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About the talk:

In the urban landscape of the Global South, there is a pronounced policy focus on transforming cities into world-class metropolises. In India, efforts to combat domestic poverty have given rise to a political culture that seeks to invisibilize poverty through periodic slum eviction and clearance operations in urban areas. These demolitions not only lead to the immediate displacement of the ‘urban poor’ but also result in the devastating loss of livelihood, material well-being, and access to essential healthcare services for impoverished communities. The law naturally assumes a pivotal role in the lives of the ‘urban poor[ in India, dictating their legal status and rights and mediating their interactions with the state while also indexing land use and ownership claims. The inherent violence of urban development relies heavily on legal institutions to imbue the lives and built environments of the ‘urban poor’ with illegality, reducing their status to illegitimate citizens. Despite the disruptive nature of law in the lives of the Indian ‘urban poor,’ claim-making through legal channels is one of the key strategies employed by marginalized communities to articulate and assert their rights to secure housing, challenge state-enforced evictions, and access public services. This paradoxical faith placed in the law to mitigate the violence of neoliberal city-making projects, especially when the law serves as an agent in furthering these aspirations, presents a curious phenomenon in urban settings. Within this context, this paper asks: How and why do the ‘urban poor’ in India mobilize the law, given that the law itself constructs the terms of their ‘illegality’ and perpetuates their marginalization? When and under what conditions do the ‘urban poor’ elect to engage in legal mobilization in addition to other forms of contention to resist dispossession? And how do the limitations of mobilizing a law that is inherently antagonistic to their interests shape their strategies in these
struggles?

Speaker:

Shatakshi Singh is a Ph.D. Candidate in Political Science at the University of California, Santa Cruz. Her dissertation, “Resisting Displacement: Legal Mobilization and Claim-making in Contemporary India,” examines the legal strategies, political negotiations, and grassroots mobilizations through which marginalized communities in Indian cities contest forced evictions and assert housing rights. Her research situates the everyday politics of displacement within broader debates on urban governance, law, and the restructuring of democratic space in contemporary India.

 This is the one hundred and eighty-eighth (188) in a series of Urban Workshops planned by the Centre de Sciences Humaines (CSH), New Delhi, and Centre for Policy Research (CPR). These workshops seek to provoke public discussion on the city’s development issues and address all its facets including its administration, culture, economy, society, and politics. For further information, please contact: Rama Devi at ramadevi2487@gmail.com, Champaka Rajagopal at champaka@cprindia.org or Partha Mukhopadhyay at partha@cprindia.org.