Rights as the pharmakon: Right to have real property rights in Delhi

Keywords: Urban Geography, Legal Geography, Property Rights, Pharmakon, Delhi
Abstract Type: Virtual Paper Abstract

Abstract

In this paper, I aim to show how the postcolonial Indian state’s contemporary recognition of real property rights in Delhi, chiefly through a new land policy that promotes real-estate-driven suburbanization, curtails rights in land across the periphery of the city for those who live on its margins. By positioning this legal exception within a broader turn towards propertization in India, which in Delhi originates from its liberal-colonial planning framework, I argue that the emerging political rhetoric of promising individual property rights in the name of urban social justice, and as part of right to the city movements for the marginalized, is simultaneously a space for neoliberal reinforcement and colonial continuity of juridical formations that have socio-spatially segregated the city along lines of social difference. However, these are also rights to property that one cannot not want in the violent landscape of Delhi's dispossession-laden history. In this sense, the liberal-colonial right to have real property rights is a pharmakon that is both poison and cure, with its toxic and curative dimensions unravelling in the everyday life of the postcolony. While maintaining this overarching right to have rights in landed property is crucial for the care and wellbeing of the city’s marginalized, the dominant juridical formation of individual rights in private property must be overcome as a transitional object to imagine alternative pathways for living with and on the land but without property - ways that can then transcend both prevailing modes of racialization and the neoliberal sociospatial reproduction of Delhi.