A new “bulldozer politics” has taken hold in many Indian cities, destroying neighborhoods and displacing city residents as it pursues a global city aesthetic. While most accounts explain these evictions as being part of a global land grab, Logics of Dispossession challenges that story and situates them in more local politics and in a longer historical durée. 

Employing a comparative genealogical approach to historical analysis, Liza Weinstein traces the Indian government’s power to evict—from its beginnings in the colonial capitals of the British Raj, to developmental state-building projects and the rise of ethnonationalist politics, up to the present neoliberal conjuncture. Drawing on fieldwork across cities, archival research, and a database of more than a thousand eviction cases, Weinstein argues that evictions constitute a historically entrenched tool of city governance, motivated by a shifting set of intersecting, often contradictory, logics that have accumulated over time and in locally specific ways across Indian cities aspiring to be world-class.

This book will be of interest to students and scholars of urban policy, India’s political history, and postcolonial studies.

Liza Weinstein is Associate Professor of Sociology at Northeastern University

List of Figures
Acknowledgments
Abbreviations

Introduction: Genealogies of Dispossession

1. Evictions as Colonial Governing Practice, 1896–1931

2. Citizenship Logics After Independence/Partition, 1947–1955

3. Emergency Evictions, Electoral Logics, 1975–1985

4. Spotlight Scapegoating After Ayodhya, 1992–2002

5. Cumulative Logics of Neoliberal Evictions, 2000–2020

Conclusion: Historicizing Dispossession

Notes
References
Index