Urban Cleansing: Evictions, Exclusion, and State Violence in Contemporary Urban India

• In Event: 215 - Section on Political Sociology Paper Session. The State and Racial Exclusion

Abstract

While the intersections of ethnic and racial conflict, state violence, and housing insecurity shape the lived experiences of many city dwellers throughout the world, these links have only scantly been analyzed in the sociological literatures on these topics. Addressing this gap, this paper analyzes these connections through a case study of state-sponsored slum clearance campaigns and demolition drives in the Indian cities of Bangalore and Mumbai since the early 1980s. Highlighting the confluence of ethnic cleansing and urban renewal, which anthropologist Arjun Appadurai has termed “urban cleansing,” this paper analyzes three periods of heightened slum clearance activity in the two cities, as well as the discourse surrounding such actions, over this period. Employing critical discourse analysis (CDA), we find that universalizing discourses of “beautification,” “nuisance,” and “restoration of law and order” are often used to mask actions grounded in religious, caste-based, and ethno-linguistic exclusion. However, we find that while the local state may pursue strategies of “silent marginalization” at certain moments, it pursues “spotlight scapegoating” of the “ethnic other” at other times. This paper analyzes the local political conditions and the historically grounded construction of social status in contemporary Mumbai and Bangalore to identify the conditions under which urban renewal and ethnic cleansing come together to produce uneven landscapes of housing insecurity and social exclusion.

Authors

• Autumn Mathias, Northeastern University

• Liza J. Weinstein, Northeastern University