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.
For those labelled as “encroachers” by urban planners and administrators, the “little inconveniences” perceived by elites translate into the lived trauma of displacement and the reality of makeshift internment camps.
The case of the Kali temple’s demolition in Bhoomiheen is not an isolated case: let’s look at three recent stories from across Delhi where religious structures in working-class settlements were removed, damaged, or stripped of their civic functions, even when they serve as vital anchors of community life.
First episode:
Six years ago, on August 19, 2019, the DDA demolished a Ravidas temple in Tughlakabad, which was once central to Dalit religio-political assertion in the region. In November 2018, even as the Delhi HC accepted the DDA’s record of land acquisition under the Land Acquisition Act, 1984, the judge, Justice Valmiki H. Mehta had urged DDA to consider relocating the “small mandir” - the Ravidas temple.
Following up on the relocation idea, when the Ravidas Jainti Samaroh Samiti filed an SLP, the Supreme Court first dismissed it in April 2019, and when DDA alleged continued occupation, it brazenly ordered for clearance with police assistance by the next day. Only after protests did the Union government concede 400 sq m in the Tughlaqabad forest for a new temple under state-approved management.
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?
Second episode:
In Mehrauli, in January, 2024, the centuries-old Akhunji Masjid, along with its seminary and cemetery, was demolished in a night-time operation without notice. Police and paramilitary forces barred worshippers, confiscated the imam’s phone, and removed debris before the Fajr prayers. The DDA invoked Sanjay Van’s reserved-forest status, approvals by Ridge Management Board and a Religious Committee meeting (of January 2024) to justify the removal without issuing a fresh eviction notice.
The mosque had been under legal dispute with the DDA for decades. Its destruction displaced orphaned children living at the madrasa. The mosque appears in the ASI’s 1920 list of monuments, yet the absence of formal protection allowed local authorities to treat it as an “unauthorised structure” under the Delhi Development Act. Forest rules, municipal planning powers and encroachment discourse thus enabled a functioning Waqf property housing orphans to be razed.
Third episode:
In July 2025, a power cut at Jai Hind Camp shadowed similar abuse of legal strategy. Two sanctioned BSES meters, one at the settlement’s temple and another at its mosque, had supplied electricity to over 5,000 residents through informal sub-meters. A May 2024 district-court order in a property dispute recorded this as “diversion” beyond the approved premises under the Electricity Act, 2003 and Delhi Electricity Regulatory Commission Supply Code.
That observation permitted BSES to remove the meters, plunging the camp into darkness at the height of summer. Although the Patiala House Court later stayed eviction and ordered restoration of essential services, the case underscored that access to power and water in Delhi is tethered to ownership papers and the formal address grid, while communal arrangements in informal settlements are rendered illicit.
Across these episodes the pattern is consistent. Acquisition files, ridge notifications, building regulations, electricity-supply conditions and court-imposed deadlines are presented as neutral technicalities but operated as levers of exclusion.
What appears in court records is that enforcement of law becomes, on the ground, a managed unmaking of citizenship from below, fragmenting, re-siting or extinguishing long-standing religious and residential communities and converting essential services themselves into instruments of displacement.
Religious spaces are rallying points for working class mobilisations, while in multiple neighbourhoods, both temples and mosques have served as sites for organising resistance to demolition drives, showing that these spaces, far from being passive relics, are active nodes in the political and social life of the working poor. As I witnessed, thought more deeply about Bhomiheen, and the temple that was felled, I realised how, in moments of demolition, utility removal, and political marginalisation, these religious spaces were brought down not only physically but metaphorically too, for being living institutions of community-making, spaces that asserted the right to remain, the right to the city, and the right to be recognised as citizens in the fullest sense.
Placing Bhoomiheen in the varied definitions of citizenship
Over the past two decades, Delhi has witnessed repeated waves of eviction, displacement, and resettlement. These shifts have been driven not only by infrastructure needs, but also by changing priorities tied to the city’s aspiration to become a “world-class city” (Master Plan Delhi 2021:2). Large-scale projects and beautification drives have reshaped the city’s spatial configuration, but the burden of this transformation has been disproportionately borne by its lower-income working class, the same construction workers, domestic workers, gig workers, and labourers who sustain it.
Bhoomiheen Camp’s story makes this erasure visible. Here, a small Kali Mandir stood at the heart of community life until it was demolished by the Delhi Development Authority and police, alongside residents’ homes, in the days leading up to Independence Day. For over sixty years, the Kali Mandir stood at the centre of a living tradition. Its caretaker, Maya Devi Goldar swept its courtyard at dawn, lit incense, and sang Hare Ram Hare Krishna kirtan, ensuring every festival bound the community together.
“They told us they would not break it,” she recalls. “We even brought them proof when they asked. But at two in the afternoon, when most people were at work, they started demolishing.” The police blocked entry and beat back those who tried to intervene. She watched helplessly as the murti was pulled from the sanctum and left outside.
Her home stood beside the temple, and each morning began with darshan before work. Now, months later, she says it is painful to look at the empty space. At night, she dreamt of the goddess trapped under the debris, asking to be freed as the camp emptied and devotees scattered. Moved by these dreams, the mandir committee, of which Maya was a member, decided to perform visarjan, carrying the murti away together in grief.
For the working poor, such religious spaces are often the most stable institutions in their lives, places where spiritual meaning is inseparable from everyday survival, and where worship also sustains food-sharing, mutual aid, and care.
Bishwajeet Bera had lived beside the Kali Mandir for more than three decades. He could trace that permanence through paper and memory alike, a voter ID from 2008, a gas connection from 2004, a bank account opened in 2006, and years of entries in the temple’s ledger from when he helped organise Kali Puja, Durga Puja, and Janmashtami.
In Mehrauli, in January, 2024, the centuries-old Akhunji Masjid, along with its seminary and cemetery, was demolished in a night-time operation without notice.
“They came in the morning and said the Kali Mandir would not be demolished, so we went back,” he recalls. “At 2:30 in the afternoon, I got a call, they had demolished it.” In its notice of June 7, there was no exclusive mention of the temple - it only directed residents to relocate in three days voluntarily or face demolition.
The police and DDA had kept people out of the temple; no one could remove anything, utensils, lights, the mic, iron grills, even the Shivling that had sat beneath the Kali murti for over forty-five years. “They broke the Shivling too,” he says flatly.
Bishwajeet’s documents didn’t translate into protection. “We have ration cards, voter cards, everything”. Yet their petition was dismissed in the High Court. He could not reach the division bench — there was no money, no leave from his office-boy filing job. After nights spent outside with his 11-year-old after the camp’s demolition, Biswajeet has now moved into a rented accommodation. “The temple was there before us. It was tradition.” He had served as the temple’s treasurer-cashier. “Even the daan-patti is now lost somewhere under the mud,” he said.
Dinesh Gupta headed the committee. The site held layers of a Shiv Mandir above, the Kali Mandir below, the office in between, all kept alive through small donations and labour. Gupta had been out of town for three months. On June 11, around 2:30 p.m., he was suddenly called and told that the demolition had begun.
Prem grew up with the temple wall as the edge of his home. “I have been connected to the temple from the beginning,” he says; now in his fifties, he still speaks of it in the present tense. He handled electricity bills for the camp, ran cable work, and helped organise weddings on the temple roof when families could not afford a hall, just the pandit’s fee, often waived.
“Many times, when couples could not even afford a pandit, we would open the gates of the temple to them,” he said.
Prem begged DDA and police officials to hand over the murti. “We’ll keep it, install it in someone’s apartment.”
The officials replied nonchalantly that it was not allowed and they had to toss it away. The roof of the Shiv Mandir collapsed; an upper storey the committee had planned would never be built. Prem has since received a housing allotment, but he is stuck in paperwork and doubt, feeling that “what was done was very wrong”. There is a sense of injury no letter or plea to the government officials can resolve.
Religion, for the urban poor, cannot be understood solely as belief or identity. As Nandini Gooptu argued, it is woven into the very fabric of labouring life, sustaining solidarities, providing material support, and offering moral vocabularies for justice and dignity. The contradiction under Hindutva lies in its symbolic embrace of such communities as part of the Hindu nation, while materially undermining the infrastructures that sustain them.
Thomas Blom Hansen writes that majoritarian politics promises dignity to subaltern Hindus, yet neoliberal urbanism, through demolitions, evictions, and “world-class city” schemes, strips away their means of survival. The result is what James Holston calls “graduated citizenship”: a stratified belonging in which the poor are included in the nation’s cultural body but excluded from its material benefits. For Bhoomiheen Camp, the loss of the temple thus signified both a spiritual dispossession and a withdrawal of one of the few institutions through which citizenship was actively lived, negotiated, and defended.
The religion of the working class
On May 17, 2022, during the Gyanvapi survey, a claim of a Shivling set off a national frenzy. Since then, Shivlings have been “found” in tombs and mosques across headlines, until even Mohan Bhagwat urged restraint, saying there is no need to look for a Shivling in every mosque.
What, then, of the Shivling in Bhoomiheen’s Kali Mandir, forty-five years under the goddess, and the officials who shattered it in the afternoon when most workers were away? The contrast is instructive. Some symbols are amplified into sovereignty; others are reduced to rubble with no broadcast. The difference is not theology. It is class, caste, and utility.
Residents describe DDA’s posture in a sentence, “You are defaulters; your story is over.” There was no time to “fix papers”, no meaningful hearing. A thousand families still await housing in the national capital. Bengali-speaking Hindus and Muslims, already cast as provisional, fear a second invalidation- Why were we resettled here? Where will they take us next? In the present Hindutva landscape, even being Hindu is not enough; only certain forms of Hinduism are legible, the ones that travel well in speeches and court petitions. The rest, the roof-top weddings, the shared mics, the daily darshan before a shift, are treated as clutter on valuable land. Secularism is not only dismantled against minority religions, it is also dismantled against indigenous, varied forms of worship within Hinduism. The idol is the same, but the worshipper is not: the god of a jhuggi does not count like the god of a gated colony, especially when the latter is useful to power.
This is why Bhoomiheen’s story matters today. We can honour the usual symbols, or we can look closely at a small temple that carried a neighbourhood’s worth of memory and mutual aid, and ask: Who is an Indian as a whole person, with home, vote, worship, and dignity intact? If the answer excludes the keepers of this temple, then the promise of citizenship has been narrowed to the size of a headline.
“They came in the morning and said the Kali Mandir would not be demolished, so we went back,” Biswajit Bera recalls. “At 2:30 in the afternoon, I got a call, they had demolished it.”
Ralf Dahrendorf’s argument* that erosion of social citizenship produces an “underclass” excluded from the edifice of citizenship is directly relevant. In India, neoliberal economic policy has produced mass underemployment, stagnant wages, and dismantled key welfare entitlements, from the dilution of the public distribution system to privatisation of health and education.
Hindutva politics, meanwhile, overlays this economic precarity with a cultural politics that marks religious minorities, dissenting workers, and marginalised caste groups as “outsiders” to the imagined Hindu nation. . Here, the “boundary” separating the secure from the precarious is simultaneously economic and cultural, making class exclusion inseparable from religious and caste exclusion.
As the Kali temple’s demolition in Bhoomiheen shows us, for poor Hindus, symbolic inclusion in a majoritarian project does not translate into material security or protection from dispossession. Instead, neoliberal urban development logics render them expendable in the pursuit of real estate capital and elite urban visions.
In Sassen’s terms, their political and cultural incorporation is ‘unbundled’ from substantive social rights, producing a form of citizenship that is at once invoked for electoral mobilisation and denied in the everyday conditions of housing, livelihood, and spatial belonging.
Secularism, wholeness of personhood and religion of the oppressed
The history of popular religion in India is not only a history of faith but of social and political improvisation as well. Across centuries, marginalised communities have used religious idioms not to consolidate power from above but to redistribute dignity from below. Unlike the French model of laïcité, which seeks to exclude religion from the public sphere, Indian secularism evolved in a space where religion was too deeply embedded in cultural life to be simply discarded.
Here, secularism meant curbing inequality and preventing state capture by any one faith, while working with the cultural legitimacy of religion to democratise it. This distinctive trajectory owes much to a long lineage of reformist, egalitarian, and anti-colonial religious movements that emerged from both subaltern and reformist elite contexts.
The Bhakti and Sufi traditions of medieval India laid an early foundation for this democratic engagement with religion. Bhakti poets like Kabir, Mirabai, and Guru Nanak rejected caste hierarchies, ritualism, and priestly intermediaries, advocating instead a direct, personal relationship with the divine. They preached in vernacular languages, making spiritual knowledge accessible beyond elite circles, and fostered interfaith harmony. Parallelly, Sufi orders, from early figures like Rabia al-Adawiyya to the Chishti saints in India, nurtured spaces where gender, community, and caste boundaries could be softened or transgressed. In both traditions, love and inner devotion displaced orthodoxy, providing a spiritual vocabulary for social equality. This was not an abstract theological shift but a political one, enabling religious practice to become a medium for solidarity rather than subjugation.
In the 19th century, reformers such as Jotirao and Savitribai Phule drew on these egalitarian currents while incorporating influences from Christian missionary education, Islamic egalitarianism, and Enlightenment rationalism. Their Satyashodhak Samaj broke the monopoly of Brahmin intermediaries in worship, opposed scriptural sanction for caste, and actively worked for widow remarriage, women’s education, and the dignity of Dalits. B.R. Ambedkar extended this logic. His fierce critique of Hinduism as a “menace to liberty, equality and fraternity” was matched by his conviction that religion could be reconstructed to serve justice, culminating in his adoption to Buddhism. For Ambedkar, the problem was not religiosity per se but the institutional form it took; a righteous religion was possible only through radical ethical reform.
Tribal and peasant uprisings under colonialism further show how religion could become a rallying point for anti-colonial mobilisation. The Santhal rebellion of 1855, the Birsa Munda movement, the Kherwar revival, and the Sardari Larai all wove together grievances over land alienation, landlord exploitation, and British interference with tribal customs into visions of a divinely sanctioned restoration of justice. Leaders like Birsa Munda infused their political demands with moral-religious authority, mobilising followers through disciplined codes of conduct and collective worship. Peasant militancy in such contexts blurred the line between economic resistance and religious revival, as seen also in the Satnami movement of Saint Ghasidas in Chhattisgarh, which rejected caste hierarchies and promoted ethical self-restraint.
These religious movements were not always secular in the modernist sense, but they were politically democratic in their effect: they shifted authority from established elites to the oppressed, legitimising demands for justice in the cultural language people already knew. E.P. Thompson’s perspective on the English working class, that religion iss a lived, cultural idiom in which class consciousness can develop, helps us see how, in India, subaltern religiosity often became a grammar for political mobilisation. Rather than being an ‘opiate’, religion here could be a medium for articulating grievances, forging solidarities, and imagining a moral order beyond the colonial-capitalist and casteist status quo.
The anti-colonial period saw this dynamic at work in multi-religious fronts such as the Khilafat Movement (1919–1924), which was a religiously rooted anti-colonial struggle, launched to defend the Ottoman Caliphate, but in India transformed into a mass campaign against British rule. Led by the Ali brothers and supported by Gandhi, it drew on Islamic solidarity while merging with the Non-Cooperation Movement, creating a moment of Hindu–Muslim unity in the fight for swaraj.
As the Kali temple’s demolition in Bhoomiheen shows us, for poor Hindus, symbolic inclusion in a majoritarian project does not translate into material security or protection from dispossession.
Figures like Maulvi Ahmadullah Shah stood as symbols of armed resistance that crossed sectarian lines. Yet, the postcolonial state has had to navigate the double-edged nature of religion in politics: the same cultural depth that makes religion a resource for democratic inclusion also allows majoritarian projects, such as the Hindutva mobilisation around Ayodhya, to recast religious sites into instruments of exclusionary hegemony.
Thus, the Indian democratic experiment with religion is inseparable from the struggles of communities to claim their whole personhood—economic, cultural and spiritual within the nation. In constitutional terms, these movements have been about more than formal rights; they have been about dignity, recognition and belonging. Religious movements have offered an arena where the poor, lower castes, women and tribals could speak as moral equals, assert their community’s worth and rehearse the practices of self-rule long before the state extended them legal equality.
The Supreme Court’s expansive interpretation of Article 21 has transformed it from a guarantee of bare survival into a constitutional foundation for the wholeness of personhood, material, cultural, and social. By recognising rights to livelihood, health, dignity, heritage, and peaceful habitation, the Court has affirmed that “life” is not reducible to the act of breathing but includes all that makes existence meaningful and secure.
The top Court’s jurisprudence under Articles 21 and 25 shows two parallel moves: an expansive reading of “life” and “religion” and an equally persistent trimming of those rights when confronted with state power and market-driven “public purpose.” In Bijoe Emmanuel v. State of Kerala (1986), the Court recognised that freedom of conscience includes not only belief but also non-participation in practices contrary to faith; and in Shafin Jahan v. Asokan K.M. (2018), it tied religious choice and inter-faith marriage to Article 21’s autonomy and privacy. In The Commissioner, Hindu Religious Endowments, Madras v. Shirur Mutt (1954) and Sardar Syedna Taher Saifuddin Saheb v. State of Bombay (1962), it articulated the “essential practices” doctrine to insulate core rituals and denominational discipline from state interference
This broad conception of religion, however, has frayed in the age of neoliberal urbanism. Courts now routinely uphold land acquisition, redevelopment and planning measures that displace places of worship or deny street-level religious uses on grounds of “public order” or “development.” The result is a shrinking of Article 25 precisely in those spaces, bastis, street shrines, informal congregations, where marginalised communities live and worship.
This tension matters because the same Article 21 that the Court has read to include livelihood, dignity and peaceful habitation also underwrites the right to carry one’s faith into those spaces. A genuinely “whole” conception of life, as promised in Francis Coralie Mullin v. Union Territory of Delhi (1981) and its progeny, cannot be squared with redevelopment regimes that evict residents and simultaneously treat their rituals as expendable. Subsequent rulings have taken up these templates in ways that both reaffirm and hollow out their promises: in Mohd. Aslam alias Bhure v. Union of India (2003) the Court, citing Ismail Faruqui, upheld restrictions on worship at adjacent land, treating a decades-long practice as subordinate to state planning; in Indian Young Lawyers Association v. State of Kerala (2018), the bench invoked Bommai to insist that secularism is part of the Constitution’s basic structure, yet simultaneously reaffirmed the “essential practices” doctrine to decide what counted as religion; in Shayara Bano v. Union of India (2017), the same doctrine underwrote the invalidation of triple-talaq (and the false discursive demonisation of Muslim men); and in Subramanian Swamy v. Union of India (2016) and A.S. Narayana Deekshitulu v. State of A.P. (1996) the Court accepted deep state regulation of temples and religious property.
Taken together, these judgments show how an initially broad reading of Articles 21 and 25, one that recognised dignity, heritage and the fullness of life, now coexists with a legal regime in which “secular” planning powers delimit what counts as legitimate worship. For the working class, especially those in informal settlements, this intentional reading of constitutional rights provides a legal and moral basis to claim not only shelter but also the networks, spaces and practices through which they reproduce life in the city. In contexts like Bhoomiheen Camp, the right to life cannot be disentangled from the right to participate in community life, to inhabit spaces of worship and mutual aid, and to preserve the social infrastructures that enable survival under precarious economic conditions. Here, Article 21 becomes a vehicle for reimagining citizenship beyond formal membership in the nation-state, towards a conception rooted in lived personhood, where the measure of belonging is the ability to inhabit the city as a whole person, not merely as labour or voter.
The demolitions in Bhoomiheen is about the destruction of an entire social infrastructure. The Kali Mandir was not an “encroachment” or a “structure” in the DDA’s files, it was a living institution that organised time, trust, and mutual help. Its festivals, ledgers, and stone icons were not ornamental relics; they were instruments of citizenship, where people without secure titles could still be recognised as members of a community.
Urban governance in Delhi increasingly reflects the pattern Harriss described - an alliance between reforming state agencies, private capital, and a professionalised “civil society” that speaks the idiom of planning, growth, and cleanliness. Resident welfare associations and master plans speak for middle-class comfort zones, while the urban poor are tolerated only within electoral politics, where their claims are mediated through “messy” bargaining and often dismissed as illegitimate. In this frame, the religious infrastructure of the poor is invisible or seen as disorganised, something to be cleared for “development”, rather than as a valid, functional order.
The Indian democratic experiment with religion is inseparable from the struggles of communities to claim their whole personhood—economic, cultural and spiritual within the nation.
When bulldozers destroy these sites, the act is not neutral. It is a form of classed and caste-marked governance that enforces an exclusive urban citizenship, one in which religious freedom, as lived by the poor, is treated as expendable. The “planning” that replaces it is a science of exclusion, where productivity and beautification overwrite the lived city of survival networks, affective economies, and sacred solidarities.
Seen through this lens, “planning” under the neoliberal legal regime is not merely a technical or managerial exercise but a juridico-political project. It deploys zoning, nuisance doctrines, environmental norms and master plans as instruments of selective visibility, rendering the survival networks and sacred solidarities of the urban poor illegal or expendable. Bulldozers demolishing mazārs, dargāhs or wayside shrines are thus not neutral acts of urban improvement but forms of caste- and class-marked governance. They effectuate a shift from an inhabitation-based citizenship to an exclusionary, property-based urban citizenship in which subaltern religiosities and informal livelihoods are recoded as “encroachments.” This is precisely the terrain where the right to the urban spaces contests the state’s monopoly over the production of urban space.
To defend these spaces is to defend a fuller meaning of citizenship, one in which the poorest residents are not merely planned for, policed, or patronised, but recognised as co-authors of the city.
Notes:
* As Dahrendorf argues in The Changing Quality of Citizenship in ‘The Condition of Citizenship’, London: Verso, 1994.