Legality in a liminal light

The Indian State legitimises the demolition drive through its discourse of legality. Here, however, the State takes up the role of a neutral judge. This article takes an entirely opposing stance and claims that the discourse of illegality is used as a technology of space production, which does not identify violations of the law but instead decides who gets to live in the ambivalent space created by the law. Muslim neighbourhoods in India have twice been made homeless: initially deprived of their structural capability of getting formal housing rights due to centuries of State indifference, discrimination, and violence, and ultimately demolished because of the informality that they were forced into. The bulldozer, in this reading, is not an instrument of urban governance but the final act in a longer drama of spatial exclusion whose earlier acts were carried out through indifference, discrimination, and the slow withdrawal of the State from areas it had already deemed expendable. Illegality here does not reveal itself; it is constructed and imposed.