This excerpt is from the chapter “Slum”, taken from Corruption Plots: Stories, Ethics, and Publics of the Late Capitalist City (2024) by Malini Ranganathan, David L Pike and Sapana Doshi. This section of the book explores the way corruption (and corruption talk) tries to obfuscate the persecution, erasure and displacement experienced by slum dwellers in urban India. Slum evictions are often hasty and violent, seeking to “whitewash” these spaces which are considered eyesores by middle-class and upper-class urban elites, and the simultaneous “blackening” or criminalizing the homes of the poor, especially those belonging to oppressed castes, and Muslim and Christian minorities.

With “bulldozer justice” frequently making headlines in India, often without any kind of judicial process, it has become clear that books like Corruption Plots, which shed a light on the insidious workings of various governmental and outside forces, are vital.

Chapter One

Slum

Around 7:30 a.m. on January 18, 2013, bulldozers moved onto Ejipura slum, about three miles southeast of Bengaluru’s downtown area. Most residents were up already, filling water from the few public taps available and readying for the dhobi (washing), construction, domestic help, and other kinds of manual labor jobs they held. They were not expecting the bulldozers to close in so quickly. Officials from the Bengaluru city government jumped out of their vehicles and issued warnings via loudspeaker before giving the order to demolish the slum. Residents pleaded with the officials, insisting that they had been given until April, the end of the current school year, to vacate the land to make way for a new luxury development. Some asked to be shown an official eviction notification but were told that they needed to file a right-to-information (RTI) petition in order to see it. Others formed a barricade between their homes and the bulldozers, a last ditch attempt to stall the demolition. More than twenty women, many dragged away by baton-wielding police, were later detained at the police station under the pretext they had assaulted law enforcers. A fact-finding mission by the Housing and Land Rights Network and People’s Union for Civil Liberties reported a few months later that one woman in her third trimester of pregnancy had delivered a child and was forced to return to the pavement days after the eviction.¹

When the demolition was over, nearly 1,600 families—five thousand residents— had been dispossessed to make way for a shopping mall, parking lots, and a condominium complex to be developed by a public-private partnership between the city and a company called Maverick Holdings and Investments Private Ltd. This arrangement was reported to be “marred by illegalities and irregularities” and a “collusion of vested interests.”² When we visited the site in 2018, we found that the area where once stood tin sheds erected by the city government to house slum dwellers designated as an economically weaker section (EWS) was now a deserted and ghostly expanse of land being churned by construction vehicles, cordoned off by a blue metal fence bearing the words “PPP PROJECT OF BBMP MAVERICK HOLDINGS (P) LTD.” One corner of the fence abuts a portrait of Dr. B. R. Ambedkar, India’s foremost anticaste intellectual, author of its constitution, and Dalit emancipation leader (figure 1.1).

The Ejipura slum once housed a majority Dalit population, members of India’s most oppressed castes who continue, despite civil rights laws, to be subject to myriad humiliations and dispossessions, including the loss of land. As we discuss below, in the 2018 film Kaala directed by Pa Ranjith, India’s current cocktail of casteist and right-wing Hindutva politics intersects powerfully with plots around real estate corruption and slum dispossession. Corruption as depicted in this film, and also according to the activists who protested the Ejipura eviction, does not simply refer to the land grab, but to Brahminical kleptocracy and the caste system itself.

In this chapter we focus on how corruption talk is deployed to narrate slum evictions. Whereas middle- class and elite discourses often posit slums as filthy eyesores born of the corruption of the political class and the poor, we find that corruption stories emplotted in the slum flip this assumption on its head. “If they ask us to move out so quickly there is definitely corruption involved,” contends a slum evictee from Ejipura in a short film by a nonprofit called Video Volunteers. The film’s title reveals the centerpiece of its argument: Public-Private Plundering: Bengaluru Municipality Steals Homes of Poor.³ We find that, as an indictment of the opaque economic, nationalist, and casteist forces stealthily upending the poor and “cleansing” the city of them, corruption talk using the topos of the slum turns fundamentally on a critique of social injustice. This critique is articulated in particular through the hypocrisies around “whitening” the real estate illegalities and excesses of the wealthy, and the concomitant “blackening” or criminalization and destruction of the homes of the poor, especially oppressed castes and Muslim and Christian minorities. For critical planner Oren Yiftachel, writing on the Beer Sheva metropolitan region of Israel/ Palestine, whitening “alludes to the tendency of the system to ‘launder’ gray spaces created ‘from above’ by powerful or favorable interests,” while blackening “denotes the process of ‘solving’ the problem of marginalized gray space by destruction, expulsion or elimination.”⁴ Tucker similarly defines the term blanqueamiento (whitening) as used by poorer, Indigenous Paraguayans to name a “social process of wiping away illegality’s stains from the pasts of the powerful.”⁵ We find that corruption talk becomes a way of spotlighting and reversing this antipoor blackening/whitening gaze.

We derive textured accounts of the ethics at play here from novels and films, as well as from our own ethnographic observations of slum-related corruption stories. Our analysis puts forth a “slum’s-eye view,” a term we borrow from critic and political psychologist Ashis Nandy.⁶ Such a view takes seriously the political maneuvering, discourses, and what we name as gray ethics of those who inhabit slums. Without claiming to speak authentically for the subaltern, the slum’s-eye view nevertheless aims to narrate how ordinary people perceive, negotiate, and participate in everyday and spectacular stories of corruption. We contend that corruption talk calls forth slum evictees as a spectral public, egregiously wronged but present in their haunting absence. Even in contexts where slums may be considered “durable,” as sociologist Liza Weinstein argues in her study of Mumbai’s long-standing Dharavi slum—capable of withstanding the constant pressures of clearance and redevelopment—its publics and its buildings seem to be caught in a perpetual state of “limbo.” Set against the paradox of glittering “world-class” zones, described as “hallucinations” by urban dwellers in Mumbai, anti-eviction protests carry an especially charged ethical indictment of inequality.⁷ We argue in this chapter that corruption’s emplotment in slums conjures not only an affective register of class, caste, racial, and ethnic inequality in late capitalism, but also a sense of haunting and surreal spectacle that marks the experience of erasure and banishment of the urban poor.⁸

Appadurai has famously referred to housing in urban India as “spectral” in the sense that the “absent, the ghostly, the speculative, the fantastic all have their part to play” in the “swollen realities” that mark the experience of housing for the urban poor.⁹ Thinking of housing as spectral reminds us that, for many, housing frequently depends on negotiated arrangements, sweat and labor, and erratic protections by politicians—an illusory ideal rather than a stable given. Across ethnographic and literary and cinematic sources, spectrality and spectacle (both derived from the Latin verb spectare, meaning to see or behold), characterize a heavily visual affect that speaks to what the Comaroffs call the “messianic, salvific, even magical manifestations of… millennial capitalism,” or what anthropologist Anna Tsing has called “an economy of appearances.”¹⁰ An economy of appearances can be witnessed in glossy catalogs of the world-class city and architectural renderings of luxury buildings, verdant parks, and European-looking residents—a city evacuated of slums, in other words. So, when, in turn, slum dwellers and activists create a spectacle—for instance, when they enthusiastically participate in election related cash exchanges, when they stage a mass protest, or when they perform a fantastical sting operation pretending to exchange massive money bags, as we discussed in the introduction and we return to here—they do so not purely out of a marketized calculus.¹¹ Rather they do so to establish their visibility and presence in a class-oppressive city that seeks to make them invisible.