SPECIAL ARTICLE

Fragmented Citizenships in Gurgaon

Thomas Cowan

G
This paper examines the fragmentary production and urgaon, India’s “millennium city,” is said to represent
governance of Gurgaon, Haryana. Based on fieldwork an “urban metonym” for the country’s embrace of glo-
bal capital (Kalyan 2011) and the concurrent “urban
carried out in 2012, it asserts an epistemology of the
turn” (Prakash 2002). Free from the vestiges of postcolonial
“exception” as the central mode of urban production in urban compromise, the city has been developed by a coalition
the city. To do so, the paper examines three spaces of of real-estate visionaries and a parastatal government agency
Gurgaon: the workers’ neighbourhood, the urban village eager to attract transient, mobile capital to the hinterland of
India’s national capital. Gurgaon is an experiment in city-
and the gated colony.
making through public–private partnership; a project which
seeks to bypass the everyday obstructions and subversions of
existing urban settlements and produce rational spaces fertile
for the production of global identity and capital (Bhattacharya
and Sanyal 2011). Here, on the urban periphery, the state and
its corollaries, shape “patchworks of valorised and de-valorised
spaces” (Gururani 2013) to the imperatives of speculative
global capital through “territorialised flexibility” (Roy 2009a).
The state in Gurgaon utilises informal governmental logics
to flexibly inscribe value to particular citizenships within a
fragmented space, outsourcing authority to de facto sovereign
actors who arbitrarily administer “conditional ...situational”
(Ong 2006) urban citizenships. As such, the exception emerges
as a key mode of production in the city, through which com-
peting sovereigns seek to impose territorial sovereignty over
fragmented codependent spaces.
Whilst Gurgaon has been celebrated as symbolic of Indian
modernity and a representation of an emboldened and emerg-
ing new middle-class spatial identity (Yadav 2012), it is also
presented as a city of unsustainable chaos, and the product of
a third-world peculiarity embedded in the Indian psyche1
where “dynamism meets dysfunction” (Yardley 2011). The pur-
pose of this paper is to look beyond parochial representations
of space which dominate media discourses, in an attempt to
understand the relationship between Gurgaon as the embodi-
ment of a “new architecture” of neo-liberal accumulation
(Goldman 2011) and as a fragmented space of competing, over-
lapping sovereignties. As such the paper seeks to transcend
purely structuralist understandings of the “urban” as a pas-
sive, functional receptor for global capital (Shatkin 2008), and
deploy a critical understanding of urban governmentality.
In doing so, this paper, taken from field research carried out
I would like to thank Kriti Bhudiraja, Rakhi Sehgal and Gurgaon in 2012, departs on a double movement: on the one hand in-
Workers News (www.gurgaonworkersnews.wordpress.com) for their voking H Lefebvre’s (2003a) “State mode of production” to
assistance and support whilst conducting research in Gurgaon. The critically analyse the production of fragmented, hierarchised
research was conducted in 2012 and was financially supported by the
spaces in the neo-liberal city; and on the other hand, to under-
Rajiv Gandhi Foundation.
stand the techniques of sovereignty which negotiate forms of
Thomas Cowan ([email protected]) is a PhD researcher at the citizenship within fragmented space. In this manner, this paper
Geography Department, King’s College London.
examines the manner in which the exception as technique of
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SPECIAL ARTICLE

rule emerges as hegemonic form of governance in Gurgaon, Until recently, the city was governed by a municipal council
upon which “territorialised citizenships” negotiate their inclu- appointed by the state commissioner in Chandigarh, 300 km
sion or survival in the city. Sovereignty, here, is understood away. However, in 2011, elections were held and de jure legis-
not as a fixed, institutional container of power, but as a “tenta- lative powers were transferred to a municipal corporation of
tive and always emergent form of authority” (Hansen and elected councillors. For the majority of Gurgaon’s history, offi-
Stepputat 2006: 297), one which is the product of and simulta- cial governance of the city has been shared between the state
neously produces fragmented, hierarchical citizenships in commissioner, the zilla parishad,2 and HUDA, a situation of
the city. centralisation which, through bypassing the obfuscations of
regular democratic representation, provided the state commis-
Context sioner and private developers space to develop the city untrou-
Gurgaon’s recent development is well known as the brainchild bled by democratic procedure (Gururani 2013). Meanwhile, a
of visionary real estate developer K P Singh, who in the early practice of delayed completion certificates and concurrent
1980s took advantage of developer-friendly building regula- charging of maintenance fees is followed by the private devel-
tions (the Haryana Ceiling on Landholdings Act, 1972 and the opers and HUDA, and has resulted in only a very small
Haryana Development and Regulation of Urban Areas Act, proportion of the city coming under the municipal corpora-
1975) and ambiguous, malleable zoning controls, to acquire tion’s jurisdiction.
vast tracts of land directly from villagers in the then agricul-
tural region of Haryana (Gururani 2013: 12–13). ‘Actually Existing Neo-liberalism’
The development of the city was inextricably dependent on Contemporary scholarship on cities and urban governance has
India’s broader liberalisation and embrace of global capital focused on the transformative role of the state in reconfigur-
flows in the early 1990s; India’s own “urban revolution.” In this ing the built environment to facilitate the imperatives of mo-
manner, the 74th amendment to the Constitution, in 1992 bile global capital (Harvey 1989; Weber 2002; Brenner 2004).
decentralised state sovereignty to local nodes and empowered Such scholarship attempts to understand the changing spatial-
fiscally weak urban governments to reconfigure the urban en- ity of the state in the production and management of accumu-
vironment to best meet the imperatives of global capital (Du- lation within the urban arena. These structural explanations
pont 2011). While the city’s first experience of urbanisation of urban socio-spatial transformation, however useful, bypass
came with the opening of Sanjay Gandhi’s Maruti plant in the the agency of the “local” in producing the “actually existing
early 1980s, it was not until the mid-1990s (post-liberalisation) neoliberalism” (Brenner and Theodore 2002) of Indian every-
that the real estate sector began to dominate the city. day politics, mediated through consent, violence, and contra-
Rather than consisting of any public, unitary whole, today’s diction in the global South.
Gurgaon is constitutive of a variety of fragmented and divided Lefebvre’s ontology of state mode of production conversely
zones where residents live in deep yet distant codependence seeks to examine the dialectical relationship between state
(Searle 2010). The city is divided between territorially distinct governmentality, and the “lived” spontaneous production of
sovereigns, the private developers govern (with the assistance space of everyday experience (Lefebvre 2003a). For Lefebvre,
of the resident welfare associations [RWAs]) within the bound- the social relations of capitalism are representative of a dialec-
aries of their colonies (predominately to the south-east of the tical unity between the state and space, wherein the state is
NH8); the Haryana Urban Development Authority (HUDA) are conceptualised as an “(artificial) edifice of hierarchically or-
responsible for their own colonies along with service infra- dered institutions” which allocate and reproduce the dispa-
structure to the boundaries of the private colonies; industrial rate, spontaneous masses into appropriate spaces in the social
areas are the responsibility of the Haryana State Infrastruc- division of labour (Lefebvre 2003a: 84–85). In neo-capitalism,
ture and Industrial Development Corporation (HSIIDC); while according to Lefebvre, the demands of “developers and invest-
existing villages are largely governed by the newly formed ment banks” require the incessant production and imposition
Municipal Council of Gurgaon (MCG). The urban landscape of of a political space “organized according to a rationality of the
the city is thus inclusive of 43 malls, golf courses, a dozen five- identical and the repetitive” onto the lived space of the every-
star hotels, 30 of Haryana’s 34 IT and biotech special economic day, creating a “paradox of space that is both homogeneous
zones (SEZ) (“Gurgaon Calling 2011” [2011]) and over a hun- and broken” (Lefebvre 2003a: 86). This space is homogenised
dred Fortune 500 companies (Ahuja 2011). Private developer through processes of valorisation, wherein all units are equal
sections of the city are also serviced by a network of premium and interchangeable, yet broken into legible units and parcels
infrastructure, including a private rapid metro system, private for state control and manipulation (Lefebvre 2003a: 87–88).
security companies, private water supplies, and the largest The role of the state is not only to facilitate spaces for capital
private toll road in India (currently under construction) (DLF accumulation, but also to bind together the resultant chaotic
India 2012). While the city’s official population has increased splinters in order to ensure the reproduction of capitalist social
20-fold over the past 10 years, some 8–10 lakh population of relations. Yet, for Lefebvre, the state’s rational, representa-
predominately migrant industrial and manufacturing work- tional logics can do little but impose the “homogeneity of the
force are unaccounted for, living off-the-map in the city’s identical–repetitive for this situation of pulverisation” creating
urban villages. urbanised landscapes which, fractured and hierarchised,
64 june 27, 2015 vol L nos 26 & 27 EPW Economic & Political Weekly
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assume “a collection of ghettos: for the elite ... bourgeoisie ... In cities in the global South, however, state governmentality
intellectuals ...[and] foreign workers” (Lefebvre 2003a: 95). and, indeed, capitalist social relations, have long operated
The urban, under the capitalist state mode of production, is through a process of “passive revolution.” In this manner,
thus representative of a volatile dialectic between production, India’s truncated transition to modern capitalism was not ex-
destruction, and reproduction, articulated through the para- pressed by an internally coherent state project, but in an awk-
doxical “abolition of lived experience” (Lefebvre 2003a: 96) by ward fragmented relationship between “colonial rationalism”
rationalised governmentality. and the divergent realities of everyday Indian politics (Kaviraj
1984: 225). Indeed, within colonial India, “unruly coalitions”
Neo-liberal State Space between the state and de facto leaders operated as a key tech-
Under the logics of neo-liberal capitalism, cities have under- nology of rule over ungovernable spaces (Hansen and Steppu-
gone socio-spatial transformation from engines of industrial tat 2006: 297). This technique of “fragmenting governmental-
production to economies established on finance capital, leisure, ity” served to produce spaces of exclusivity as the colonial city
and technology (Bhattacharya and Sanyal 2011: 41). Indeed, spatially distanced legitimate citizens from colonial subjects
for Lefebvre (2003b) such a transformation was indicative of through fortressed enclaves and premium infrastructure net-
the “urban revolution,” a movement of capital accumulation works (Hansen and Verkaaik 2009: 11).
away from the primary circuit of industrial production and The logics of colonial governmentality remain at the heart
towards the secondary circuit of social reproduction, wherein of the postcolonial neo-liberal Indian state, which still oper-
urbanisation itself—highways, hotels, and finance districts— ates through a terrain of passive revolution. This continuity is
provide a “spatial fix” for the contradictions of capitalist accu- nowhere more evident than in the Indian urban, wherein some
mulation (Harvey 2001). As such, cities have undergone a tran- have noted that extensive paralegal channels operate to
sition towards “wholly privatised and marketised urban forma- sustain disparate groups of insurgent citizens (Chatterjee
tions” (Roy 2009a), key sites for national and global accumula- 2004). Urban governmentality in contemporary India is, thus,
tion wherein technocratic parastatal bodies enact territorialised constitutive of a colonial “battle” to “handle the legacy of
accumulation strategies to extract value from the built environ- constitutive separations of life-worlds of the city proper from
ment (Weber 2002). Yet, as these new state structures enact that of the native quarters” (Hansen and Stepputat 2006: 13).
spatial reconfiguration, they are inherently confronted with re- Somewhat reminiscent of A Roy and N AlSayyad’s (2006)
sidual spaces and citizenships from previous forms of produc- “medieval modernism,” urban governance in India
tion and alternative interpretations of space. This dialectical necessarily transcends teleological understandings of modern
relationship between “old” and “new,” “rational” and “lived,” “progress” and Western principles of “integrated ideals,” and
represent tangible ruptures in the otherwise seamless flows of instead can be understood as transitory and negotiated,
accumulation, representative in everyday subversion, violence, based on political, aesthetic, and sometimes violent claims
and anxiety in the contemporary urban. (Chatterjee 2004: 59).
For N Brenner (2004: 76), the space of the state under neo- The contemporary Indian state is thus understood as “ver-
liberal capitalism has thus been “actively produced and trans- nacular” (Kaviraj 1984), or constitutive of a “shadow state”
formed through regulatory projects and sociopolitical strug- (Harriss-White 2002) which has maintained sovereignty over
gles,” such that in attempting to attract and mobilise highly disparate groups through para-official channels of negotia-
concentrated forms of capital into territorial specific assets tion, exemption, and violence. In this manner, governance in
state space has rescaled to adept forms, itself confronted and the contemporary Indian city is not representative of the re-
resisted by citizenships and structures of existing modes of gressive breakdown of the “urban,” but of intensification
production. Such transformation constitutes an emergent form through the “roll back” and rescaled logics of neo-liberal gov-
of Lefebvre’s state mode of production wherein the imposition ernmentality, and the incomplete, non-hegemonic nature of
of rational, optimised capitalist space is not primarily articu- colonial rule (Hansen and Stepputat 2006).
lated through official state plans, but through a rescaled, out-
sourced, and intensified group of de facto sovereign actors. The State of Exception
An understanding of governmentality in Indian cities, thus,
The Fragmented Urban requires an understanding of state spatiality that extends be-
In the global North, the neo-liberal mode of production has yond the hierarchical scale. The state appears, retracts, and
thus produced a “splintering” of urban space into “secession- reforms in different forms, at different times. In Gurgaon, state
ary networks” of governance and social reproduction (Graham space is at once shaped by deregulated land policies and fluc-
and Marvin 2001). Urban splintering is symptomatic of neo- tuating capital flows into residential, commercial, and indus-
liberal governmentality, which enforces a spatial hierarchy trial real estate, and yet mediated by informal logics of control
onto the built environment through dividing and demarcating and service provision (the social reproduction of both factory
optimal spaces of accumulation, supplanting the Keynesian workers and gated community residents is almost completely
“integrated ideal” (Graham and Marvin 2001) for “the most governed by non-governmental actors). Of course, the state is
extensive and dramatic privatisation” of urban areas (McKen- present at each point, and state sovereignty here is expressed
zie 2011: 1). topologically (Allen and Cochrane 2010), as perpetually
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present yet “mediated” through sociopolitical struggle and the claims to land and citizenship are not fixed, but are contingent
paradoxes of capitalist space. on the needs of transnational capital flows (Roy 2009a), and
In this manner, the continuity between colonial and neo- compromise with insurgent urban actors. Expressed through
liberal modes of governmentality in urban India, has served to “powerful parastatal agencies,” urban governments mobilise
ideationally formalise “vernacular” informality as a hegem- dispossession through flexible “technologies of power” to un-
onic technology of rule in everyday urban life, a mode, “organ- map territories on the urban periphery (Goldman 2011: 556),
ising logic” and “system of norms that governs the process of informally appropriate land for Special Economic Zones and
urban transformation itself” in Indian cities (Roy 2005: 148). shopping malls (Goldman 2011), and arbitrarily demolish
The neo-liberal mode of production, as a convergence of spaces deemed obsolescent to the neo-liberal state project. The
ephemeral state sovereignty and rapacious needs of neo-liberal neo-liberal exception as such emerges as a fundamental tech-
accumulation is thus expressed primarily through informal nique for imposing optimal space onto the contradictions of
logics of governmentality, between inclusion and exception. neo-liberal urban formations.
Drawing from a Schmittian ontology of sovereign rule,
G Agamben (2005) has argued that sovereignty is principally Citizenships in Exception
expressed through the “state of exception,” constitutive of a As a technology of rule and mode of urbanisation, the excep-
“transformation of a provisional and exceptional measure into a tion operates to maintain rule in non-hegemonic territories,
technique of government” (Agamben 2005: 2). The utilisation wherein competing sovereignties and interpretations of space
of the “exception” enables sovereign bodies to separate the coalesce to facilitate or obstruct the dominant mode of produc-
Foucauldian “biopolitical” citizen, of legal and moral rights, from tion. In this way, the contemporary city is often depicted as a
the politically marginalised “bare life” in spaces wherein “the “battle space” (Graham 2009) of spatial ruptures produced by
norm becomes indistinguishable from the exception” (Agamben the logics of neo-liberal spatial accumulation and the blockad-
1998: 170). Counter to static understandings of disorder– ing of such projects by “lived” interpretations of space. The
control, exclusion–inclusion, for Agamben (1998), the partial politics of neo-liberal exception, as such is articulated through
inclusion of bare life into the political realm renders exception degrees of inclusion and exclusion, optimising preferred citi-
and rule, inclusion and exclusion indistinguishable. Instead, the zens into the sovereign project of rule, whilst forcing others to
“exception” as governmental technique, is utilised by the sover- make citizenship claims elsewhere (Ong 2006: 21). In this
eign to flexibly manage subjects between legality and illegality, manner, a focus on the everyday tactics of urban citizens in
citizen and subject. Whilst in epistemologically and materially contesting state sovereignty—a focus of much “subaltern ur-
rendering fact and law indistinguishable, the space of exception is banism” (Roy 2011) on Indian cities—explicates the complex-
also inevitably volatile, open for reinterpretation, capture, or ridden, truncated processes the state of exception undertakes
counter-hegemonic struggle by competing sovereign actors. at an “actually existing” level and demonstrates the flexible,
For A Ong (2006: 7), under neo-liberal governmentality, the permeable nature of the exception itself.
exception, as a regulatory technique of everyday control, man- The extent to which practices of collusion and encroach-
ifests differentially in order to optimise spaces and populations ment represent an emboldened “right” to urban life for the
for rationalised accumulative purposes operating through urban poor, as suggested by much scholarship on Indian “sub-
both inclusion and exclusion; creating “new possibilities, altern urbanism” (Chatterjee 2004; Benjamin 2008) must be
spaces and techniques for governing the population” (Ong attentive, however, to hierarchised, fragmented citizenships
2006: 7). In this manner, the imposition of “exception” oper- fostered in the state of exception. Indeed, the postcolonial
ates to optimise spaces for capital accumulation, through ex- urban is dominated by fragmented systems of sovereignty
empting concentrated areas from regular planning or labour wherein particular socially dominant groups, “strong men,”
regulations, and flexibly creating citizenships optimal for the slumlords or landowners occupy the space between the state
needs of capital (Ong 2006). and populations (Hansen and Stepputat 2006: 305). In this
Indeed, the exception has been mobilised by neo-liberal manner, in examining state space under passive revolution
urban governments to essentialise spatial segregation between one must acknowledge the deeply fragmented and contradic-
reified identities, producing purified spaces for chosen popula- tory politics within the internally incoherent subaltern.
tions, whilst partially preserving the excluded in “gray space” Here, I have attempted to utilise a Lefebvrian ontology and
of “permanent temporariness” (Yiftachel and Yacobi 2003: epistemology of state space to understand the production of
689; Yiftachel 2009). Here, excluded populations are con- fractured space and citizenships governed by the neo-liberal ex-
tained at a distance, governed through toleration in “unserv- ception, the emergent “mode of urbanisation” in the neo-liberal
iced, deprived, stigmatised” spaces of the city (Yiftachel and state. In doing so, I have sought to explicate the relationship be-
Yacobi 2003: 689). In this sense, the exception is the perfect tween neo-liberal production of space, and the state of excep-
corollary of the neo-liberal mode of production, tailor-made to tion as a tool which flexibly governs neo-liberal spatial contra-
manage spontaneous, everyday space through flexible legiti- dictions. I will now examine three spaces of Gurgaon’s fragmented
misation and immiseration strategies. urban landscape—“Global” Gurgaon, the urban village, and the
In Indian cities, the state of exception operates through a workers colony—in order to understand the forms of citizen-
dialectic between intensification and mediation wherein ships and identities which emerge within spaces of exception.
66 june 27, 2015 vol L nos 26 & 27 EPW Economic & Political Weekly
 SPECIAL ARTICLE

Zone of Exception and produce diverse and contingent outcomes.” As such, in

If existing urban settlements are party to the reclamation of the Gurgaon, new battles over the production of space have been
city by middle-class consumption practices and aspiration, the created, between the exempt and the included, the existing
emerging suburb represents its opposite—a splintering off from and the emergent, and within the uncomfortable exclusion of
the urban “battle space” (Graham 2009), a relinquishment of the immiserated.
competition for spatial control of the city, and the emergence of
a built environment premised on the lifestyle and consumption Kapashera
preferences of an emergent cosmopolitan upper middle class. On the north-eastern corner of Gurgaon, as you pass the gleam-
According to Ong (2006: 19), nowhere are such logics of spa- ing factories of the Udyog Vihar Industrial Area, lies Kapashera,
tial purification more readily deployed than in the creation of an urban village which partially sits between the “Thank you
new urban spaces of intensified neo-liberal exceptions on the for visiting Gurgaon” and “Welcome to Delhi” signs. The settle-
urban periphery. In these spaces of frontier accumulation, the ment is one of three adjacent parts of Kapashera Village, each
state withdraws itself from official governance and planning, as broadly defined by stage of authorisation which largely corre-
parastatals, the private sector, and local “bosses” exert de facto spond to the affluence of the residents; from High Tension Gali
control over spaces fertile for accumulation. to the temple is the original village; between the temple and
New peri-urban towns are spatially symbolic of a globalised the ganda nala is the original extension brought into the Lal
India, planned, governed, and financed through parastatal Dora3 in 1995–96; beyond the ganda nala, “Kapashera Border,”
agencies and public–private partnerships, the entire urban which fully extends into Haryana and around the Surya Vihar
system from governance to planning to infrastructure delivery gated colony, is the current unauthorised extension to the vil-
maintained and controlled by transnational, highly specula- lage. Within Kapashera lies a mix of village housing and “worker
tive capital (Bhattacharya and Sanyal 2011). Yet, the urban lines” which house around 2,50,000 predominately garment
periphery is also a complex site of spatial contestation, where workers who make the daily pilgrimage to Udyog Vihar. Here,
ambiguous regulations and flouted planning laws have pro- on Gurgaon’s own periphery, Kapashera workers exist in a quin-
duced “new forms of segregation, polarisation and socio- tessential zone of exception, between de facto non-implemen-
spatial fragmentation” (Dupont 2005: 13). tation of labour laws in the factory, and superfluity, invisibility
In this manner in Gurgaon, Delhi’s urban periphery, the in the neighbourhood. The “exception” within these two spaces
state and private developers were able to violently free up land thus manifests conditio sine qua non as the fundamental, rein-
assets for real estate-led accumulation, deploying a “new spa- forcing condition of everyday life. An everyday life, overwhelm-
tial vocabulary of control” (Roy 2004: 158) in “flexible accu- ingly dominated by violent and arbitrary relations of produc-
mulation” (Gururani 2013) to un-map the urban periphery. tion, maintained by de facto sovereign bodies.
Through subjecting differential value to fragmented zones of Kapashera residents, who manufacture a quarter or $20 bil-
exemption (Gururani 2013), the state territorially inscribed lion worth of India’s total garment exports, are overwhelm-
the sovereignty of optimised “global” images, subjects, and ingly employed on temporary contracts through labour theke-
practices—in this case, in the areas to the south-east of the dars, are not afforded full cover by Indian labour laws (Ramesh
National Highway 8. For more specific information, I would 2008), such as the right to collective assembly. Garment work-
refer you to S Gururani (2013) work on the city’s planning. For ers in Udyog Vihar earn around Rs 7,000 a month depending
our purposes, it is important to highlight (a) the licence system on position, work 12–16 hours a day, and it is common to have
of private sector-led development, wherein the state provides only one day off per month (Gurgaon Workers News 2010a).
licences for builders to acquire land directly from landowners, The thekedar system deployed in Udyog Vihar, and across the
of course, at a set cost; and (b) the formalised system of pay- National Capital Region (NCR) industrial belt formalises flexi-
ments required for land use changes (Gururani 2013). In es- ble, precarious labour and contributes to a culture of fear
sence, with the right amount of money, or “goodies,” as one among workers themselves. Thekedars do not simply recruit
developer put it to me, one can manipulate the “plan” of and formally employ labour, they also deploy “supervisors” to
Gurgaon at will, and all completely legally. operate within the factories, whose role it is to ensure workers
Such flexibility alongside intensified dynamics of global do not cause any “problems.” As one thekedar put it to me,
capital as such present Gurgaon as a “new zone of reification” where there are “strong” supervisors there are no strikes. Not
wherein volatile and ambiguous claims to territory allow only do the thekedar’s men operate within the factory, they also
powerful transnational and local actors to reconfigure urban predominately stay in the same neighbourhoods as the workers
space to best meet their needs, whilst the rich, middle class, (many I have interviewed are themselves former workers), ope-
and poor compete for space in residual, fractured spaces rating as the informal eyes and ears of the management out-
(Arabindoo 2005: 74). In this sense, the socio-spatial environ- side of the factory. In numerous conversations with workers
ment of Gurgaon is representative of the quintessential neo- living in Kapashera, it is pointed out to me that it is not the
liberal mode of production governed through “exception”. Yet, “management” per se that cause them problems, harass them,
as Ong (2006: 7) notes, within spaces of neo-liberal exception beat them, ridicule them, it is the “supervisors.”4 And, indeed,
“sovereignty is manifested in multiple, often contradictory in many formal industrial agitations and actions, it is the thek-
strategies that encounter diverse claims and contestations, edars who are the first line of attack in breaking the strike.
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The Kapashera neighbourhood straddles Gurgaon and factory under extremely precarious conditions, one has little
Delhi, and is itself a product of land acquisitions in Delhi’s time for community participation.
urban fringe up until the 1990s, including government acquisi-
tion for Delhi’s Indira Gandhi Airport and much private acqui- Urban Politics
sition for farm houses and luxury resorts. Dispossessed villag- In Kapashera, it is then the factory on the other side of the road,
ers built accommodation on vacant agricultural land as rental which itself constitutes the “living conditions of the worker,”
for migrant workers upon the development of Udyog Vihar, yet and, indeed, conversely is where workers do, if sporadically, en-
themselves remained with the original village. As such the vil- gage in an overt collective—I would argue “urban” politics.5
lage has a noticeable spatial divide between local landlords The working conditions of the factory have a disciplinary power
and workers, representative in the seeming absence of land- over the everyday experience of the settlement. The discipli-
lord surveillance in the everyday life of the worker areas of the nary logic of arbitrary dismissal, compulsory underpaid over-
village (Gurgaon Workers News 2010b). While Kapashera Bor- time, expropriated provident fund contributions and abuse di-
der and Kapashera Village are directly adjacent, the quickest rected towards workers in factories generates a palpable envi-
way to go from one to the other is to walk out to the main road ronment of insecurity and survival in the living space. Hence,
along the road and back again. State surveillance from tradi- whilst Kapashera might appear characteristic of the spontane-
tional state actors is also seemingly absent. Despite the state’s ous and heterogeneous spaces of insurgent urban citizenships,
reliance on the neighbouring industrial area for concentrated in reality, in the controlled and alienating socio-spatial struc-
investments of transnational capital (“Gurgaon Calling 2011” ture of the neighbourhood emerge citizenship claims which os-
[2011]), both the settlement’s and the workers’ partially cillate between everyday survival and spontaneous violence.6
authorised statuses render the workers invisible in official Indeed, the garment workers of Gurgaon’s SEZs are notorious
plans and statistics, which calculate the Kapashera population for successive, often violent protest. In March 2012, for exam-
at 6% (21,000) of its probable amount (Brinkhoff 2014). ple, 2,000 workers of Orient Craft rioted following delayed
The worker areas themselves have a controlled socio-spatial wages and an instance of violent abuse directed at a worker.
hierarchy of slum tents, single-floor lines (which somewhat re- The workers smashed windows and burnt down cars which
semble military accommodation) and multistorey blocks, each closed the factory for three days (Gurgaon Workers News 2012).
with a representative stratum of worker. Whilst garment work- In the very same week, construction workers rioted after an on-
ers might pay Rs 2,000 a month to share a room in a workers’ site death of a worker, demolishing parts of the housing project
block, the surrounding slums are rented for Rs 500 to lower- and setting the contractor’s office on fire (Gurgaon Workers
caste sanitation workers, who in turn service the settlement News 2012). In February 2015, workers of various factories
(Gurgaon Workers News 2010b). The regimented structure of came together—after rumour spread that a worker of Gaurav
the settlement as such differs from the archetypal urban poor International had been beaten to death by a guard for arriving
settlement. Kapashera is not the product of “occupancy urban- late to work—to engage in “factory-breaking,” throwing stones,
ism” (Benjamin 2008), nor of subaltern autogestion (Lefebvre and setting vehicles alight. In contrast, despite the alienating
2003a) through covert encroachment (Bayat 2000). It is a and controlling structure of the settlement, when inquiring
stratified rational space for producing subjects optimal for with workers about their sense of belonging in the neighbour-
work in the factory, overseen not by traditional state actors, but hood, their claims to political and civic rights to “daily life,” I
often by private sector labour contractors living in the area. was repeatedly met with perplexity. For most, the “everyday” is
The production of space in Kapashera reflects the discipli- dominated by the workplace, fraught with anxieties and vio-
nary logics of global capital in the factory. In this way, Kapa- lence. In this manner, Kapashera represents a transient space of
shera can be understood as a mutation of Lefebvrian state survival, a respite from the intense struggle of the factory. In-
space, a controlled, homogeneous space which spatially facili- deed, contrary to Holston’s (2009: 2) claim of a global urban-
tates the flexible demands of transnational capital. Yet, India’s periphery of “insurgent citizenships,” in Gurgaon perhaps the most
neo-liberal urban-periphery state space emerges not through global of peripheries, the violent disciplinary control of capital en-
formal state channels, but informal governmentality of de sures everyday identities continue to be centred on production.
facto sovereigns in the factory, their representatives in the The extent to which Kapashera residents might engage in
neighbourhood, and local landlords (all of whom I have spo- the “everyday weapons of the weak” (Scott 1985) was of course
ken to deny any coordination with the factory management or difficult to ascertain during my considerably short stay in the
governing HSIIDC whatsoever). The resultant space is one of neighbourhood, yet an atmosphere of ambivalence and tempo-
anonymity and alienation, a space which reproduces the mini- rality gave the impression that such practices might be com-
mum “bare life” necessary to maintain global accumulation in monplace. Indeed, one evening in Kapashera, a worker brought
the factory, where rights claims, oscillating between violence home a dress (with its UK price tag attached) she had managed
and ambivalence, are made to the instruments of “bare life,” to sneak out of the factory as a gift for an acquaintance living
production and survival. Here, there is no “quiet encroach- nearby—an incredibly risky move, I am told.
ment” (Bayat 2000) or civic activism. Time and time again my The candid, dark humour of a security guard worker pro-
questions of this nature to worker residents were met with vides a telling insight into workers’ tangential relationship to
utter bemusement. When working 12 hours every day in the the workplace:
68 june 27, 2015 vol L nos 26 & 27 EPW Economic & Political Weekly
 SPECIAL ARTICLE

We are watchmen. Our job is to watch the factory burn. It is not our job Locals of the village owned both the existing residential
to douse the fire. Our job is to guard the ashes, once the factory has and agricultural land around the settlement until the early
burnt down. If someone asks about the whereabouts of the company,
1990s, when DLF began to acquire the majority of the agricul-
we have to provide information: this is where the factory used to
stand, it has gone to ashes. This is our job, nothing more. It is our job to tural land. When speaking with a group of local landlords, I
guard the factory, not to save it. We don’t manage to save ourselves, was told that during the acquisition process DLF representa-
how are we supposed to save the factory (Gurgaon Workers News 2011). tives brought forged government acquisition notices in order
The security guard’s account perhaps demonstrates a form to persuade the villagers to accept their compensation.7 The
of “resistance” fitting of the violent, erratic conditions of the going rate at the time was Rs 30,000 per acre, a fraction of
neo-liberal zone of exception, in which “head-turning” and today’s cost.
minimal obligations to production are covertly utilised as a Chakkarpur’s exemption from the inclusive or dominating
form of insurgency, however partial and reactionary that logics of “global” Gurgaon is representative of a compromise
might be. Despite this, the overwhelming domination of the between rapacious development and existing institutions and
workplace in the everyday assures that insurgency translates structures. In order to bypass politicisation and obstruction of
as production. As a local blogger notes: primitive accumulation as a whole, the state allowed small
How much time left for street life and sub-culture after a 16-hours
pockets of sovereignty to remain in permanent dormancy.
shift ... There is a culture of a ‘group of five’ ... at a Chai stall or around Whilst some villagers were able to accumulate extreme wealth
the home. There is corner-hanging-out of young men ... there is a from real estate deals (Varghese 2009), others have been left
street-filling mass whistle and screams of joy after the end of a sum- in a state of exclusion from the broader development processes
mer’s day power-cut. There is Sunday hidden beer-drinking ... there is
of the city. Thus, the existing village is under-serviced with
an atmosphere oscillating between feelings of anonymity ... and feel-
ings against segregation (Gurgaon Workers News 2010b).
high population densities, much like many urban villages in
the NCR.
In this manner, the ephemeral yet authoritative presence of When asked how the village had benefited from the city’s
the state, local landlords and factories in Kapashera can be un- infamously rapid development, the local landlords I inter-
derstood through Ong’s (2006) neo-liberal state of exception viewed interjected that “there is no development” between
which “pries open the seam between sovereignty and citizen- state and private development, their land was gone, and there
ship, generating successive degrees of insecurity” (Ong 2006: was no employment and no facilities provided. They spoke
19). Indeed, in Kapashera, residents’ civic claims do not emerge nostalgically of the bygone era of panchayat8 government in
politically and covertly as P Chatterjee (2004) suggests of the the village, when their local officials were friends, and prob-
Calcutta slum, but in a convergence of both violence and lems were resolved locally. When asked a similar question, the
“getting by.” ex-sarpanch of the village,9 noted: “The villagers have had the
worst deal—they are left neither here nor there...the village
Chakkarpur culture is lost, without [integration] into the city.” He went on
Whilst the socio-spatial environment of Kapashera is rigidly to suggest that compensation was never spent productively:
controlled through segregation, within Gurgaon’s central “no one could anticipate that this land, which was only jungles
“urban villages” space is less clearly defined, locals coalesce then, could become such a lucrative investment.”
with migrant workers in areas built within the village’s tradi- The tense, yet dependent relationship between the urban
tional zone of exemption. Chakkarpur, which lies at the heart village and the adjacent “global” city is expressive of the rela-
of the city bridging old and new Gurgaon, is a useful environ- tionship between inclusion and exclusion in the neo-liberal
ment in which to examine the stratification of citizenships exception. Whilst agents of “global” Gurgaon have depended
within neo-liberal spaces. The village, which like many vil- on “territorial pacts” with village leaders to undertake rapid
lages in the NCR, due to the Lal Dora is exempt from urban territorial commodification of the city, dispossessed villagers
planning and development regulations, is internally divided are heavily dependent on rents and compensation financed by
between the dominant landowning Yadavs and an invisible yet those included in the neo-liberal exception. In creating frag-
numerous class of migrant workers, and externally distinct mented spaces of territorialised citizenships, however, this
from the surrounding spatial icons of modern India; icons relationship between “global” and “local” is also fraught with
which symbolically reinforce the village’s exemption from the territorial contestation, as claims to urban life frequently man-
broader city’s transformation. ifest on the boundary between the included and excluded.
Chakkarpur is symptomatic of neo-liberal governmentality In this manner, Gurgaon’s “global signifiers,” heavily
in Gurgaon, wherein powers and spaces are fragmented, cre- guarded both physically and symbolically, sit adjacent to
ating inequal yet fierce “territorialized forms of association” in Chakkarpur, stage everyday urban insurgencies of clandestine
“overwhelming sites of dominance” (Roy and AlSayyad 2006: local shoppers in middle-class attire, and periodic bouts of vio-
12). Such association in Gurgaon is sharply stratified, marked lence (Schindler 2007). The Sahara Mall sits at the entrance to
by defined boundaries of exemption. Whilst the Chakkarpur Chakkarpur. Owned by formal villagers, the mall has been a
locals dominate the political and social everyday of the village, particular point of resentment for Chakkarpur’s locals. Whilst
outside the village boundary locals contest alienating and there is no explicit prohibition of locals from the mall, visits by
dominating forms of sovereignty. locals are often met with resistance from security guards and
Economic & Political Weekly EPW june 27, 2015 vol L nos 26 & 27 69
SPECIAL ARTICLE

bouncers of the bars. One newspaper claims that “almost every derided the Haryana government for failing to provide water
week there is a brawl, a shooting, or a case of molestation” to the village. The village councillor told me he had recently
between locals and mall staff at the malls on M G Road received budgetary permission to construct a distribution line
(Sen 2012). After a group of Chakkarpur teenagers were beaten for drinking water in the village, after some 12 years of negoti-
up by security guards at the mall in 2011, the Chakkarpur com- ating with local officials. The delay in infrastructure provision,
munity called a dharna10 at the gates of the mall demanding a he claimed, was due to undercounting of migrants, 90% of the
closure of all the bars and the right for locals to access the mall village population from the village census. I asked whether a
freely (Yadav 2011b). The protest amassed 3,000 villagers political effort to include migrant populations in the census
from surrounding villages, who, by destroying water and elec- might be beneficial to the village, to which he disagreed: “If
tricity lines to the mall, closed it for seven hours, costing the they get counted in...then what about the locals? We don’t
mall $500,000 (Times of India 2011b), and eventually led to want a Bihari councillor!” In each of the urban villages I have
closing the bars down permanently (Yadav 2011b). conducted interviews, this was the immediate response. The
locals deliberately manipulate the survey (by not providing
Migrants and ‘Citizens’ migrants with the documentation with which they might ac-
The ability of Chakkarpur residents to make these claims quire voter IDs or formal registration) to essentialise segrega-
demonstrates the way in which citizenships are stratified in tion in the village, yet in doing so deprive the village of service
Gurgaon’s fragmented spaces. Such claims are necessarily ex- provision.
clusive to the local landowning population, reliant on the terri- The undercounting of migrants also serves to contradicto-
torial legitimacy of locals as separate from other groups. Locals, rily obstruct the personal wealth of village locals. The con-
unlike migrants, possess the biopolitical characteristics of a struction of high-rise apartment blocks in the village for mi-
potential insurgent citizen whose claims to city and civic space grant workers is a principle source of income for most villagers
must be negotiated and rationalised with competing global and and represents a territorialisation of villager sovereignty
local forces. In a partial inclusion into the city, locals are able to within the Lal Dora. The Lal Dora boundary limit is measured
both contest the exception itself, through violent claims to public against the population of the village. As such, an extension
space outside their sovereign territority, and use the exception would provide villagers rents and presumably greater wealth,
for their own benefit within their sovereign territory. something which members of the village have long cam-
When speaking with locals about their relationship with mi- paigned for (Behl 2012b). Yet, appeals have been repeatedly
grants, a vocabulary of ownership rights over tenants was fre- blocked by the undercounting of migrants in the village; an
quently used. Indeed, a migrant worker living in Chakkarpur, undercounting orchestrated by the villagers. Thus, in Chakkar-
described the relationships as violent and abusive, “the locals pur, the state of exception, articulated through under-calcula-
see migrants as their hunt,” and are forced to purchase rations tive measures, operates as a central feature of de facto govern-
from the landlord’s shop lest they are evicted. He remarked mentality reinforcing sovereign power through exempting the
that only recently a Bihari resident had brought a car into the local and migrant residents from state responsibility.
village (presumably a rare occurrence) and within a few days The internal dynamics of Chakkarpur, thus, demonstrate the
the car had been destroyed by local teenagers. The councillor, fragmentation of identities within neo-liberal state space;
himself a landlord, characterised the relationship as mutually wherein technologies of exemption and informal governance
beneficial, yet noted that there was an issue of “exclusivity’” are utilised by both the state and landlords to territorialise sov-
which would often cause animosity between groups; perhaps a ereignty and control the everyday of the migrant resident. In
reference to landlord control over migrants’ social reproduc- this sense, the exception is expressed as both a technology of
tion, where she works and where she spends her wages. control and of resistance, a dialectic which ideologically perme-
The territorialisation of sovereignty within the village itself, ates the everyday politics of the city, reconfiguring state domi-
however, is principally expressed through the covert manipu- nation within elite–subaltern relations. Social relations in the
lation of population statistics by local officials. In D A Ghertner’s village are thus sharply demarcated and characteristically con-
(2010) analysis of the survey in Delhi’s slums, he notes that as a tradictory, as local landlords remain both immiserated yet em-
“calculative function” of the neo-liberal state, the survey is boldened by their exemption from state oversight, whilst the
captured by elites where it is informally manipulated through migrant remains stripped of her biopolitical self, left anony-
extra-legal metrics in order to overcome the political obstruc- mous and reliant on the arbitrary rule of the landlord.
tions of India’s everyday urban politics. However, in Chakkar- As in Kapashera, the migrant residents of Chakkarpur are
pur, and indeed all of Gurgaon’s villages with high proportions reduced to “bare life” exempt from state plans and regulations,
of migrant residents that I have visited, the survey is manipu- subjected to the arbitrary violence and surveillance of de facto
lated by both the state to exempt the village from public sovereign powers in the absence of the state. Yet Chakkarpur’s
investment, and by the fractured sections of locals to impose socio-spatial structure, where migrants and locals live to-
a hierarchised territorial sovereignty upon the village’s gether, provides a different lens through which to examine the
migrant residents. dynamic of the neo-liberal exception. In Chakkarpur, zones of
When speaking to residents in Chakkarpur a recurring issue exemption are sharply demarcated within and beyond the
of concern was the village’s lack of water supply. The locals village. Whilst locals as landowners and de facto sovereign
70 june 27, 2015 vol L nos 26 & 27 EPW Economic & Political Weekly
 SPECIAL ARTICLE

rulers exert domination and control over the everyday social relationship with the city, between rejection and dependence,
relations within the village, such domination is partial, indulging in the “bland, impersonal... spaces that remove the
demarcated by the boundary of the village. Beyond village threat of social contact” (Hansen and Verkaaik 2009: 10)—the
boundaries, locals must engage in negotiation and rationalisa- malls, golf courses and express highways—and yet simultane-
tion of their citizenship claims and right to everyday life ously deriding the residual fragments of lived space as
against competing hegemonic actors of “global” Gurgaon. “burden[s] of dirt and overflowing humanity” (Hansen and
In this manner, the city’s spatial fragments are not mutually Verkaaik 2009: 10).
exclusive, but tangentially dependent, overlapping, held at an The middle-class residents are nevertheless allured to the idea
arm’s length by the state of exception, which, in flexibly man- of Gurgaon, a city which “symbolizes the advent of privately
aging disparate spaces and human behaviour, produces emer- managed cities” (Sanjay Srivastava in Bouissou: 2012) offering
gent forms of conflict and negotiation over territory. an escape from public governance, a system associated with
Such a dynamic is characteristic of neo-liberal urban space, corruption and politicisation. Indeed governance for “global
wherein unregulation and exemption are recreated as distinct citizens” is largely divided between self-governance and the
forms of governmentality (Roy and AlSayyad 2006). Within private developer. In this manner, when speaking with the
such spaces, thus, inherently unequal citizenships emerge president of a DLF RWA he was quick to dismiss the recently
based not on universalist claims to civic right, but on demar- elected municipal council as an instrument of “Old Gurgaon,”
cated association to the village, the mall or Bihar. irrelevant to DLF City where the developer provides all serv-
ices. Whilst, he also complained that the parastatal agency
New Gurgaon HUDA, which is mandated to provide water to private neigh-
“New” or “global” Gurgaon represents the privately-developed bourhoods, were inept and corrupted by Haryana state poli-
section of the city, crudely put, to the south-east of the national tics, incapable of matching DLF governance and service provi-
highway. The socio-spatial characteristics of “new” Gurgaon sion. Voting figures in Gurgaon’s privately governed colonies
represent a convergence of the accumulative logics global capi- are indeed the lowest in the city, with turnouts of just 33% in
tal and the emboldened consumerist practices of the Indian the elite DLF Phase I-IV areas (Chowdhury 2011).12
upper middle class. Such “global” spaces are centred upon elite Whilst most elite citizens self-exempt from everyday city
consumption practices and civic ideals, yet are heavily reliant politics, the spatial consequences of their exemption have in-
on practices and identities, the neo-liberal exception aims to creasingly led to middle-class unrest and protest concerning
exclude. Thus, “global” refers to the space of the city reified as the city outside the gated community; of growing “encroach-
zones optimal for global capital accumulation, where circuits ments,” unsustainable infrastructure system, pollution, and
of global capital produce global images and lifestyle prefer- corrupt officials (Ray and Baruah 2007). The city is plagued by
ences in malls, finance capital and elite real estate.11 power and water shortages, with 70% of residents relying on
The production of such space in “global” Gurgaon is as such groundwater (Yadav 2012), whilst power cuts are extremely
characteristic of the neo-liberal exception. The exemption of common. Between May and July 2012, vast swathes of the city
many elite settlements from standard planning and develop- were subject to daily 16-hour power cuts (Munshi and Kumar
ment regulations allowed the state to flexibly manage flows of 2012). In response, civil society groups have begun to contest
global capital into the built environment and bestow “meaning the fragmented production of space outside the gated commu-
and value” onto particular spaces and practices appropriate to nity, utilising informal connections with global capital and
the needs of global capital (Gururani 2013). high-level officials,13 to informally impose middle-class ideo-
In these zones of inclusion, private developers acquire, de- logical and aesthetical preference onto the “public” spaces and
velop, and manage premium gated communities with global populations of the city.
labels such as “Heritage City,” “Malibu Towne,” and “Silver I Am Gurgaon is one such group aimed at “awakening a re-
Oaks Avenue” for a young, wealthy middle-class customer. sponsible, aware and vigilant populace” and bringing together
Residents are able to escape the dysfunction of the urban in “the administration, corporate organisations, schools, RWAs,
high-rise communities offering “exclusive conveniences... NGOs and developers” to “make a true ‘Millennium City’” (I Am
stringent security, wide-open space, parks, schools, health Gurgaon). Lead by a group of residents from DLF City, the
center and shopping arcade” (Unitech Group). The gated group’s primary project has been the “Million Trees Campaign”
enclaves are serviced by 24-hour generators and privately sourced through which the group organise tree-planting, monitor
water; and disparately linked by “secessionary networks” of sanitation and street-cleansing workers, and have developed a
private infrastructure and transport services. DLF provides Biodiversity Park on the edge of DLF City. The campaign is spon-
residents a private shuttle service to metro stations, malls, and sored by multinational corporations such as Coca-Cola, Canon,
workplaces, whilst the 16-lane DLF toll way and private rapid and KPMG, and has the support of both the HUDA administra-
metro system service DLF’s Cyber City SEZ. tion and the municipal council (Hindustan Times 2012). The
Such networks exclusively service the elite areas of the city, Biodiversity Park is built on land previously used for mining and
distinct in their placement on one side of the highway, and al- over the past few years has been occupied by slum “encroach-
low elite residents to live in the city without interacting with ments” and illegal developments, which were cleared and gated
the city. Middle-class residents as such have an awkward to make way for the park’s development (Hindustan Times 2010).
Economic & Political Weekly EPW june 27, 2015 vol L nos 26 & 27 71
SPECIAL ARTICLE

When meeting an active member of the group, an ex-em- expressed to produce a “splintered territorialisation of citizen-
ployee of a banking multinational, I was told that the idea be- ship” (Roy and AlSayyad 2006). Under neo-liberal logics the
hind the group was to informally push corporates and the state exception is utilised to inscribe rational value and meaning to
to invest in green space and “create a sense of belonging” for sharply separated yet distinctly dependennt spaces and popu-
residents of the city. The organisation was described as a “king lations where secessionary middle classes depend on unitary
maker,” able to provide the expertise and knowledge of the city networks, multinational corporations on cheap, controlled
corporate world, which the underpaid, inexperienced state labour, and dispossessed villagers on migrant rent. As such,
simply could not offer. When asking about whether the organi- citizenships in Gurgaon counter normative conceptualisations
sation faced any political difficulties in project implementa- and instead demonstrate the contradictory and subversive
tion, I received the candid response that the local government ways in which sovereignty is expressed under the neo-liberal
simply did not have the education, knowledge or expertise to exception.
manage the city, and that due to corporate and high-level state In examining three socio-spatial configurations of the city, I
support the “Million Trees Campaign” has been able to bull- have attempted to trouble notions of the “urban” which fetish-
doze all significant political opposition. ise “global” modes of production as the defining characteristic
The relationship between the ephemeral state and the middle of socio-spatial production. Instead, I have attempted to expli-
class in Gurgaon, is thus one of mutual exemption, as repre- cate the everyday processes of governmentality, which pro-
sentatives of “global” India, the middle class are optimised as duce the modern city as a site of overlapping sovereignties and
exempt from regular procedure and are simultaneously utilised conflictual territorial claims. Utilising an epistemology of state
as “global” consumers for the city’s vast flows of global capital. sovereignty as a “contested institutional arena in which di-
Through utilising informal connections with agents of global verse sociopolitical forces struggle for control over everyday
capital, the middle class exempt themselves from juridico-politi- sociopolitical relations” (Brenner 2008: 239), Gurgaon
cal norms and participate in the informal negotiation of India’s is an expression of informal governmental techniques mobi-
porous state machinery. Yet, in neo-liberal state space, the state lised in divergent spaces and populations in capitalist space.
of exception operates to fragment and essentialise spaces and Importantly, however, expressions of sovereignty within frag-
citizenships, necessarily creating ruptures in the rationalised mented jurisdictions do not operate on a transmission belt
spaces of the city. In this manner, the spatialisation of middle- from elites to the subaltern, but are perpetual sites of contesta-
class identity onto Gurgaon’s urban formations is not seamless tion through extralegal territorial claims, everyday “head-
and free-flowing, but necessarily truncated by residual spaces of turning” and outbreaks of spontaneous violence.
weak governance, poor infrastructure and worker residences. In this manner, urban governance through “exception” is
dialectically expressive of the paradoxes of capitalist state
Conclusions space, which by seeking to hierarchise spaces and populations
The citizenships formed within the fragmented spaces of Gur- in optimal positions for global accumulation creates the
gaon are expressions of the state of exception as a mode of conditions for new rounds of segregation, conflict and
neo-liberal production, differentially and contradictorily subversion.

Notes 9 The council seat is reserved for women, so com/India-news/NewDelhi/Gurgaon-New-

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