Puppeteers and Patrons: The Judicialisation of Dispossession in Neoliberal Delhi

Abstract

If in the developmentalist era, India’s land wars were fought in fields against factories, in its neoliberal era, they are fought in courtrooms against speculative real estate. Judicialised anti-dispossession struggles are most often the currency of landed farmers seeking one means by which to stall or shelve capital projects. In Delhi, the judicialisation of dispossession is a predominantly way-one-street, as the state imposes its vision of Delhi’s world class future from behind the bench. The case that I present and analyse in this thesis is an anti-dispossession struggle mounted by the informal residents of a slum scheduled for demolition which took to the courtroom prior to its dispossession – an empirical rarity in the capital territory. The state sought to redevelop the Kathputli Colony through a public-private-partnership providing ‘in-situ upgradation’ and formal tenure over their rehabilitation apartments. This marks a strategic departure for Delhi’s regime of dispossession from its summary and spontaneous evictions and ‘resettlement’. This thesis analyses the effect of this gradual process of dispossession and the judicialisation which it incurred.