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Contemporary South Asia
ISSN: (Print) (Online) Journal homepage: https://www.tandfonline.com/loi/ccsa20
Producing multiple ‘others’: spatial upheaval and
Hindutva politics in urban India
Ritanjan Das, Nilotpal Kumar & Praveen Priyadarshi
To cite this article: Ritanjan Das, Nilotpal Kumar & Praveen Priyadarshi (2021) Producing multiple
‘others’: spatial upheaval and Hindutva politics in urban India, Contemporary South Asia, 29:4,
514-531, DOI: 10.1080/09584935.2021.1996538
To link to this article: https://doi.org/10.1080/09584935.2021.1996538
© 2021 The Author(s). Published by Informa
UK Limited, trading as Taylor & Francis
Group
Published online: 07 Nov 2021.
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Producing multiple ‘others’: spatial upheaval and Hindutva
politics in urban India
Ritanjan Das
a
, Nilotpal Kumar
b
and Praveen Priyadarshi
c
*
a
Faculty of Business and Law, University of Portsmouth, Portsmouth, UK;
b
School of Development, Azim Premji
University, Bangalore, India;
c
Zakir Husain Delhi College, New Delhi, India
ABSTRACT
This article examines two simultaneous dynamics in contemporary India:
the development of new urban spaces, and an intensification of Hindu
nationalism (Hindutva). Examining the case of Noida (a township
adjacent to Delhi), this article suggests that the entrepreneurial mode
of urban development [Harvey 2006. Spaces of Global Capitalism.
New York: Verso] has restructured local spaces, which in turn may give
rise to rival attempts at group making, seeking to recreate exclusive
identities out of choice and resentment to mobilise political action.
Such rival attempts may enable Hindutva to entrench itself in local
milieus through multiple modes, including the soft mode of ‘neo-
Hindutva’.Overall, the article outlines the dynamic association between
new urban processes and exclusivist/nativist forms of politics in
contemporary India.
KEYWORDS
Urban space; Hindutva;
identity; Noida; India
1. Introduction
Two simultaneous dynamics characterise contemporary development politics in India. One, within a
well-entrenched capitalist economy, value accumulation through dispossession of rural and peri-
urban communities has been apace, and capital thus accrued tends to primarily favour corporate
businesses and real estates (Levien 2012, 935). Often developed by a coalition of public and
private agencies, new urban centres facilitate the localised reproduction of global capital (Bhatta-
charya and Sanyal 2011). The middle-class elites’demand for aesthetically appealing urban spaces
helps to close this loop of ‘new towns as the location of a new economy and a new class of producers
and consumers’(Bhattacharya and Sanyal 2011, 42).
Two, the Indian polity has witnessed an ascendance of right-wing politics. The Indian political
right has a long history. But since the BJP (Bharatiya Janata Party) led government assumed
power in 2014, religious-ethnic divisions have become considerably sharper (Anderson and
Jaffrelot 2018). With its roots steeped in the RSS (Rashtriya Swayamsevak Sangh, the Hindu nationalist
parent organisation of the BJP), the government has attracted scrutiny amid reports of violence
against minorities. Many scholars also point out that a sizeable section of India’s middle-class
shares some strands of right-wing ideology in their everyday political practices (Fernandes 2006; Cor-
bridge and Harriss 2000).
The interaction between these two dynamics has received somewhat uneven attention. A major
strand of urban sociology has examined emergent middle-class aesthetics, class relationships, and
© 2021 The Author(s). Published by Informa UK Limited, trading as Taylor & Francis Group
This is an Open Access article distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivatives License (http://
creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-nd/4.0/), which permits non-commercial re-use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the
original work is properly cited, and is not altered, transformed, or built upon in any way.
CONTACT Ritanjan Das ritanjan@gmail.com
*Present address: IIT, Delhi, India
CONTEMPORARY SOUTH ASIA
2021, VOL. 29, NO. 4, 514–531
https://doi.org/10.1080/09584935.2021.1996538
their impact on urban place-making in the post-economic reform era (Fernandes 2006;Atluri2013;
Baviskar 2003). There are also notable works on the rise of Hindu nationalism in metropolitan cities
(Desai 2010;Lele1995). But the entrenchment of this ideology in everyday lives in newer Indian
cities has received relatively less attention. Similarly, except for a few works on political-cultural mobil-
isations in smaller towns (Brass 1997;Simpson2006;Berti,Jaoul,andKanungo2011), the literature on
Hindu-right is largely silent on how new urban processes in a neoliberal context mediate its entrench-
ment at various scales.
This paper brings together the usually separated analytical strands of political economy of urban-
isation, class relationships, and cultural entrenchment of Hindu nationalism (Hindutva) into one
analytical configuration by examining the case of Noida, a township bordering Delhi, in the state
of Uttar Pradesh (UP). It suggests that neoliberal forms of space production and governance, com-
bined with existing class relationships, generate a ‘logic of competitive identity politics’among
different social groups. This logic recreates cultural distinctions to address inter-group conflicts
around the control of local spaces. This everyday politics of cultural contestations around places,
we argue, enables Hindutva discourses to become entrenched locally. We use a recent labour-
dispute case in Noida as an entry point for this argument.
1.1. The Mahagun Moderne incident
In mid-2017, Noida suddenly featured in international headlines for a seemingly local affair. ‘At a luxury
high rise in India, the maids are rioting’,reportedtheWashington Post.
1
On 12th July, a group of
migrant domestic workers and labourers barged into a luxury housing enclave called Mahagun
Moderne, claiming that a housemaid was being detained by her employers since the previous night.
A search of the employers’residence remained unfruitful, but the maid was found elsewhere inside
the complex, having spent the night inhiding after a dispute. Several police complaints were promptly
filed charging the crowd with rioting, property destruction, and even attempt to murder; 13 people
were subsequently arrested (John, Topo, and Monchari 2017).
Despite the local turmoil, this wasn’t an incident to gain nationwide significance. And yet it
attracted considerable attention due to a certain political colour being almost simultaneously
imbued to it. Though described by some national media agencies as representing India’s increasing
economic inequality, many middle-class inhabitants of Noida framed the dispute in an ethnic-nation-
alist context by invoking the religious and regional identities of the crowd as purportedly illegal Ban-
gladeshi Muslim immigrants. They saw the incident as a threat to the Indian nation and its Hindu
majority; the ‘threat from Bangladeshi rioters’narrative was scaled up by regional right-wing
groups and several vernacular media organisations in turn. John et al. (2017) summarises these
developments as follows:
Within hours, an obvious labour issue …was projected as a communal confrontation …identifying the protest-
ing workers and the missing domestic worker as ‘Bangladeshis’…social media exploded with communal dia-
tribe …The Mahagun residents have also conveniently bracketed Bengali Muslims, and now all workers from
[West] Bengal …as ‘Bangladeshi rioters’.
The Washington Post, however, drew attention to the spatial dimension of the event:
Mahagun …[is] a gated, 25-acre complex with swimming pools, a tennis court and landscaped pathways. A
short distance away, their household help —mostly migrants from the state of West Bengal —live in tin-
roofed huts in a muddy field, bathing from a communal tap.
2
John, Topo, and Monchari (2017) elaborates:
[Mahagun] constitutes a ‘new’way of life- a mini-city …watching a frail domestic worker undergoing a ‘tap
down’by guards …is the first unusual site …Following the footsteps of the domestic workers …one begins
to wonder if there is any space for the women to even sit down and rest.
CONTEMPORARY SOUTH ASIA 515
Such spatial features of residential differentiation are neither unique to Mahagun, nor to Noida.
However, this incidence gives us a window into the embedded socio-spatial relations in new
urban India. Like most new and upcoming Indian cities (Cowan 2015), Noida exhibits a stark
spatial differentiation where luxury urban enclaves (comprising of a few hundred to 8000 plus
flats) are segregated from semi-urbanised rural settlements and slums/shanties where locals and
migrant populations live. We argue that the exclusivist discourses thrown up by relatively small-
scale/localised disputes like Mahagun may be understood in the context of a spatial upheaval in
which the new middle-class city dwellers are attempting to control their neighbourhoods against
rural and migrant inhabitants; a control that is simultaneously animated by the wider ethno-nation-
alist narratives of the current political regime. In turn, it is a conflict that owes itself to the mode of
urban development under an entrepreneurial state (Harvey 2006).
3
We develop this argument in five
sections of this paper. The next section describes our theoretical framework. Section three explores
the nature of ‘spatial upheaval’in Noida and the production of distinct social spaces/nodes. Section
four examines spatial practices in each node and the concomitant entrenchment of Hindutva politics.
The concluding section summaries our core argument about the role of space as an enabler of the
exclusivist politics.
Methodologically, the article is based on six months’field research in Noida in 2017–18. We con-
ducted 50 in-depth semi and unstructured interviews with retired bureaucrats (2) and urban plan-
ners (2) who were involved with Noida, academics and journalists (4), politicians (5), middle-class
residents of the urban enclaves (12), villagers (13), and migrant labourers (12). The last three
groups formed the majority of our respondents, as they represent the three prominent communities
in Noida both in class and caste terms. The urban residents, members of India’s burgeoning middle-
class, are largely upper-caste Hindus. The villagers included traditional landowning elites and land-
less labourers hailing from the three locally dominant castes of Gurjars, Chauhans and Yadavs, and
the schedule castes (SC) respectively. The migrant labourers came from marginal rural families in
eastern India (Bihar, Jharkhand, West Bengal), and were primarily SC Hindus and Muslims. We also
interviewed academics from the School of Planning and Architecture (New Delhi), and politicians
from the BJP/RSS, the Samajwadi Party (SP) and the Bahujan Samaj Party (BSP). The categorisation
of the respondents were done to get an overall sense of urban development in Noida, ranging
from its history, planning imperatives, current governance/political issues, and finally a detailed
exploration of the different resident communities. A significant proportion of the fieldwork also
went in collecting archival resources, particularly the older Master Plans of Noida.
4
Data gathered
were mostly in the form of field notes, recorded interviews, and print media articles in English,
which were memoed for textual and conceptual analysis. Given the inter-group politics and cultural
contestations that form the crux of this study, we have primarily used interview excerpts from the
three communities to substantiate our arguments, while the remaining interviews aided in giving
us a broad context of the field, pointing to relevant archival sources and potential informants.
2. Space, place, and Hindutva politics in India
Space is a historically configured social relationship (Lefebvre 1991; Massey 1994; Smith 2010).
Beyond an independent physical background containing entities, the critical geographical under-
standing is that ‘social spaces’are constituted through relationships in physical spaces, with social
processes constantly recreating said relationships. Harvey has, for instance, proposed the concept
of ‘relative’space as the space for variable but interdependent relationships among physical entities
and social networks (2006,3–4). Relative spaces are increasingly manifested through global flows of
capital and information, interconnecting vast urban and rural geographies, and coinciding with the
entrepreneurial state in producing new urban spaces by appropriating new territories and resources
(2006, 93). A variant of this relative space is the ‘relationality’of spaces, capturing social experiences,
symbols, and discourses shaping and being shaped by the absolute and relative features of a
516 R. DAS ET AL.
particular space. The dual concepts of spatial relativity-relationality enable an examination of con-
tested meanings and identities associated with reconfigured urban spaces.
Social spaces also embody certain forms of power that states and markets seek to impose on the
‘lived spaces’of symbols and social interactions (Lefebvre 1991,33–42). This space-power interplay
necessitates the understanding of social processes at the lower scale of a ‘place’: a particular form of
space that ‘emerges in a …bounded territory through a field of meanings and social interactions’
(Hubbard, Kitchin, and Valentine 2004, 6). Yet, being more than just proximate geographies of inter-
actions and meanings, places are also specific configurations of interacting relationships and mean-
ings across geographic scales (Massey 1994). On the space-place continuum, Harvey has accorded
global economic processes such a causal primacy that place-based lived spaces become inert and
dependent on wider spaces. For instance, he considers neoliberal urban places to be polarised in
a way that low-income populations aggregate in localities where they defend spaces as ‘use
values’through segmented communal attachments, while more affluent groups make places by
enhancing ‘exchange values’through high-value consumption choices (1989, 266). Harvey also con-
nects spatial reorganisation under post-industrial capitalism with exclusive identity-based claims to
places. As space becomes an ‘abstract commodity’, it elicits politico-cultural reactions that attribute
moral-mythical values to places (‘aestheticization of politics’:1992, 209).
Albeit appealing in determinism, such formulations ignore how historical contingencies attach to
places, reconfiguring wider political economic processes regionally and locally (Massey 1994).
Massey agrees with Harvey that both new nationalisms and exclusive inner-city enclaves of the
middle-classes represent attempts at addressing ‘spatial upheavals’of the pro-market era.
However, she stresses that such attempts entail rival impositions of ‘labels/identity/boundaries’on
places (Massey, 1994, 5), and that place-bound cultural identities are not derived exclusively from
the economic category of class (Massey, 1994, 137). Drawing on Massey’s anti-essentialist and
dynamic conception of spatial upheavals and associated contestations, we suggest that state
mediated commodification of space and the resultant differentiation in Noida has set offnew pol-
itical processes in which rival social groups seek to control space by creating cultural frameworks.
Simultaneously, we also draw on Bourdieu’swork on class formation and social practices to
understand local social fields. Bourdieu’s(1985) key contention, that group specific socio-spatial
practices emanate from varying ‘habitué’of perception, rules, and properties, is highly relevant.
Habitué/habitus is constituted by the distribution of properties (capitals) among individuals, confer-
ring specific strengths to individuals/groups within interconnected economic, social and symbolic
fields. This structuralist model of practice is organised around a ‘logic of difference’, where social
agents with shared dispositions pursue spatial, economic, and symbolic distinctions as ‘lifestyles’
to maintain social separation. Our attempt is to demonstrate how the social practices of community
making involve the production of new logics of difference among social groups cohabiting in Noida.
To summarise, we approach Noida as a state-produced new urban space in which everyday place
making is inherently connected to the political need for controlling space, creating group ties
against a rival ‘other’in a search for shared habitus.
Our approach also places us among ethnographic studies of Hindu nationalism in urban settings
(Berti, Jaoul, and Kanungo 2011; Brass 1997; Desai 2010). Having remained peripheral for most of
twentieth century, Hindu nationalist ideas were mainstreamed through the post-1991 rise and
aspiration of the BJP to recast India’s civic nationalism as Hindutva, a political ideology constructing
the idea of Indian nationhood through an ‘irreducible and exclusive affinity of Hindu-ness’(Desh-
pande 1995, 3220–22). Hindutva justifies Hindu supremacy over an ‘other’–often a religious min-
ority –seen as threatening the body cultural of a Hindu nation (Corbridge and Harriss 2000). It is
therefore committed to a fundamental transformation of India to achieve a ‘Hindu Renaissance’
(Anderson and Longkumer 2018, 371–72).
Recent anthropological scholarship has focused on how Hindutva percolates into various local
contexts where social groups interpret and adapt it to further their own ends. Berti, Jaoul, and
Kanungo (2011) present a nuanced account of Hindutva seeping through quotidian social and
CONTEMPORARY SOUTH ASIA 517
cultural life in multiple ways. Echoing Billig’s(1995) construct of ‘banal nationalism’(the everyday
reproduction of informal nationalistic feelings through routine symbols and speeches), they
contend that Hindutva entrenches itself through three cultural trajectories: a top-down ‘mediation’
of the RSS in local issues; by ‘converging’with non-committed individuals/social groups following
Hindu religious associations or spiritual leaders; and via facing ‘resistance’in local milues. Similarly,
Anderson (2015) uses the term ‘neo-Hindutva’by drawing on Reddy’s idea of Hindutva’sdiffused and
nebulous logic becoming ‘a mediating discourse in its own right’(Reddy 2011, 421; 2018). The idea of
neo-Hindutva proposes two categories: a hard form explicitly connected to Hindu nationalism, and a
soft/diffused form avoiding explicit linkages with majoritarian politics (Anderson 2015). Neo-Hin-
dutva can be seen as ‘a starting-point for thinking about the dynamic and idiosyncratic ways in
which Hindu nationalism has evolved …often into increasingly mainstream and normalised …
forms of rhetoric and mobilisation’(Anderson and Longkumer 2018, 373). Additionally, post-2014
coalescence of Hindutva can also be attributed to, first, the BJP’s intense ‘top-down’social media
presence through the ‘Internet Hindu’or ‘enterprise Hindutva’(Udupa 2015,2018;Jaffrelot 2015,
2013). Second, the BJP has managed to pit the ‘people’–the poor and the newly urbanised
middle-classes against a liberal elite who is seen as monopolising power, resources, and pandering
to non-Hindu minority groups (Chacko 2018).
3. Noida as a differentiated urban form
Noida of today can be traced back to April 17, 1976 when the UP government notified 36 villages on
the eastern periphery of Delhi as the New Okhla Industrial Development Area (Noida). Just on the
previous day, the government had enacted the Industrial Area Development Act,
5
which enabled
itself to constitute the ‘New Okhla Industrial Development Authority’(Authority from hereafter).
The Authority comprises of 11 members –of whom 6 are bureaucrats including the CEO, and 5 nomi-
nated members –who are responsible to the state government (but no public representation). In its
first Master Plan (1978–1992), the Authority envisioned a ‘new industrial town’where small and
medium industries from Delhi will be shifted to; a move to decongest Delhi and regulate its specu-
lative land-market. The Authority soon notified another 45 villages, thereby expanding the entire
notified area to 20316 hectares from 81 villages, of which 15280 hectares was proposed for devel-
opment, the rest being flood prone (Noida Master Plan 2031, 37). Periodic acquisition of notified
land continues till date, hence the township registering gradual increase in size (Table 1). Initially
planned for 220,000 jobs and a million residents by 1992 (Potter and Kumar 2004), estimates have
been revised upwards in every Master Plan. The 2011 census estimated Noida’s population to be
642,381, and the latest Master Plan predicts a net population of 2.5 million by 2031.
Divided into 163 ‘sectors’, the city has two primary land-use patterns: industrial and residential,
6
occupying approximately 18.4% and 37.5% of the total area (Table 1).
7
While there are several indus-
trial quarters in the city,
8
Noida has gradually transformed from a low-density industrial township
into a city of high-density middle-class residences. An average residential sector measures about
55 hectares with a mixed development of group housings and private residences, though much
of the development since mid-2000 has been of the former category. As Table 1 shows, between
2001 and 2011, residential land allocation increased by 96%, and then again by 45% between
2011 and 2021. Persons-per-hectare allocations were also raised by more than 100% in 2008, from
700 to 1650, thereby allowing for densely populated group housings (Master Plan, 2031). What
adds to the dominance of these middle-class enclaves is that much of the land allotted for rec-
reational, commercial, and other public purposes –a total of 42% of the city –primarily benefits
the residents of these spaces. The commercial zones, public parks, etc. are either embedded
within the residential sectors or are within easy access of the residents and befitting their taste
and aesthetic sensibilities. In fact, it is not uncommon to witness active opposition to villagers
‘encroaching’upon a sector’s land by accessing the local parks or by using the sectors’internal
roads as thoroughfares to the villages.
518 R. DAS ET AL.
Table 1. Changes in the land use pattern of Noida.
Land use category Area as per successive Master Plans (in hectares)
1976–1992 2001 2011 2021 (proposed) 2031 (proposed)
Area
Percentage of Total
Developed Area Area
Percentage of Total
Developed Area Area
Percentage of Total
Developed Area Area
Percentage of Total
Developed Area Area
Percentage of Total
Developed Area
Industrial 324 9.8 495 13 985 12.7 3001 20 2806.52 18.37
Residential 1725 52.2 1870 49.2 3672 47.2 5334 35.7 5772.14 37.45
Commercial 134 4.1 230 6.1 431 5.5 564 3.77 581.33 3.8
Public/semi-public
spaces
460 13.9 365 9.6 1224 15.7 1219 8.15 1357.97 8.89
Recreational spaces 200 6.1 292 7.7 536 6.8 1513 10.11 2432.82 15.92
Transportation 400 12.1 495 13 941 12.1 2211 14.78 1942.15 12.71
Water bodies/
unusable land
61 1.8 53 1.4 NA NA 121 0.81 104.5 0.68
Agriculture NA NA NA NA NA NA 1001 6.67 NA NA
Total 3304 100 3800 100 7789 100 14964 100 15279.9 100
Source: Potter and Kumar (2004), NOIDA Master Plans (2001,2031).
CONTEMPORARY SOUTH ASIA 519
The erstwhile villages, on the other hand, present a contrasting picture. The acquisition of farm-
lands until 2011 drew on the ‘urgency clause’of the 1894 Land Acquisition Act, suspending the land-
owners’right to raise objections. Yet, the 1978–92 Master Plan hoped that village settlements would
‘be integrated’via planned civic amenities in such a way that would change ‘their character …to
urbanised villages’, although describing the integration as an ‘intractable problem’(iii–x, 11). At var-
iance with these optimistic visions, the residual rural settlements continue to stand in contrast with
the planned neighbourhoods in multiple ways. The village population has growth substantially, and
a considerable presence of migrants in the villages were already noted by 1979 (Lall and Suri 2020).
As a result, these villages, some of which had very high rates of density even in the 1980s (>3 persons
per room; Lall and Suri 2020), are significantly overcrowded now. Though euphemistically described
as ‘urban villages’in the Master Plans, they are ghettoised within the urbanised sectors without any
space for expansion despite population growth, which has naturally led to crumbling infrastructure
and inadequate civic amenities. Having lost their farmlands, majority of villagers have resorted to
renting out low-cost accommodations to migrant workers, small-scale businessmen, and service pro-
viders in the middle-class enclaves (housemaids, security guards, drivers, etc.).
This ghettoisation has also entailed considerable politico-administrative costs for the villages. In
2015, invoking a special clause of the Industrial Area Development Act, the then state government
decided to abolish the panchayats (village councils). Having lost all recourse to the traditional local
governance institution, the villagers since became completely dependent on the Authority for even
the most basic civic necessities, which in turn is a process mediated via bureaucratic rigmaroles that
they were largely unaccustomed with. Conversely, with a steadily growing middle-class population,
dismantling the panchayat system has facilitated the Authority to prioritise the aesthetic and infra-
structural requirements of the planned sectors over the villages. For instance, the 2031 Master Plan
remarks that ‘a significant proportion of the population growth in the villages due to unplanned
growth of the village settlements may create problems for planned development of NOIDA’
(p.15). Because a sizable proportion of villagers are litigating the Authority over the acquisition of
their farmlands under the ‘urgency clause’and limited financial compensation, many characterise
the Authority as an ‘encroacher’and ‘trouble maker’in their lives and livelihoods.
Beside the planned sectors and the urban villages, the third node in Noida is the unauthorised,
unplanned squatter colonies (jhuggis) inhabited by migrant labourers. The steady influx of poor
migrants and the formation of jhuggis is not a recent phenomenon. In fact, even as early as 1995,
20% of entire Noida population was living in jhuggi clusters (Master Plan, 2031), and the numbers
kept increasing through the 2000s as Noida began to witness a real estate boom (Maitra 2011,
118). In a 2008 survey, the Authority estimated that about 11000 jhuggis are located in the
sectors 1–11 alone (Master Plan, 2031). However, Das and Walton (2015, 551) have questioned
these figures, saying ‘the number of jhuggis identified were far fewer …the website mentioned
525 jhuggis in Sector 5 whereas our census showed 830 jhuggis in one cluster alone in this
sector’. The Authority also failed to furnish details about building alternative accommodation for
these settlements or about developing the clusters themselves. Till date, most jhuggi residents do
not have legal residential status, routinely face eviction threats from the Authority, and suffer
from limited access to the most basic civic and welfare services.
Overall, Noida’s evolution straddles two different moments of urban policy making in post-Inde-
pendent India. It was conceived during 1970s when the state was concerned with rationalising urban
growth through land control, town-planning instruments, and medium/small-scale industrialisation
(Shaw 1996). Further, it came into being during the national Emergency when the federal state made
certain summary interventions in the urban sector (cf. Frankel 2006, 551–2). But within a decade, the
township faced the ‘reformist’trends of achieving financial self-sufficiency via internal resource
mobilisation (Shaw 1996, 227). Adding to the urban restructuring patterns in other states (Anand
and Sami 2016), the Authority strategically retained the ‘industrial township’label that gave them
complete command over land-acquisition and governance, but at the same time let the city turn
into a residential township with booming real-estatisation. Today, Noida is the largest contributor
520 R. DAS ET AL.
to UP’s gross-domestic product (GDP),
9
but it also has a sharply ‘differentiated residential space’
(Harvey 1989, 37) owing to the juxtaposition of planned sectors, rural remnants, and jhuggis. There-
fore, Noida’s spatial restructuring evokes Massey’s concept of ‘spatial upheaval’(1994, 157). Follow-
ing Massey and Harvey, we think of the three different socio-spatial nodes as relational spaces in
terms of the entangled subjectivities and practices of their residents. In the next section, we show
how this relationality is expressed through a competitive practice of ‘difference’in each node and
its amenability for Hindutva politics.
4. Competing logics of ‘difference’and Hindutva politics
4.1. Urban enclaves: homogeneity and threat of outsiders
Social mentalities and practices within the urban enclaves are mostly oriented towards two pur-
poses: maintaining homogeneity and order within the enclaves, and producing ‘differences’vis-à-
vis the outside. As Bourdieu observes (1993, 108), such goals emerge partly because there is
already an economy of ‘goods’in the form of sectors and housing complexes that are represented
as being in ‘good taste’or ‘distinguished’, as opposed to the ‘bad’/‘vulgar’sectors. The earliest
planned, low-density residential sectors have tended to mostly cluster retired civil servants and
defence personnel, whereas the post-2000 high-density sectors are inhabited by middle-class pro-
fessionals in IT, banking and related sectors. Notwithstanding finer distinctions based on economic
capital, a considerable overlap in social origins among these two class-fractions has been noted else-
where (Deshpande 2006): they are likely to be upper-caste Hindus, and their dispositions are often
informed by a belief in a merit-based superiority. Additionally, most of these urban enclaves have
very few Muslim residents. The preponderance of service sector professionals in the planned
sectors, which is reflected in Noida’s share of UP’s GDP, imputes to the sectors relative homogeneity
in terms of social divisions of labour and consumption choices. Finally, the burgeoning population in
the urban enclaves also means a far bigger and influential voting bloc, strengthening the hold of the
urban rich as well as real estate capital in the city.
The perception and practices of social homogeneity in and across these enclaves are predicated
on shared ideas about the space outside. At its root, this inside-outside distinction is about the ‘aes-
thetic of maintaining elective distance from the necessities of social world’(Bourdieu [1984]1996, 5).
Following gated communities elsewhere (Falzon 2004, 150), housing enclaves in Noida provide ame-
nities such as swimming pools, manicured parks, sports courts, shops and eateries inside their gates.
Persuading and looking over residents to maintain this internal order offers the enclaves the every-
day means to reproduce the ‘outside’as both messy and threatening. Security has thus emerged as
an interfacing trope for the middle-class aesthetic of self, its boundaries, and its consumption depen-
dent nature. Most enclaves possess uniformed private security guards and elaborate surveillance
protocols. Enclave residents regularly use social media platforms –WhatsApp in particular –for
monitoring security provisions on their premises. Also, multiple inter-enclave WhatsApp platforms
are used for exchanging wider security concerns, coordinating local responses, and for conveying
collective demands to the Authority.
10
Yet, as Massey quips (1994, 87), white-collar work and
virtual activities, including ‘tweeting and ordering things online’–as an informant characterised
his fellow residents’disposition –presuppose manual work and workers. The aesthetic challenge,
which in turn is also an ethical challenge (Bourdieu [1984]1996), is therefore to regulate access of
the outside without disrupting internal homogeneity and order on an everyday basis.
The most problematic category of outsiders is the housemaids. Shabbily dressed and culturally
different, their dispositions barely befit the enclaves’spatial aesthetics. They come from the
jhuggis and villages that are contrasting spatial forms to the planned homogeneity of the sectors.
Predictably, the security protocols are elaborate, including police verification, identity/access
cards, monitored entry-exit, random checks, separate service elevators, and restricted access to
the communal areas even for intermittent resting. These protocols are seldom formally written,
CONTEMPORARY SOUTH ASIA 521
but are communicated to the maids (and other service delivery people) by the maintenance staff.
Beyond the housemaids, the residents’common understanding of the villagers and jhuggi residents
is that they contain the ‘risks of misalliance’at best and physical insecurity at worst (Bourdieu [1984]
1996, 374). The refrain that ‘we feel so vulnerable here because everyone is a thief outside’is rather
common. The jhuggis represent illegal spaces that are out of sync with the imagined aesthetics of
Noida as a global city, whereas the ghettoised villages are seen as deformed relics from the past.
Despite some contextual differences, such self-perception is illustrative of Hage’s(2003) obser-
vation about an institutionalised culture of worrying among privileged and dominant social classes
across societies, involving a ‘defensive society’of ‘citizens who see threats everywhere’(Hage
2003, 2). Once most pronounced among supporters of the extreme right and anti-immigration
movements, it has now become the dominant trope for expressing one’s attachment about the
nation (Hage 2003 22). The way this culture fuses with Hindu nationalism is that many middle-
class residents conflate worrying about their own selves as worrying about their nation. The sense
of threat related by middle-class residents of Noida originates in the perception of dangers posed
by the ‘others’to their ‘well-deserved’, ordered social spaces, which projects their understanding
of the nation.
4.2. Rural ghettos: reinventing a ‘rural’identity around loss
In contrast with the occupational/consumption/aesthetic homogeneity of the urban enclaves, the
rural ghettos are spaces of heterogeneous caste-based identities. Historically, western UP has had
a strong presence of middle-rung proprietary peasant castes of Jats,Gurjars,Yadavs, and Chauhans,
interspersed with upper caste Brahmins (Singh 1992). Singh’s observation that local villages were dis-
tinguished according to the resident dominant castes rings true even today. For example, Sharfabad,
Chhalera and Rohillapur are respectively Yadav, Chauhan/Rajput and Gurjar villages to most locals.
Their caste-based membership anchored to parts of a village territory allows them to stake a
moral claim to the (home) place of their village. Brijendra Chauhan, an octogenarian in Chhalera,
asserts:
I cannot work anymore. But everyone in the village knows me. This is my land, my place, my home.
11
Chauhan’s claim of belonging originates in his agnatic relationships (kunba), in the relationship of his
kunba with his caste settlement (mohalla) and in inter-caste relations within the village (cf. Chand-
hoke 1990, 125). Villages continue to be social spaces in which personhood is constituted and recog-
nised through clan and caste relative titles, such as that of the Chauhan,Chaudhari (clan-head of Jat
or Gurjar families), Pradhan (head of the village council), or lambardar (intermediary revenue collec-
tor). These nested webs of relationships remain salient in local contexts of commensality and clan
exogamy even as the overall configuration of castes as a system has transformed.
Yet the engulfment of villages within the city has intensified the fragmentation of these identities
at multiple scales. While land acquisition from the villages located in the northern and central parts
of the city had almost completed before 2009–2010, those in the southern part continued ceding
lands until recently. In a landmark intervention in October 2011, the Allahabad High Court upheld
451 petitions from aggrieved farmers from Noida and Greater Noida (another adjacent township),
holding land acquisition under the ‘urgency clause’to be in violation of due process. The court
ordered the Authority to pay additional compensation of 64.7% and return 10% of the ‘developed
land’to the farmers, leaving the decision of extending these benefits to other villagers to the Auth-
ority (Gajraj and others vs. State of UP, 2011).
12
Combined with ex ante inequalities in landholdings
and assets, this intervention has enabled a class of villagers in the southern villages to receive sub-
stantial compensation and ‘developed plots’for their lands. A class of such beneficiaries is now
engaged in profitable ventures including real estate brokering and public works contracts. This
class forms a township-wide ‘rural affluent class’in terms of its income and ostentatious post-
peasant consumption choices.
522 R. DAS ET AL.
Fellow villagers, especially older ones and those who lost out on revised compensation, often
dismiss this group of new parvenus with disdain for their purported lack of attachment to the
rural soil and the older lifestyles. Malkan Singh Chauhan,aChhalera resident, called such persons
‘kal ka badshah’(kings since yesterday), for having made their riches by selling village lands, a dis-
honourable act for villagers with izzat (respect) and pechchan (identity).
13
Put differently, such par-
venus are seen to have ‘displaced dispositions’in the rural space (Bourdieu [1984]1996, 110). Some
of the older village respondents also went beyond such strictures to critique the surrounding forms
of urbanism using the frame of ‘sacredness of rural traditions’.Sukhvir Singh, a former army recruit,
and now an influential village leader, observes:
We have gained materially, but lost our heritage and property; earlier our food was our own. We led a simple life,
respected our elders and lived in joint families. That atmosphere has died out. Even today my identity comes
from the village; I respect anyone wearing a dhoti.
14
A more radical criticism of the township as well as the newfound rural affluence comes from the
lower castes who remained impoverished throughout this transformation. Lacking in social and
economic capital to begin with, many informants that we met are making do on petty jobs.
Ashok Ram, a SC resident of Baraula village, comments: ‘Neither I am from the high-caste, nor do I
have money. Where do I go? This place was mine, and yet it has left me nowhere’.
15
Unlike Brijendra
Chauhan or Malkan Singh Chauhan, Ashok Ram relates to his village through a sense of victimhood
and betrayal. Except in a few villages like Mamoora where many SC families have benefitted as
homestead owners from the arterial road development, lower castes have benefitted less as a
social group in general.
Notwithstanding this deep polarisation, there is also a discourse about ‘belonging to the village’.
Omkar Chauhan, a milk distributor in Chhalera,reflected with a sense of pride that ‘there are higher
and lower [castes], but when it comes to the village, we all are one. We are from Chhalera, that’s our
identity’.
16
Such expressions try to underline a multi-caste rural disposition against the ‘sector’
habitus, but part of this claim to a cohesive rural identity and tradition is a deliberate political
response to the consciousness of engulfment by Noida and the need to resist it. Thus, the protests
organised by farmers groups against the Authority often used the frame of the ‘lost village’.Begraj
Gurjar,aninfluential leader of the BKU (Bharatiya Kisan Union or Indian Farmers’Union), sitting in
protest against the Authority’s encroachment allegations, elaborates:
We are villagers lost in the city. We don’t know what to do having lost our farmlands. Noida’s farmers are in jail
today, and will have to remain so forever. All we can do is unite.
17
The self-representation of loss of villages as a free home-place is also used to distinguish villagers
from the ‘outsiders/others’. The ‘other’here includes anyone who’s not from a village, including
the low-income migrant tenants who actually are the pillars of the village rent-economy. This
logic of distinction requires villagers to recreate separations between themselves and the migrants
while grudgingly accepting the latter as part of their local milieu. While there are instances of mutual
engagement between village landlords and tenants within familial spaces, the dominant disposition
of villagers is to regulate this engagement to minimise misalliances. Ajit Singh Tomar, a resident of
Rohillapur, laments:
They are undeniably our bread and butter, but so many different people are also polluting our village (emphasis
added).
18
The enclave residents form the second set of outsiders against whom many villagers have resent-
ment, usually stronger than that shown for the tenants. Lokesh Chauhan, a senior journalist of a
local newspaper, traces this sense of distance:
First, the physical disparity; the villages suffer from a lack of the most basic provisions. Second, they have a sense
of betrayal due to lack of jobs. Third, they have an emotional connection with ancestral land. Fourth, their com-
plete political marginalisation following the panchayat abolishment.
19
CONTEMPORARY SOUTH ASIA 523
We have already discussed the marked spatial disparities between the enclaves and the villages.
The second source of animosity stems from the villagers’self-perception as deceived losers in
the township’s development. Many claim they were promised jobs in the upcoming industries
and prioritised school admissions for their children, but none of these have materialised; and
there are plenty of anecdotes about active discriminations in the matter of jobs in local industries.
The internationally accredited schools cater to the urban elites, and numerous instances are also
related about village children being refused admission. Some of these claims about ‘promises
made by the Authority’are difficult to be falsified, but what cannot be overstated is that older
farmers struggle to come to terms with the loss of their ancestral lands and to adjust their rural
dispositions according to the ‘dictates of market-based utilitarianism’(Bourdieu, cited in Joas
and Knöbl 2009, 381–2). While urban residents base their claim to property in sectors as a ‘fair’
exchange on the market,’villagers frame this ‘exchange’as coercion (jabardasti, tanashahi)of
the Authority. They continue to treat lost lands to be a constitutive part of their self in a phenom-
enological sense. Lokesh Chauhan, who grew up in Baraula village, describes his relatives who are
still in the village as:
They can’t accept the loss of land, still saying the current owners are outsiders. In fact, they often take others to
see a skyscraper, proudly pointing out that it is their land on which it stands. They have had to let go of their
land, but not their memories, and continue to live in the past’
20
The final strand of this new self-consciousness relates to the loss of political representation. Albeit
rarely raised outside the villages, but the dismantling of the panchayats has dealt a severe blow
to rural political lives. Not only do villagers lack local representation, they are also marginalised in
the electoral landscape. The four major parties (BJP, BSP, SP, and Congress) still have their village
networks, but in the current political milieu, there is limited incentive for prioritising rural claims
that would put one at odds with the imperatives of the urban enclaves, the latter being the
primary voting bloc as well as the face of the state’s development efforts.
4.3. Jhuggis: the invisible others
The third node of our tripartite, the jhuggis, stand outside of the urban enclaves and the rural
ghettos, with the inhabitants having hardly any control over their everyday conditions. Much of
their spatial practices take shape in response to their treatment by the two other nodes. They are
the subservient ‘others’for the city dwellers (housemaids, construction workers) who need to be
controlled through a strict security regime minimising any risk to the urban homogeneity, and ‘pol-
lutants’for the villagers, a threat to their traditional customs and hierarchy. For example, a large
jhuggi cluster is located in Sector 76, right amidst several housing enclaves. We estimated around
200 families living there, amounting to almost thousand inhabitants in total.
21
Almost everyone is
a Muslim migrant from West Bengal. The men work as labourers/carpenters/plumbers, while the
women are housemaids. The cluster is hard to miss (it’s directly opposite Mahagun), and yet a
world away from the glitz of its posh neighbours. Standing on a disputed plot owned by a villager
from Baraula, it is an extremely congested place of brick and tin shanties. Each family (4–6 members)
occupies one tiny room, with 8–10 families sharing a toilet. There is no public space, education/
healthcare facilities, and the dwellers are completely dependent on the landowner
22
for even the
most basic services. Their electricity connection (unauthorised ‘hooking’) was cut offfollowing the
Mahagun incident as a punishment, and we found the residents to be living in darkness for over
three months.
What are the spatial practices in the jhuggis? In contrast to the other nodes, there is a clear dis-
association from the space they inhabit. Amina Bibi, a lady who has been living in Noida for two
decades, emphatically asserts:
We are Bengalis. We have nothing to do with this place. We just work here.
23
524 R. DAS ET AL.
This disassociation also produces its own logic of difference, where the residents are equivocal about
imbibing any meaning to their space. It is a process that has taken shape through a strong associ-
ation with their homeland, and years of neglect/disrespect as migrants. The former is clearly evident,
as everyone has families elsewhere whom they periodically visit, especially during the farming
season and elections. There was a unanimous consensus among everyone we spoke to about
going back home to vote. Upon probing further, Amina Bibi responded:
What about the roads and electricity in my village? It is our home that we have to take care of. Where else will we
vote?
24
This association (with a distant space) is bolstered through their abject living conditions and continu-
ous neglect. In spite of living in Noida for decades, they are completely at the mercy of the land-
owners and/or the builders on whose projects they work, constantly under the threat of eviction.
Furthermore, as migrant labourers, they are actively discriminated against. Masood Alam, a carpen-
ter, explains:
The Authority always treats us differently. I tried to become a voter here.
25
But they discouraged me, saying ‘you
are from outside, we don’t want you here’. Our condition is like that old proverb: a god in your own land, a dog
outside.
26
Masood’scomments aptly reflect the residents’everyday existence enforcing their ‘outsider’identity:
evoking suspicion for speaking a ‘foreign’language (such as Bengali), with minimal political capital
(not voting in local elections), and little claim over the place they inhabit.
27
In response, in spite of
their crucial role in the city’s socio-economic fabric, they reject any association with the space. It is
not their place in the sense of a home, but just a space for work (a feeling also discernible among the
children, albeit somewhat subdued. Most of them would have visited their ancestral homes a few
times, and can be seen maintaining the distinction between home and Noida even in casual conver-
sations). At the same time, such claims cannot be left entirely uncontested. As Hage shows, argu-
ments about the migrant’s participation in the political processes of the host society fluctuate.
‘They can be portrayed as …too “home”-oriented and thus not participating enough, or …partici-
pating …so much that they are feared to be “taking over”[thus fuelling the middle-class paranoia]’
(2003,1–2). Generally, the argument is that migrants are at best instrumentally interested in their
host society institutions, but are not affectively attached to them. And yet, the everyday differen-
tiation between participation as a formal/instrumental process and as an affective relation to
society is rarely accounted for, with the formal categories of ‘rights’and ‘responsibilities’dominating
the mainstream discussions.
4.4. Acquiescing to Hindutva politics
We can now briefly return to the Mahagun case as demonstrative of how the socio-spatial settings of
these nodes (particularly the urban enclaves) tacitly lend themselves to Hindutva politics. Brass’s
observations in his seminal study Theft of an Idol (1997), that acerbic inter-community relations in
contemporary societies can deliberately place any localised violence in wider abstract contexts
and engage in the ‘political act’of producing divergent interpretative frameworks (p.4), is particularly
relevant here. Insofar as the incident itself is concerned, it was not a ‘movement’of any sort by the
migrants, coalescing only as an impromptu search party for a missing person (John, Topo, and Mon-
chari 2017). Yet, the enclave residents attempted to seize the interpretive initiative by imposing the
wider category of ‘Bangladeshi Muslims’on them. This category of identification established that the
maid was an illegal immigrant,
28
and by extension, so was the agitating crowd. Additional layers of
scale and affectivity were added to this construction when a known RSS functionary and resident in a
nearby enclave interpreted the jhuggi crowd to indulge in ‘mob rioting’against ‘decent Indians’:
You employ them, they will steal, if you question, they will bring mob and riot. If you earn well, live in a decent
society, are secular and think that they won’t harm you …then you are living in an imaginary world.
29
CONTEMPORARY SOUTH ASIA 525
This set the stage for BJP leaders to appropriate these constructions for ‘the maintenance of ideo-
logical and state authority’(Brass 1997, 7). Mahesh Sharma, the local MP (a RSS functionary and
cabinet minister), observed upon visiting Mahagun:‘even though we know who they are, we turn
a blind eye because of our needs.’
30
This series of reiterated constructions, invoking ‘peaceful
Hindu community’and ‘illegal Bangladeshi Muslim immigration’, collapsed the local and regional
contexts into an overarching national ‘security threat’. It created justificatory grounds for the sub-
sequent exercise of state authority (police arrests, demolition of several jhuggis), which in turn
further reified the distinctions already etched so sharply.
To understand these wider arcs of political interpretation better, attention needs to shift from the
incident itself to its socio-spatial setting. Urban enclaves possess the potentiality to interpret disrup-
tions to their distinct habitus –especially one with an ‘outsider’dimension and originating from the
jhuggis that already are marked as spatial aberrations for the middle-class aesthetics –as an existen-
tial threat. In Mahagun, turning these outsiders into ‘alien Muslims’rendered the case ideal for appro-
priation by both the institutional systems of enclave security and Hindutva organisations. While
enclaves in the entire neighbourhood closed ranks on social media on the common plank of ‘secur-
ity’, some local residents with membership of Hindutva organisations activated communication links
with the wider leadership (such as the local MP). Our analysis suggests that the themes of ‘security’
and ‘order’, which otherwise encode exclusivity for affluent class members –many of whom may be
non-committed to Hindutva –can and are strategically mobilised by Hindutva activists. Likewise,
routine religious-cultural events (Durga Puja,Navaratri etc.) transform the semi-public space
inside these enclaves into a benign Hindu space. Though by itself not hard-Hindutva, there still
are instances of its strategic politicisation, such as by enforcing non-vegetarianism as a matter of
‘purity’during these celebrations. Berti, Jaoul, and Kanungo (2011) are right in arguing that not
all religiously minded residents may see these practices as an ‘acquiescence’to Hindutva, but reiter-
ation of a homogenous Hindu identity and the local presence of pro-Hindutva activists can and does
enable an ideological mobilisation of agnostic residents.
The presence of two different but overlapping axes of caste and class on one hand, and the out-
siders (both the migrants and urban residents) and villagers on the other, complicate the relationship
between villages and Hindutva forces. We have noted that a substratum of large farmers from the
Rajput, Gurjar, and Yadav castes has managed to minimise its economic losses –or even gained –
due to land acquisition. Contrarily, small farmers from these middle castes and SC communities
have lagged behind. Culturally, the rural ghettoisation and the inflow of poor and ethnically
different migrants have led to a general resentment about identity erosion and its socio-cultural
anchoring. These unevenly impacting economic, political, and cultural processes and their relation-
ship to Hindutva become more meaningful in the historical context of political and apolitical mobil-
isations of village societies in the region. Since 1969, western UP has witnessed the political
mobilisation of middle level Jats, Rajputs, and Gurjars, which in turn has popularised and sustained
a discursive framework of ‘rural, authentic Bharat’set against an ‘exploitative urban/bureaucratic
India’(Singh 1992, 98). While this construction emphasised its commitment to ‘vernacular secular-
ism’and electoral neutrality in the 1980s, by 1991 these claims came under increasing doubt
(Singh 1992, 182). Since 1991, the BJP has made inroads locally by placing the Gurjars and other
backwards castes at the centre of its political calculations, while local farmer movements have
lost strength. Many hyper-local organisations (including the BKU splinter groups) championing
the cause of Noida villages commonly depend on the substratum of rich Gurjar, Yadav, and
Rajput villagers, while Muslims and SCs are almost completely absent in their ranks. Faced with
increased economic differences within villages, and with a need for addressing their local audience
meaningfully, village leaders routinely dwell on a distinct rural identity and its traditions within a
wider Hindu cosmology. Some strands of this vocabulary go beyond Hindutva politics to the
broader nationalist history (drawing upon the region’s involvement in the 1857 mutiny), but
others may be used to support Hindutva’s autochthonous claim on local geography (viz., ‘this is
the land of Krishna’). Other strands overtly encode the Hindutva theme of ‘minority appeasement’
526 R. DAS ET AL.
against the local state (viz., ‘Mosques built on Authority land are not demolished, only our villages are
troubled’). We also find continued relevance of Lindberg’s(2020) argument that the presence of Arya
Samaj ideology (a nineteenth century Hindu reform movement) in western UP has aided the local
entanglements of Hindutva. We came across several affluent pro-BJP village leaders who professed
to be Arya Samajis. They located the Authority’s discrimination against the villages in the ‘weakness/
fracturing of the body social of the Hindu village’, which necessitated the promotion of a virile form
of collective masculinity in the villages.
31
5. Conclusion
Employing Massey’s concept of ‘spatial upheaval’, we have described how erstwhile rural settle-
ments were reshaped by a reformist state, creating a predominantly residential, consumption
driven city. Noida also illustrates Harvey’s(1985) thesis about a ‘discriminatory consumption’
oriented urbanisation propped up by a class-coalition of property owners, developers, affluent
middle-class consumers, and urban governments. At the local level, this spatial upheaval has engen-
dered new relationships due to certain specific historical contingencies. The Authority has promoted
highly profitable but high density vertical growth, thereby allowing large group-housing enclaves to
have become the city’s face. The same entrepreneurial process has, however, enabled the residual
urban villages to recreate a sense of socio-spatial identity out of their lived experiences of economic
and political marginalisation. Contrary to Harvey’s thesis about the polarised nature of class-relative
claims on space, this identity accommodates its ‘rentier capitalist’dimension by emphasising the loss
of agricultural livelihoods while underlining its fight as ‘justice to the farmer’. Finally, this entrepre-
neurialism has also attracted a significant migrant population to the city, yet kept them perpetually
alienated. Noida neighbourhoods have thus become ‘difficult spots’(Bourdieu 1999,4–5), in the
sense that urban enclaves, villagers and slum dwellers are jostling to interpret and command rela-
tivities of space on an everyday basis. Following Massey (1994), Bourdieu (1984)1996, and Hage
(2003), we have suggested that besides class, caste and ethnicity are implicated in the experience
and practices of this differentiated space.
Further, we suggest that this spatial differentiation creates parallel modalities for the entrench-
ment of Hindutva.Affluent middle-class residents continually worry about disruptions to their
ordered ‘aesthetics’as a ‘security threat’. These are tropes not directly linked to Hindutva, but in
the face of a perceived threat from ‘Muslim outsiders’, they can be appropriated as forms of soft-Hin-
dutva premised on ‘majority victimhood’.Here, agreeing with Brass’s emphasis on the role of ‘insti-
tutional converters’(1997, 17), we think that the presence of Hindutva organisations’members as
local residents aid such appropriation. This dynamic finds a parallel in the villages where attempts
to forge a political community against the sectors, Authority and the migrant ‘others’use a broad
interpretive framework of the ‘loss of rural/village/Bharat’. Specific parts of this framework are
liable to be re-appropriated by sections of the locally dominant castes under the banner of
‘Hindu nativism’or ‘Muslim appeasement’. But, does this suggest that there are areas of ideological
agreement between the middle-classes and villagers on the core tenets of Hindutva, taking shape
particularly against the migrants?
32
Ideas related to the Indian nationhood in terms of its Hindu hom-
ogeneity and of one’s duty to remove ‘threats’to this nation are indeed expressed openly among
both elite villagers and enclave residents. But the fractured socio-spatial existence between the vil-
lagers and urban residents (the latter also being an ‘other’for the former), and the migrants’crucial
role in the rural rent-economy prevents any ideological convergence. The overall upshot being, on
the one hand, elite upper caste villagers who are largely aligned with Hindutva ideologies tend to use
the Authority vs. village and/or villagers vs. outsiders (urbanites and migrants) cleavages in their nar-
ratives of a distinctive self-identity. On the other hand, enclave residents who are also ideologically
sympathetic to Hindutva, nevertheless acknowledge the cultural difficulties in interacting with elite
villagers, let alone the ‘lumpenized elements’from both the villages and jhuggis. An ideological
CONTEMPORARY SOUTH ASIA 527
congruence between these different groups therefore remains rhetorical at best, the cultural distinc-
tions being determinant in their politics.
Given such structural and multi-dimensional challenges, Hindutva’sproliferation in Noida –
despite its wider appeal –remains dependent on a patchwork of ideological interventions from
the top as well as pragmatic strategies at the grassroots. It continues to build networks of committed
local activists in each of the three nodes that join with wider political organisations in turn, a strategy
that Berti, Jaoul, and Kanungo (2011) classifies as ‘mediation’while Brass (1997) calls it ‘conversion’.A
consistent focus on the Muslim ‘threat’is maintained through this mediation. But Hindutva activists
also share spaces horizontally with grassroots organisations working on ‘local’issues in villages and
jhuggis.Itisa‘convenient’strategy (Lele 1995, 192) that has been adopted commonly by Hindutva
organisations elsewhere. Our study of Noida suggests that the multifarious contestations between
the ‘people’and the ‘others’that is at the heart of many popular exclusivist movements including
Hindutva, may be enabled by spatial configurations in which social groups vie to preserve material,
cultural, and moral interests they think are endangered. Space shapes politics, becoming political in
the process.
Notes
1. Washington Post, 13th July 2017; https://www.washingtonpost.com/world/asia_pacific/maids-riot-at-luxury-
high-rise-exposes-class-divide-in-india/2017/07/12/f126b9e0-4f02-49c5-b8c3-f2ebf8d51ab6_story.html?utm_
term=.431d2f9ee01e.
2. Washington Post, 13th July 2017; https://www.washingtonpost.com/world/asia_pacific/maids-riot-atluxury-
high-rise-exposes-class-divide-in-india/2017/07/12/f126b9e0-4f02-49c5-b8c3-f2ebf8d51ab6_story.html?
utm_term=.431d2f9ee01e.
3. Harvey describes the entrepreneurial state as being increasingly preoccupied with new ways to foster local
development and employment growth, in contrast to the managerial practices of earlier decades which primar-
ily focused on the local provision of services to urban populations.
4. Only 2021 and 2031 versions are publicly available.
5. The Act derived from Article 243Q of the 74th Constitutional amendment. It provided for an exclusionary cat-
egory of industrial townships that were to be developed and managed by Regional Development Authorities
(RDAs), responsible only to state governments rather than elected local bodies (Anand and Sami 2016; the
article has been invoked by multiple state governments to develop Special Economic Zones).
6. The interspersed rural settlements are separate from the residential land. Jhuggis (see below), however, are
usually found on land earmarked for other purposes.
7. See https://noidaauthorityonline.in/en/article/noida-master-plan-map for a map of the city.
8. Sectors 1–11 (small scale manufacturing units); sectors 80-81, 83-85, 87 and 90 (IT companies and an export-pro-
cessing zone); sectors 57–60 (financial hub); sectors 145-147, 155-157, and 164–166 (SEZ). Sectors 63-65, 67-68,
88-89, and 138–140 have also been planned for future industrial usage.
9. ‘Noida Tops Uttar Pradesh GDP’, Times of India, March 13, 2020; https://timesofindia.indiatimes.com/city/
lucknow/noida-tops-state-gdp-per-capita-income-again-lucknow-is-second/articleshow/74602571.cms#:~:
text=Noida%20retains%20first%20position%20among,than%2040%25%20of%20Noida’s%20figures.
10. Most urban enclaves have elected Apartment Owners’Associations (AoAs) that employ firms for maintenance
and security services, and closely liaise with the Authority on civic issues.
11. Interview; Chhalera, 20th Dec.
12. Available at https://indiankanoon.org/doc/195081303/
13. Interview; Chhalera, 19th December.
14. Interview: 13 June, 2019.
15. Interview; Noida City Magistrates Court, 19th December.
16. Interview; Chhalera, 20th December.
17. Interview; Noida Authority Office, 14th September.
18. Interview; Rohillapur, 17th December.
19. Interview; Sector 61, Noida, 7th September.
20. Interview; Sector 61, Noida, 7th September.
21. jhuggi residents are mostly migrants from West Bengal, Bihar, Jharkhand, Chhattisgarh and eastern UP. Among
the Bengali migrants we interviewed, everybody described their villages and families in districts like Malda, Musr-
shidabad, Midnapore etc. There is, however, anecdotal evidence that some might have originally migrated from
Bangladesh. Even if true (the West Bengal-Bangladesh boundary is notoriously porous; see Shamshad 2017),
528 R. DAS ET AL.
everybody possesses legal documentation (voter id, aadhar card). Employers also conduct regular police verifi-
cations. Reports of illegal immigrants being identified in the city are extremely rare.
22. The plots on which this and similar jhuggis stand are usually embroiled in legal disputes between the original
owners and the Authority, and the former usually construct jhuggis and rent them out in the meantime.
23. Interview; sector 76, 20th September.
24. Interview; sector 76, 20th September.
25. ‘Being a voter’indicates transferring electoral registration from his village constituency to Noida. While a legal
right, bureaucratic discrimination in such matters is common, especially if the residential status is unclear.
26. Interview; sector 76, 20th September.
27. Such perpetual conditions of neglect is evocative of Vigh’s description ‘crisis as context’, forcing people to live
permanently in fragmented, volatile worlds (2008, 8).
28. Because she was Muslim and spoke Bengali - the language of Bangladesh. But so it is of West Bengal, a distinc-
tion conveniently overlooked in India’s Hindi heartland. The ‘illegal Bangladeshi’also is a strategic element
within the Hindutva discourse (Shamshad 2017). As indicated earlier, there is no legal basis of labelling them
Bangladeshis.
29. https://www.facebook.com/jshubh/posts/10155995219010656.
30. https://scroll.in/article/844166/in-the-class-conflict-unfolding-in-Noida-union-minister-makes-it-clear-he-
stands-with-flat-owners.
31. While BJP has a strong presence in the older, industrial zone jhuggis, there is limited evidence of them prolifer-
ating the residential sector jhuggis, possibly due to electoral irrelevance.
32. As in 1970s’Bombay (Lele 1995, 199).
Acknowledgements
We would like to thank the International Institute of Social Studies (The Hague, Netherlands) for a research grant
awarded as part of the Emancipatory Rural Politics Initiative that allowed us to conduct the first phase of fieldwork
for this project. We would also like to thank Dr. Shipra Basu for her help with curating the data, and the two anonymous
reviewers for their comments on earlier drafts of the paper.
Disclosure statement
No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).
Funding
This work was supported by International Institute of Social Studies, Hague, Netherlands [ERPI (Emancipatory Rural Poli-
tics Initiative) Smal].
Notes on contributors
Ritanjan Das is Senior Lecturer at the University of Portsmouth, UK. His current research focuses on the political
economy of development in the global South, exploring the role of local actors, networks and agencies from an anthro-
pological perspective. He received a PhD in Development Studies from the London School of Economics for his study on
the politics of policy transition in the state of West Bengal. His book Neoliberalism and the Transforming Left in India: A
Contradictory Manifesto was published by Routledge in 2018. His second book Illiberal Spaces, Illiberal Cities (co-
authored with Dr. Kumar) is forthcoming in 2022.
Nilotpal Kumar is an Associate Professor at the School of Development, Azim Premji University (Bangalore). His current
research explores the interaction between horticultural restructuring in semi-arid regions of Andhra Pradesh and emer-
ging forms of local authority and cultural identity. He received a PhD in Development Studies from the London School
of Economics for his ethnographic study of the phenomenon of farmers’suicides in post-reform India. His book Unra-
velling Farmer Suicides in India: Egoism and Masculinity in Peasant Life was published by Oxford University Press in 2017.
His second book Illiberal Spaces, Illiberal Cities (co-authored with Dr. Das) is forthcoming in 2022.
Praveen Kumar Priyadarshi is an Assistant Professor of Politics at IIIT, Delhi. His interest lies at the intersections of the
categories of digital and social spaces, institutions and policies. He brings these categories to bear upon the concep-
tualisation of everyday politics in the cities of the global South. A PhD in Development Studies from the London School
of Economics, he has been an Associate at the Crisis States Research Centre, LSE, and the Developing Countries
Research Centre (DCRC), University of Delhi. He was also the Tata PhD Fellow at the Asia Research Centre (ARC), LSE.
CONTEMPORARY SOUTH ASIA 529
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