Report No. 248: Slumdogs and the Millionaire: What a Project to Transform Mumbai Says About India’s Democracy

Image: Andrei Armiagov / shutterstock.com

This report investigates why a mega slum redevelopment executed by Narendra Modi’s key business ally has triggered political opposition and charges of opacity, arbitrariness, and cronyism. The development threatens to uproot people from the city and banish them to its peripheries as Mumbai’s turn to capitalist urbanism intensifies along with the suppression of its discontents. Fears of dispossession loom as the authorities decide who belongs and who doesn’t—mirroring the wider nativist politics of Hindu supremacism, fused with unfettered neoliberalism.