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Paper short abstract

This paper examines how the Disturbed Areas Act in Ahmedabad governs property transactions through post-evidentiary state practices. It reflects on the ways regulatory anticipation and sedimented prejudicial logics come to shape possibilities of urban coexistence in polarized contexts.

Paper long abstract

Who or what decides where one may live? In the dense and often chaotic array of intersecting forces shaping urban residence, one factor that stands out in the city of Ahmedabad is the regulatory regime of the Disturbed Areas Act (DAA). Formally titled The Gujarat Prohibition of Transfer of Immovable Property and Provision for Protection of Tenants from Eviction from Premises in Disturbed Areas Act, the law was introduced in the aftermath of communal violence as a temporary protective measure intended to prevent distress property sales. Originally enacted in 1986, the Act, through subsequent amendments, has evolved into a framework that extends its scope beyond episodic violence to the regulation of property transactions. Drawing on a critical analysis of the Act and its amendments, government notifications and interviews with practicing lawyers, this paper examines the DAA as a paradigmatic post-evidentiary policy. Contemporary iterations of the law no longer hinge on demonstrable evidence of “disturbance”. Instead, they rely on governance vocabularies like “polarisation”, “demographic equilibrium”, and “improper clustering”, through which residential population movement itself is rendered subject to regulatory assessment. Such discursive reconstruction underpins a post-evidentiary mode of governance, in which administrative intervention is justified through anticipated risk and sedimented prejudicial logics rather than demonstrable evidence of disorder. This reconfiguration displaces evidentiary thresholds with administrative discretion, enabling state inventions through delays, denials, and bureaucratic scrutiny. Through this analysis, the paper reflects on whether possibilities of urban coexistence can endure in a polarized context where the state adopts post-evidentiary practices.