From Third‐Class to World‐Class Citizens: Claiming Belonging, Countering Betrayal in the Margins of Ahmedabad

Abstract

AbstractThis paper ethnographically explores the repercussions of the large‐scale displacement and resettlement of slum‐dwellers in the city of Ahmedabad, India, where state‐sponsored urban development aimed at the creation of a slum‐free world‐class city is strongly personified around the figure of Prime Minister Narendra Modi. Based on ten months’ fieldwork in the slum resettlement site of Sadbhavna Nagar in 2015–2016, I explore the intricacies of betrayal resulting from world‐class city making. First, I suggest that infrastructure interventions and futuristic imaginaries invoked dreams of a better future among the poor, but resulted in a sense of having been betrayed by both Modi and the state when people were physically and discursively excluded from the world‐class city. Second, I demonstrate how resettled people have engaged in micro‐level practices of betrayal by mobilizing middle‐class “nuisance talk” (Ghertner 2012) to denigrate their new, unwanted neighbors. I argue that the perceived betrayal by the state trickles down and translates into a betrayal of neighbors in the resettlement site, reinforcing the pre‐existing inequalities of caste and religion among the urban poor [Displacement; Urban Development; World‐Class City; Resettlement; India].