Intimidation, Anxiety and Hope as India's financial capital Residents Confront Demolition

Across several weeks, coercive communications recurred. Initially, allegedly from an ex-law enforcement official and a retired army general, later from the authorities. Ultimately, Mohammad Khurshid Shaikh claims he was called to the police station and warned explicitly: keep quiet or encounter real trouble.

Shaikh is among those fighting a multimillion-dollar redevelopment plan where this historic settlement – one of India’s largest and most storied slums – faces demolished and redeveloped by a corporate giant.

"The unique ecosystem of this area is like nowhere else in the planet," explains Shaikh. "But their intention is to eradicate our way of life and silence our voices."

Dual Worlds

The dank gullies of the slum present a dramatic difference to the high-rise structures and Bollywood penthouses that overshadow the neighborhood. Residences are constructed informally and often missing basic amenities, informal businesses release harmful emissions and the atmosphere is saturated with the unpleasant stench of uncovered waste channels.

To some, the promise of a renewed Dharavi into a developed area of luxury high-rises, well-maintained green spaces, contemporary malls and homes with multiple bathrooms is a hopeful vision realized.

"There's no proper healthcare, paved pathways or drainage and we have no places for children to play," says A Selvin Nadar, fifty-six, who moved from Tamil Nadu in that period. "The sole solution is to demolish everything and build us new homes."

Resident Opposition

However, some, such as Shaikh, are opposing the redevelopment.

All recognize that Dharavi, consistently overlooked as unauthorized settlement, is urgently needing economic input and modernization. Yet they worry that this project – absent of public consultation – might transform a piece of prime Mumbai real estate into an elite enclave, displacing the marginalized, working-class residents who have been there since the nineteenth century.

It was these marginalized, migrant workers who developed the empty marshland into an extensively researched phenomenon of community resilience and business activity, whose production is valued at between $1m and two million dollars a year, making it a major unofficial markets.

Displacement Concerns

Among approximately a million people living in the crowded sprawling zone, less than 50% will be qualified for new homes in the development, which is expected to take an extended timeframe to complete. Others will be relocated to barren areas and salt plains on the remote edges of the metropolis, threatening to fragment a historic neighborhood. A portion will receive no housing at all.

Those allowed to stay in Dharavi will be provided units in tower blocks, a significant rupture from the evolved, collective approach of dwelling and laboring that has sustained this area for many years.

Industries from clothing production to pottery and recycling are projected to decrease in quantity and be moved to a designated "industrial sector" separated from people's residences.

Existential Threat

In the case of this protester, a craftsman and third generation inhabitant to call home Dharavi, the project presents an existential threat. His informal, three-storey workshop produces leather coats – tailored coats, premium outerwear, decorated jackets – distributed in premium stores in the city's affluent areas and abroad.

His family resides in the rooms downstairs and his workers and sewers – migrants from north India – reside on-site, enabling him to sustain operations. Outside Dharavi's enclave, accommodation prices are often significantly costlier for basic accommodation.

Threats and Warning

In the official facilities in the vicinity, an illustrated mock-up of the Dharavi project illustrates a very different vision for the future. Fashionable people gather on two-wheelers and electric vehicles, acquiring continental bread and breakfast items and socializing on a patio adjacent to a restaurant and dessert parlor. This depicts a complete departure from the 20-rupee idli sambar first meal and low-cost tea that sustains Dharavi's community.

"This represents no development for us," says the protester. "It's a huge real estate deal that will price people out for us to survive."

There is also concern of the business conglomerate. Managed by an influential industrialist – one of India's most powerful and a close ally of the Indian prime minister – the conglomerate has faced accusations of preferential treatment and financial impropriety, which it rejects.

Even as administrative bodies calls it a partnership, the corporation contributed nearly a billion dollars for its controlling interest. A case claiming that the redevelopment was unfairly awarded to the developer is under review in the top court.

Continued Intimidation

Since they began to vocally oppose the redevelopment, Shaikh and other residents state they have been subjected to an extended period of pressure and threats – including communications, direct threats and suggestions that speaking against the development was equivalent to anti-national sentiment – by figures they claim work for the business conglomerate.

Part of the group suspected of delivering warnings is {a retired police officer|a former law enforcement official|an ex-c