shukla 2013)    74 the employers installation of twenty close circuit cameras as a futile attempt at control which inevitably led to her fury when she realized her inability to control her household servants. While the journalist does not attempt to minimize the violence committed by the employers, the sustained attempt at understanding the emtelling. In contrast, the casual reference to the assumption of barbarity among slum residents in the first sentence illustrates the ease with which residents of such poor neighborhoods are excluded from notions of aam aadmi [common man] or even humanity.  Similarly, while sympathy is expressed for the women and girls being abused, they are clearly marked as non-Delhiites their ethnic or tribal background, they apparently do not fit the narrative of the modern working Delhi woman. Similarly, while violence against women remained at the forefront of public discourse and statistics show that the majority of domestic workers are women (Pandit 2013a), the recurring cases of their abuse was never framed as violence against women or presented under the frequent TOI and non-existent labor laws for domestic workers. While such cases do indeed illuminate the legal protections and regulation as well as the power differential between such workers and their employers; the almost exclusive framing of these cases in terms of labor regulation also illustrates how poor women are categorized primarily by their economic marginalization along with their   75 middle-class women. Thus, such narratives also work to exclude poor women from making gendered claims on the state for protections by positioning them as outside the parameters of  Therefore I argue that these narratives, circulated through middle-class discourses and ar-class women and simultaneously erasing or excluding the experiences of poor and JJ resident women, the narratives -class and render that of poor and JJ women as unrecognizable. This recognition, or rather its absence, is critical because as Butler assertaam aadmi [common man] in the TOI article discussed above illustrates such a frame of recognition that renders poor and JJ resident women as unrecognizable.  Moreover, when these narratives or frames are taken up by the state through its various institutions and representatives, they render poor women as what Agamben (1998) and others have -to/outside the law per se but rather as having been relegated outside the protections of the law and   76 that dominant discourses of womanhood that render poor and JJ resident women as restrictive gendered citizenship available to women of higher socio-economic classes because such narrativeswhich are taken-up and reified by state actors contour the relationship of the state with its women citizens.        This was evident within many of the protests, (calls for) policy reforms, and popular 50 which were largely or wholly inaccessible to them. For instance, while the passage of the Sexual Harassment of Women in the Workplace (Prevention, Prohibition, and Redressal) Act of 2013 was widely heralded as a significant milestone in legislating safer work environments for all women in India and even incorporates a section on domestic workers, the overall framework of redressal within the act is predicated on a corporate/ formal workplace model and is thus very difficult to implement more employees are required to form an internal committee to investigate reports of sexual harassment in the workplace with an external NGO member for oversight, employers of domestic workers have no such mandate. Instead, domestic workers wishing to report such incidents would who will in turn conduct an investigation that may include the deposition of the parties involved and the gathering of any relevant documentation. The committee may then proceed to either settlement to the accuser, or refer the case to the police if the reported action legally constitutes a crime according to the                                                            50 See sections below for further discussions of these changes   77 IPC.51 Beyond the bureaucratic hurdles that may make filing a written complaint against her employer impractical and undesirable for a domestic worker, the very precarious nature of termination for such employees means that filing such a complaint will likely result in the loss of a domestic workissues of sexual impropriety in the workplace; the daily issues facing domestic workers in need of redressal go far beyond sexual harassment. In contrast, one piece of legislation which had the potential for a more direct impact on the daily lives of domestic workers is the Domestic Workers Welfare and Social Security Act drafted by the National Commission of Women (NCW)52 in 2010. This act requires that all households employing domestic workers, domestic worker placement agencies, and domestic workers register to a local body established for that purpose so as to allow the regulation of such households as workplaces and collect fees to establish a pension/social security fund for domestic workers. Furthermore, this act provides a framework that would establish a legal limit of working hours for both part-time and full-time domestic workers, including specific stipulations about required breaks and holidays, minimum-wage, and overtime pay.53 However, while the widely publicized instances of domestic worker abuse and torture in 2013 reignited public discussions on the need for legal protections in such contexts, in 2016 the Domestic Workers Welfare and Social Security Act (drafted in 2010) has yet to be enacted into legislation. This illustrates the simultaneous                                                            51 See Chapter V (especially sections 10.1, 11.1, & 11.3) of the Sexual Harassment of Women in the Workplace (Prevention, Prohibition, and Redressal) Act, 2013.  52 The National Commission of Women is a statutory body mandated to guide the central government on issues facing women.  53 See Domestic Workers Welfare and Social Security Act, 2010, Chapter Six (especially sections 26.4-7 & 27a)   78  policy, reflecting dominant middle-class discourses.        Similarly, while there are consistent cross-cutting issues and themes that persist within educational and employment opportunities, the fissures seem to emerge when trying to incorporate the ways in which they manifest within the lives of particular (groups of) women. For many of the residents of the Aradhaknagar, Kalandar Colony, and Geeta Colony jhuggi jhopris, the lack of safety is a reality that must be negotiated daily when sending their children to school, when they and their daughters need to use the toilet (particularly after dark), when their toddlers play amidst the trash filled gutters in front of their homes, as well as the ever-present threat of demolitions. During a group conversation about the schools in the area accessible to their children, several women of Aradhaknagar told me that because there is no school close to their neighborhood, the children have to walk far and cross dangerous train tracks to get to the nearest  far. We are in -ji told me while clasping her hands together and pulling them against her heart to emphasize her point. Maya, a woman in her forties and another long-ta young girl killextend far beyond the fear of sexual assault while traversing the city which dominates popular discourses.    79 Similarly, while discussing basic services available to the colony including sanitation with Padma, a grandmother in her sixties, a resident of Kalandar Colony and a domestic worker, she told me that when they manage to come, municipal sanitation workers simply remove the garbage blocking the gutters and place it on the street, apparently to dry before they can return and collect it. She points out how dangerous this is, stating: We all are people who work in households, someone washes utensils, someone cooks, and someone washes clothes in households, secondly there are some who children have become insects of that gutter. Have they not become? Because we who can take care of them, we are not at home. And if there is garbage lying around children will pick it up, look at it, play with it and if they eat it then again it is trouble.  When I ask if there is a hospital nearby in case the children accidently ingest the trash, she there only. There also there in the colony, lack of adequate sanitation services also means an ongoing threat to the health of their children which is compounded by their lack of access to dependable medical care. However, while dominant notions of proper Indian womanhood center on motherhood and domesticity, such characte Likewise, the majority of women living in JJCs, who do not have access to an in-home toilet must coordinate group outings to relieve themselves either in community toilets or in nearby fields. Following a community meeting organized by the NGO CURE to discuss cleaning up a park located within the colony which was currently being used as a trash dump and for open defecation, I spoke to several women residents of Geeta Colony about their frustrations with the existing community toilets and why some chose to use the gutters in front of their homes during   80 the night as a safety measure. Beyond its limited hours of operation, which usually runs from 5am to 10pm depending on the non-man in her mid-inside because there is no bolt inside, there is no door. Our daughters-in-law, daughters, elder with Urvashi, another woman also in her thirties named Kanta adds,  There is no sewer54 so we have to use the [community] toilets. Near the toilets four-four boys are standing, our sisters and daughters face a big problem in going, so we good people and bad people. That is why you have to go with them. Now if gutters are made deeper and cleaning is being done every day, if we make toilets below that, girls will be safe in their houses.  the luxury of an in-home toilet. Indeed, the persistent threat of sexual assault in the citywhich dominated middle-class discourses at the timewas almost exclusively discussed in terms of being able to safely relieve oneself/access toilets by my JJ resident interlocutors (particularly after dark). Yet, while there are indeed disproportionately fewer public toilets in Delhi for women than there are for men;55 the access that middle and upper-class women have to toilets in exclusive or semi-public spaces such as shopping malls and restaurants while travelling throughout the city as well as their access to in-home toilets makes the issue of safely accessing toilets one that                                                            54 Kanta is referring to the fact that the JJC is not conntheir own in-not connected to the sewer system either, but instead simply pumps the sewage into a massive tank which is periodically emptied by the MCD.   55 According to a study conducted on behalf of the Delhi High Court in 2007, out of 3,192 public toilets in Delhi, zero public toilets for women. (Sheik 2008: 23).    81 apping threat of sexual assault in public spaces faced by both poor and middle-class women, the issue of safely accessing adequate toilet facilities remains largely ignored within dominant discourses of  Even more so, the constant possibility that their home or entire colony may be demolished by the DDA remains an ever-present fear for JJ resident women contradicting the dominant As Krishna-ji togovernment will come? Which government will go? How will which government behave with us? generally problematic in its refusal to acknowledge the very real dangers of domestic abuse, dowry violence, or sexual assault within the home; it is particularly false for JJ resident women whose overall insecurity is rooted in the precariousness of their homes. Moreover, as the following conversational exchange between Krishna-ji, and fellow Aradhaknagar resident Seema indicates, the intersecting struggles of JJ resident women at times requires them to subordinate one need in pursuit of another: Krishnaji  The main thing is, we should get a sewer put in our colony...  Seema    Krishnaji    Seema  Sewer will not be put for you, it will be put for the haveli [mansion] that big sewer will be put for the big houses and the big parking.   82 Unlike Seema and Krishna-ji, the women living in the imagined havelis of the future which Seema -class residencConsequently, both of these issues remain largely ignored within dominant discourses and state     they nevertheless constitute a cohesive and identifiable group with shared interests persists within popular discourse and among all of my female research participants themselves. Indeed, it is the persistence of this notion of a shared identity that allows for the erasure of the experiences of poor women and the generalization of that of middle-class women. It is thus useful to examine what it is that conceptually constitutes this shared identity. During all of my initial interviews with JJ resident women in the city, when I asked them to tell me the specifics of their daily activities, the women inevitably responded by glossing over their domestic chores and adding some variation of how foreign or economically privileged I might otherwise be, as an adult woman I necessarily understood and performed basic domestic activities such as cooking, cleaning, washing clothes, considering the fact that the middle and upper class women for whom many of the JJ resident workers is largely predicated on middle and upper class women not having to engage in domestic work. Yet, the notion that the domestic sphere is a feminine one and that consequently all domestic concerns and responsibilities are necessarily that of women persisted.    83 Illustratively, Dr. Martha Farrell,56 co-director of the NGO PRIA, shared her observations of this notion in practice both within her own organization and while conducting trainings for an initiative57 58 in neighboring villages. Within the context of her NGO, Martha pointed out that while she and others had worked very hard to establish organizational policy that took into account the safety of women staff in the field, as well as family friendly policies such as flexible working hours, maternity and paternity leave, and childcare; certain gendered expectations of domesticity persisted among the staff. For instance, while the organization employs support staff to handle its cooking and cleaning needs, and despite her prominent position as co-director, as a woman she is still the only one in upper management who oversees these activities. Similarly, she pointed out that during her time training women to work in panchayats, the expectation of domesticity and deference to men persisted  And within the system of panchayats and munithe women to speak, even though they belonged to the panchayat or the municipality. If there were chairs, the men were sitting on the chairs; the women sitting on the floor.  Women being asked to make tea for meetings, including the Sarpanch59                                                             56 A year after I interviewed her, Dr. Martha Farrell was tragically killed along with 13 other people in a terrorist attack in a guesthouse in Kabul, Afghanistan on May 13, 2015. She was in Kabul leading a gender training workshop on behalf of the Aga Khan Foundation. Her death remains a shock to me and all those who knew her.  57 The passage of the 73rd & 74th amendments to the Indian Constitution in 1992 formally incorporated panchayats within the framework of municipalities as the form of local self-governance in small towns, rural areas, and semi-urban areas. The 74th amendment also required the reservation of no less than 1/3 of the seats in said municipalities for women, including those from Scheduled Castes and Scheduled tribes.  58 elders and existed throughout South Asia. In contemporary India, panchayats are formally recognized local government bodies with elected members that operate mainly in small towns and villages (also see footnote 12 above).    59 A Sarpanch is the elected leader of a panchayat.   84 in politics or work outside the home, her domestic duties were expected to remain her paramount obligation: What we found were issues of family and having young children were a major .  Typically what happens is that in  because your mother, your sister-in-law, and other women will take on your role.  -laws to look after, the expectation is you will do it all.  And then you can do   Often, the result of this expectation was the withdrawal of many women from active participation in the panchayats, either through their own decision or because of family pressure to do so.         However, perhaps the most salient feature of what constitutes womanhood that consistently emerged both within ethnographic encounters with women participants and more broadly within November 1, 2013 headline of the , Martha shared with me that one of her co-workers, a twenty-generally unafraid to speak her mind, had been struggling with how to handle a man on her morning commute who had begun using the cover of the crowded bus to rub his body against hers. Martha and her colleagues wherein some had suggested the woman change her commute route, while ot the issue than to confront it b  85 clothes were you wearing? How do you knoturn a blind eye to things, and women do not want to confront, because who is going to support you?  Who is going to support you?  So a lot of women take that way out.  Like Martha and her coworker, most of the women I spoke with were neither surprised by the harassment of women by men, nor did they expect to be supported or believed if they report such matters to authorities or their families. Rather, they expected other women to understand, commiserate, and when possible, help each other in finding ways to negotiate and minimize their shared suffering.  For instance, while there seems to be a resignation that most politicians and officials are corrupt and ineffective among most of my research participants, the women of Aradhaknagar and Minister for the preceding fifteen years. At the core of their critique was the belief that, as a woman, she should understand the difficulties of running a household and that the policies during her tenure should have reflected this understanding and ameliorated their struggles. Instead, many felt that things had gotten harder for them during her incumbency. As Raj, a woman in her forties who has lived in Kalandar colony for over twenty years told me once, while sitting and drying her hair on the rooftop terrace of her jhuggi: Whatever has happened, it is during ShShe is also a lady but she never thought about womencame, flour was 4rs/kg today it is 22rs/kg. Oil was 20rs, it is 100rs now, onions were 10rs/kg now it is 100rs/kg, garlic 100rs/kg, and green chilies Emphasis added]  in c-overall. Yet the disappointment the women of Aradhaknagar and Kalandar Colony expressed to   86 --could also argue based on the rising cost of living described by Raj above, but rather in her failure as a woman to mitigate the struggles of other women.   During one of my initial visits to Aradhaknagar, I sat chatting with a small group of women in a shaded area in front of a small community park which was crowded by makeshift homes constructed out of tarp and plastic sheets by families whose jhuggis had been demolished a few years prior in order to build a flyover. As a rather lively group discussion ensued and more women began to join the group, a woman named Seema who was in her late forties began to vocalize her lamented that a w There is no unity among us! At night we say something, but in the morning the man says somethingand then we melt. We forget...the fire burning within goes out at that time. Because in a woman motherhood and love for   Here, Seema points to an understanding of womanhself/identity with its own needs and desires. While other residents did not explicitly refer to such competing dual identities, their dissatisfaction with the unwillingness or inability of their fellow women to form some kind of united resistance against their shared oppression was a common  However, perhaps because Seema was so outspoken and seemed to have no qualms about openly criticizing anyone; or perhaps because unlike some of the women who had lived in the colony most of their lives, she had only moved to the colony as an adult after marrying a resident; many of the other women seemed resistant to her claims during our group discussion. After   87 Krishna-ji, who was older and more well-liked by the women, interrupted her by saying she was just airing her personal grievances; the following exchange occurred between Seema, her daughter Kamla who was in her late-teens and had joined the group late upon her return from school, Krishna-ji, and Shiva, another longtime resident of the colony in her late forties: Seema  This is not my personal matter, you keep quiet a bit [to Krishna-ji]. We should speak, the outsider should get to know what is happening in this power a woman has, how much she is losing!  Shiva  Is a woman only not sitting in front of you? What proof does she need? Is she not a woman?   Seema  The power that she has, that power is yet to come in us. She came alone   Kamla  You go with your daughter if you send her till that border there!   Seema  There is so much injustice in our country!   As the above excerpt illustrates, for some of the JJ resident women that I came to know, my presence signified both a shared womanhood as well as a divergent one. It is apparent from this domestic routine entails, that to a certain extent the women of Aradhaknagar agreed upon my sharing their conceptualization of womanhood and thus our collective suffering. Yet, the fact that I had travelled alone from a foreign country, that I had been able to make that decision and execute ified that my experience above implies that my freedom to do those things, or rather their inability to allow their daughters to travel alone is illustrative of the shared suffering of Indian womanhood in particular. Interestingly, there was no suggestion by Seema or any of the other JJ resident women I spoke with that Indian women in higher socio-economic classes had a divergent experience then   88 their own in terms of d suffering of women like her at the hands of men would eventually push them to transgress the  Power comes to a woman when her courage increases due to over-harassment... when harassment gets too much. When she thinks that the lemon has been squeezed too much and has become sour, then she learns to speak! The men only teach her... a man makes a woman step forward! A woman does not have so much power to leave everything and   For Seema, while a shared suffering was characteristic of being a contemporary Indian woman, it was not immutable. Similar to the wave of resistance and critique that emerged against sexual violence towards (primarily middle-class) women in public spaces after years of apparent apathy, catalyzed by the Nirbhaya Attack in 2012; a broader resistance to all forms of suffering routinely experienced by women inside and outside the home seemed inevitable to her. Gender, Violence, & the Postcolonial Indian State  While the ongoing issue of sexual assault against women in Delhi has increasingly come into the spotlight in recent years, a historic view of both acute and structural violence illustrates h its women citizens. For instance, Das (1999 & 2007) illustrates the intersection of the social intersection helped to construct a particular national gender dynamic that continues to intertwine patriarchal kinship structures with national and sectarian identity. She argues that women became marked as victims of sexual assault, as objects of trade between men and nations, and as symbols   89 of national honor and purity during the violence of Partition and the ensuing political negotiations (1995: 6-8; 56-women from their abductors blatantly disregarded the desires of those women who wanted to while perpetuating the rhetoric of restoring women to their families as a matter of national honor, Das (2007) shows how such state policies are consistent with the conceptualization of women as icons or embodiments of each nation over which men (as heads of households and by extension as heads of the nation) had dominion and obligation to protect (18-30).  Indeed, it was this same conceptualization that prompted particular expressions of violence against women during Partition such as the rape, sexual humiliation, and the mutilation of private parts. That is to say, the types of violence inflicted were distinctly sexual and formulated as attacks on women was framed primarily as a violation of their male kin, and by extension as a violation of condemned, this underlying social framework of gender remains. As a result, the everyday violence perpetuated against women within the patriarchal family and state system goes unrecognized and continues to make such violence as that committed against women during abducted women was framed as a partial corrective for the explicit violence experienced by them to remain where they were was itself illustrative of gendered structures of violence emanating from the state.     90 the patriarchal family and the state (discursively constituted as masculine); I would argue that the failure of these social/state institutions to effectively protect all women is not perceived as a failure all identities through the newly drawn lines of demarcation; in the context of violence within the nation, the various intersecting identities of the victimincluding class, caste, religion, ethnicityand their relation to that of the perpetrator determine how the violence is popularly characterized60 and whether it warrants the protection/intervention of the state.61 For instance, the physical or sexual assault of poor or Dalit women by wealthy or upper-caste men, while not uncommon, rarely garners the amount of public outrage or triggers legislative and policy changes like those discussed below following the Nirbhaya attack.62                                                            60   61 Whether in terms of more stringent policy/legislation, or through punitive adjudication.  62 As an example, I point to the March 2014 abduction, rendering unconscious, and rape of four poor Dalit girls ranging in age from 13 to 18 in the neighboring state of Haryana. Their attackers were five middle-class Jat [upper-caste] boys who abducted the girls as they walked together away from their homes one evening to pee. The boys later used their car to transport and leave the unconscious girls on a train platform miles away from their village. The  attempts to have their assailants tried and punished was marked by caste-bias, negligence, and general mishandling on the part of the Haryana police and judicial system; ultimately prompting the families to camp out at anding justice. For further details of the case see Dubey (2015).    91 unrecognizablethe state. Various norms of proper behavior and ways of being which are both deeply classed and genderedcorrelating 63 when adjudicating rape casescombine to render JJ resident women and their daily experiences of constraint and coercion fically, JJ resident women remain inconceivable epistemological frames (Butler 2009). Thus, neither their experiences of acute sexual violence nor their routine experiences of structural violencesuch as safely accessing adequate toilet facilitiesare recognizable. Similarly, Akhil Gupta (2012) argues that the structural violence of poverty emanating from the Indian stateincluding endemic hunger and malnutrition, and the lack of access to basic necessities such as shelter, clothing, clean water, and sanitationis not ,-5 &15).64 This is perhaps why the violence of inadequate infrastructure such as the daily threat of injury or death associated with traversing train tracks to reach the nearest school; the threat of sexual assault while attempting to use communal toilets after dark; or the ongoing health threat posed by children playing in and ingesting toxic garbage left uncollected by the MCD discussed examine some other ways in which structural violence manifests as constraint and coercion in the                                                            63   64 thanatopolitics similar to that theoripower (2012:5-6).     92 lives of my JJ resident interlocutors as they attempt to navigate state bureaucracy and have their basic needs met. Bechara65: Intersections of Gender and Poverty within a Bureaucratic Matrix  As the preceding sections of this chapter demonstrate, while there are many convergences in the ways in which dominant understandings of gender shape the experiences of women in Delhi, there are also significant differences in the ways in which broad notions of Indian womanhood manifest within and impact the lives of particular women according to their various other many JJCs, their lived experiences are distinctly formed at the intersection of their gendered identity and their socio-wherein they must continually negotiate for security of housing and access to basic resources and services. During a small group conversation in Aradhaknagar, I sat with a handful of residents in front of the former community park now occupied by the tents of displaced former residents. Krishna-ji, who had lived in the colony her whole life, in a resigned tone shared some of her daily struggles thusly: food, where will I get it from, if he gives me 100 rupees? There are 6 children in the sense that we can get things done, we are tied since generations by the elders, -in-law and daughters are educated, today they are controlling a bit. In our life there was no control.  She illustrates here the intersecting struggles women living in JJCs like hers must constantly negotiate. As a woman, she is expected to run her household. This includes purchasing the groceries she can manage with the little money at her disposal and trying to make it stretch to feed                                                            65 used by both JJ resident women and others to characterize them.   93 all the people in her household, as well as acquiring clean water with which to cook and clean. While she shares a jhuggi with her husband who brings home an income, ultimately, the home is her domain and making sure that the income is enough to keep the family fed, clothed, and clean stretch the rupees for food etcetera, she is still dependent on a virtually non-existent infrastructure and often corrupt low-level officials to access basic resources such as clean water, sanitation, and ration cards.  Moreover, both practical requirements of daily domestic work and expectations of proper gendered behavior necessitate that negotiations between women like Krishna-ji and governmental institutions be mediated or at least supported by either community pradhans, who themselves expect bribes; or men from within the family, who are often too busy working and perhaps do not daily. As the discussion continued, Maya, who is also long-time resident of Aradhaknagar, told me that the local pradhan asks for 2-3 thousand rupees to get ration cards issued, and even if the to deliver, if he does at all. When I asked her why the mediation of the pradhan was necessary she added: Why is a pradhan needed? When there is a pradhan, and no other person is able to do it, then we will go to the pradhan only, right? You want to get work done sitting nt... time will get wasted... here no one has time to even die, if we take our work [the Pradhan] will also say, I am also busy... I am also busy... listen to me, forget pradhan our own family men are busy. Tell your husband we have to go there, he will sapradhan for any [bureaucratic] work.    94 I had a similar conversation about the need for powerful intermediaries to access basic services with Amarvati. Originally form the Azamgarh district of the neighboring state of Uttar Pradesh, she had moved to Kalandar Colony twenty-two years prior and lived in her jhuggi with her husband and five children. Irritated by the constant need for mediation by the Member of Local Assembly (MLA) in order to access government services, she said: I heard once in a meeting that MLA has no role to play, but it is there that in all the work MLA will put his seal. In that MLA has no role, everyone can do it on their places, in this MLA has no role tnumber 6 comes, they fill it, whatever ID is there after putting it, they fill it and they get it made. But in Delhi, I have heard in meetings that here only in most of s seal. But MLA has no role in it. This that way.   Nevertheless, despite the knowledge that they are being exploited by elected officials and a frustration with the status quo, as poor women their access to formal avenues of resistance are very limited. After reading some articles in the TOI about JJ residents running for office in the 2013 Delhi Assembly elections, I once asked some women from Aradhaknagar if any of them had ever considered running for local office. Krishna-assistant Kanika started a campaign that was sympathetic to the needs of women like her, it would be easier for them to just vote in support. Pointing to the truth of Krishna-an incident in which she had confronted some people from the electricity company who were overcharging the residents the exact circumstances surrounding the incident with the police is unclear, what is clear is that the threat of social censure is very real for women who openly defy the expected norms of proper   95 womanhood. The expectation of adherence to these norms persists within their own communities, even while the womanhood of JJ residents remains unrecognized by the state and dominant middle-class discourses. This is consistent with the previous discussions in this chapter which indicate a cross-cutting sense of shared womanhood predicated on shared suffering among my JJ resident interlocutors. Additionally, within the context of colonies like Aradhaknagar and Kalandar colony, challenging the established system of patronage and vote banks between long standing elected officials and JJ residents by running against a corrupt or ineffective official would certainly put a woman at risk of such censure.  In the following section, I shift from this discussion of structural violence towards one of acute violence and the spectacle of rape that dominated middle-class and media discourses of ment during my time in Delhi. Specifically, I explore the ways in -political landscape and gendered ways of being in Delhi in its aftermath.  The City after Nirbhaya While Delhi had been mark a palpable shift in the public and political discourse of the city wherein the dark moniker was no longer simply accepted as an inevitability, but rather a rallying cry for change and accountability. The brutal and fatal gang-rape of 23 year old student Jyoti Singh, popularly known as Nirbhaya, in December of 2012 triggered a series of political, legal, and socio-cultural responses and brought to the forefront the heretofore largely taken for granted hostility of Delhi towards women. A year later, a December 31, 2013 Times of India year-end review article with the headline w 2013b). A section of another TOI   96 influential, and gave succor and sp). While I would argue that the implied new power-position of women in the city is overstated in these articles, the heightened focus around the safety of women in public spaces certainly allowed for the introduction of broader access to full citizenship into the public discourse and onto the political agenda. Indeed by the time I arrived in Delhi in the autumn of 2013, with the local elections on the horizon and the national elections to follow several months later, the treatment and experiences of womenparticularly their safety, had become a key political issue incorporated to varying extents into the campaign political actors largely excluded poor JJ resident women by subsuming them and their needs into ed on the experiences and concerns of the middle-class. While illustrating the shared condition of precariousness among all women in do so through attempts at locating the impact of broader shifts in gendered government policy and legislation, or lack there-of, on the lives of poor and JJ resident women. Securing Women The government response directly following the Nirbhaya attack both in the particular handling of that case and in terms of broader policy change was distinctively prompt and decisive. Although Jyoti Singh ultimately died from her extensive injuries, the government assembled a committee of physicians within days of the attack to ensure she received the best medical care. She was later airlifted to a hospital in Singapore to receive specialized care, where she eventually   97 died. It is important to note here that there was in fact existing legislation66 that covers emergency treatment and allows for government subsidized further medical assistance for victims of violent crimes at the discretion of high ranking police officials. However, the involvement of both local and central government leadership in tindeed unique due to the high profile nature of the case. Illustrating the disparity between the dispensation of government assistance in the Nirbhaya case and other rape cases in the city, a November 11, 2013 TOI that despite promises by the Delhi government to amend its Victim Compensation Scheme to ned unratified (Chitlangia 2013).67 As a result, many survivors continued to suffer the financial burden of medical treatments, physical rehabilitation, and lost wages long after their attack. As a case in point, the article points to a 15 year old girl (alias: Rajni) who had been raped by a neighbor the me eight months after applying. She is one of six siblings, and her father who is a day laborer was struggling to pay her medical bills with his already overburdened earnings (Ibid). This points to how structural violence in the form of institutional apathy and bureaucratic lags can compound the                                                            66 In February of 2012 (10 months prior to the Nirbhaya attack), the Delhi NCT Government passed the Delhi Victims Compensation Scheme 2011, which established a framework whereby victims of violent crimes or their legal dependents could request financial support, depending on the type of crime and the severity of their injuries, to cover costs of medical treatment and rehabilitation, as well as potentially lost wages and other damages. Clause 8 of this legislation also allows police station-chiefs and Magistrates to order emergency medical aid to victims.      67 In 2015, the legislation was finally amended to expand the factors to be considered for awarding compensation, to revise the quantum of compensation, to include both mental and physical harm, and to expand the list of sexual immediate/interim financial assistance to victims following ongoing reports of delays and bureaucratic roadblocks in dispensation of funds.    98 suffering of poor victims of sexual assault, even when policies meant to ameliorate their financial burdens exist on paper.     Similarly, the arrest and prosecution of the Nirbhaya attackers was notably swift. Her assailants were captured within days of the attack, and through a special fast-track court, the five adult attackers as well as the juvenile68 attacker were tried and convicted in less than a year.69 -f rape and sexual assault were established in 2013, including 6 courts to serve Delhi (Thakur 2013). Unfortunately, while the establishment of these courts was meant to give precedent to and accelerate the processing of sexual offense cases, the exclusive relegation of such cases in Delhi to only six district courts had the opposite effect of decreasing the number of such cases processed even while reports of criminal sexual offences steadily increased. While statistics showed a five-fold increase in reported crimes against women70)a December 16, 2013 TOI process 415 cases in 2013 with over a thousand cases still pending (Shakil 2013). In contrast, from -700 sexual offense cases annually (Ibid).  Nevertheless, the creation of these courts, along with the passage of the Criminal Law Amendment Act (2013), and the Sexual Harassment of Women at Workplace (Prevention,                                                            68 One of the attackers was 17 years old at the time of the attack, as a result, he was tried separately and convicted under the Juvenile Justice Act and on August 31, 2013 he was sentenced to three years in a reform facility (which is the maximum sentence for a minor) including time already served (Nigam 2014:209).  69 9 months after the attack, 4 out of the 5 adult attackers were found guilty and sentenced to the death penalty. The fifth adult attacker was found hanging in his cell before the completion of the trial and was deemed to be a suicide by the police. (Nigam 2014:209).  70 -    99 Prohibition, and Redressal) Act 2013, have opened a space which allowed for a narrative shift by acknowledging and criminalizing various ways in which certain spaces and contexts are made hostile to them. Unfortunately, either during implementation or through their limited scope,71 these potentially inclusive policies ultimately offered little substantive change in the lives of women who did not already fit into the proper middle-class ideal.   The expansion of the Indian Penal Code (IPC) to include acid attacks, often associated with voyeurism and stalking implicitly recognizes the potential hostility of private and domestic spaces, as does the sexual harassment act for the workplace. Moreover, a closer examination of the language and wording of these legislative documents reveals an underlying premise that women have a right over their bodies and sexuality72 as well as a right to safely occupy (certain semi-public) spaces. Clause 3.1 of the Sexual Harassment of Women at Workplace No woman shall be subjected to sexual harassment at any in its broad scope of inclusion73 which attempts to countermand the constructions of respectability and proper womanhood often used to render certain women outside the scope of legitimate                                                            71 See the discussion of the 2013 Sexual Harassment of Women at Workplace Act in relation to its impact on above.   72 The major exception here is that, like the previous laws, the new legislation does not recognize rape within the context of marriage unless the couple is separated and living apart. Essentially, marriage legally endows the husband with a blanket consent.   73 It is notable that, as indicated in the title of the legislation, sexual harassment is exclusively imagined to be a crime against women. There is no recognition that men or people of other genders (Trans, gender non-conforming etc.) may also experience sexual harassment. Similarly, while the Criminal Law Amendment Act various types and contexts of rape, it is nonetheless defined as an act by men against women.     100 victimization due to their social/sexual history, their socio-economic class or caste, or the nature of their employment.  Similarly, the Criminal Law Amendment Act amends section 53A of the Indian Evidence Act (1872) to state that sexual experience with any person shall not be relevant on the issue of such consent or the quality -examination of the victim as to the general immoral character, or previous sexual experience, of such victim with important narrativeand thus sociopoliticaldecide what happens to her and her body by placing her consent as the paramount determinant of context of the alleged crime. Secondly, by assuming an inherent and exclusive right of all women to consent74 with regards to their bodies, it removes the expectation that women have to prove their adequate respectability and purity of the crime onto alleged assailants. Such legislation attempts to narrow the gap between these citizenship rights and the lived experiences of women in India by codifying certain aspects of those claims and offering potential avenues of legal recourse for their violation. However, these laws and policies are not interpreted and implemented in a socio-political bubble but rather through existing dominant epistemological frames discussed above which work                                                            74     101 tresult, a gap between the codified laws and their implementation, a blind-spot in the coverage of said laws over certain populations of women, as well as the persistence of narratives of -track Judge (ASJ) Virender Bhat, who presiof acquTOI  They [young women] voluntarily elope with their lovers to voluntarily explore the greener pastures of bodily pleasure, and on return to their homes, they conveniently fabricate the story of kidnapping and rape in order to escape scolds and harsh treatments from parents.    The girls are morally and socially bound not to indulge in sexual intercourse before a proper marriage, and if they do so, it will be to their peril and they cannot be heard to cry later that it was rape.  She [a woman who has pre-marital sex] must understand that she is engaging in an act which not only is immoral but also against the tenets of every religion. No religion in the world allows pre-marital sex. It is becoming a very difficult job, nowadays, for the courts to differentiate the genuine rape cases from the false ones. The cases like the present one create a well-founded belief among the public as well as the judiciary that the rape-related laws are used with impunity. (Singh 2014)  comments above found 75 but were rather apparently based on the                                                            75 Moreover, section 53A of the Indian Evidence Act (1872) amended by the Criminal Law Amendment Act discussed earlier in this chapter clearly prohibits the use of the accusers sexual history and questions of her    102 ). In response, a division bench and had the potential to influence a lighter treatment of sexual harassment and sexual assault cases by police. However, the record (Ibid). Moreover, the verdicts of such cases over which he presided have not been reviewed, and he continues to preside over the Dwarka special FTC in Delhi. Indeed, he made the final two comments included above the day after  rampant false accusations of sexual assault and harassment as a means of enacting revenge or as a tool of blackmail have emerged, particularly among men in positions of power, counteracting  moderate legislative gains discussed above. In December 2013, following sexual harassment allegations against a former Supreme Court judge, union minister Farooq Abdullah publically proclaimed that he was hesitant to employ a female secretary or even talk to women for of ). Along similar lines, in November of the same year Samajwadi Party leader Naresh Aggarwal asserted that the n---he knew, judges  )   103 Considering the public and familial backlash faced by women who are known to have been sexually assaulted-victimization and assault by police officers, and public speculation and shaming of their moral character and sexual history within the mediathe notion that there are women casually lining up to falsely accuse men of such acts is at best a gross exaggeration. Yet, this emerging narrative attempts to reformulate public discourse about sexual assault and harassment by repositioning accused rapists as victims forever marked and socially ostracized due to false accusations despite the simultaneously recurring media. As many others had commented before her, on January 29th, 2014, Dr. Asha Mirge, a ing a public political event that could have gone for a matinee or an early evening sho). And while Nirbhaya was still being posthumously implicated in her own attack a year after her death, on April 11, 2014, Samajwadi Party Chief Mulayam Singh Yadav declared during an election rally in the neighboring state of UP that the new legislation assigning the death penalty to repeat rapists ladke ladke hain. Kai baar, jab ladke-ladki mein matbhed ho gaya to ladki jaake bayaan deti hai ki rape ho gaya [boys will be boys. Following a boy-girl quarrel, the girl complains she was rape).  The above comments, which are all too common, illustrate that while women who have survived sexual assault continue to be questioned and blamed for their attack, even repeat rapists manage to garner open sympathy and the benefit of the doubt. During a November 11, 2014   104 acquittal judgment of two men (apparently falsely) accused of drugging and raping a woman, ASJ Bhat gave the following impassioned statement76: It can't be lost sight of that the false accusation of rape causes intense miseries and humiliation to the accused. The rape accused are looked down upon in the society. Rape being the most hated crime in society, men accused of this heinous offence are ostracized from the society. Their plight continues even after their acquittal from the court as nobody takes note of the acquittal. They are treated as rape convicts even during the trial of the case. It is very difficult, nay impossible, to restore the lost honor and dignity of a rape accused after his acquittal from the court. They are never compensated for the emotional distress, humiliation and pecuniary damage suffered by them. (State vs. Vikash Tyagi & Manish Yadav, p.15 (2014)) While the emotional and psychological trauma of enduring a false accusation for a violent crime should not be minimized, it is important to note the lack of at least a comparable level of compassion and outrage for the victims of such violent crimes. In fact, as the remarks by various officials discussed above illustrates, the level of social humiliation and ostracization described by ASJ Bhat during his adjudication seems more consistent with the experiences of rape victims than those accused of the crime, particularly those acquitted of such acts due to false accusations. Thus, it seems even more likely that women said to have made false allegations would endure even more public backlash and social censure considering the shaming and, at best, insensitive treatment of actual rape victims.  to this threat works in tandem with the narrative of respectability and proper Indian womanhood previously discussed to once again remove the onus of sexual assault and harassment away from men. Moreover, it allows for the further exclusion of women from certain non-domestic spaces, particularly workplaces historically dominated by men. Even as legislation such as the 2013 Sexual Harassment of Women in the Workplace Act attempts to codify the right of women to                                                            76 Full judgement document available online at << https://indiankanoon.org/doc/139080284/>>    105 women pose to their male colleagues helps to de-legitimize their right to occupy those spaces. In employed, these narratives serve to further discourage the women from reporting any incidents of harassment. The existing power dynamics between the women and their employers, as well as the inherent precariousness of their positions make the probability of their successfully addressing an incidence of harassment and keeping their jobs very low.   Surveillance as Security     In addition to reforms in punitive legislation and policy, state actors also took steps towards safety in public spaces. While safety from sexual assault was the explicit aim of most of these proposed policies; it should be noted that none of them included plans to increase the safety of JJCs through the provision of adequate and safely accessible toilet facilities to minimize JJ resident various state departments and ministries submitted proposals ranging from GPS based monitoring of public transportation and the installation of live camera feeds into buses to offer real-time assistance to identifying and mapping out areas where woman are particularly vulnerable. Yet, by the end of 2013, proposals were still being considered and no allocations had been made (Dhawan 2013). However, the local Delhi government did launch several ventures of its own. ThDepartment of Transportation increased regulation of public service vehicles by requiring the   106 posting guards on its night buses (Banerjee 2013). Notably, many of the proposed interventions were predicated on increased surveillance and policing, and thus are ultimately linked to the  rban spaces and traversing said spaces.77 Other scholars have also pointed to the utility of surveillance as a means of regulating and disciplining bodies (Foucault 1977) and as a means of creating exclusionary spaces (Crawford (1992); Judd (1995)). Using interviews with women in Finland and Scotland regarding their responses to the use of surveillance cameras in public spaces such as metro stations and shopping malls, Koskela (2002) points out that while women felt safe to a certain extent, they also felt uneasy, embarrassed, guilty without reason, and even fearful (269). The disembodied nature of a CCTV camera along with the uncertainty of who is watching on the other side creates a sense of mistrust. Similarly, I assert that while the use of cameras throughout sence may be intended as deterrents for would-be assailants, for women whose visibility is already magnified and scrutinized in public spaces, these measures also add yet another layer of circumscription to their movements. As illance can be thought of as the re-embodiment of women, as an  Moreover, for many JJ resident women, whose routine experiences with police officers involve extortion and threats, the increased presence of police officers is unlikely to elicit feelings                                                            77 See discussion in chapter 1 on Chakrabarty (1992), Kaviraj (1997), Phadke et al (2011), Hansen (2001), and Lukose (2009).    107 of security. Indeed, the only reference my JJ resident interlocutors made to police officers was within the context of their ongoing harassment and demands for pay-offs.78 Therefore, I would argue that a sense of security with police is a privilege of class that assumes the state and its agents raison d'être is to serve ns79wherein long standing JJCs continue to be razed in response to middle-class complaints of pollution, blight, and criminal threat, JJ resident women do not fit into dominant narratives of the police departments exist. Indeed, the existence of Criminal Procedure Code (CrPc) section 46(4),80 which prohibits police officers from arresting women and taking them into custody between sunset and sunrise (outside of the most exceptional cases) in an attempt to shield them from sexual misconduct by police officers, does little to inspire a sense of security in police presence among women in general and JJ resident women in particular.  Nevertheless, the Delhi Police Department claims to have made attempts to transform the way it deals with crimes against women. In a December 15, 2013 TOI full page commemoration more sensit). In this article, special commissioner of police                                                            78   79 See discussion of PILs in the Rights to the City and Legitimate Belonging section of chapter 1.   80 On March 08, 2014, a TOI article reported that four Delhi police officers had been found guilty of violating this ordinance after a woman who had been detained overnight accused them of molesting her while she was in custody (Shakil 2013)    108 complaints; (2) women are discouraged from filing police reports and pursuing cases, and instead C. As a for crimes against women. Today, no woman complainant is turned away from a police station.  It is doubtful however, that this newly acquired sensitivity towards women applies to poor JJ resident women who continue to be routinely harassed by the police, or that the women themselves would indeed go to a police station to report such a crime. Yet, while the scope and sustainability of these changes remains to be seen, they may be a factor in the apparent spike in reports of crimes against women. Nevertheless, the growing narrative of rampant false accusations discussed above brings to mind questions of how difficult the cases will be to prosecute even if they reach the courtroom.          Politicizing Rape and the Will to Empower  While lacking the weight of the official policy changes discussed above, the election season with its accompanying campaign platforms and attempts to woo voters created a dynamic public TOI been part of a political movement.81 But now there is such a level of dissatisfaction that the                                                            81   109 politicization of gender issues is ). Metro stations, billboards, walls and sides of buildings throughout Delhi held campaign posters of major parties promising to political hopefuls and the sitting government claiming credit for, or an established record of supporting, successful initiatives for women. One ad for the BJP appearing periodically in the Times of India which were five brief statements in smaller font:    Time for Change. Time for Modi.  Next to the words was a large photograph of Narendra Modi, who was running for Prime Minister at the time, looking directly into and pointing his index finger at the camera reminiscent of the  In another TOI ad for the incumbent Congress Party, Minister of Women and Child Development (WCD) Krishna Tirath appears in three photographs. In the first photo she is standing by herself smiling dressed in a red sari and wearing a large bindi on her forehead, in the second photo she is serving food to an unidentified woman at what appears to be a Ministry of WCD event, and in the last photo she appears to be placing a garland around the neck of another unidentified woman. The photos, noticeably lacking any male subjects, seem to be emphasizing projects. Indeed, the first photograph, which occupies a third of the Ad space, gives no indicators                                                            protests was indeed unprecedented. (F(2012) and Subramaniam (2004))    110 of the context in which it was taken, and could be that of any smiling sari-clad middle-class legislation divided under subheadings as follows: Schemes for Nutrition and Health; Schemes for Empowerment and Training; Schemes for Providing Safe Abode; and Key Legislative Initiatives. fo In contrast, BJP and AAP campaigns consistently pointed to the ongoing dangers faced by women in the city often referencing the Nirbhaya attack and the increasing reports of rape in the media to delegitimize press conference, senior party leader Shushma Swaraj promised that BJP would remove Delhthrough lighting, CCTV, and around-the--tection Force that [would] be trained election promises also included exclusive public transportation for women, GPS for all public motorized transportation including auto-rickshaws, taxis, and buses, as well as better training for medical staff dealing with rape and sexual assault victims and simplified FIRs for filing rape charges. In an unusual step, the party also planned to instate mandatory self-defense training for for boys to prevent them from raping.    111 Similarly, the newly emerging AAP also promised to establish Mahila Suraksha Dal  retired military personnel. These MSDs would incorporate men and women representatives from local communities as well as representatives from NGOs with physical environmewomen's security teams would not be a parallel police force but more like private security guards who will not only undertake safety audits to identify key security issues pertaining to women in the community but would also mobilize the local police and administrative machinery to take appropriate action" (Ibid).82  AAP also promised to install CCTV cameras in every police station to ensure that police officers did not ignore incumbent government discussed above, most of the interventions proposed by AAP and BJP to conversely made those spaces less desirable for women to occupy. Similarly, none of the major parties proposed ways to make JJCs safer for their women residents. Also problematic was the apparent lack of critical approach behind the proposed initiatives towards the causes of violence experienced by women in the city and how to address them.                                                               82 Delhi is not an independent state, but rather a union territory. This means that while it has its own legislative assembly, chief minister, and lijurisdiction of the central government. Accordingly, the Delhi Police Department falls under the central influence local officials (including those who would be elected into office during the elections being discussed) have on aspects of policing in the city. This at would fall    112 Circumscription and Self-Defense as Empowerment  -ofrom holding female suspects in custody over-night may provide immediate relief from the real threat of men who grope women in crowded trains and police officers who use their position of power to victimize certain civilians, and mandatory self-defense classes for young girls in schools may give them a certain layer of protection while they move through the city; these initiatives also normalize assaultive behaviors of men, concede swathes of public spaces and hours of the day to them, and teach young girls that they must be vigilant and prepare to fight to protect their bodies while never teaching boys that they must not rape or assault. For instance, there were a few times during my compartment. Each of those times, my female friends and I were met with openly hostile looks by the men in those compartments. Some men refused to move aside to make space for us or to let us of our own which they could not e Similarly, the code that prevents police officers from detaining women after dark is linked to the expectation that respectable women are not meant to be out after sunset. It is this same notion that allowed people like Dr. Mirge discussed above to confidently ask why Nirbhaya had gone to as inevitable, particularly after dark, proper and respectable women are therefore further limited to only occupying the city  113 -turn be cast as (at least partially) responsible for their  blic discourse about women during election season, the meaning of the term seemed ambiguous and broad, often used focus of international political discourse in recent decades, particularly within the context of socio-economic development, the term empowerment remains without a fixed clear meaning. Instead, it is reinvented and deployed in different institutional, spatial, and historical locations by variously positioned social actors. While the term itself arises out of anti-imperialist, radical, and feminist language it has nevertheless been increasingly embraced by governments such as that of India and powerful transnational institutions that have depoliticized the poverty and powerlessness it -2008: xx -4).83  Similarly, in the context of the 2013-2014 election season in Delhi, the term was often deployed by politicians to signify aspaces while glossing over the structural and socially embedded gender inequalities that middle-class) men. Nevertheless, as many politicians declared their vague intentions of demanding accountability and clear plans of action. Newspapers such as the Times of India frequently published Op-                                                           8383 See chapter 6 for further discussions of the use of empowerment narratives as a tool of neoliberal governmentality.   114 TOI undoing of patriarchal myths AAP shares with ). Another TOI article despite the Congress Party and BJwomen, their records show that both parties have been very ineffective at doing so in the past (Varma 2014). Yet, while several of these public critiques were adamant about the need for critical reflection on existing policies and underlying causes for gender based violence and inequality, they also generally lacked a similar critical reflection on the ways in which class impacted these issues. Towards a More Inclusive and Substantive Discourse  discourses to push for more substantial legal and social reforms and publically critique the underlying patriarchy upon which many policies were built. Those who for years had been sexual harassment in the workplace, quotas for women in parliament and more found renewed public interest and political will in their causes. In fact, the Sexual Harassment of Women at Workplace (Prevention, Prohibition, and Redressal) Act which came into effect in late 2013 was based on the Vishaka Guidelines, a set of procedural guidelines which were drafted to by the Indian Supreme Court in 1997 for dealing with sexual harassment cases during the judgement of the PIL Vishaka and others vs. State of Rajasthan84 which established legal president                                                            84 In 1992, Bhanwari Devi, a Dalit social worker in Rajasthan interceded to stop a child-marriage from taking place within a local upper-caste family. As retribution, five men from the family raped her but were acquitted. Outraged   115 enacted as legislation until after the Nirbhaya case, having been tabled for over fifteen years. In the weeks leading up to the Delhi Assembly elections taking place on December 4th, 2013, two important documents were released in attand empowerment and instead innumerate and demand a commitment for specific and more inclusive policy changes within the platforms of all the major political parties. mpiled and published jointly on November 28th by Woman Power Connect, a national level advocacy organization established to bridge the gap between grassroots activism and government policy, and the Center for Social Research (CSR) a Delhi based non-girls of India, guarantee (WPC & CSR 2013:1). Aimed both at the upcoming 2013 local assembly elections across the country such as those in Delhi, as well as the general elections in spring 2014, the Gender Manifesto presents a broad and intersectional range of demands that attempts to address issues faced by all Indian women. It demands that political parties take an active role in addressing lth and nutrition, work opportunities, and education and that they take further diversity and existing inequality among women and asks that political partieattention to the needs and priorities of marginalized and vulnerable women such as Dalits, Tribals, enumerate a long list of policy reforms specified                                                            Vishaka arguing that Devi incurred the ire of her rapists while performing her job as social worker and used this as a launching board to establish laws against sexual harassment in the work place.  Complete court judgement available online at: << https://indiankanoon.org/doc/1031794/>>      116 empowerment, political empowerment, social infrastructure, education, health and nutrition, water and sanitation, environment, and violence in private and public spaces (Ibid: 2).   The second document, written specifically for the Delhi elections and released on December 1st by the local branch of international social justice and advocacy NGO Avaaz was titled the Delhi Womanifesto and included initial signatories ranging from the general secretary of All India 85 awards, to individual scholars, activists, and journalists. Asking all candidates running for Chief Minister (CM) of Delhi to commit to a six point plan for protecting the safety and ensuring equal  Since Delhi rose up against rape and sexual assault last December, over 1300 rape cases and thousands of molestation cases have been reported. But, despite a round of reforms, lakhs of assaults remain invisible to the police and the judicial eye, and Delhi's women still do not have the freedom that is every person's birthright. With this election Delhi's citizens are demanding more action to stop these crimes against women. Slogans and limited reform are not enough. [Emphasis added]   It goes on to demand government funded comprehensive public education to end the culture of gender based violence with curricula for each level of schooling; detailed plans of action for implementing and enforcing laws against gender based violence; the creation and enforcement a public protocol for police response to crimes against women; the establishment of more FTCs for crimes of violence against women with reforms of court procedures to address victims' needs; the creation of one-stop 24 hour crisis centers in hospitals to provide comprehensive services to women who are victims of violent crimes; and infrastructural changes to ensure that Delhi is a safe                                                            85 The Padma Bhushan and Padma Shri are the third and fourth highest civilian awards in India, respectively. The Padma Bhushan is given as recognition of distinguished service to the nation in any field, while the Padma Shri is awarded in recognition of distinguished contribution in the Arts, Education, Industry, Literature, Science, Sports, Medicine, Social Service and Public Affairs. They are awarded publically by the President of India during the annual Republic Day ceremonies in Delhi.   117 city in which to move around. Yet, while the Delhi Womanifesto demanded broader infrastructural changes that could indeed improve the overall safety of JJ resident women; the overwhelming -class. However, taken together these two documents offered the most critical and comprehensive plan of action both addressing some of the social and structural causes behind gender based violence and inequality imagined beyond safety and financial independence, and Indian women can be understood not as a monolith but rather as heterogeneous group with intersectional identities and needs as well as overlapping interests.  Moreover, while the campaign platforms of the various political parties towards curbing analysis of the deeper issues behind gender based violence and inequality, their willingness to publically support the Womanifesto (to varying extents)86 violence. This was further illustrated by the swift public backlash that consistently challenged comments by politicians and government officials blaming sexual assault victims for being out -blaming narratives is disheartening, the insistence by civil society groups, journalists, and individuals that officials                                                            86 While the incumbent CM Sheila Dixit of the Congress Party publically endorsed the Womanifesto, CM candidates goals to the press.    118 intolerance for these sedimented sexist narratives. Conclusion  This chapter has focused on the ways in which dominant middle-class discourses on of the state with its women citizens. I drew on of violenceboth acute and structuralagainst women occupying different social positions in Delhi. I argued that while all women in Delhi (and beyond) share a general condition of precariousness in terms of gender, JJ resident women remain outside dominant epistemological frames of both womanhood and broader urban citizenship (which similarly centers the middle-classhere have been some modest legislative gains for upper and middle-class women, these transformations have been largely tangential to the mainstream social and political discourse has created a potential space for a more inclusive and publically challenge certain deep-seated sexist narratives. In the following chapter I extend this exungrievable through a broader analysis of dominant discourses on JJCs and their residents. Particularly, I examine how legitimate belonging and urban citizenship are asserted and contested through the   119 deployment of persistent and distinctly classed narratives. I also examine the ways in which JJ residents contest their marginalization, assert their belonging, and make claims on the state.     120 Chapter 4: Legitimate Belonging and Rights to the City  In this chapter, I use formulations of legitimate belonging and urban citizenship introduced and government staff, urban planners, and JJ residents themselves, to explore how in-migration, pollution, criminality, moral corruption, economic and social productivity, as well as birthright are all utilized to assert and question their legitimate belonging in the city and thus their right to entitlements and claims on space and resources. Particularly, I examine how individuals in the media as well as research participants occupying different social locations position themselves vis-à-vis the state, the city, and other Delhi residents by accessing particular narratives about alternatively utilize appeals to conscience and rights-based approaches to negotiate for secure housing and access to basic resources and services. I conclude by examining the case of Kathputli residence-based organizing by JJ residents and the language and rhetorical devices they use to frame their claims-making in the context of impending demolitions.  Whose City?  A week following Diwali in November of 2013, a private advertisement consisting entirely of text over a light green background appeared in the City section of the TOI introducing a new collective of Delhi residents who called themselves TRUE or Towards Rehabilitation of Urban penned by the apparent founder of this new collective whose name remained anonymous. The waking up the morning after Diwali to the city filled with smog resulting from the widespread use   121 of fireworks during the holiday, and taking the time to reflect on his own behavior and to nt in recent years, among which he includes flyovers, world class airports, a stable electricity supply and more hospitals and schools. He admits there remains much to be done, including fighting the beggars at crossings, illegal encroachments, overflowing and chocked drains, limited [and] undrinkable water, murder, rape, theft, corruption, food laced Emphasis added].   He continues by stating that while he obsessively maintains the cleanliness and upkeep of his ancestral house, he has typically been unconcerned with what happens outside of his house gates and chastises himself and others for not shouldering the responsibility of taking care of the city and the natio-class citizens like him) to make a difference, ranging from planting trees and conserving water and an extended arm of the government try and make our city a model cityEmphasis added] This advertisement, while more generous towards the government than what is commonly heard in conversations around the city, is illustrative of the dominant discourse in Delhi wherein claims to the city by middle-class residents (even more so than affluent residents87                                                           87 For instance, it is not uncommon to hear criticisms of the rich for being inconsiderate of others by crowding residential streets with their many cars and leaving little room for others, or for living lives of leisure while other Delhiites [read: middle-class] work hard for all they have. It should be noted however, that this criticism is often on   122  corruption, crime, and pollution, as problems be solved. This discourse is predicated on the persistence of certain narratives and entrenched stereotypes discussed below about both middle-class and poor residents of Delhi. Individuals and communities draw upon these easily accessible narratives to fortify their own identities, challenge the claims of others, or alternatively to use these narratives as a foil against which to construct alternative and opposing narratives.       Of Migrants and Delhiites  As Pakistan marked the beginning of a sharp increase in population wherein Delhi experienced the d well into the 1990s (DuPont 2000: 230). Migration, first by those impacted by Partition violence and more recently by those responding to increasingly widespread urbanization and seeking better economic opportunities, has consistently been a substantial -meal and temporary work, or Americans and Europeans living in African or Asian countries are commonly characterized as  who move -class Indians who  -                                                           their perceived dominance illegitimate belong.   123 about middle and upper-class residents breeds an underlying notion that the poor residents are ultimately not of Delhi. Moreover, the term migrant or migrant worker has a further connotation of a rural-to-of the resence in the city and their claims to its spaces and resources.  identity of middle and upper-class migrants remains intact long after their arrival in Delhi. Particular neighborhoods, commercial districts or occupations are casually referenced as being predominantly populated by people from certain ethnic or regional backgrounds (i.e. Punjabi businessmen; Bengali intellectuals; South Indian IT experts). Indeed, many middle and upper-class Delhiites have established networks and community organizations linked to their ethno-regional 88 used to challenge or de-legitimize middle and upper-resources or question whether they belong in Delhi. Rather, they function as simple signifiers of distinct cultural or regional traditions and histories shared by members of particular communities. pervasive among many of my research participants across socio-economic strata and irrespective of whether they were sympathetic or hostile to the struggles of JJ residents.                                                             88 It is important to note that particular region-legitimize the claims of some Delhiites despite socio-economic privilege based on long standing tensions. Particular n-persistence of linguistic chauvinism between Hindi speakers (the official national language of India, and dominant language in Delhi) and speakers of other languages, particularly the Dravidian languages of South India.       124 During an interview with Mr. A.K. Jain, the former Commissioner of Planning at the DDA, 89 middle/ upper-by explaining the common understanding among city planners of how JJCs in Delhi emerge: Jhuggis are basically spontaneous.  People come as migrants, maybe to work in the construction site, maybe some Commonwealth Games event, come there. They continues for a year or six months, they decide that they have nothing to earn in their own village and they would be better off in Delhi even if they are a beggar or a street vendor.  They can earn 100 maybe 200 Rupees per day, and back in their village they are not able to earn 10 or 20 Rupees per day, so they decide to stay back and they put up some kind of shack from non-building materials, various types of structures, and they occupy very minimal land.  Mr. Jain was arguably the most sympathetic towards the plight of JJ residents in the city of any (former or current) government official that I met during my fieldwork. He was adamant that JJ residents be gra-situ and not displace right of his conceptualization of JJ residents is his understanding of them as migrants. In contrast, his -class neighborhoods never addressed who they were and where they came from. There was no question of where they had been living phomes and businesses. The inherent assumption was that they are from Delhi.                                                             89 -class housing settlements that have been built illegally, often in public/government land, they are often built on private land which has been split into plots and sold off by owners and developers; and through bribes to local officials manage to gain access to all the basic services (water, sewage, homes in- the meeting of these conditions is rarely verified prior to -   125 Similarly, during another interview with Mr. Sunil Mehra, a senior town planner with the MCD, he told me while village life was generally healthier and more desirable, people continue to opportunities in rural areas for income generation and upward mobility. Therefore, as new people come from villages in search of work, first living with others from their village who had come before them and eventually moving out to build jhuggis of their own nearby, JJ clusters and colonies emerge. While Mr. Mehra asserts that as Indians, JJ residents have a right to live in the city and earn a livelihood, if the government were able to establish better infrastructure and employment opportunities in villages,90 they could avoid living in the city altogether and the already overcrowded Delhi would not have to accommodate more migrants. Referencing the or what  Again, Indeed, his assertion that infrastructural improvement in villages would minimize migration   Likewise, the narratives of migration were central in conversations with NGO staff and JJ residents as well. In early February, 2014, Colony to meet with several resident women who routinely participated in CURE initiatives and                                                            90 Here Mr. Mehra alludes to the long history of state-led development with an emphasis on capital-intensive industrialization and urbanization that emerged under Nehru early in the post-colonial period. While this industrialization was meant to coincide with rural reforms in land ownership to spur agricultural development and wealth redistribution; the economic and political capital of the land-owning rural elites meant that substantive land reforms were never fully realized. As a result, rural economic and infrastructural development has continued to lag behind its urban counterpart. For further readings on the Developmentalist Indian state and its economic policies see Chatterjee (1998); Khilnani (1999); & Varshney (1998).   126 -forties, knew all of the women and had a casual and easy rapport with them. Upon our arrival, Bidya-ji invited us to join her and four other women on her rooftop terrace as she dried her hair in the sunlight. While most of us sat on woven mats on the concrete rooftop, two women jointly sat on a cinderblock. Bidya-ji is a grandmother in her late fifties, and had been living in the colony for almost three decades. Her six children and two grandchildren were all born there. Similarly, the other women had also lived in the colony for many years, the shortest tenancy among them being sixteen years. Yet, following a discussion of the ever-present fear of demolitions and removal, the persistence of their migrancy emerged thusly:  Shashi  So have you ever thought, if you are removed from here, what you will do?  Raj  We will see then what to do. Until the time we are able, we will go on living here.  Amarvati  We are teaching our children, we will complete their studies, after that we will see what happens.  Shashi  Because in villages you must be having your own homes.  Raj    Bidya-ji  Everything is there, but there is no livelihood.   Shashi  So you all came here for a livelihood. To educate your children and to earn a livelihood.  Bidya-ji  Husband works here, he called us here, we have children, they are studying here so we will have to live here. As long as the children are studying, we will have to be here.  Meskerem  So you will go back after that?  Bidya-ji  We will see after that if we will live here or leave.   Shashi  Once someone comes to the city, that person does not return.     127 Raj  No, we do go back.  Shashi  You go for holidays, but you will not be able to go back forever.  Bidya-ji  When we have lived in the city, our children already live in the inking about it.  This conversation illustrates the shared understanding among both NGO worker and JJ residents Colony have homes waiting for them in their own villages underscores the belief that the city is not their real home. Similarly, despite having lived in the city for almost thirty years, Bidya-ji, still relivelihoods and education, points to a recurring demand that they justify their presence in the city public spaces, JJ resident women must additionally substantiate their presence in Delhi through inadequate to remove the characterization of the residents of Kalandar Colony as migrants or to classify them as Delhiites. Even while both Shashi and Bidya-ji acknowledge the improbability of er of these imagined real homes persists in their shared imaginary and necessitates their ongoing discursive engagement with them as a legitimate questionable presence in Delhi. The  migrancy makes them not of Delhi further allows for residents an act of benevolence and not necessarily a matter of rights or legitimate belonging. In turn, even when they are available, this excuses inadequate or sub-par provisions such as   128 with no access to livelihoods and basic resources. After all, they are receigenerosity of the local government, not because they are entitled to them as legitimate residents of the city.           JJCs as Hubs of Crime and Pollution  In addition to the pervasive labeling of JJ residents as migrants, there are also widespread pernicious narratives that characterize JJCs as hubs of pollution and crime and their residents as morally corrupt and dangerous. At times subtle and at others blatant, these narratives are easily accessible to most Delhiites and manifest in contexts ranging from public interest litigations and government policy, to routine interactions between JJ residents and their middle-class employers. As Bhan (2009) and Ghertner (2011) illustrate,91 the growing proliferation of so-called public interest litigations (PILs) brought by various middle-class resident welfare associations (RWAs) and other civil society organizations against JJCs has resulted in the broad use of the term  euphemisms for JJ residents and the demolition of JJCs respectively. In December 2013, during a two week workshop titled A Rights Based Approach to Resettlement: (Inter)national Standards and Local Practices organized for urban planners working across South Asia, urban planner and SPA visiting professor Banashree Banerjee shared from her extensive experience throughout India implementing various projects designed to improve services for poor urban residents. She shared of some of her interactions with RWAs in middle-class neighborhoods during her participatory BSUP (Basic Services for Urban Poor) projects thusly: When talking to certain middle-class residents who had filed a court petition to these people are dirty and thieves                                                           91 See section titled Rights to the City and Legitimate Belonging in Chapter 1 for discussions on the use of PILs by middle-class urban residents to make claims on city spaces.   129 they are still thievesr any theft had occurred, none could give an example but insisted on their feeling of insecurity and fear of being burgled.       as well as the extension of the illegality surrounding the construction of JJCs to an overall criminality of JJ residents is recurrent within popular discourse. Little attention is given to the lack of access to adequate sanitation services, safe and functional community toilets, clean water, or residents are forced to live. Instead JJ residents are themselves characterized as inherently unhygienic. Moreover, the squalor that is inextricably linked to JJCs in popular discourse is further depicted as perpetually on the verge of overtaking its middle and upper-class surroundings. Perhaps the clearest illustration of this emerges in the language used to describe JJCs in mainstream media. The following are examples of headlines which appeared on TOI articles [referring to Hauz Khas monument] (Verma 2013-[referring to Asola Bhatti wildlife sanctuary] (Nandi 2013-ents in Mehrauli] (Verma 2014). The language of ravenous consumption and destruction employed in these headlines frames JJCs as a dangerous threat to both the history and the future of the city, conditions of JJCs by framing them as potentially infectious.     92 and that there is a significant shortage of alternative low-income housing in the city goes largely                                                            92    130 unacknowledged in popular discourse. Iinsinuate the overall unlawfulness of JJ residents. As a result, potential accusations of theft plague JJ resident women who work as domestic workers in middle and upper-class homes. During a walk through Aradhaknagar where we discussed the ongoing struggles of making a sufficient income, conversation, Krishna-in houses, but what kind of work is this? They may call us thieves, they may say bad things about women living in nearby middle-class neighborhoods and instances such as the Nirbhaya attack wherein the attackers were JJ residents serve to strengthen these stereotypes.  Even among mresident man as a lazy one who drinks excessively and has little consideration for his wife or his often as a way of highlighting the struggles of JJ resident women. Explaining a policy decision by the DDA instituted in 2000 to put deeds of JJ that women have more titles to the home than the man, and especially the poor man. You never various points during my interview with MCD senior planner Mr. Sunil Mehra, he repeatedly drew upon his conceptualization of the capriciousness of JJ resident men to emphasize the need for certain policies and initiatives. While telling me of some innovative community based programs co  131  policy of putting the deeds of homes in the name of women, he shared the story of his own sister whose husband had unilaterally sold-off their flat forcing them to live as renters for years, and double post-graduate, if a person of that nature can   Interestingly, while some of the JJ resident women I spoke with also complained about the actions of their husbands and other men from their colonies, their grievances indicated a more popular narratives. Instead, many of the women discussed the perpetual insecurity of never having Compounding these was the cycle of political campaign promises of housing security and access to basic resources in return for votes inevitably followed by the inaction of politicians once they take office until the next election when the cycle began again. They pointed to these frustrations and the widespread corruption among politicians and government officials as producing the behaviors popularly attributed to poor and JJ resident men such as alcoholism and illicit financial dealings that prove to be detrimental to their own interests. During a small group discussion in Aradhaknagar in March 2014, a long-time resident of the colony in her early fifties named Ganga shared her irritation stating:  What do these governments do? They give a bottle [alcohol], they give notes [rupees] and buy the votes. The men sell, they sell their vote for alcohol. The   132 happens in the corner? You give money money work will not be done. For how many days will the corner ones eat?   Echoing Ganga, Seema indicated that the pervasiveness of corruption and bribery leaves little stereotypes of JJ residents discussed above, narratives of morally corrupt and unreliable JJ resident men who sell their votes, or sell the resettlement plots given to them by the government to move back into JJCs ignore the contexts in which JJ residents must make their choices. As Padma told me during one of my visits to Kalandar Colony when I asked her about her views on the flats in multi- If one gets space, if there are 3 sons, then they will build their own stories on top. If it is a flat and there are 3 sons, then where will they live? Because they give one room set, there will be one room, one kitchen and one toilet. With that there will be re people. What will these people do? They will sell it and come back here only. Many people have done that because there they cannot survive, so they gave it, either on rent, or they sold it and came back to the same place, so in this way poverty does not reduce.  Just as their perpetual need for money and the seeming futility of their votes may push some residents to accept bribes of alcohol and money for political support; the inadequacy of the streamlined single-family flats for their extended family households or the isolation of most JJ JJ residents to sell their plots/flats and return to living in JJCs in more accessible locations in the city. However, when presented out of context, these choices can be used to propagate narratives of JJ resident men in particular that further other    133 Producers or Parasites?  One of the most frequently utilized narrative about JJ r--class Delhiites. Perhaps because certain claims inherent in this narrative such as government spending on subsidies - emerged as a common point of contestation for various perspectives and stakeholders. Many politicians running for office, economists, and other middle-class residents of the city publically they characterized as the -resources such as gas cylinders, water, and certain food staples assumed to primarily benefit the 93 In contrast, NGOs such as PRIA and other middle-class advocates of JJ in terms of economic productivity as well as the time and investment they had put into constructing their homes and communities, to support their appeals for housing security and better access to basic services.  On October 4th, 2013 I attended a day-long event titled People Building Better Cities: Understanding Urban Informality, Delhi at the School for Planning and Architecture marking the                                                            93 A 2014 TOI article claims that statistically, the primary beneficiaries of most government subsidies are Upper-class households [fuel subsidies], middle-class households [LPG cylinders]; and large-scale farmers [fertilizer subsidies] (Gandhi 2014).   134 opening of a traveling international exhibition on participatory and inclusive urbanization. Using perceptions of poor urban residents as burdens on city resources. As the first panelist of the event, Mr. Manoj Rai of the NGO PRIA, explained: There is a need to think about informality differently, and I would say positively. So far they have been viewed negatively and exclusionarily. If we look at it is contribution [to the city] and I deserve data to change perceptions.  Reminiscent of the Women in Development (WID) framework94 which emerged in the late twentieth century, organizers and panelists of this exhibition highlighted the productivity of l economic actors, thus offering a narrative shift in which slum and JJ residents were characterized as simply vulnerable dependents. Arguing further that the contributions of poor urban residents right to the city, fellow panelist Dr. Shyamala Mani of the National Institute of Urban Affairs (NIUA) asserted: The rich believe that they own the city and view these people in the peripheries as outsiders. They cling to that view and perpetuate it. But if we look at the contributions of the urban poor, not just the economic contributionsthey are the e adapted their lives to make our daily lives what it is. We should not look at it as if we are doing them a favor by inclusive planning, just because they are willing to live in inhuman conditions. Being included is their bloody right!   Similarly, other -cities like Delhi, and the increasing criminalization and characterizati-                                                           94 For further reading on WID see Kabeer (1994); Razavi & Miller (1995); Chowdhry (1995); and Sharma (2008)    135 he brought up a similar argument citing surveys conducted in 2001 while he was on the board reviewing the Master Plan of Delhi, stating: We also realized during these surveys that these people [JJ residents] are consuming not more than five percent of the city land, not more than five percent of the 1/3, at that time it was something like 1/3 of the GDP of the city.  So that means that at a very low cost you [non-JJ residents] are getting the services of the city. So right to the city.  So this is something for which we have to give much more priority.   This argument, consistent with the others presented above, uses evidence of productivity, economic or otherwise, to assert that JJ residents have legitimate rights to the city because of their quantifiable contributions to it.   Accordingly, PRIA partnered with the economic research firm Indicus Analytics to collecting primary data about the socio-economic realities of slums and JJCs. The study found that residents of informal settlements contribute 7.53% to the urban GDP of India (PRIA 2013: widely publicized in national newspapers and debated in various public forums among urban planners, politicians, and economists. During a private interview with Mr. Rai the following spring, he told me that twenty newspapers published the findings of the report among which seven put the story on their national cover-page across all of their publications. He further mentioned requesting a copy of the full report to respond to a question regarding the economic contribution of urban poor residents which had been recently raised in Parliament. Interestingly, other   136 significant findings of this study were rarely mentioned, such as the finding that in million-plus population cities like Delhi nearly 40% of the households live in slums or JJCs; or that 36% of slums nationally do not have access to electricity, tap water, or sanitation within homes; that while a sizable proportion of the informal settlement population are migrants, the majority are -settlement (i.e. middle and upper-class) sample households surveyed thought that their daily lives 95  Nevertheless, the deep-persisted in popular discourse. While at times these narratives emerged alongside the narratives of blight and pollution discussed in the previous section, they also manifested in the framing of any -demolition it entails and the fact that most JJ residents in Delhi do not meet eligibility requirements for resettlement housing which in-turn often results in their homelessness, is almost exclusively -based i Urban Shelter Improvement Board (DUSIB) Mr. S.K. Mahajan and his colleague Mr. Atul gave a presentation on the various activities of DUSIB. The language used by Mr. Atul during the icularly illustrative of the common notion that JJ residents are exaggerating or faking neediness to reap undeserved free benefits from the government. While describing the various components of the night shelters that                                                            95 Overview of major findings and link to full report available at: https://terraurban.wordpress.com/2013/12/18/economic-contribution-of-the-urban-poor/    137 DUSIB provides to the homeless,96 he pJust imagine, we are providing Arrow97 workshop participarequires JJ residents to pay towards the cost of a flat as a condition of resettlement, might be unaffordable for them, he dismissed the suggestion thusly: Average income of Delhiites is 2 lakhs98 per year. Why are people always migrating  Yesterday we Yes, split A.C. in the jhuggi!  Finally, when another participant pointed out that households in multi-generational JJCs are often able to add stories to their homes as their families expand and asked if the possibility for acquiring more space or an additional flat exists as families of resettled JJ residents grow, Mr. Atul replied:   Frankly, that possibility does not exist. We are trying to help this one generation -is not sustainable. Otherwise, we will have people with an income, tax-payers like   In these two quotes we see contradictory assertions. While Mr. Atul implies in the first statement that JJ residents make enough income to afford a 70,000 rupee fee for a flat, in the second statement this contradiction, these statements nonetheless work together to perpetuate the larger narrative of JJ residents as lazily living off of the taxes paid by hard-working middle-class residents like Mr. Atul. Moreover, the ever-present threat of demolitions and the lack of access to sanitation services,                                                            96 Homelessness is often induced by JJ demolitions in Delhi.   97 Arrow is a popular water filter brand commonly found in middle-class homes.  98    138 or in-home toilets, which have all otherwise been widely documented and recognized, are conveniently ignored to point to the possession of consumer goods like AC units or mobile phones fabrications of JJ residents. Even among NGO workers who regularly work in JJCs and witness their lot and manage to find better housing appears. During the discussion about demolitions with Shashi of CURE and the Kalandar colony resident women referenced previously, Shashi said to   their children. The embedded implication being that the JJ resident women  already attempting to make a ent, although less vehement, also draws upon this notion that JJ residents receive or anticipate  In contrast, during a private interview in January 2014, the director of CURE Dr. Renu Khosla pushed back against indictments of subsidies for the poor and narratives of JJ residents  Economists come in and say that these are subsidy based models and we are ubsidy mode  I actually they are unwilling to pay for bad quality service. productivity.   139  Similarly, JJ residents I spoke with often pointed to their obvious neglect by government institutions and service providers, as well as their own investment of time and energy in special advantages from the state. The residents of Kalandar colony I spoke with emphasized the fact that their homes, which were overwhelmingly kutcha or pukka constructed of permanent or semi-permanent materials like brick and concrete, and many of which had two or more stories, had been built entirely by them gradually over the decades without the help of any NGO or government agency. Several of the families had even managed to build in-home toilets, although their limited access to materials and their inability to access the ciwere able to build by placing sewage tanks directly below their homes had compromised the foundation of their jhuggis and resulted in some of the sewage seeping up into the walls. The residents had also constructed a small Hindu temple and a small mosque within the JJC which they had provided in terms of sanitation services and sewage removal. Likewise, Krishna-ji from Ait is at least 70-grandchildren are being born here. Now you tell me, has anything   Yet, even the existence of agencies like DUSIB who work exclusively on issues of housing residents. During our interview, as Mr. Mehra of the MCD explained the jurisdictional divisions board [DUSIB] is specifically for the poorest lot. There is no board for otherlike even no other group is being catered bEmphasis added] Similarly, in a February 16, 2014 TOI segment   140 titled Aam Aadmi Divided wherein reporters asked Delhiites on the streets whether or not they would vote for Arvind Kejriwal of AAP again following his resignation, a woman named Radhika Main planned ). Mr. Rai of PRIA seemed ve superseded that of other groups in socio-economic contribution of urban poor residents and calls for equitable access to basic resources are not attempts to disempower middle- -  In October 2013, I visited the Katha Lab School operated by the NGO Katha inside the Govindpuri JJC in South Delhi. This K-12 school, whose students are residents of the surrounding JJC, opened in the late 1980s and is known for its focus on literacy and storytelling as well as its innovative pedagogy which incorporates real-world experiential learning. During my visit, I observed an 11th grade Vikas [Development] class. The teacher, who appeared to be in her she began dictating notes on topics ranging from deforestation to issues of basic necessities such as access to water, electricity, and sanitation. This included statements about how development improve the standard of livinstu   141   The classroom scene described above is illustrative of the widely touted notions cities. As discussed in Chap-liberalization period (which began in 1991), -middle and upper--rise buildings and fly-landscape. In 2011, the central government launched -which included various housing, services, and livelihoods schemes for poor urban residents living this widely publicized venture. The surprisingly progressive mission statement of this venture -free India with inclusive and equitable cities in which every  and identifies the shortage -legal solutions in a bid to retain their source of -and JJ residents in a perpetual cycle of poverty and sub-standard housing and instead create institutions and policies that allow them to equally access all the resources and opportunities that   Nevertheless, the persistent characterizations of slum and JJ residents as migrants, polluters, criminals---  142 the removal of slum and JJ residents -Rather, JJCs and their residents are framed as major obstacles to the espoused aspirations of - Ghertner (2011)). Moreover, while the often cited reason for the removal of JJCs was the claim that land had become scarce in Delhi with the implication that JJCs were occupying much of it, planners such as Banashree Banerjee In fact, newspapers such as the TOI contained daily advertisements for large housing developments being built in the suburban peripheries of the city such as Noida and Gurgaon. It eventually became aesthetics, a more accurate explanation for the growing push towards the removal of slums was not the amount of space they occupied but rather their desirable location. While many of the older JJCs had been built on what were peripheries of middle and upper-class neighborhoods at the time and which constituted sources of livelihood for many of the JJ residents, as the city expanded around them, they had now come to occupy central locations with high real estate values. In turn, this has made such JJCs of pathe city, and government agencies such as the DDA and DUSIB who can fulfil their mandates of ost to them by partnering with private developers through the increasingly popular Public-Private Partnership (PPP) model. As - There was no way that private developers would find land in Delhi to develop. So this whole PPP model gives them the access to land in central areas which were actually occupied by slums. Now if you look at this Kathputli99 Colony which is                                                            99  li Colony is a longstanding JJC in Central/West Delhi which houses puppeteers, magicians, musicians, and other performers. In addition to being residences, the JJs and alleyways of Kathputli Colony also serve as places for the residents to construct and store   143 pack all of the slum dwellers in 60 percent of the land which they occupy now-- pretty high density area-- in ten-storied apartments.  And in the remaining area -storied apartment building.  She further explains that while the proposed new apartment building for the Kathputli Colony residents would be particularly impractical considering their need for a multi-purpose space wherein to construct and store the tools of their trade; the corresponding 56-story luxury apartment helipad, would contain massive flats each occupying the space of up-to ten jhuggis. Such plans for exclusive  an even smaller area belies the claim that JJC  Banerjee adds that when urban planners reviewed the Master Plan of Delhi several years back and alternatively suggested that a more functional and efficient approach would be a low-rise high-density development wherein existing residential areas could be densified with new housing city should have high-he notion that the removal of slums and JJCs or the relocation of their residents to high-rise apartments is necessary for the development of the city. First, while discussing the problems with relocating JJ residents to the peripheries of the city, Mr. Me                                                           their puppets, musical instruments and other props used in their performances. Some examples of these include large dhol drums, stilts, and performing animals like snakes and monkeys.     144 too far away from the main area, but they vacate the very prime location, space which is very shortage of land in the city and offered high-rise flats as the preferable alternative to relocating JJ residents, saying: Nowadays in Dilli, we do not allow more slums to come, thik hai-na [Okay]? We do not allow for the reason that land has become very precious and there is very strict direction that no squatting will be allowed of this manner. People are many, land is scarce. So what I had started when I was over there in the Slum Department,100 I proposed to construct 24 story building for poor people. ::chucklesMaintaining a lift is such a petty thing!   The ongoing narrative that land in Delhi is scarce, and that the way to solve this perceived problem the other ninety-five percent frames JJCs and their residents as obstacles to the growth and -constituted by streamlined high-rise buildings which are often in conflict with the practical needs of JJ residents who require adaptable multi-use spaces, further positions JJCs and their residents -  Together, the various narratives discussed thus far in this chapterthose that characterize slum and JJ development, work together to question and de-legitimize the presence and ultimately the claims lly not of the city, and narratives challenge their legitimate belonging in Delhi. Consequently, following the assertion of                                                            100 Referring to the former Slum and JJ Department which was alternatively housed in the MCD or the DDA from 1962-   145 legitimacy rather than legality , housing, and basic services. Nevertheless, JJ residents and their allies push-back against these narratives by offering counter-narratives of their economic and social productivity, and their investment in the construction and maintenance of their JJCs. They further utilize these counter--makingwhether through routine bureaucratic interactions or in moments of heightened tension during demolition drivesemerges as a frequent site wherein such narratives are deployed and urban citizenship and legitimate belonging are actively contested and negotiated. Claims-Making through Alternating Approaches The success of [political] claims depends entirely on the ability of particular population groups to mobilize support to influence the implementation of governmental policy in their favor. But this success is necessarily temporary and contextual. Partha Chatterjee (2004: 60)  Whether characterized as political society (Chatterjee 2004) or insurgent citizens (Holston 2008), various scholars have noted the differential access that poor and marginalized populations have to bureaucratic institutions, governmental services, and full citizenship rights more broadly (Appadurai (2001); Das (2004); Caldeira (2001); Miraftab & Wills (2005); Wacquant (2008)). Correspondingly, their limited access to formal systems of property and judicial recourse often requires that slum and JJ residents actively negotiate for governmental recognition and entitlements through variously framed individual or collective claims. Such claims may be deployed through the use of prior documentation or conditional bureaucratic recognition to establish precedence and length of tenancy, citing personal or collective contribution and   146 suffering and vulnerability to appeal to the collective conscience of fellow city-dwellers and government officials. Moreover, the limited social and economic capital of JJ residents necessitates, as the introductory quote from Chatterjee suggests, that they effectively mobilize the government officials, politicians, NGOs, as well as middle and upper-class Delhiites. To explore the ways in which JJ residents and their allies attempt to do this, I approach their claims-making as a rhetorical activity aimed at persuading particular and at times multiple audiences. My approach broadly draws upon social constructionist theories processes and interactional activities of claims-making (Spector and Kitsuse 1987), as well as scholarship which examines the functions of narrative and rhetorical aspects of such claims-making (Best (1987); Mulcahy (1995); Fortmann (1995)). Furthermore, I diverge from Chatterjee (2004) and others who designate the primarily immediate-needs driven claims-making activities of poor marginalized peocitizens politically engaging the rights endowed to them as such. Instead, while recognizing the differential access to full citizenship rights by poor marginalized peoples and their treatment by the state, I follow Das and Randeria (2015) in the assertion that o distinct domains but deeply made up by the relation they deployed by JJ residents in their attempts to secure space and resources in the city can be underspolitics.         147 The Language of Suffering and Appeals to Conscience Social feeling is understood as the foundation of civil society, an emotional connectivity that underlies pro-empathy, a transpersonal state of emotional extensiveness. Gillian Swanson (2013:126)  There is a long history of the use of narratives of suffering, injustice, and appeals to conscience in efforts to mobilize audiences to act within social movements throughout the world, including the Abolitionist and Civil Rights movements of the United States, the Palestinian National Movement, the Gandhian Satyagraha approach from British colonial rule, and the international Human Rights movement101 which emerged after WWII. Whether through publically recounting experiences of violence and inhuman conditions, documenting and exposing images of the same, or through non-violent resistance and social disobedience which places into stark contrast the brutality of oppressors; social movements throughout history have utilized both verbal and visual illustrations of suffering to simultaneously legitimize their claims and condemn the status quo by appealing to the emotions and the humanity of the societies from which they emerge. It is thus, to this political deployment of the language of suffering that I attempt to draw a link from that utilized by JJ residents in Delhi during interactions with NGO staff, media, government officials, middle-class activists, and researchers like myself. In contrast to the fetishized depiction of their suffering in international media,102 I argue that JJ residents use storytelling and testimony to move their audiences to act, as agentive but marginalized actors.                                                                  101 It is important to note that while each of the social movements described here are presented in the singular to point to the historic use of narratives of suffering and injustice, they should not be thought of as monolithic but rather as heterogeneous and constituted by various, and at times contradictory, ideologies and organizing strategies.   102 I refer here to the voyeurism of so-misery and victimhood. Examples of such commodified suffering include the success of books and films like Shantaram and Slumdog Millionaire -world.   148  During my extended interactions with residents of Aradhaknagar and Kalandar Colony, as well as my shorter visits to Kathputli Colony, stories of suffering and injustice were often recounted by residents within different conversational and social contexts. At times they were interwoven within casual conversations about everyday life, at others they were used to frame persistent problems and emphasize the need for change or make a call for action. Also, while the ongoing research context of my interactions with the women in Aradhaknagar and Kalandar Colony meant that I was the explicit audience for many of these narratives, it also became clear that the speakers were at times also addressing accompanying NGO staff and fellow JJ residents. In the context of Kathputli Colony (discussed in-detail below), the audience further included locally and internationally. Moreover, while JJ residents at times recounted specific stories or experiences, they more commonly used a general language of suffering and injustice to draw attention to their ongoing plight or to reaffirm their shared oppression with one another. During one of my earlier visits to Aradhaknagar, Krishna-ji matter-of-factly explained the ubiquity of suffering in the lives of poor people while we stood with several other resident women on a wide street at the edge of the colony. She declared:  burden, that we diseases and diseases.  Here, while Krishna-ji may have been telling me (the outsider) about the struggles that she and her neighbors experience, she is also reflecting on and acknowledging the suffering she shares with the other women present. Indeed, they are her primary audience in this instance and her statement functions similarly to self-  149 their shared suffering, such statements help to build a foundation upon which collective claims can be made. Later during this same conversation when the discussion turned towards the lack of political will to address the problems of JJ residents, a resident in her early forties named Rajwati  there is no counting. There are crores103 of them. We all go to vote... they [politicians] win from us only... they win because of poor, and they cut pedh kathna-injustice and suffering was also directed at her fellow JJ residents and works not only to reaffirm a shared oppression but also to point out the collective power of JJ residents as voters and its exploitation.    In contrast to the above examples which illustrate the use of broad narratives of suffering and injustice within self-directed rhetoric to coalesce a shared identity of oppression, similar language was also directed at other audiences in seeming attempts to garner empathy and petition for change. During a group discussion with some Kalandar Colony residents about their struggles with accessing important services, Padma stated how the nearby government hospital continually placed the lives of poor neighborhood residents at risk with its underqualified medical staff and their general apathy towards poor patients. After other residents added that the medical staff at the counted a personal story of loss in relation to the hospital:  Recently when my jethani104 died, this is what happened with her. She had a heart seen so many people like this and so many have died. In their hands, so many have died.                                                              103  104 -in-law).   150  -time resident and self-described pradhan of the colony, shared his own ongoing struggle to get proper medical care for his ailing son. After the nearby hospital misdiagnosed his son multiple times and prescribed him the wrong medication, he had finally managed to find a private clinic to accurately diagnose he had returned to the nearimportant indication of their intended audience and potential function. As this was my initial visit to the colony, I had accompanied Sukant and Ramesh (CURE regional managers) as well as Lalita and Ganga (CURE field-staff) while they introduced me to various residents and asked them to sit and talk with us. Indeed, the fact that the two upper-level NGO staff present were men was likely the reason that Mahesh joined the discussion at all, as no other men (including Mahesh) were interested in participating in my research during any of my subsequent visits to the colony. I would thus posit that of the nearby government hospital were the NGO staff and the institution they represented. tablished working relationship with government agencies like DUSIB, and its historical willingness to serve as a liaison between JJ residents and local government meant that the NGO could conceivably use its dministration. Accordingly, I further posit that the language of suffering used by Padma and Mahesh thus served as rhetorical devices utilizing pathos in service of their attempts to access improved medical care. This is not to imply that their storytelling was disingenuous. It was clear that the stories of personal suffering and loss they shared were sincere. Rather, like all claims-makers, they used their own personal experiences and   151 mine the most effective way to make their claims heard.  -makers articulate their claims in ways that they find (and dominant narratives of JJ residents in Delhi that suggest that they fabricate or exaggerate their vulnerability to receive government concessions, as well as the limited accessibility of formal legal recourse for JJ residents due to their lack of social and economic capital, it follows that appealing to the sympathies and collective conscience of those with administrative power (or those who could potentially influence it) serves as one of the few accessible avenues through which to pursue various claims. Furthermore, as Bhan (2014) notes using a 2007 Delhi High Court decision to demolish a JJC in west Delhi,105 the presence of multi-story jhuggis and the use of jhuggis for commercial activities can effectively be utilized to de-legitimize JJ residents claims of economic deprivation and generally erase their vulnerability (554-555). This is similarly illustrated by the -conditioners in jhuggis as proof that their claims of economic vulnerability were illegitimate. Thus, the deployment of the language of suffering by JJ residents further attempts to counteract these erasures of vulnerability by government officials and judiciary by pointing to the various structural realities that continue to marginalize them despite an incremental rise in economic security that may allow them to purchase consumer goods or expand their jhuggis.                                                                        105 Kalyan Sanstha Social Welfare Organization vs. Union of India and Ors (2007)   152 A Rights-Based Approach Constitution of India 1949 Article 21. Protection of life and personal liberty: No person shall be deprived of his life or personal liberty except according to procedure established by law Article 39. The State shall, in particular, direct its policy towards securing: (b) That the ownership and control of the material resources of the community are so distributed      as best to subserve the common good; (c) That the operation of the economic system does not result in the concentration of wealth and     means of production to the common detriment  Universal Declaration of Human Rights 1948  Article 21(2). Everyone has the right of equal access to public service in his country. Article 25(1). Everyone has the right to a standard of living adequate for the health and well-being of himself and of his family, including food, clothing, housing, and medical care and necessary social services, and the right to security in the event of unemployment, sickness, disability, widowhood, old age or other lack of livelihood in circumstances beyond his control.   While poor Delhiites have limited access to legal protections and recognitions in practice, the articles of the Indian constitution cited above along with those of the UDHR to which India is an original signatory, indicate that there are legal precedents for rights based claims of JJ and slum residents. NGO workers, urban planners, and activists with varying sympathies towards JJ and slum residents often cited one or more of these codified rights when they discussed government policy towards them. As Sunil Mehra of the MCD told me: rights here. More than Europe or the U.S. There are many articles that guarantee liberty for such [believe they have a right to live  as per our constitution as I have explained to you before, there are various articles which empower them, every citizen has rights for certain facilities and things like that.   Prior to the more recent trend within the Indian judiciary to criminalize JJs and their residents, it landmark 1985 PIL case Olga Tellis v. Bombay Municipal Corporation cited to declare that the displacement of JJ residents following the demolition of their JJCs infringed on their ability to   153 make a livelihood which in turn constituted a violation of their right to life (Ramanathan 2005: 2909). While the judicial consensus seems to have shifted away from this perspective (Bhan 2009), the broad framing of JJ demolition and displacement, and to a lesser extent issues of access to basic resources, as a matter of the basic right to life persisted among many of my research participants. This framework was the underlying premise of the urban planning workshop I attended in Delhi titled A Rights Based Approach to Resettlement: (Inter)national Standards and Local Practices sponsored by IHS and SPA, as well as the international exhibit on inclusive urbanization titled Building Better Cities. Particularly, larger organizations advocating for extensive policy and civic reform like PRIA, as well as individuals working within the context of city-scale projects such as urban planners, regularly deployed the language of rights and government obligations when discussing JJ residents and their access to housing and basic resources. While discussing the role of urban planners in creating inclusive cities, former DDA Commissioner of Planning A.K. Jain stated: We as planners, we have to focus much more on the poor people, and especially if sition, because the rich people can take care.  centers, entertainment centers, everything. But who is there for taking care of the onsibility.  If the government is not able The government does not have the right to exist.  Similarly, Manoj Rai of PRIA, explained to me the overall aims of the organization as centered on increasing citizen participation in the overall governance through their incorporation into decision-responsive, and accountable to people and protective of their rights. He described their work during election season thusly:   154 In different districts we are inviting political parties and [poor urban] communities face-to-versation is not about subsidies and gas cylinders. The conversation is in terms of rights.  The conversation is in terms of basic services.  Conversation is about dignity, identity and advancement of life, security. These are the conversations.      In contrast, the NGO CURE works closely with specific JJ colonies doing smaller-scale community level projects. The director of the organization, Renu Khosla told me that they do not use a rights-based approach or explicitly discuss rights, even though she believes that JJ residents are entitled to basic services and a certain quality of life. It seemed that this approach was primarily in service of bureaucratic efficacy. As an example, she pointed to the Right to Information Act (RTI) of 2005, which was designed to promote transparency and accountability in government and allowed citizens to file RTI forms with government agencies to get access to information about ongoing projects, public interest court proceedings, or government norms and policies. The RTI was quite popular among middle-featured in stories about uncovered government corruption in the TOI. Khosla told me that CURE only used the RTI sparingly, stating: What RTI helped was to give us the  at least give us information on the standards and the norms. What the RTI did not do was to actually translate that into services  we try to use more the process of legislation with the state and the city to move services there. We also believe that RTIs can also annoy the service providers, so then they can become   Because a rights-based approach could be interpreted as antagonistic by local government agencies and service providers, it could prove to be counter-effective in terms of accessing services and resources. JJ residents, particularly like the women of Aradhaknagar and Kalandar Colony who participated in my study, had little in terms of leverage or legal recognition to confront government agencies head-on with rights-based demands for housing tenure or access to services. Instead,   155 negotiations for specific services such as electricity or water, or resources such as ration cards tended to occur on the household level through repeated visits and bribes to area pradhans and 106 Heitmeyer and Unnithan (2015) note a similar distinction between the use of the language of rights and the language of needs among legal activist groups and NGOs in Delhi and Rajasthan addressing issues of maternal and reproductive health. Particularly, they assert that while the language of rights is primarily utilized by advocates attempting to change national level policies with regards to maternal health for poor women, those working on a local level dealing directly with women struggling with accessing their reproductive rights due to a variety of obstacles including family intervention tended to frame their claims in the language of needs and justice (Ibid: 379).    Nevertheless, there were certain contexts in which JJ residents deployed the language of rights in their claims-making. The most common context involved occupation based organizing. Similar to the street hawkers in Mumbai discussed by Anjaria (2011) and Rajagopal (2001), street vendors, kabadiwallahs107, and women involved with local chapters of the Self-Employed utilize their occupational (i.e. productive) identities to deploy rights-based demands for improved working conditions, specific concessions, or legal recognition. Moreover, occupational identities which are linked to caste identitiesas with many occupations which involve direct contact with  have thus historically been the burden of the lower castes,                                                            106 Bureaucratic Matrix section of Chapter 3.  107 --work has historically been ascribed to so- are still predominately Dalits. In Delhi, they are mostly of the Balmiki or Chura sub-caste       156 including waste removal and working with animal hidesprovide even more salient shared identities around which to organize.108   kabadiwallahs voiced their rejection of the newly drafted Municipal Solid Waste Rules which side-lined the work they do in collecting and recycling waste and instead only recognized the private companies contracted under the MCD. On October 23, 2013, a union named the All India Kabadi Mazdoor Mahasang with a membership of 17,000109 kabadiwallahs and to demand changes in the municipal solid waste regulations (Nandi 2013). Pointing to their contribution towards reducing pollution and minimizing landfills through waste-segregation and recycling in contrast to the pollution producing waste-to-energy plants, they demanded the decentralization of waste-management to the ward level, that they be provided equipment and space to process dry waste collected from homes, that the government stop all support of waste-to-energy plants, and that kabadiwallahs be incorporated fully into the municipal solid waste plan.  Similarly, between January and February of 2014, street venders of Delhi organized through the National Alliance of Street Venders of India (NASVI) conducted multiple protests, including a hunger-strike at Jantar Mantar110 and a march to the gates of a police station which had recently evicted 200 street-Street Vendors (Protection of Livelihood and Regulation of Street Vending) Bill which had been                                                            108 lmiki community organizers and activist groups in Delhi.   109  in Delhi (Nandi 2013).  110 Jantar Mantar is an 18th century astrological observatory in Delhi, which through the years has also become the default site for protests and similar public gatherings.     157 passed by the Lok Sabha in 2013 but had been pending in the Rajya Sabha111 since then (Chitlangia 2015). While the NASVI protests spurred the passing of the Street Vendors Bill by the Rajya Sabha in February 2014, and the adoption of the Act by the Delhi Government in November 2014, the version of the bill which passed omitted the requirement that the local regulating bodies to be created, called town vending committees (TVCs), be composed of at least 40% street vendors along with other protections which were part of the original draft of the bill.112 Moreover, implementation in Delhi has been a slow process with the municipal corporations (MCD) delaying the creation of the TVCs and thus delaying the initiation of their function of conducting surveys of street vendors in the city, issuing vending certifications, and designating vending zones. The bureaucratic lag ultimately resulted in the Delhi High Court intervening by demanding that the Chief Secretary of Delhi appear in court to answer for the delays after over 1,600 street vendors filed writ petitions to the court requesting interim protection from evictions until the act was fully implemented by the city (Mathur 2015).  Likewise, following a widespread critique of the 2013 Solid Waste Management Rules by both kabadiwallahs and environmentalists across the country, the Union Ministry of Environment, Forests and Climate Change (MoEFCC) cancelled its implementation and re-drafted the policy which was finally released in 2015 (Mudgal 2016). While the new draft recognizes the contributions of kabadiwallahs and provides that they be incorporated into the waste management plans at the state/ local level, the extent and the process by which they are to be incorporated remains at the discretion of local governments. Some of the demands articulated by the All India                                                            111  are elected by the elected members of State Legislative Assemblies in accordance with the system of proportional representation by means of single transferable vote.  112 NASVI posted its disappointme < http://nasvinet.org/newsite/delhi-government-scheme-nasvi-disappointed/>   158 Kabadi Mazdoor Mahasang in 2013 were indeed addressed in the new draft, such as the decentralization of waste-management to the ward level, the mandatory segregation of solid and wet waste prior to disposal by all, and the investigation of waste-to-energenvironment and the search for more environmentally friendly alternatives (MoEFCC 2016). While occupational organizing and right-based claims-making like those described above do not automatically result in the recognition or expansion of legal rights for the participants, they often result in the delay of implementing policies that may prove detrimental to these groups because of the increased public scrutiny, or the offer of certain concessions as a form of compromise that do not fully address the demands of the claims-makers.    In contrast, the JJ resident women living in Aradhaknagar and Kalandar Colony who participated in my study were primarily domestic workers, did piece-meal work for area factories, or were unemployed and dependent on their husbands or adult children for financial support. This meant that the isolated nature of domestic work and the precarious nature of piece-meal work made the prospect of occupation-based organizing unfeasible. Residence-based organizing was similarly impractical due to the heterogeneity of occupations, ethnic and religious backgrounds, and general interests which made collective bargaining difficult. Within specific contexts such as the imminent threat of demolition and displacement however, residents united to deploy both the language of rights as well as that of suffering and injustice at the colony level. Yet even within such circumstances, the proliferation of pradhans who claim to represent the interests of a colony as a whole but present contradictory demands or perspectives can often result in the silencing or unique case of a long-standing JJC in west-central Delhi and events surrounding the announcement of demolitions and resettlement in early 2014.                       159 The Unique Case of Kathputli Colony No ordinary slum, this, although the huts built out of old packing-cases and pieces of corrugated tin and shreds of jute sacking which stood higgledy-piggledy in the shadow of the mosque looking no different from any other shanty-continually flocked, to seek their fortune in the capital city.  Salman Rushdie, (1981:196)  Located in the now bustling central Delhi neighborhood of Shadipur, less than a block away from a stop on the blue line of the Delhi Metro and a mere five minutes from Connaught Place, Kathputli Colony is arguably the most well-known and storied Indian slum following -winning novel  While some residents claim the colony dates as far back as sixty years, government sources indicate that the settlement emerged in the early 1970s after a handful of performance artists113 from Rajasthan including puppeteers and musicians settled there, in what was a semi-forested area of the western Shadipur region, due to the accessibility it provided for performances around the city. In the years that followed, more artists from other regions such as into a single settlement known as Kathputli after the type of string-puppet theatre performed by its from musicians and puppeteers, to acrobats and dancers. Despite the widespread demolitions of the Emergency period, the residents were able to organize around their artistry and managed to avoid displacement. In the 1980s, their work with a performing arts council established by the Indian Government gained them local and international recognition, traveling to the U.K. and the                                                            113 As with the Balmiki Kabadiwallahs discussed above, the various artists who live in Kathputli colony are members of various performer (scheduled) castes and tribes such as Bajania Nat and Bazigar.    160 continued to perform internationally, traveling to places like Russia and France on special from acquiring a standard passport. Moreover, despite their seeming recognition by the government, Kathputli Colony remains - through the years the DDA -situ slum/JJ redevelopment plan and announced that the chosen JJC was Kathputli Colony. Following a design/planning and open bidding process, in 2009 the DDA announced that a private developer named Raheja had been awarded the project which would proceed in a PPP model (Banda et al 2013:5). Correspondingly, Raheja announced that it would use the current Kathputli Colony land to build a 15-story apartment building for the to construct a 54-story building to house luxury apartments, complete with helipad and sky-club, to be sold at commercial rates by the developer (Ibid: 1). In the meantime eligible Kathputli Colony residents would be relocated to a nearby transit camp for 3-5 years while Raheja demolished the colony and constructed the two new buildings. By the time I arrived in Delhi in September 2013, the project was stalled in the approvals stage as the construction plans had failed to meet the Environmental Clearance guidelines of the SEAC and the developer attempted to incorporate all the changes required to meet the norms and standards of the various approving agencies, including the Delhi Jal Board, MCD, Delhi Fire Services, and the Delhi Urban Arts Commission114 (Ibid: 6). Indeed, with the lack of progress on the project and the impending local elections, most of the                                                            114 Approvals from the Delhi Urban Arts Commission (DUAC) were concerned with environmental and aesthetic aspects of the proposed buildings   161 planners and NGO workers I spoke with postulated that the plan would likely never come to fruition.  However, apparently having acquired all the necessary institutional approvals, on February residents, and the developer Raheja would be used to resolve the disagreements between residents and the other two parties so as to proceed with the project as planned. This would require a certain percentage of eligible residents to sign-off on the new housing plans along with Raheja and the -). Concerns of residents included a disagreement on the number of nsit camp that they were supposed to inhabit for up to five years while the new housing was being constructed, and the overall impracticality of the streamlined flats for their lifestyle which necessitated multi-use spaces. Less than a week later and prior to obtaining resident approvals, on Wednesday, February 19,th the DDA suddenly announced that it would begin vacating and relocating eligible residents -the-DDA planned to have the entire colony vacated to begin demolitions within two days (Munshi 2014).  Based on a commissioned survey conducted in 2010/2011 by a private firm, the DDA said the number of residents to be moved was 2,754 households. However, residents insisted that there were 3,200 households in the colony based on their own survey (Ibid). Apparently, the DDA commissioned survey had not included any households living above the first floor, presumably under the assumption that upper levels were simply the expansion of the ground floor residents. Because the proposed flats would be single-family unit homes, this of course meant that extended families who had been living in upper stories of jhuggis in Kathputli would be excluded. Moreover,   162 the DDA had never released a master list of which households had been included among those eligible for resettlement following completion of its survey in 2011. This meant that residents would not know whether they were going to be become homeless until the DDA agents arrived to who did not receive letters would be evicted with n-were persistent reports among residents and NGO workers that that the camp was not yet fully constructed, still lacking basic fixtures in the small flats, enough community toilets, and a school for the children of the colony.   Around noon on February 24, 2014, the day of the scheduled evictions, I arrived with Shahana Sheik and Subhadra Banda of the Center for Policy Research (CPR) at Kathputli Colony. area well. They had heard from friends involved with NGOs in Kathputli that the residents were planning to protest the evictions, so I had come with them to stand in solidarity with the residents. When we reached one of the smaller entrance lanes to the colony, we were met with a group of 30-40 resident women sitting on a large tarp covering the ground and blocking the entrance into the colony. Shahana and Subhadra explained to me that the residents along with some NGOs and activists who work in the community had decided that the best way to stop the DDA from coming in and demolishing their homes was to create a barrier of women and children whom presumably body as a barrier in protest which is utilized around the world, can further be understood in this context as an embodiment of claims   163 -Singhvi to lose sleep and moved him to grant a stay to halt impending demolitions.115 Hoping for a similar fate, Shahana and Subhadra further told me that there had been a petition filed on behalf of the colony requesting that the evictions be halted. However, the judge had neither granted the stay order nor had he sided with the DDA. Instead he had set a court date for March 11 to hear arguments on behalf of both the Kathputli Colony residents and the DDA. In the meantime, there was nothing to legally prevent tmore, there seemed to be misinformation circulating, as we heard several residents discussing the March 11 court date as if legally, the DDA would have to wait until after the hearing to proceed. Further complicating matters, there had apparently been two lawyers hired by two separate NGOs who had appeared in court claiming to represent the colony. While it remained unclear how this issue had ultimately been resolved, it nevertheless illustrated the complexities of representation for a heterogeneous community and raised questions about outside organizations who claimed to speak for such communities.  As we made our way through the colony toward the front entrance lane where the majority of the protesters where situated, a man who looked to be in his forties and a woman who looked to be much older, stopped us to talk. They first asked us if we were with the DDA, and when we  to stop the demolition. marne ki thayaar hai Hum garib log hain, yahan se kahan jayenge? [We are poor people, where can                                                            115    164 faced with the real potential that they might lose their homes, there emerged an equally intense language of suffering and injustice. The repeated insistence that they were willing to die and the vivid imagParticularly, outsiders like us who may be able to share their message to the city at large and help to mobilize a defense of their homes. Indeed, we were certainly not the only non-residents present that day in the colony. I saw more than a dozen NGO workers, activists, and journalists in and around the colony.  At the main entrance lane, there was a massive crowd assembled of residents and others. Similar to the smaller entrance, there was a large sheet of tarp on the ground upon which sat about a hundred women and a dozen children, along with roughly 30-40 men, both young and old dispersed around the perimeters of the seated group of women in smaller clusters. Among the seated women were some carrying protest signs written on construction paper and card board that read as follows: Zameen hamari; Adhikar hamara; nahi hatenge, nahi hatenge [The land is ours;   Gareeb bachchon ki yahee pukaar; mat karo hamaaree-parishram bekaar [this is what the poor children are crying out for: don't let our labor/work/effort be in vain]  Dharma116 alag; samachar alag; lekin hum sath [Our destiny may be different; our story may be different, but we are united/together]  These signs illustrate perhaps the most explicit use of both the language of rights and the language of suffering and injustice as rhetorical devices in claims-making and protest. The first sign boldly lays claim to the land upon which the colony is built as well as to the rights of the residents. While                                                            116 of life (dharma-karma-samsara), where an essential aspect of onreborn with a better dharma, the ultimate goal being to reach samsara (i.e. nirvana) and thus escape the cycle of rebirth.   165 refusing to recognize the technical/legal ownership of the land by the DDA, this proclamation of being Indian citizens, and by their long-standing occupation and development of the land which further legitimizes their claim. The second sign uses the language of suffering and pathos -conscience of spectators, whether they be researchers and NGO workers or the audiences of the journalists who have come to cover the protest. The final sign, could be read as a personal affirmation for the Kathputli Colony residents as well as a declaration of solidarity and resistance against the DDA and their eviction plans. It further indicates that despite (potentially) divergent caste backgrounds and life-stories, the residents remain united in their fight to keep their homes. As it got later in the day without any sign of the DDA, several women got up to leave to apparently eat lunch. In response, an older woman seated on a bench facing the women on the tarp their current predicament despite the absence of the DDA at that moment and to persuade the other women to remain at the protest to present a united front. Eventually, there was an announcement by a representative from an NGO stating that the lawyers had gone directly to the Lieutenant Governor, Najib Jung, after leaving the Delhi High Court, and he had given them his word that no demolition proceedings would be initiated prior to April 1st, giving them time to proceed with the case filed with the High Court and express their concerns to the developer and DDA. However, Mr. Jung had not put his promise in writing, so the guarantee lacked legal force.   In the weeks that followed, there were dozens of newspaper articles hypothesizing the fate ents. While there were no   166 demolitions as the lieutenant governor had promised, the DDA organized a community meeting to convince residents to willingly move to the transit camps, a handful of whom did. A collective of individual activists, artists, and NGOKathputli Colony residents organized a series of events including performances and informal conversations with residents designed to attract middle-class residents of the city with the hope of mstories of the residents of Kathputli Colony. This is an attempt to not just raise awareness on their present stature but also to unearth and share their history, trace their lives in a humble attempt to  On March 24th, I attended the final oit on their Facebook page. There were a series of performances presented on a stage in what appeared to be an MCD constructed outdoor community space in the colony. The event space was incredibly crowded with several rows of viewers having to stand outside the compound gates to watch. After purchasing our tickets, my two friends and I (one of whom was Indian, and another who was American) were ushered by the ticket-takers through the dense crowd to a seating area vast majority of those seated were either foreigners, media, documentarians, or young middle-class Indian women taking pictures or videotaping using smartphones and expensive DSLRs. In of the buildings on the sides and on the edges of the stage. After their impressive performances of music, acrobatics, and dancing, each of the performers introduced themselves and shared how long they had lived in the colony and ended with impassioned pleas or demands to save the colony. A   167 group of four Australians were also invited to the stage where they performed a juggling act and afterwards spoke about their love of Kathputli Colony and the residents.117  Local pradhans, including three women, were then called onstage where the MC thanked ich had been given the previous week. It outlined that the DDA would give explicit guidelines to the residents about the eligibility requirements, which included residency in the colony dating back to 2011. This would also include residents living in upper-story jhuggis as long as they could prove their residency in 2011. The court also ordered that the colony residents form a five member committee to visit the transit camp and ascertain its habitability, after which it could provide a list of changes to be made to the DDA to make it more habitable. The court also required the developer and the DDA to provide the plans for the new housing to be built, which the residents were to examine and respond with any complaints within two weeks. Finally, the court warned that no force should be used to relocate the residents. The reading of the court ruling was followed by some chanting of slogans Kathputli Colony ka ekta zindabad Mahilaon ka ekta zindabad [long  [We children ranging in age from around ten to their late teens. The play dramatized the ongoing attempts by the DDA to resettle the Kathputli Colony residents, including very unforgiving e colony residents to the transit camp, although a handful of residents had moved willingly. In March 2015, the DDA announced that the "rehabilitation" scheme for the Kathputli Colony was a failure and                                                            117 See figures 5-7 on the following pages for pictures of the event.   168 suggested a new proposal for rehabilitation that would require approval by at least 70% of the  Figure 5: (1)                 169    Figure 6: (2)  Figure 7:      170 Although bureaucratic red-tape often means that many government projects are slow moving or indefinitely stalled, the case of Kathputli Colony is quite unique because its residents possess widespread recognition and support that provides them with significant leverage with tural -recognition and legitimation of their colony. Furthermore, the recognition they acquired as performers had securely embedded them in the popular imaginary as they appear in award winning books like Children, International documentaries like Tomorrow We Disappear, and popular magazines like the 2008 Time Magazine article by Heidi -broad international and domestic sympathy and support for their cause and has allowed them to make certain demands towards the DDA. In contrast, most JJCs in Delhi remain largely anonymous even to the rest of the city and are routinely demolished and displaced with little warning, media coverage, or pushback from non-JJC residents of the city. For instance, on December 26th, 2013, a JJC under a metro stop in Northeast Delhi was demolished by the railway er 900 residents, including 500 children, were left homeless on what was the coldest night of that winter (Pandit 2013hich to examine residence-based organizing by JJ residents and the language and rhetorical devices they use to frame their claims-making in the context of impending demolitions, it is important to note that because most JJCs in Delhi lack the singular history and recognition of Kathputli Colony, their claims-making during an impending demolition would likely manifest differently.    171 As an example of claims-making around JJ demolitions that is more representative of the experiences of residents of an average JJC, I turn to a petition to Delhi CM Sheila Dixit filed by Aradhaknagar residents following their displacement due to the demolition of their jhuggis during the construction of a flyover in 2009. Parvati was one of these displaced residents who had lived icluster of tents and makeshift shanties made of tarp and plastic sheeting in what had been the only community park in the colony. During one of my visits to the colony, she showed me a copy of the petition letter she and the others had submitted, the body of which read as follows:118   This request is in regards to a [eviction] notice dated 12/01/09 which in its first line gave us only two days-time to evacuate Aradhaknagar Colonywhich had been settled since approximately 1961. In this time we could not even manage to collect our belongings and house materials when suddenly the homes were brought down ments. During this [demolition] one Maharishi Valmiki temple and a Shiva temple was also destroyedan act which was beyond boundaries [intolerable/unimaginable].  Madam, during that incident approximately 62 houses were demolished. Madam, before the demolition, on the assurance of MLA Dr. Narendra Nath we made a payment of one and a half-lakh rupees which were used to make a filler tank/pond in that colony. But now, MLA Dr. Narendra Nath is incapable of helping us and gives us false hope and has not returned once to see the sorrow of the colony residents.   Madam, from the 62 houses, there is now absolutely no space for more than approximately 35 houses. Therefore, please give permission to settle/occupy this 35-house accommodating space. And 27 houses are such that there is only space for one room each left. There is enough space in front of them for one more room, so please permit them/give them this space.  Madam, police trouble/harass us a lot and threaten to remove us (make us flee) from here. Madam, we are all staunch Congress voters. Please, stop the police.  Madam, we are the sisters, daughters, and daughters-in-law of poor families. Please, solve the problems of us poor people. We will be grateful to you for the duration of our lives. [Emphasis Added]                                                             118 The version presented here is a translation of the document by myself and my research assistant Kanika Gupta.   172  This letter illustrates the deployment of various rhetorical devices discussed above by the JJ resident petitioners as they attempt to access legal permission to rebuild their jhuggis and protection from police harassment. They point to both their lengthy tenure at that location (since language of suffering by describing their devastating loss of personal property, alluding to their helplessness as members of poor families, their ongoing suffering at the hands of the police, as  elicit a sympathetic response. It is also notable that while the displaced residents included both men and -in-the state. It serves a similar function as the positioning of women and children at the entrances of Kathputli colony as a barrier from the demolition trucks. Specifically, the sanctioned harming of women serves as a moral indictment of the state. Finally, they remind the CM of the usefulness of remains following the new road construction. Yet, unlike with Kathputli Colony, the displaced Aradhaknagar residents had yet to receive any acknowledgment or formal response from the state.           Conclusion  This chapter has focused on the ways in which legitimate belonging and urban citizenship are discursively constructed and contested among Delhi residents occupying various social positions as they draw upon and at times refute deeply entrenched narratives about themselves and   173 others. By exploring the persistent characterization of JJ residents as migrants, criminals, polluters, and state-ses, I illustrated how their claims on the -legitimized. The persistence of some of these stereotypes even among self-described allies of JJ residents facilitated the reification of these narrati-turn their deployment in the ongoing marginalization and exclusion of JJ residents from fully accessing their rights and entitlements as Delhiites. Yet they continue to contest their marginalization by alternatively drawing on a rights-based approach or utilizing pathos as a rhetorical device in their attempts to secure space and resources in the city. The petition of Parvati and others from Aradhaknagar succinctly illustrates h and resistance to popular narratives that portray them as new- state.  In the following chapter, I expand beyond these negotiations, improvisations, and rhetorical activities deployed by JJ residentspolitical engagement which works to stretch the limits and possto examine the ways in which their relationship with the state and formal politics is shaped by shared perceptions and experiences of bureaucratic opacity and corruption.     174  Chapter 5: Politics and the Rise of the Aam Aadmi In this chapter, I explore how perceptions and experiences of state opacity, bureaucracy, and corruption have shaped the ways in which JJ residents have tended to interact with governmental institutions and engage in political activity. To this end, I begin with an exploration of recurring themes that emerged throughout my interactions with women of Aradhaknagar, Kalandar, and Geeta Colony surrounding their attempts to navigate bureaucracy and have their basic needs met. I then examine how the recent emergence of the Aam Aadmi Party or the relationship to the statehavadvocating for the needs of the poor by contrasting perceptions of him within the middle-class and mainstream media with that of my JJ resident research participants. Finally, I problematize the tion in Delhi and the intersectional identities of my JJ resident interlocutors.  around the thin lines between the legal and the illegal are part of the everyday life of these [poor]  Veena Das (2004:244)  119                                                           119 This term offers the most easily recognizable short-hand for a range of behaviors and practices broadly characterized by illegality, questionable ethics, and the misuse of power for personal gain. However, considering the assertion by my JJ resident participants (discussed in this chapter) that these practices are indeed the rule rather than   175 -into the local bureaucratic system as well as the constantly changing, inconsistently implemented, and at times contradictory government policies form a complex socio-political matrix which JJ residents must continually navigate in their negotiations for rights to the city and basic resources. that Das (2004) alludes in the introductory quote above. Throughout my interactions with JJ residents, certain themes repeatedly emerged within the context of getting their basic needs met norm across institutions of powerboth governmental and non-governmental; the incomprehensibility and inconsistency of government policies; and a shared sense that JJ residents  The Power to Exploit For most of the JJ residents I spoke with, their interactions with state bureaucracy in its various iterations was predicated on their ability to gather a sufficient bribe or hafta.120 As Ganga give money work will not be done.121o-                                                           the exception, I present it here within quotation marks to problematize its connotation/implication of deviation from the norm or ideal.   120 -time bribe payments, it is more commonly used for ongoing periodic payments, perhaps based on one obscure translation of the   121 section of chapter 4.    176 and state institutions.122 For instance, as Maya of Aradhaknagar told me, the local pradhan insists several women from the cto three to four thousand rupees. While the government does not require that ration card applications be filed by pradhans, the complexity of the bureaucratic process involved in such applications, the amount of time such processes require in terms of repeated visits to government offices etcetera, as well as existing alliances between said intermediaries and low-level bureaucrats often necessitate the intervention of such intermediaries in order to practically access basic processes like applying for a ration card. Similar to the pradhan in Aradhaknagar, Amarvati and others in Kalandar Colony pointed to the insistence of their local MLA that applications for the processed through him. Particularly, Amarvati pointed to the MLAs use of his official seal/stamp plication. endorsement that the MLA seal provides to legitimize an otherwise extra-legal practice. Pointing to the pervasiveness of corruption, Seema of Aradhaknagar told me that the few people in the bureaucratic network who are willing to work without requiring bribes are rendered -4 people who work, they are not allowed to work. They take papers from here, but once in the of-1000 rupees. If you give in hand they will take. A form fee is one thing, but 1000 rupees? From where will the poor give? Must he steal? 3000 is salary, from where will we                                                            122    177  within the system, whether in the form of bribery and extortion or in the form of circumventing or exploiting legal policies, was not limited to bureaucrats.  For instance, Padma of Kalandar Colony insisted that doctors working in the much criticized nearby government hospital worked in connivance with a nearby private pharmacy. The  dispensary and directed them to the pharmacy which in-turn gave the doctors a commission. Another Kalandar Colony resident, Mahesh argued that private schools find ways around legal Half of the schools, to their kids and our kids are left out. They say they have lottery system, in 100 they pick 1 and even those they remove in a year or two using somgovernment schools predominantly attended by poor and JJ resident children had a mandate from the (then) CM Sheila Dixit to pass the students along until the 10th grade in an attempt to maintain high official literacy raahesh, irrespective of their factual accuracy, clearly illustrate the shared understanding that corruption is the rule rather than the exception within institutions of power.  Likewise, Aradhaknagar resident Rajwati, declared during a group discussion that assertion, supported by the other residents present, not   178 By negotiating a (periodically repeated) payment constructed and remain standing, police officers as enforcers of law, blur the distinction between the legal and the illegal. They provide a tacit, albeit conditional and temporary, authorization to a technically illegal construction. It is also important to note here, that while there is a significant difference in the relational power between the home-builders and the police/government agents in the context of JJCs, middle and upper--thorization for their constructions through bribes and haftas to police officers and relevant government agencies (i.e. DDA or MCD). In such contexts however, the negotiations are not predicated on the threat of violence by the police as described by Rajwati. Moreover, such extra-legal authorizations as well as the accumulation of various other bureaucratic recognitions attained through illegal or extra-legal negotiations described aboveofficial voter registration or ration cards acquired through un-official payments to pradhans and MLAshelps to establish a documentation trail upon which claims for legal recognitions can be made through time. For instance, the most commonly used criteria by government agencies like the DDA to determine eligibility for resettlement housing after the demolition of a JJC is -of course is necessarily dependent on the construction and prolonged existence of a JJC facilitated by bribes to police and local bureaucrats, and extra-legal negotiations and recognitions that allow for government issued entitlement cards and utility connections.    profiteering were directed at agents and agencies of the state, there were also some indications that JJ residents also had similar critiques of NGOs. During one group discussion with Aradhaknagar   179 resident women, the always outspoken Seema pointed to a half-constructed gutterapparently a CURE projectand posited that the NGO had probably allocated to it from the government or donors, and pocketed much of it instead of properly building the gutter. Lalita, who worked as part -y Kalandar Colony JJC, had accompanied me to Aradhaknagar that day to help me facilitate a focus group discussion. She had initially introduced me to most of the Aradhaknagar resident women, and had a long-standing and generally amicable relationship with them. While discussing if there had been any infrastructural improvements initiated in the colony by the government or non-governmental agencies working within the community, Seema addressed both Lalita and myself thusly: They made a gutter here, from your group [gesturing to Lalita]. They said gutter very poorly! [Pointing to the gutter and speaking to women in the group seated in that direction] Get away let her [Meskerem] see. These are the bricks they have put, the 2 bricks should have been placed equally [levelly]! Allocation must have been of 10-to Lalita]Your group must have eaten it up! You take accounts everywhere. Government must have given the money.  denied the accusation and insisted that CURE had done as much as they could until they had run out of funding. Once the cacophony quieted down, Krishna-ji asserted that at least the organization had done somethingwas the only resident I spoke with who made a direct accusation against a specific NGO misusing government funds allocated for a JJC, there were a few other occasions wherein residents made conditions.    180 Similarly, during an interview with former DDA Commissioner of Planning A.K. Jain, he told me that he had conducted an informal survey of 500 residents in several Delhi JJCs to determine what they expected from the DDA, local councilors and politicians, as well as what they expected from NGOs as a member of a 200-city known as the Madhukar Gupta Committee. He claimed, that while about fifteen percent of those interviewed found NGOs to be useful for getting specific resources like blankets or medicine, they didnerceptions of local councilors money from the residents.  My conversations with JJ residents did not (explicitly) reveal a common belief that the existence of NGOs necessitates the continued suffering of poor and JJ residents. If this was indeed a shared belief among my research participants, it is unlikely they would have shared it with me considering our introduction was facilitated by an NGO. Nevertheless, the general perceptions of are consistent with those of my research participants. Their formal interactions with individuals occupying positions of power relative to themselveswhether government bureaucrats, admissions officers in private schools, doctors in government hospitals, or even NGO workerswere contoured by an expectation of exploitation or profiteering. As such, their negotiations within such interactions were preemptively aimed at minimizing this exploitation as they attempted to have particular needs met.     181 Navigating an Opaque Bureaucracy       As with corruption, the frustrations of JJ residents with the opacity, plurality, and inconsistency of government policies that directly impacted their lives repeatedly emerged throughout our interactions. While some residents referenced their repeated and unsuccessful attempts to access certain officials or policy initiatives, others pointed to their general confusion and uncertainty about particular bureaucratic processes or policy changes. As indicated in the previous chapter, a long-time resident of Aradhaknagar named Parvati told me of her ongoing struggle to get some kind of definitive response about compensation or resettlement from the Delhi government following the demolition of her jhuggi in 2009 for a road expansion project. After showing me a copy of the petition123 she and the other displaced residents had submitted to the explained to me: Our file is also therebroken, their names, everything has gone but to dateit will soon be 5 yearsthere has been no response. We have been making enquiries, spent our money in travel  -responsiveness, she always kept a copy of the petition and several accompanying documentswhich included a copy of the eviction/demolition notice124 and a list of all the displaced residentsstapled together and close at hand. She regularly showed them to NGO workers and researchers like me who visited the colony, and was prepared to present them to government officials if they ever came to assign alternative housing. The petition and through their mimicry of bureaucratic documents and their circulation (Das 2004), as well as their                                                            123 For a translation of the letter as well as an analysis of its contents, see Chapter 4.  124    182 resettlement.         While accompanying CURE regional manager Shashi on one of her biweekly visits to Geeta colony, the general confusion and lack of information about several pertinent government policies for poor and JJ residents became apparent. Mentioning her recent visit to a JJ resettlement colony called Savda Ghevra in the northeastern peripheries of the city, she stated how possession of specific documents corresponding to various historical government schemes had determined the size of the plots that had been given to resettled hous18yd,2 such as ration cards as proof of residence received 12yd2 plots. Shashi went on to ask the six women sitting with us if they had filled out paperwork for the recently initiated Rajiv Awas Yojna (RAY)125 scheme aimed at providing housing for poor urban residents, to which they all replied broad advertisement on television and billboards acroget to know once we hear of it, even from your side many people must have filled it, nobody got madam, forms were fi                                                                    125 RAY, launched in 2009, was the latest and most popular in a long history of anti-slum and affordable housing initiatives during my time in Delhi in 2013-14 along with the recently established DUSIB and its overarching mission of slum and JJ redevelopment.     183 Likewise, during a visit with several Kalandar Colony resident women during which Shashi was also present, a conversation about another government scheme called Ladli Yojna further illustrated the confusion surrounding such government initiatives and their inaccessibility to JJ resident women. Explaining that the Ladli scheme was meant to empower girls from low-income families by linking financial assistance to their education,126 Shashi told me that it was launched in 200of five Amarvati waved her hands dismissively after which the following exchange occurred: Amarvati  They did not apply it, they did not give us anything. All my children have studied in government schools, nothing has happened. A form came and we 127, get her signature, madam will  all rubbish. They fooled the girl by giving her a toffee!  Shashi  No it is not like that aunty, the younger girl [gesturing toward Raj] has just received a check.   Raj  Yes, my own daughter has got it, a letter came we did not open it. People do not have information about it, people should have information. It is not Where should we collect information from? They have been making us run around for so long!  and Raj illustrate their inability to access a program that could uniquely benefit them and their daughters. Similarly, Kathputli Colony residents discussed in the previous chapter pointed to the complete lack of transparency by the DDA and Raheja Builders regarding population surveys and                                                            126 The initiative offers Delhi-born girls from families which make an annual income of less than 1 lakh 5,000 rupees upon admission to grade school, with additional lump sums of 5,000 rupees when the girl continues her education by enrolling in 6th and 9th grade, and then again if she passes the 10th grade, and finally in 12th grade. The families are payment, and to which only she will have access upon turning 18 years old.    127    184 eligibility criteria which left residents anxiously speculating on their potential homelessness in the wake of an impending demolition.  Adding to the incomprehensibility of government policies due to the lack of transparency were the multiplicity of overlapping policies and their inconsistencies. For instance, during my fieldwork in Delhi in 2013-2014, there were at least five simultaneously active national-level policies on low-income housing and poverty-alleviation in urban areas of which I was aware in addition to the numerous state-level programs such as Ladli Yojana discussed above and the The national policies included the National Urban Livelihoods Mission (NULM), launched in 1997 and updated in 2009-10, which aimed at reducing urban poverty through increasing employment;128 the Jawaharlal Nehru National Urban Renewal Mission (JNNURM) launched in 2005 with its particular sub-schemes Basic Services for Urban Poor (BSUP) and Integrated Housing & Slum Development Program (IHSD) which focused specifically on slums and JJCs; Rajiv Awas Yojana (RAY) launched in 2011 and framed as an extension of JNNURM and overlapped with the existing BSUP and IHSD schemes; and Rajiv Rinn Yojana (RRY) launched in 2013129 aimed at increasing homeownership among poor urban residents by extending them lines of credit towards purchasing homes (Ministry of Housing 2014). While the JJ residents who participated in my study should have been eligible for most of these programs; the dearth of accurate information available to them, the complexity of navigating local bureaucracy to process applications for such programs, and the frequency with which said programs were altered or                                                            128 This initiative was itself was created by merging and restructuring three previous programs: Urban Basic Services ation Program (PMIUPEP).    129This scheme was a re-designed version of a previous 2008 scheme named Interest Subsidy Scheme for Housing the Urban Poor (ISSHUP) which the Ministry of Housing & Urban Poverty Alleviation reported as having had a    185 replaced made them practically inaccessible to my participants. Moreover, the plurality of jurisdictional authority over policy implementation and ownership of land occupied by JJCs allowed for the eschewal of accountability by government agencies and thus resulted in the stagnation or general neglect of certain policies. As Manoj Rai of PRIA told me, pointing to what authority. Where I should  particularly evident during two separate conversations with Lalita and Sukant of CURE. While leaving Kalandar Colony after a CURE sponsored workshop for resident women on maternal health, I noticed an overwhelmingly putrid chemical smell emanating from a stagnant pool of water located in a small trash-filled field just beyond a low wall which, along with the field, separated the rear border of the colony from several private factories where many residents of the colony work. There were several young children playing in the area, as well as a few scattered groups of young men sitting and chatting on the wall. Lalita, who was also a resident of the colony, told me that the malodorous water is run-off from the factories. No government land-owning agency was willing to claim ownership of the field and thus procure its clean-up, either through negotiating with the factory owners or through obtaining an injunction requiring the factories to properly dispose of their chemical run-petition for such an injunction as neighboring residents affected by the run-off since their JJC was illegally occupying land owned by the DDA. As a result, CURE had been unsuccessful in its attempts to eliminate this ongoing pollution.   186 Similarly, Sukant told me of an ongoing issue with a gap of jurisdictional authority over community toilets in Delhi JJCs. Residents of Geeta colony and CURE had worked out a system wherein they would assume responsibility for the two community toilets in the colony. Residents had agreed to pay for monthly household passes which would allow unlimited usage instead of the 1-2rupees the men were required to pay per visit. The money from the passes would go toward hiring care-takers for the toilets who were colony residents as well as toward general up-keep of the facilities (which would presumably be subsidized by CURE). The plan had emerged from the to the toilets was dependent on the arrival and departure of an outside care-taker hired by the MCD. The residents had worked out this plan with the NGO to maximize their access to the toilets and eliminate some major factors behind open defecation in their colony.  This plan was dependent on the CURE and the residents being able to officially assume responsibility for the administration of these toilets from the government. However, as Sukant pointed out, while the construction and maintenance of basic sanitation infrastructure and services had historically fallen under the purview of the MCD, the recent establishment of DUSIB as the MCD to hand-over responsibility for the administration of nearly 450 community toilets to DUSIB. However, citing its lack of budgetary allocations and overall capacity for undertaking the task of cleaning and maintaining all of these community toilets, DUSIB had refused to accept the assumed responsibility for them. This had in-turn prevented CURE and the residents of Geeta Colony to proceed with their plan for self-administered community toilets. Sukant further explained:   187 dle. We have a good partnership with MCD, we have a very good reputation with DUSIB, but the difference is that they [MCD] have given the toilets and they [DUSIB] are 2 toilets, if we want to take, we have to take all [450] of them.   In this particular case, the overlap of jurisdictional authority and the eschewal of responsibility by both agencies had not only resulted in an administration gap of an already inadequate service, but  A Sense of Being Unheard  Perhaps the most frequent assertion that I heard throughout my interactions with JJ residents was that their needs and claims were consistently explicitly stated, this sense of being unheard was an underlying theme of most discussions. It can be seen in the preceding sections of this chapter within the routinely unfulfilled promises of politicians to JJ residents; the continued lack of response by the Delhi Government to Parvati and and Kalandar colony tell her of their inability to access certain government programs. Similarly, an exchange between colony residents and two CURE representatives during a community meeting about cleaning up a park demonstrated one of the ways in which JJ resident needs go unheard.  The meetingwhich I was told had been requested by residents who had approached CURE about helping them clean-up a small park in the colony which had been rendered unusable as a communal space for recreation and leisure by its habitual usage as a trash dump and site of open defecationwas apparently meant to ensure community consensus before embarking on the clean-up project. However, early in the meeting, several resident men asserted that what was more needed was another community toilet in place of the park. One of the NGO meeting facilitators, a   188 man in his sixties wand again they asked the government contractor to build a toilet when he had first come to build the park, Ramesh responded by saying that it must not have been within his contract to build a toilet and proceeded with the meeting as planned. It may have been true that there were residents who wanted to utilize the park for recreation who approached CURE; that perhaps building a new toilet was beyond what expressed desire/need for a toilet was repeatedly dismissefor a toilet, the second comment by Ramesh draws upon his opinion that open defecation is a matter of habit not of necessity to do the same. As the government agency that originally built the park had seemingly chosen not to consult colony residents about their needs before building it, the NGO co-facilitators similarly chose not to hear the needs of at least a segment of the residents participating in the meeting.  During my first visit to Kalandar Colony described in the previous chapter, self-identified pradhan Mahesh cited a similar practice of not incorporating residents and their expressed needs He told me: If the government representative comes to the public he will get to know. He sits in his parliament and Vidhan Sabha and says that he will build 10 story building and   189 give. If he is giving 10 storyhe is not giving but let us suppose that if he givesS  sustain their means of livelihood due to the impracticality of their new housing. While my interactions with urban planners indicated that there might be an emerging shift towards participatory planning which incorporated JJ residents' input, the more common refusal to hear JJ  perception discussed in chapter 4 that providing JJ residents with resettlement housing is a matter of benevolence. As such, they are expected to gratefully accept whatever is provided for them. Likewise, while discussing the problem of rising electricity bills following the recent privatization of that utility service with a group of Geeta Colony resident women, Kanta expressed her struggles to be heard by both elected representatives and the electricity provider in her attempts to have her complaints addressed. Like several other residents, she believed that the high prices  The people who have won, the vidhayaks [councilors], you go to them but there is no one to listen. If you go to Krishna Nagar,130 no one will listen to you. If you go anyone come from Krishna Nagar? [Emphasis added]   was consistent with the description of many other JJ residents with whom I interacted. It was often used to connote a sense of helplessness and frustration. Similar to the performance of politicians during election campaigns, there was a sense that no onebureaucrats, researchers, NGO workers,                                                            130 Krishna Nagar is the location of BSES-Geeta Colony. While Kanta begins her statement by referencing the newly elected councilors, she shifts to talk about the electricity company.   190 and journalists alikewas really listening to what JJ residents were saying. Rather everyone was residents to fill-out formal complaints, but ultimately not hearing what JJ residents wanted or needed and thus failing to make any qualitative changes to address them. Vijay, resident and master the government throughout the (ultimately unsuccessful) redevelopment attempt thusly: Today, so many news channel people come here, they have picked our voice, it is visible on TV, also newspapers. But we have one complaint, that when our interview is taken, then whatever we tell, the complete statement is not shown, for this we are complaining to the media people. Whatever we say, they should show the whole thing. Why are the main things cut out? So we are a little upset with the media people.    Whether it manifested in those in positions of authority entirely ignoring the expressed needs of JJ was common experience among the JJ residents with whom I spoke. This struggle to be heard, along with the frustrations of navigating opaque bureaucracy and government policy, and ongoing attempts to minimize or circumvent the payment of bribes and haftas together characterized a sic needs. Thus, as we move to the following section, it is important to recognize that while the public spectacle of elections garners them much attention, routine encounters with bureaucratic institutions and negotiations with low-level officials such as with government and the state more broadly.   Despite the explicit distrust and ambivalence of many slum and JJ residents towards politicians and their associated institutions of power discussed above, India has historically boasted   191 a consistently high election turn-out among its poorer citizens (Khilnani 1999). This is generally attributed to the prevalence of client-patron relationships between politicians and their otherwise marginalized constituents and the associated vote-bank politics. As indicated in previous sections and chapters, electoral campaigns on the ground often manifest in quid-pro-quo agreements with JJ residents wherein politicians promise protection from demolition, improvement of basic infrastructure, or use proxies to offer residents alcohol and cash in return for votes. These relationships are neither static nor simply transactional. Rather, JJ resiparticular parties or candidates, as well as their routine bureaucratic encounters with agents of the state help to shape their overall perceptions of governmental institutions and processes. This in-turn informs the ways in which they engage in political activity and negotiate for basic resources and services.   Consistent with the shared understanding that exploitation and profiteering is the norm within institutions of powers among many of my JJ resident research participants, there was also a persistent theme of distrust of and disillusionment by politicians and their false promises. Yet all of these same participants admitted that they regularly vote, reflecting the above mentioned high voting rates among poor urban residents. Residents of Aradhaknagar, Kalandar Colony, and Geeta Colony all referred to the familiar image of political candidates coming to their neighborhoods 131a visit to Aradhaknagar in March 2014, I spoke to several women residents about their participation in the recently completed local Legislative Assembly elections as well as their perspectives on the upcoming national elections to be held the following month. Krishna-                                                           131 use is notable in the context of politicians toward JJ residents because the greeting denotes respect to those being greeted, which is not consistent with how officials generally treat JJ residents outside of the campaign context.    192 come, the leaders themselves come to our homes with folded hands, they fold hands, say that we after winning they do nothing.colony following a community meeting organized by the NGO CURE, Urvashi told me that while most of the time there is no one to hear their complaints about not being able to access adequate sanitaand shrugged silently. When I asked her and the other women if they still vote considering this illustrate, the candidate with folded hands had become a signifier for the illusory spectacle of electoral politics. Even while many JJ residents played-along with the familiar performances of candidates who visited their colonies during election campaigns and even voted for them, they had little expectation that the politicians would keep their promises once they were elected into office.   Later during the above referenced group discussion in Aradhaknagar, when the all the political voting can generally be framed as a utilitarian rather than an idealistic endeavor. Particularly, it is a way for them to deploy the limited power that voting affords them to maximize the potential for a more sympathetic and accessible local bureaucracy, or to minimize the potential of their JJCs   193 being demolished. Expressing a sentiment similar to that of Rajwati discussed in the previous chapter that politicians win elections through the votes of poor residents, Mahesh of Kalandar member will want to remove us and spoil his vote bank? Maybe they will remove us, but we will  Thus, while JJ residents generally have limited social capital to deploy to ensure favorable policies, voting-provides potential leverage through which to temporarily secure tenancy or access to certain resources. Of course, any such assurances of secure tenancy and access to resources are tentative and rarely constitute permanent legal recognitions (Chatterjee (2004); Hossain (2013)). This is because the success of such vote-bank politics requires that the need which causes a vote-upon a particular political party or elected official remain on-going. Consequently, the inaction of also works to maintain their ongoing socio-economic marginalization in the city.  Moreover, important to note that not all such client-patron relationships are mutually beneficial to even this cash incentives by political campaigners may provide immediate, if limited, financial relief for JJ residents. However, as Zabiliute (2014) notes, the distribution of alcohol as a voting incentive which overwhelmingly targets JJ resident men can exacerbate violence against JJ resident women (93-94). There are also instances in which vote-banks are mobilized not through material incentives and political promises, but through the coercion of local strong--other powerful proxies of the candidates. Even so, the lead-up to the 2013 Delhi Legislative Assembly Elections and the corresponding rise of the newly established Aam Aadmi Party offered   194 from the established patterns discussed above.  The   On November 26, 2012, during a public rally marking the fifty-third anniversary of the adoption of the Indian Constitution, the Aam Aadmi Party was formally launched. This formal n October 2, the birthday of Mohandas K. Gandhi and a national holiday (Wyatt 2015:169). Focusing primarily on the widely acknowledged corruption within the Indian government and political system, the party initially emerged as an avatar of the 2011-2012 social movement against corruption which advocated the establishment of an independent, civil society led jan lokpal levels of government. After several failed attempts to get the proposed Jan Lokpal Bill passed, the core leadership of the India Against Corruption (IAC) movement splintered into two major camps in September 2012. While one camp led by the erstwhile face of the movement, Anna Hazare, continued to push for legislative change through protest, civil disobedience, and other forms of social mobilization; another camp led by Arvind Kejriwal chose to further pursue the goals of anti-corruption by forming a new political partythe Aam Aadmi Party.  Building on the IACs harsh critique of what it characterized as the endemic corruption of hard-working citizens, ready for a responsive and transparent governmenti.e. the aam aadmi and aurataracterization of the political class echoed and validated many   195 while simultaneously distancing itself. Instead, the new party positioned itself as a virtuous colpolitics in an attempt to fix the system from within because it had been unable to change it from the outside (Bornstein & Sharma 2016:83). This allowed Delhiites who otherwise distrusted -ed himself as a social activist through his work on government transparency through advocacy of the RTI Act and more stringent legislation against corruption further strengthened his position.  Moreover, Kejriwal as the national convener of the newly established AAP personified the domi-132 living in several North Indian towns. After graduating with a degree in mechanical engineering from IIT Kharagpur, and briefly working for Tata Steel, he entered the Indian civil service where he worked for the Indian Revenue Service (IRS). Being disillusioned by the corruption he apparently witnessed first-hand while working for the IRS, he established an NGO133 called Parivartan134 in Delhi to address corruption and help citizens, particularly poor slum and JJ residents, access government services (Wyatt 2015: 168-9). He eventually took an extended leave from his position with the IRS to focus on his NGO and to campaign for government transparency in what ultimately became the Right to Information Act,                                                            132 With the exception of the conspicuously wealthy or poor, the term seemed to be used by most Indians to self-identifyranging from entry-level workers in government agencies living in small rented flats, to those with --economic spectrum.    133 While Parivartan functions like and is widely viewed as an NGO by the media and the public, it is not officially registered as such (Bornstein & Sharma 2016:82).   134    196 first at the state-level in Delhi in 2001, then nationally in 2005. By the time he became involved with the IAC in 2011, he had broadened his focus beyond transparency and RTI work to include wider governance reform and had established a network of social activist supporters in Delhi through the continued work of his NGO (Wyatt (2015:168); Bornstein & Sharma (2016:82)). As the face of the new party, Arvind Kejriwal signaled that AAP was the party of the hard-working middle-committed to advocating for government reform and bureaucratic efficacy. More importantly for many JJ residents, KejriParivartan indicated that AAP would champion their cause if elected into office. reputation for social activism and incorporating pressing and timely issues in Delhi such as steady following in the city and announced its intent to contest in the upcoming local Legislative Assembly Elections in December.  Appropriating Symbols and Depoliticizing Governance  Shahrukh Khan in Chennai Express (2013) Repeated refrain from popular Bollywood Film  The Aam Aadmi trope is ubiquitous within the Indian popular imaginary, and easily accessible apopular Bollywood films, political speeches, media reports, and casual social conversations. Like many over-used terms, it is vague and lacks a consistent and broadly agreed-upon definition. which it arises and the interlocutors who draw upon it. It is most generally defined by what it is notd or powerful. More significantly, the term has an overwhelmingly positive connotation which implies an inherent moral fortitude, similar to that of   197 -of-the-validates the legitimacy of those it identifies by marking them as the majority and thus the authentic citizenry of the nation. By naming the new political party the Aam Aadmi Party, its founders automatically tapped into and attempted to appropriate a positive symbol embedded within the national imaginary and with whom many Indians already identified.  As the party gained popularity, those wanting to remain politically neutral or those simply making social observations were compelled to be intentional about differentiating between the  due to the ubiquity of the term within conversation. For instance, the SPA discussed in the previous chapter, Mr. Dharmendra Kumar of FIUPW made the following -wallahs, impact of fly-of such a ubiquitous term forced people to acknowledge it, and perhaps even engage in discussions of the party, during routine conversation. This was particularly evident during the months leading up to the Delhi elections in 2013, due to the already widespread political discourse of that period.   Similarly, the AAP, like its predecessor IAC,135 deployed symbols and language closely associated with Gandhi and the independence movement within its social mobilization campaigns. Indian nation. In doing so, the AAP further attempted to re-appropriate this Gandhian symbol from                                                            135 For a discussion of the IACs deployment of Gandhian symbols during its 2011-2012 anti-corruption movement, see Bornstein & Sharma (2016).    198 the Congress Party, whose members had heretofore regularly utilized the cap along with the Nehru jacket arguably as a sartorial nod to these important national figures and to the fact that Gandhi and Nehru were themselves members of the historic Congress Party (INC). Similarly, by employing darnas [sit-ins] and other forms of civil-disobedience to pursue legislative change, even after being elected into political office,136 AAP invoked the Gandhian Satyagraha movement. for decentralized governance nationally, as well as its push for representative self-Swaraj [self-rule] was a direct invocation of the anti-British colonial rule of the early Twentieth Century. By appropriating these symbols connected to  AAP positioned itself on a moral high-ground which in-turn allowed it to claim political legitimacy translate moral projects into technical,   jhadu, a traditional short broom made from a bundle of dried straw or grass attached at one end, as its official party symbol also warrants some analysis. The corruption and clean the political system. In this respect, it is consistent with the other symbols                                                            136 In late January, 2014, Arvind Kejriwal, recently elected CM of Delhi staged a 32-hour dharna demanding that and further demanded that the Delhi Police be placed under the jurisdiction of the Delhi government instead of its current jurisdiction under the central government (Lalchandani & Jha 2014).      199 AAPs victory in the 2013 Delhi Legislative Assembly Elections, one TOI article pointed to a local -free Delhi and celebrate the birth of a new I). However, the classed connotation of the jhadu as a symbol also bears consideration. As Devaki Jain (2013) observed about the celebration following vision screen where scores of supporters and well-wishers can be seen waving jhadus instead of flags or face masks or even candles, felt goodas if the celebration was not just focused on the AAP but also focused on the less privileged, on the working classesthe sweepers.common household item, as a symbol it is particularly evocative of those whose lives and livelihoods are closely linked to its usedomestic workers and street sweepers. Thus, by choosing  the aam aadmi was constituted by more than just the middle-class, while simultaneously signifying -class and poor Delhiites alike.  Through the appropriation of deeply embedded nationalist symbols such as Swaraj, Satyagraha, and Gandhian social activism along with the malleable concept of the disempowered but morally upright aam aadmi, the AAP discursively erased the identity distinctions widely used within contemporary Indian politics and instead constructed a citizenry defined by its shared national identity and its frustration with an elite political class which had grown corrupt, opaque, and inefficient. Expanding on a long-standing idealized notion of India as a secular nation united   200 in the EPW   After critiquing identity and interest-group based electoral politics for being divisive, Kumar asserts that a major challenge for the nascent party would be to make sure that AAP is people as individual citizensnot as members of a primordial community or a modern interest groupas an electoral platform on the basis of its agenda and : 14can and should be parsed out and prioritized over all other competing group or interest-based identities in order to build a new and healthy political system. Correspondingly, the party could subsume potentially conflicting interests around economic, regional, caste or religious disparities under the banner of a shared aam aadmi and citizen identity. Moreover, the discursive construction  whom accusations of perpetuating inequality and subverting democratic imperatives could be launched without fracturing the unity of the aam citizenry.      -cutting and its discursive erasure of distinctive backgrounds was its active depoliticization of governance into a technocratic endeavor and its consistent moralizing rhetoric, AAP leaders like Kejriwal were intentional about distancing the party from any distinct ideologypolitical or otherwise. As Patnaik (2011) and Roy (2011) point ch as corruption, and I would add unequal access to basic services or the persistence of gender based violence, not as symptomatic of structural inequality    201 issues from an ideologically situated standpoint. As a result, AAP was able to rally support around such issues from individuals with otherwise contradictory ideological standpoints because it did not require them to cohere to a shared political ideology but only to be righteously indignant towards corruption, bureaucratic inefficiency, or violence against women (in public). Correspondingly, the solutions to these moral problems were similarly framed not as political but as a matter of effective and efficient bureaucratic governance. As Bornstein and Sharma (2016) implied, and neither did their solutions. Reforming the government was a task to be undertaken by ideali  Beyond its function of garnering the party followers from different ideological providers of entitlementsservices, resources, and protections. This reconfiguration of the relationship between individuals and the state collapses the classed distinctions drawn by Chatterjee (2004) and others between the performative citizenship and political engagement of -bearing citizens who have a moral stake in the sovereignty of the state and participate in shaping of political engagement lays in the participation of a socio-economically undifferentiated citizenry in decentralized governance, particularly through demands for certain services, resources, and aam aadmi are entitled.    202  Accordinglyprovision of these basic services, resources, and protections. Similar to the ways in which neoliberal restructuring of international development has resulted in the emptying and comes reduced to a technocratic instrument of service delivery devoid of ideology. During the 2013 Delhi Legislative Assembly election campaign and its aftermath, the promise of passing a Jan Lokpal bill to fight corruption, the promise of water and electricity  Nevertheless, while a major critique against the previous government was bureaucratic opacity and poor/unequal service delivery due to corruption; once in office, the AAP government seemed to lack practical alternatives for effectively addressing bureaucratic efficiency and equitable service delivery. For instance, in early January, 2014, Kejriwal announced that the AAP government would provide free water for households that used 20kl of water or less per month, ). He added that he would initiate an assessment to ensure that the DJB installed water-meters were working correctly. While this initiative was framed as an attempt to ensure equitable access to water by offering a financial relief to lower-income households, some critics noted that it left out a significant segment of the population it was claiming to assist because it only impacted those households with metered connections in their homes (Akram 2014). Meanwhile, it did nothing to improve water access for slum and JJ residents who were primarily dependent on communal taps with an inconsistent water supply or DJB tankers, around the arrival of which many residents (primarily women) were required to schedule their daily activities.   203 Similarly, the AAP government attempted to operationalize its participatory governance goals by having MLAs visit their constituencies to gather their concerns face-to-face, as well as having their problems (Chitlangia 2014). However, the first Janta Durbar137 [Public court/hearing] held outside the Secretariat on January 11, 2014, had to be cut-short and plans for such future durbars were put on hold indefinitely. This occurred after the crowd of over twenty-thousand attendees, including displaced JJ residents seeking re-settlement housing and those who had been unable to get ration-cards issued due to demands for bribes, rushed the stage where Kejriwal sat and nearly trampled him in their attempts to have their grievances heard (Pandit et al 2014).      Kejriwal, government officials were similarly expected to approach their jobs and the tasks they ecame particularly evident early sitting (BJP) chief of the Delhi Commission for Women (DCW), resign from her position as her investigations into the legality and appropriateness of the recent actions of (AAP) Law Minister Somnath Bharti towards some African women living in South Delhi were evidence of her being                                                            137 audiences where their subjects could approach them with problems for redressal, conflicts to resolve, etc. The AAP residents and Kejriwal, or MLAs and their constituents, it brings to mind the very patron-client relationships which AAPs     204 neighborhood of Delhi after some neighbors had claimed that the apartment was the site of a drug and prostitution ring.138  While the underlying complaint of the AAP representatives against Singh seemed to be ). In of evidence warranting intervention of law enforcement was not condemned as undignified symptomatic of embedded xenophobic ideology which particularly criminalizes Africans. Rather it was touted by Bharti and other APP leaders as the unfortunate but necessary manifestation of -residential neighborhood. Indeed, Kejriwal even staged a dharna in-part demanding the suspension and investigation of the police officers who had refused to conduct the raid in Khirki Extenstion (Lalchandani & Jha 2014).139                                                                           138 See further description of this event in the  section of chapter 2.  139 See footnote 136 above    205 Nayak-politician & Defender of the Poor  Arvind Kejriwal, Delhi CM (01/21/14)   While the rise of the AAP and Kejriwal on the Delhi political scene in 2013 had largely garnered positive coverage within mainstream media outlets such as the TOI, similar to that of the 2011-2012 anti-corruption protests; by February 2014, there had been a conspicuous shift towards criticism. As AAP members continued to deploy protest tactics such as dharnas and attempted -e-class Delhiites. Less than a week before TOI  published a political cartoon140 that showed the Sansad Bhavan (Parliament House) in the background surrounded by a massive crowd of people wearing Gandhi caps and waving signs. The illustration was captioned at the top with -haired man (also wearing a Gandhi cap and holding a sign) speaking to a red-haired white woman with a camerapresumably a tourist. The dia While earlier TOI articles had described AAP as illustrative of the (Pandit 2013), it ), and dharna demanding the punishment of certain police officers (Lalchandani & Jha 2014). It even published an article exploring whether he could                                                            140 Image and accompanying article available at: <<http://timesofindia.indiatimes.com/home/sunday-times/deep-focus/Politics-Bachao-Andolan/articleshow/30084081.cms>>   206 an analysis of the Greek etymology of the term (Arora 2014).   Even so, as is evident from the introductory quote for this section, Kejriwal did not deny -h traditional politics which had have the effect of alienating some of his middle and upper-class supporters. As one particularly critical TOI article titled Wsy for a permanent revolution, the author added  Trotsky, Kejriwal seems incapable of understanding that peopleaam aadmiare unwilling and uninterested in being instruments of continua). Similarly, I routinely heard conversations in coffee shops in South Delhi, between my landlord and his friends, my neighbors, and even my previously pro-AAP acquaintances from academic circles criticize  Although the public critiques of Kejriwal among the middle-class, thein too much say over governance. This fear is aptly illustrated in a political cartoon by Ajit Ninan published by the TOI on February 11, 2014Entitled he cartoon consisted of three consecutive renderings of Kejriwal dressed in his signature scarf and Gandhi cap stamped with the AAP logo. In the first rendering, he is walking   207 jhadu [broom] against his shoulder, and under this picture is and an angry expression on his face, while the jhadu has been replaced by a bat which he is holding in front of him with both handspresumably prepared to swing. The caption under this picture knuckles on the ground as he walks. The bat has been replaced by a much bigger club, reminiscent ulder while his teeth are visible and clenched, and mirrors that of many middle-overtones.   141 reputation remained particularly strong among the JJ resident women with whom I interacted. Indeed, his resignation after only 49 days in office was more commonly taken as an indictment of the corrupt political system. He was seen as the victim of the malice and connivance of the other political parties who did not want to see him succeed in his attempts to change the system and thus lose their own power. During his brief term as CM, Kejriwal had managed to engage many otherwise marginalized populations within routine bureaucratic processes. For instance, he had invited city residents to collectively submit manifestos of their needs from the governmentthe first of which had been from an organization of homeless                                                            141 I rarely heard JJ residents talk about AAP as a party. Rather, they spoke specifically about Kejriwal and      208 and working Badhte Kadam142 (presumably official ID cards) and that they be allowed to participate in government meetings held sked residents to bring their bureaucratic issues directly to him via the short-lived Janta Durbars or their neighborhood AAP representatives during their weekly visits to their constituencies in attempts to circumvent the network of bureaucratic brokers. On a more symbolic level, he had invited a JJ resident cycle-rickshaw puller as his guest to cut the ribbon during the inauguration of a impractical, they nonetheless seemed to have garnered him approval among many poor and JJ residents.     to several resident women. During a conversation about the irregularity of their water access through the communal tap which only has running water between 1 and 3 hours a day depending on the season,143 I asked the women if there had been any improvement in their water access since AAP took office roughly a month prior. Improved water access had -the water subsidy discussed abovBidya-                                                            142   143 As in most JJCs I visited, water in Kalandar Colony was scarcer during the hot summer months.   209 not expect that he will get 28 seats, I thought he will g-though none of them had voted for him, and despite their general distrust of politicians and bureaucrats, all of the four women in our discussion believed that Kejriwal would advocate for their needs.  Two weeks later, a few days after Kejriwal had resigned, I spoke to another group of women while accompanying Shashi on one of her bi-weekly visits to Geeta Colony. While the time Kejriwal came, we were getting all facilities, vegetables Before a high bill used to come, but this time with this government it became cheaper. It became Towards the end of our conversation, after discussing the process of getting voter cards and voting, the women told me that in the December elections, they had all voted for different candidates, some saying they voted for BJP or Congress, and a few saying they had voted for AAP. But for the upcoming national elections and the inevitable special elections that would be held following Similar to Kalandar Colo   210  Likewise, I noticed a similar appreciation and support for Kejriwal, during yet another group conversation with women in Aradhaknagar early the following month. Krishna-ji, whom  during my very first visit, spoke passionately about what he had accomplished during his short tenure as CM. She Kejriwal came, he made things a bit strict. The poor were relieved a bit, in everything we big clerks that are there, their chairs were shaken! Sconversation, while the women commiserated about their frustrations with extortion by police, Ganga exclaimed: If they kill, let them kill us... It is not as though, if one is killed 10 will be born. If 1 is killeda poor man, lakhs will be born! He [Kejriwal] came like a nayak!144 In the same way fear spread among people here, Delhi Police and all started fearing! They used to take bribes from us. That had stopped. It was entirely stopped!  nayak, the teenaged Kamla added:  145 Like Kejriwal, he came but  him live, he would have done a lot, BJP people are pulling his leg,146 Congress is pulling his leg...if 100 dogs are behind a man he will automatically go   The statements by both Ganga and Kamla clearly illustrate a shared perception of Kejriwal as a  to connect him to the critically                                                            144   145 Anil Kapoor is a famous Bollywood actor who played the lead role in the 2001 Bollywood film titled Nayak: The Real Hero.  146    211 he had willfully ignored a violent riot in the citywhich could have been preventedfor his own political gain. When the CM offhandedly challenges the arena. As the new CM, the journalist-turned-politician proves to be quite effectivewiping out  politics by his concern for his fellow city-dwellers and the desire to clean-up his city. Unlike in the film however, Kejriwal 147 political system. Even so, he is perceived as no less a hero and champion of the poor by the women of Aradhaknagar, and conceivably also to the women of Kalandar and Geeta Colony.       The Aam Aurat & Politics common man?  Sruti Herbert (Qtd in Sreeram 2015)   to note that it is indeed an explicitly gendered term that centers men. Thus the choice of a political party to use the term, however common, as its official name can at best be read as indicating a lack of reflexive engagement with the politics of gender on the part of the party organizers, if not Farrell of PRIA, she implied that for many people the ubiquity of the phrase masks its inherent                                                            147 The victory of the Kejriwal led AAP in the 2013 Delhi Legislative Assembly Elections was decided by a split vote where they won 28 out of 70 seats, which in-turn caused much of the gridlock that prevented the party from successfully implementing the various legislative changes promised during the campaign season and prompting Kejriwal to resign rather than compromise on some key bills. In contrast, in 2015 he returned as the CM in a landslide with AAP winning 67 out of 70 seats.   212  the moment because she believed it was the one -about a recent meeting she had attended with AAP, Martha seemed to believe the presence of sexism and patriarch We in fact had a dialogue the other day, Aam Aadmi representatives and people of the NGO sector, mainly women  o you build a gender component archaic ideas full of patriarchal conceptsexposedAnd how do we address the issue?   148NGOs like PRIA for help in that venture indicated its openness toward gender equality and a of attack, by Spring 2014 the party had been publically accused of sexism and male dominance by s.  Following the Khirki Extension incident where AAP Law Minister, Somnath Bharti raided the home of several African women, AAP founding member Madhu Bhaduri drafted a resolution that the party offer a formal apology to the African women for their mistreatment and disavowing any racist comments that had been deployed to justify their treatment. Despite her submission of                                                            148 AAP Ki Mahila Shakti, Aap is read as the  to a special interest marginal to the main agenda of the party.   213 the resolution to the party secretary and its circulation among AAP leaders well in advance of the uary 30, 2014, the resolution was left off the meeting agenda. When Bhaduri requested a chance to speak after the last scheduled speaker, she was finished making her statementcounter to the message of insaniyat [humanism] espoused by Kejriwal. She also pointed out that, even if the African women had been prostitutes as they were accused, their treatment was no more appropriate considering that prostitution is a complex issue which is often predicated on the by Bharti before taking any action. She was heckled and shouted at by the AAP council members in attendance, after which her microphone was taken away and she was told by party leader Yogendra Yadav not to make a nt (Bhaduri (2014); Dhawan (2014)). She soon left the as Khap Panchayats149 helpless women is justified if it makes the party popular and popularity of the party takes precedence over ). Her exit from the party was later followed by another prominent female member, Shazia Ilmi, who accused AAP of being dominated by a TOI headline declared                                                            149 Khap panchayats are a councils of clan or village elders which technically have no legal or government recognized authority, but function as informal judicial bodies who deliberate on local social issues and hand down orders/decisions especially in rural areas in northern India. They are often criticized by liberal leaning Indians for perpetuating the mistreatment of women and lower-castes through their verdicts which have included the    214 -aged men form 88% of AAP ticket-top AAP leaders were men between 40-professional degrees), although the basis for characterizing .      Nevertheless, as their commentary in the previous section suggests, the reports of the Colony, and Kalandar Colony from supporting Kejriwal and his party. In fact, during a visit to Aradhaknagar a few days after the Khirki Extension incident, I overheard two of the resident women (who were not research participants) talking about the scandal. One of the women was (presumably from other political parties) trying to remove AAP members from power when they e Delhi police -dealers to the ongoing problem of sexual assault against women in Delhi, AAP had managed to frame the law foreign women as a defense of proper Indian women who were   and AAP had more to do with the ubiquity of sexism and male dominance among all political parties than it did a belief that AAP or Kejriwal was particularly gender sensitive or inclusive of women. For instance, M Sheila Dixit was based on their disappointment in her failure as a woman to ameliorate the struggles of other women; their praise of Kejriwal was linked to what he had or intended to do for them as poor JJ residents. Despite the prominence of a   215 few women politicians, such as Sonia Gandhi, Sheila Dixit, and Mayawati Prabhu Das,150 it was no secret that the political arena was dominated by menmany of whom had a history of port by the National Election Watch and the Association for Democratic reforms, there were 260 political candidates from a number of parties that year facing various sexual offense charges against womenincluding 26 from Congress and 24 from BJP (np). On the national level, there has been an as-yet unsuccessful campaign for several years to pass a bill to reserve at least 33% of seats in parliament for women.  In Delhi, during the 2013 local Legislative Assembly elections, women won only 3 out of the possible 70 seats in the Delhi Legislative Assembly; although, notably all three of the women were from AAP.151 As Krishna-ji told me when I asked her if there were any women pradhans or MLAmen], not the salwars152 salwarsKrishna- the final decision making power of the husbands and fathers-in-law in every household. Later returning to the subject of elected office, Seema told me that she had actually tried running for office once but had been unsuccessful because the local representatives of the various parties were                                                            150 Sonia Gandhi has served as the president of the Congress Party since 1998, she is also the widow of former Prime Minister Rajiv Gandhi and daughter in-law of late Prime Minister Indira Gandhi. Mayawati Prabhu Das is the current Bahujan Samaj Party (BSP) and was the first Dalit Chief Minister in India, serving as the CM of Uttar Pradesh for four consecutive terms from 1995-2012.  151 signation in 2014, six women were elected into the Legislative assembly. Again, all the women were from AAP.  152 A Salwar is a type of traditional trouser worn by women as part of a tunic-trouser set called a salwar-kemis. It was the most common type of clothing worn by most of the JJ resident women I interacted with.   216 May We saw how the netas [political leaders] were giving speeches. The fight is going They are lowly pMLAs, all chief ministers, all prime ministers, they talk using shoes and chappals [sandals], we all watch TV and news.   them arguing with chappalsmeant to evoke the image of people fighting in the street waving tereotypically associated with poor womenpoliticians. This narrative is similar to that deployed by middle-class and media critiques of Kejriwal discussed above. However, her use of this narrative also reverses and redeploys a negative stereotype commonly placed on poor women to refute the notion that the political class is somehow whom they preclude from accessing the political arena.  Conclusion  This chapter has focused on the shared experiences and perceptions that characterize JJ Particularly, it illustrated how a struggle to be heard, along with the frustrations of navigating opaque bureaucracy and government policy, and ongoing attempts to minimize or circumvent the payment of bribes and haftas fulfill their basic needs. I alsactive engagement in electoral politics, and argue that voting is deployed within a larger context of ongoing negotiations for (temporary) protections and resources. Extending this exploration of   217 poor JJ residents. I assert that, to a certain extent, the emergence of Kejriwal, AAP, and their anti--some new (albeit short-lived) avenues for JJ resident women to potentially access basic resources and services and have their needs met by allowing them to circumvent established networks of intermediaries and brokers. Through its symbolic incorporation of poor Delhi residents into bureaucratic activities such as participatory governance through mohalla sabhas [neighborhood assemblies] or having a cycle-rickshaw puller inaugurate a government hospital, AAP also tenuously elevated the image of poor Delhiites from mere vote-banks to that of constituents to be served equally by the government. Indeed, the persona of Kejriwal as the anti-politician champion of the poor did offer many JJ residents a politician in whom they could believe despite their general distrust of politicians and bureaucrats.  Yet, the brevity of the (initial) AAP government in Delhi and its paucity of practical of governance in an attempt to create an undifferentiated citizenry meant that their new policies were unsustainable and often failed to reach those who needed them the most, such as JJ residents. n safety from sexual assault in public (similar to other major parties), meant that there was very little substantive improvement in the lives of most JJ resident women whose daily insecurity encompassed issues such as the looming threat of demolition and the dangers of using community toilets. Therefore, their encounters with state bureaucracy and politics continued to be characterized by the expectation of exploitation and profiteering on the part of those in positions of power; a general frustration with the incomprehensibility of government policies and programs;   218 an expectation of marginalization by menwhether they be officials or members of their own households, and an ongoing sense of being unheard.          219 Chapter 6: Conclusions Key Findings I have argued that the relationship of JJ resident women with the state and their access to the rights and entitlements it guarantees are contoured by dominant discourses on proper Indian womanhood, legitimate belonging, and urban citizenship. Through the analytic chapters, I have institutions of power and inform their claims-making strategies as they attempt to fulfill their basic needs. In this conclusion, I identify important and recurrent themes in the chapters, and discuss the , urban citizenship-life. Circumscribed Citizenship  grievable life by Butler (2009) and re-scholarship of Das & Poole (2004); I illustrate the ways in which dominant discourses of gendered claims on the state for protections. Particularly, I argue that through their disproportionate reliance on the lives and experiences of middle-class women in defining who and thus that which is readily recognized by the statedominant discourses have facilitated the rendering of poor JJ resident or women  220 sexual assault claimsrgue that these discourses construct a restrictive framework of citizenship for middle-class women that is predicated on their domesticity bodies also demand their protection by the state, and thus allows them to make gendered claims on the state for such protections. However, this pervasive definition of dle-class practices and experiences excludes poor and JJ resident women from making similar protection claims on the state and thus isolates them further within an already marginalized and restrictive gendered citizenship.   Similarly, in chapter 4, I explore the persistent characterization of JJ residents as migrants, criminals, polluters, and state--legitimized. Particularly, by framing JJCs and their residents as fundamentally not of the city, and even more -working, tax-paying, middle-legitimate citizens. Thus, in the same way that poor and JJ resident women are excluded from the forms of gendered citizenship available to middle-class women, all JJ residents are excluded through the construction of middle and upper-class Delhiites as the citizenry within the dominant discourse of the city. This is further reified through the success of middle--free narratives.      221 Discourse and the Hegemonic Domain of Power  Throughout this dissertation, I have argued that particular narratives within dominant discourses have tangible material effects, particularly on those with intersectional identities that locate them within the margins of said discourses. In chapter 3, I argue that the narrow boundaries of womanhood discursively constructed and circulated by the middle-class and mainstream media work to erase the experiences and suffering of JJ resident women. Similarly, in chapter 4 I argue dangerous, morally corrupt, unhygienic, and obstacles to development all work to de-legitimize their claims on discourses function within what Collins (2000) calls the hegemonic domain of power to justify oppression. The wide-spread accessibility of these narratives, the ease with which they can be drawn upon by individuals occupying various social locations, and their persistence (in less conspicuous iterations) even among allies of (women) JJ residents indicates their hegemony within resident women, or framing JJ residents as antithetical to the norms and shared vision of Delhi as a world class city, each work to legitimize the oppression of JJ residents. For instance, they allow for the demolition and displacement of hundreds of families living in JJCs by justifying it as essential for city development or the preservation of public (read: middle-class) interests.      Bureaucracy and the Structural Domain of Power  Similar to the function of discourses discussed above, I also argue that bureaucracyits networks and practicesoperates within the structural domain of power (Collins 2000), organizing oppression through its various institutions to reproduce the subordination of JJ resident women. In chapter 5, I illustrated the routine struggles of JJ resident women as they attempted to   222 navigate opaque and illegible bureaucratic processes in their attempts to access basic resources and services. The lack of transparency surrounding bureaucratic processes, the multiplicity of overlapping policies and their inconsistencies, and the frequency with which programs are introduced and discarded make important services and entitlements essentially inaccessible to JJ resident women. This inaccessibility is further compounded by the complex networks of extralegal brokers and intermediaries that operate as gatekeepers to state resources. Together these bureaucratic practices reproduce the subordination of JJ resident women by blocking their access to potential resources and programs that might uniquely benefit them and ameliorate certain  and e arbitrary outcomes of its practices is central to producing and reifying the suffering of the poor (2012:6).      Claims-Making in the Margins  and judicial recourse often requires that they actively negotiate for governmental recognition and entitlements through variously framed individual or collective claims. Due to the precarious legality surrounding most JJCs and their claims on the land they occupy, negotiations rarely occur through direct appeals to the judicial system but rather require ambiguously legal and temporary agreements between JJ residents and individuals within various positions of power or influence in -political networks. Depending on the particular contexts within which certain claims are being made, these negotiations may utilize a rights-based approach and cite instances of temporary or partial recognition from the government, point to the contribution and investment of the claims-makers in their communities or the city, or attempt to establish length of tenancy to secure housing tenure. Alternatively, they may attempt to garner empathetic support   223 from bureaucrats and middle-class residents by utilizing a language of suffering and making appeals to conscience to mobilize various audiences on their behalf. Here I draw on global and historical deployments of the language and exposure of suffering as a tool for marginalized and immoral actions, and to mobilize potential allies with more socio-hat the selective deployment of various rhetorical devices, such as storytelling and testimony, to assert claims ranging from (better) access to certain services and resources, to the protection of their homes from imminent demolition by JJ residents can be read as a form of resistance and political engagement by marginalized urban citizens.       In chapter 5, I argue that there was a shared perception among most of my JJ resident interlocutors that corruption and profiteering permeated institutions of power. Their routine encounters with individuals occupying positions of power relative to themselves were characterized with an expectation of exploitation. As such, their negotiations within such interactions were preemptively aimed at minimizing this exploitation as they attempted to have particular needs met. Narratives of corruption which circulate among JJ residents through the re-telling of particular encounters with bureaucrats and state agents, or in the form of rumor and speculation/paranoia on otherwise opaque institutions and practices construct a shared imaginary of an insidious and far-reaching network of power. As the commentary from my JJ resident women interlocutors throughout the various chapters illustrates, this notion of exploitation and domination old, while the various discussions of interpersonal encounters with bribe-demanding pradhans, police   224 officers, and politicians indicates its persistence (with varying detrimental effects) all the way up to the highest levels of political office.  In addition to informing the strategies JJ residents employ when interacting with individuals occupying positions of power, the particular narratives of corruption embedded with indictments of unscrupulousness and venality can also be read as resistant counter-narratives to the dominant characterizations of JJ residents as criminal and morally corrupt. Here, I draw broadly (Rudé (1964); Guha (1983); Bhabha (1994)). In certain respects, the circulation of stories about corruption circulating among JJ shared critique and rejection of a hegemonic system of governance. However, unlike rumors, they are not anonymous but rather are often rooted in testimonies of personal experience. Also, these narratives of corruption work more to name the routine practices of power rather than to mobilize active resistance. Nevertheless, they serve as a resistive counter-narrative when juxtaposed with chapter 4.         Voting as Cynical Pragmatism  In chapter 5, I discussed the simultaneous wide-spread distrust of politicians and consistently high voting rates among JJ residents. I resist the characterization that the system of vote-banks and the cycle of un-fulfilled promises by politicians means that JJ residents are merely cynical pragmatism. As all the JJ resident women I spoke with made clear, they were acutely aware of the fact that while   225 season, they rarely fulfilled any of their promises of housing security, infrastructural upgrades, or improved access to basic services. Yet they continue to vote because, votingparticularly when -provides them potential leverage, within their otherwise limited access to social capital, through which to temporarily secure tenancy. As Mahesh -because the routine operations of the bureaucratic system rely heavily on personal connections between individuals occupying particular offices, the successful mobilization of votes for particular candidates can facilitate access to specific resources or services.   For instance, in May 2012, while in Delhi to conduct pre-dissertation research, I accompanied an SPA student while she conducted a survey on water access in a JJ resettlement colony in Dwarka. During an extended conversation with one of the residents, she told us that during the last local election they had elected an MLA who had close ties to electricity providers. As a result, their access to electricity had significantly improved in terms of consistency and they had fewer complaints about price-gouging. However, she also told us that the politician who had lost in that election, had close contacts within the DJB but now refused to utilize this relationship to help address some persistent issues of water access in the colony as retribution for losing the election. This illustrates that in certain contexts, voting can be deployed to facilitate access to much needed resourcesalthough the success of this mobilization may be partial and have unanticipated consequences in other areas. Similarly, common practice of political parties distributing cash incentives to secure votes or to recruit JJ residents to campaign for them, as with Champa in Savda   226 Ghevra, offers immediate infusions of (albeit small sums of) cash otherwise not accessible, which could prove vital during acute moments of financial vulnerability.           Scholarly Contributions  This dissertation is an ethnographic study of the intersectional marginalization of women ity. As such, it is concerned with understanding what it means to legitimately belong in Delhi, particularly for poor women living in perpetual precariousness. It builds on the recent scholarship on cities as spaces for gendered performance, the inaccessibility of urban spaces to women, and issues of -Rewal 2011; Phadke et al 2011; Viswanath & Mehrotra 2008) by putting them into conversation with theorizations of intersectionality and matrices of oppression (Collins 2000; Crenshaw 1989 & 1991; Yuval-Davis 2006) to uncover gaps in narrativized experiences of women in Indian cities and the scholarly,   Particularly, I use an intersectional framework to expand the analytical scope of both the literature on urban citizenship and rights to the citywhich largely centers poverty and socio-economic classand the growing literature on  access to urban spacewhich largely centers genderby putting them into conversation within the context of the lives of JJ resident women in Delhi. To clarify, I do not imply that gender analysis is completely absent in existing rights to the city scholarship, or that class analysis is similarly absent from recent literature on women and urban space. Rather, my assertion is that both bodies of literature generally tend to center class or gender respectively as primary identity/analytical categories while utilizing the other as part of a series of secondary additive variables (i.e. race, religion, ethnicity, sexuality). In contrast, I draw on theorizations of intersectionality   227 identities including class and gender are conceptualized as constitutive and inextricable, not additive. Thus, my point of entry for analysis is not through any overarching category but rather a particular intersection of social identities. By centering the intersectional marginalization of JJ resident women, I am able to simultaneously incorporate both gender and class into my explorations of rights to the city, legitimate belonging, and urban citizenship. This, in-turn, allows for a more textured analysis of the ways in which gender oppression and inaccessibility to urban space are differently articulated at particular class intersections, with the understanding that they can indeed only be experienced at the particular intersections of multiple identities.   Moreover, the use of intersectionality and understandings of  to analysis of the ways in which middle and upper-class womenboth within their interpersonal relationships with poor women and as discursively constitutedsustain and perpetuate the ongoing oppression of poor women. This analysis builds on the critiques of second wave and western feminismstheir erasure of the experiences of women who are not white/cis/heterosexual/middle-class as well as their contribution to the ongoing oppression of such women through their tacit or active support of white-supremacist/heteronormative/colonial systems of powerby black feminists (Collins (2000); hooks (1984); Lorde (1984)) and other feminists of color around the world (Abu-Lughod (2000); Mohanty (1991); Ayotte & Husain (2005)).  -(2004), Fitzpatrick (2000), and Gupta (2012) in my analysis of the marginalization and oppression of JJ resident women, I attempt to strengthen and expand the analytical and theoretical scope of both concepts. Particularly, I extend conceptualization   228 of the ways in which hegemonic characterizations/framings of acute state violence and victims of said violence circulated through mass media and popular discourse help to construct unsuch as the demolition and displacement of JJ residents, the ongoing dangers of inadequate toilet facilities, and the fiscal and sexual harassment of JJ resident women by police officersto render the lives of poor and JJ resident women as ungrievable.   Likewise, I use this understanding of the function of hegemonic discourses to delve deeper into -Das & Poole (2004), Fitzpatrick (2001), and Gupta (2012) theorize is broadly -e among marginalized communities; through complex legal processes; and through the indifferent and arbitrary practices of state bureaucracy respectively. In doing so I assert that dominant narratives often emerging from the middle-class and circulated through mainstream media and popular discoursesuch as a narrow definition of -class experiences and practices, and the persistent characterization of JJ residents as migrants, morally corrupt, dangerous etc.are taken-up by agents and institutions of the state and contour the relationship of the state with its citizens. -ects in tandem with the state practices theorized by  (2009) formulations on the constitution of epistemological frames through hegemonic discourse and media circulation as well as (2000) conceptualization of the hegemonic domain of power, with theorizations of bare-life and   229 exception that center the state and its practices, I attempt to extend understandings of the production of bare-life to include hegemonic discourse emanating from and widely-circulated by the public.    Furthermore, I expand on this discussion of the power and utility of language and narrative, not only in service of domination and oppression, but also as a medium of claims-making and resistance among marginalized communities. To this end, I draw upon social constructionist through the definitional processes and interactional activities of claims-making (Spector and Kitsuse 1987), as well as scholarship which examines the functions of narrative and rhetorical aspects of such claims-making (Best (1987); Mulcahy (1995); Fortmann (1995)) to connect the language and stories of JJ resident women to that of historical and international social justice and resistance movements such as the Gandhian Satyagraha movement and the U.S. Civil Rights movement. Specifically, I point to the use of both verbal and visual illustrations of suffering by various historical social movements to simultaneously legitimize their claims and condemn the status quo by appealing to the emotions and the humanity of the societies from which they emerge. Correspondingly, I argue that suffering and injustice to NGO workers, journalists, researchers, and each other can be understood as rhetorical activities deployed by marginal but agentive actors to move their audiences to act in their attempts to secure space and resources in the city. More broadly, such activities exemplify a political deployment of the language of suffering.            Ultimately, while my dissertation focused on the specific case of JJ residents in Delhi, the issues raised in my research speak to larger issues of intersectional marginalization, urban citizenship, and the ways in which certain lives are de-legitimized and rendered unrecognizable   230 illustrate how such discourses are able to render invisible certain communities that embody identities at particular intersections of marginality, not through outright exclusion and negligence but rather through subsuming them within dominant communities. I further point to the ability of hegemonic discourses to narratively construct certain marginalized identities as hyper-visible categories which are nonetheless emptied of nuance and substantive meaning within a shared imaginary. Nevertheless, through explorations of JJ recounter-narratives to dominant discourses, I have conversely pointed to certain modes of discursive resistance that can emerge from marginalized urban communities.  Final Thoughts This document is, at its core, an attempt to advance the telling of the lives of JJ resident ar, I sat with Krishna-ji, Seema, done on other occasions, why I came to her colony. As before I tried to articulate my interest in the stories of other women and my particular desire to understand the struggles of marginalized women from their own perspective rather than through the narratives of NGOs and government institutions. Each of the women responded thusly: Seema: If you tell the truth, all we women are with you... even if you knock on our and went away... because we have been cheated many times.   Krishnaji: That is what I said, so many came and so many went...    231 Gangaanything.  And you also came from so far. [Pause] So if this has been done... in the future also, things may get done.  Based on their general experiences with bureaucrats, politicians, and NGO workers, the women of Aradhaknagaror Kalandar and Geeta Colonieshad little reason to trust me. Yet even while ambivalent about my potential ulterior motives, they willingly took time to share their stories and experiences with me.  Indeed, I have done nothing for them that might qualitatively improve their lives. I hope, however, that my attempts to honor their truths and convey them in a way that respects their daily struggles have been successful.               232 APPENDICES     233 Appendix A to Sheila Dixit  (Submitted to Delhi CM Office, 2010)  Figure 8:     234 Appendix B Copy of Aradhaknagar Demolition Notice  (Issued by , 2009)    Figure 9: PWD demolition notice 2009     235 REFERENCES     236 REFERENCES  Aam Aadmi Party. 2013. 2013 Delhi Manifesto. Accessed March 16, 2016. http://www.aamaadmiparty.org/Manifesto-for-Delhi  Abu-Lughod, Lila. 2000. Introduction: Feminist Longings and Postcolonial Conditions. In  Remaking Women: Feminism and Modernity in the Middle East. L. Abu-Lughod, ed.  Princeton: Princeton University Press, 3-32.    Agamben, Giorgio 1998. 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