“Making do”: Religious segregation and everyday water struggles

Abstract

I illustrate through this paper how contemporary water (in)justice results from interactions between historical, socio-political, technical, and economic relations, and how such water (in)justice is emotionally experienced and embodied. Focusing on the case of Faizalpur, a low-income Muslim neighborhood in segregated Ahmedabad, I draw on lived experiences approaches to water justice and on an emotional political ecology framework to offer a multi-scalar analysis set across urban, community, and individual scales. I show how the settlement of low-income Muslim families in Faizalpur is inseparable from both the (il)legal status of this land and the religious segregation that have shaped this city. In turn, everyday experiences of water injustice in Faizalpur are premised in contestations relating to the site's land use zoning history. I illustrate how in this contested site carefully framed requests make municipal water infrastructure possible even though such infrastructure is technically disallowed here. The careful-ness of such requests lies in skirting issues pertaining to (il)legality, instead activating other discursive categories, such as ‘humanitarian’ need: categories that possess the moral power to outweigh legal and technical arguments. I suggest that everyday experiences of water (in)justice cannot be understood without attending to the discursive power of planning terms like ‘illegality’ and ‘land use zoning’. Emotionally experienced everyday water struggles in Faizalpur, in the form of anger, trust, fear, grief, etc., need to be understood then as emotional everyday experiences of religious segregation.