Gods in the rubble: How law orchestrates the erasure of working-class religious life in neoliberal India’s cities

A MODEST KALI MANDIR IN BHOOMIHEEN CAMP, a space that held not only religious but also social and emotional significance, was demolished by the Delhi Development Authority (‘DDA’) and police in June. The residents, many of them poor Hindus, were left devastated. In a political era where the slogan Mandir Yahi Banega (“The temple will be built here”) is wielded as a rallying cry of State power, the destruction of a temple in a working-class settlement raised urgent questions in my mind: What does it mean to be poor and Hindu, witness both your home and place of worship destroyed? How does one reconcile faith and belonging in a nation where governance under Hindutva coexists with the systematic disenfranchisement of its own working-class devotees?

The versions of Indian citizenship

Citizenship in independent India, as Joya Chatterji demonstrates, was never simply a legal category bestowed uniformly on all residents of the new nation. It emerged, instead, from contested processes during Partition, where State actors, refugees, and local officials negotiated the meaning of belonging in a climate of violence, displacement, and communal division. While the formal constitutional commitment leaned toward a liberal jus soli principle, in practice the State’s treatment of “minority citizens” produced hybrid statuses, neither alien nor fully enfranchised, subject to exceptional administrative measures. 

These legacies, born in a “messy, and often ugly” post-Partition reality, have continued to shape how marginalised populations experience the State. In the present context, where migrant residents of slums are labelled “Bangladeshis” and face repeated displacement, post-Partition imaginations have become central to defining neoliberal, developmental notions of working-class citizenship in the national capital and the country.

Within Hindutva’s framework, these historical ambiguities in citizenship are no more neutral residues; they have become active tools to define the national community along religious and cultural contours. The contemporary State’s selective invocation of heritage, faith, and nationalism reinforces this. While the public narrative celebrates a civilisational Hindu identity, working-class Hindus in informal settlements face evictions, demolition of community spaces, and exclusion from full civic participation. 

This paradox, being ideologically included as part of the “Hindu nation”, yet being materially excluded from the rights and securities of citizenship, echoes the “minority citizen” dynamic. Except here, the minority status is created through class, space, and urban policy rather than religion alone.

For the urban working class, disenfranchisement is both structural and symbolic. Displacement in the name of development, erasure during global spectacles, and criminalisation under encroachment laws reveal a continuity between Partition-era exceptionalism and present-day governance. 

The “state of exception” that Chatterji traces in refugee management has, in the neoliberal-Hindutva city, been repurposed to manage the poor through demolitions and relocations, all justified through legal loopholes, selective enforcement, and moralised claims about urban order. In this way, citizenship for the working class in India remains conditional, dependent on elite visions of who belongs in the city, and on what terms.

For working-class populations in urban India, citizenship is lived at the margins: not in abstract constitutional promises, but in the everyday negotiations of survival, belonging, and dignity. These communities often exist in stark proximity to the symbols of affluence — sprawling malls, gated colonies, and landscaped “world-class” boulevards. Yet, they remain structurally invisible , their presence treated as an embarrassment to the city’s global image.