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.
