Paper short abstract:

Urban landscape offers a rich site to re-theorise processes of marginalisation, its contestation and sometimes, invention of alternatives. Proposed paper will therefore undertake a discursive analysis of policy and law that underpins marginalisation in the capital city of Delhi.

Paper long abstract:

Social science analysis of marginalisation has traditionally focussed on social communities such as castes and tribes. A significant proportion of such analysis if focussed on 'development' in its multifarious dimensions - the idea, processes, apparatus and outcomes - as the metanarrative simultaneously creating possibilities of hegemonisation, contestation, subversion and occasionally, reinvention.

However, in the contemporary processes and era of global expansion of capital, many of these contests have been centred on the city. Urban landscape thus offers a rich site to re-theorise processes of marginalisation, its contestation and sometimes, invention of alternatives. The proposed paper will therefore undertake a discursive analysis of policy and law that underpins marginalisation in the capital city of Delhi. Apart from using poverty (the target of 'development') as the lynchpin of analysis, the paper shall also interrogate its complex interface with social identities such as caste and tribe to demonstrate both, politics of emancipation and alternatives that sometimes are possible in the city; as also to underline the hegemony of extant law and policy to deny such possibilities. Representation and legitimacy deficit that is generated owing to peculiar constitutional location of the governance structures of the city compounds the problems as also creates a future vision in which dissent and plurality has an increasingly declining space.

The paper will utilise policy documents, legal and juridical articulations, policy implementation datasets and budgetary allocations to reconstruct and analyse the processes of poverty and marginalisation in the city of Delhi within a Foucaldian frame of disciplining and strategic subversion.