University of Massachusetts Amherst ScholarWorks@UMass Amherst Doctoral Dissertations Dissertations and Theses July 2020 Criminalizing Childhood: The Politics of Violence at Delhi's Urban Margins Ragini Saira Malhotra University of Massachusetts Amherst Follow this and additional works at: https://scholarworks.umass.edu/dissertations_2 Part of the Politics and Social Change Commons, and the Urban Studies and Planning Commons Recommended Citation Malhotra, Ragini Saira, "Criminalizing Childhood: The Politics of Violence at Delhi's Urban Margins" (2020). Doctoral Dissertations. 1975. https://doi.org/10.7275/17660497 https://scholarworks.umass.edu/dissertations_2/1975 This Open Access Dissertation is brought to you for free and open access by the Dissertations and Theses at ScholarWorks@UMass Amherst. It has been accepted for inclusion in Doctoral Dissertations by an authorized administrator of ScholarWorks@UMass Amherst. For more information, please contact [email protected]. CRIMINALIZING CHILDHOOD: THE POLITICS OF VIOLENCE AT DELHI’S URBAN MARGINS A Dissertation Presented by RAGINI SAIRA MALHOTRA Submitted to the Graduate School of the University of Massachusetts Amherst in partial fulfillment of the requirements for the degree of DOCTOR OF PHILOSOPHY May 2020 Sociology © Copyright by Ragini Saira Malhotra 2020 All Rights Reserved CRIMINALIZING CHILDHOOD: THE POLITICS OF VIOLENCE AT DELHI’S URBAN MARGINS A Dissertation Presented By Ragini Malhotra Approved as to style and content by: ________________________________________ Joya Misra, Chair ________________________________________ Z. Fareen Parvez, Member ________________________________________ Svati Shah, Outside Member ________________________________________ Millicent Thayer, Member ____________________________________ Janice Irvine, Chair Department of Sociology DEDICATION To my parents: Anita Malhotra and Kamal Malhotra and To the boys and girls of Aakash Sadan and Manohar Nivas ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS This dissertation would not have been possible without the nurturance and encouragement of more people than I can name. My thanks go first to the girls and boys, and the women and men, whose voices inspire this dissertation. I am indebted to them for their trust and generosity, and for welcoming me into their lives and most intimate spaces. They taught me much about humility, perseverance, and life as I had not known it before. I thank the children, in particular, who with deep care and patience, taught me how to understand the everyday workings of the “state” through their eyes. I extend my deepest gratitude to my advisor and mentor, Joya Misra, who has been the force behind my growth as a publicly-engaged scholar. Thank you for supporting my intellectual, emotional, and political instincts and choices, and for nurturing my desire to find a meaningful path for myself within academia. Few mentors would have provided me with the rare combination of consistent emotional and intellectual support, and freedom that you have. For all this, including your care and assurance as I navigated crises during my fieldwork, I am eternally grateful. This dissertation would not have been possible without your generosity and trust in me. I am incredibly grateful to my committee members Fareen Parvez, Millie Thayer, and Svati Shah for their guidance and mentorship—intellectually and ethnographically— from the inception of this project through its end. They each provided me with support during profoundly difficult moments in the “field.” Fareen and Svati offered in-person reassurance in Delhi and again in Amherst, and Millie guided me toward conceptual clarity as I struggled to see the forest for the trees. I am also very grateful to Jonathan Wynn for his mentorship, thoughtful insights, and support at critical points during my graduate career at UMass. I thank Jon, Sanjiv v Gupta, Derek Siegel, Thomas Corcoran, Dušan Bjelić, Michael Levien, Poulami Roychowdhury, and Melissa Weiner for instructive feedback on talks about my dissertation. I would also like to thank the staff in the Sociology Department for their continued support over the years. In Delhi, too, I benefitted from guidance and mentorship. I extend special thanks to Usha Ramanathan, Prem Narayan Jat, and Agostina di Stefano. Without their generosity of time, invaluable insights, and solidarity, I would not have been able to navigate this research nor would I have been able to sustain it. Sabiya Khan, Bhavana Yadav, and Bala also provided critical support for my research process. I am also very grateful to the activists, scholars, academics, and state representatives whose anonymous accounts inform this dissertation. I thank Gautam Bhan, Gitanjali Prasad, and Armaan Alkazi, in particular, for their crucial guidance, encouragement, and solidarity. So many other friends and colleagues supported and sustained me through this process. I cannot thank them all, but I extend special (alphabetized) thanks to: Samuel Ace, Manishikha Baul, Anjuli T. Bhandari, Swati Birla, Bunty Chand, Arun Chandoke, Dipti Desai, Diva Dhar, Nayana Dhavan, Rodrigo Dominguez-Villegas, Carrie Ferguson, Aaron Foote, Cathy Gibbons, Kaveri Gill, Divya Gupta, Liz Hare, Rashmi Jaipal, Swati Janu, Shruti Kalra, Dennis Lacey, Rajiv Lall, Diego Leal, Misun Lim, Antoinette Merrillees, Nate Meyers, Sonia Mistry, Robert Nissim, Sonny Nordmarken, Gina Ocasion, Pilar Osorio, Yalcin Ozkan, Ashwin Parulkar, Juyeon Park, Gyalten Samten, Luz M. Sánchez, Sai Sabnis, Md. Sabur, Harsh Sahni, Seema Shah and Gretchen Walch. I also owe special thanks to my brother, Ashish Malhotra, for his emotional and intellectual solidarity as a researcher, and for his astute and sensitive reporting at one of vi my field sites. I am thankful for important lessons and encouragement from my late maternal grandmother and paternal grandfather, Myrtle Seth and Suraj P. Malhotra, and my paternal grandmother, Prem Malhotra. In different ways unknown to them, and at different times in my life, they provided me with support that helped me along the way. To my parents, Anita and Kamal Malhotra, I really do owe everything. Long before I encountered the phrase, you taught me that the personal is political. I have navigated this journey in that spirit and could not have done so without your unrelenting love, support, and faith in me and my path—even when it may have seemed incomprehensible. I owe special thanks to my mother, Anita, for her tireless and skillful assistance with complex and nuanced colloquial translations. Without her efforts to this end, I would not have been able to grasp critical linguistic and semantic subtleties in my informants’ accounts. There will never be adequate words to thank you both; I could not have done this without you. vii ABSTRACT CRIMINALIZING CHILDHOOD: THE POLITICS OF VIOLENCE AT DELHI’S URBAN MARGINS MAY 2020 RAGINI SAIRA MALHOTRA, B.A., BARNARD COLLEGE, COLUMBIA UNIVERSITY M.I.A., SCHOOL OF INTERNATIONAL AND PUBLIC AFFAIRS, COLUMBIA UNIVERSITY M.A., UNIVERSITY OF MASSACHUSETTS AMHERST Ph.D., UNIVERSITY OF MASSACHUSETTS AMHERST Directed by: Dr. Joya Misra The intensification of neoliberal economic reforms and new patterns of middle- class consumption in India have coincided with rising levels of urban inequality and poverty. Yet India’s capital, Delhi, positions itself as a “world-class city,” invoking neoliberal state aspirations to justify widespread violence against communities living and working in state-contested spaces. While much has been written about the reproduction of urban inequality and poverty in India, this body of scholarship under-emphasizes mechanisms of social control and violence, specifically, criminalization by the state. To understand these dynamics, children’s experiences are particularly important given their age-based potential and vulnerabilities. To give visibility to children’s accounts, I analyze working children’s narratives about the regulatory aspects of everyday social life in their residential communities, on the streets, and in schools. In doing so, I draw from over two years of multi-sited ethnographic research in one of viii Delhi’s “informal” communities and in the city’s most underserved homeless shelter and its surrounds. Centering children and families living and working in state-contested urban spaces, I ask: How, and to what end, does state-produced violence operate in people’s everyday lives? To address this question, I analyze participant observation data, extensive informal interviews, and over 70 formal and semi-structured interviews with girls and boys, adult guardians, legal activists, and civil society and state representatives. Conceptualizing the “state” not as an abstraction, but as a diverse set of practices, institutions, and people, in a series of empirical chapters, I examine people’s everyday interactions with “street-level bureaucrats,” and nodal agencies of the Delhi state. In Chapter 2, examining the role of the police and Delhi state agencies through a comparative analysis of my empirical cases, I argue that regulatory power operates through spatial territorialism and stigmatized surveillance in “invited,” or state legitimized and dominated, residential spaces. Conversely, in “invented” residential spaces, which exist in opposition to the state, regulatory power operates through spatial cooperation and discretionary surveillance. In Chapter 3, following girls in Manohar Nivas jhuggi as they attempt to secure access to water, I examine their (and their family’s) everyday interactions with the state’s