Law, Legitimacy, and Dispossession: Navigating Legal Mobilization in New Delhi

Abstract

 In the urban landscape of India, the demolition of informal settlements, or ‘slums’, sanctioned by the state and enforced through judicial channels is a routine site. The resultant displacement of impoverished communities inhabiting these settlements is viewed as the cost of transforming postcolonial cities into world-class metropolises. Surprisingly, these actions have found significant support within India’s historically ‘progressive’ judicial bodies, which increasingly endorse and initiate these demolitions, often adopting an overtly anti-poor stance. The law naturally assumes a pivotal role in the lives of 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 law and 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 the marginalized 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 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?