Ganapati Aane Wala Hai

Every evening, as I wrapped up my work in Shivaji Nagar, I received a WhatsApp message from Babli saying ‘Ready’, indicating she was now available to drive me home. Babli, an auto rickshaw driver who grew up in Shivaji Nagar but had moved away after her wedding, had driven me from Shivaji Nagar to various destinations across the city throughout the course of my fieldwork. She and her husband owned the auto and took turns driving it, and they both were taking care of their three-year-old daughter at the time. Babli knew the area well, and could still tell me who was whose neighbour in her old neighbourhood in Shivaji Nagar. I looked forward to having loud and heated conversations with her at traffic stops because the rest of the ride was always too noisy. Routinely, as we made our way out of Shivaji Nagar, we would get stuck at the main crossing for at least half an hour as the busses left the nearby depot. One day in August in 2016, as we chugged our way down, the traffic seemed especially immobile. ‘Ganapati aane wala hai’, Babli said, as if explaining why the traffic was especially bad that day. On one of the outer roads, this would explain the slow traffic, but here it was only a partial justification. Ganapati Utsav is the term for the festivities around Ganesh Chaturthi, which is celebrated annually in honour of the Hindu deity Ganesh. Ganapati is observed in many parts of India, especially in western India, with much fanfare. In Mumbai, the arrival of the festival fills the atmosphere with anticipation, markets with Ganesh paraphernalia, and roads with traffic. I came to realise that much like Ganesh, also known as Vighneshwar, the remover of obstacles, the phrase ‘Ganapati aane wala hai’ (‘Ganapati is coming’), or some variant, is often the magic expression that clarifies many a puzzle. As Babli and I inched forward in her auto, we saw a quarter-submerged bus protruding lopsidedly out of a giant pothole that had been freshly created by the monsoon. This was the crater that had thickened the flow of traffic. But Babli said again ‘Vighneshwar is coming’, this time with more sarcasm in her voice, highlighting the symbolic irony embedded in reiterating the phrase with the replacement of Ganapati (the lord of the people) with Vighneshwar (the remover of obstacles). ‘Now the BMC [Brihanmumbai Municipal Corporation] will fix everything to make [Ganapati] Bappa happy’.

The beginning of Ganapati coincides with the end of the monsoon season in Mumbai, which typically runs throughout August and September. At the start of the festival, the Ganesh idols are placed atop pedestals either privately in homes or in elaborately constructed outdoor pavilions called pandals. In some of Mumbai's largest pandals, the idol can be as large as sixty feet tall and sometimes made of solid gold. When the festival ends, the idol is paraded in a public procession along a specified route in the city and immersed in a body of water, usually the ocean. Any damage, or inconvenience, caused by bumpy roads, for instance, to the idols during the processions is unacceptable, as devotees would consider it a bad omen. Every year, in the run up to the preparations for the ten-day long Ganapati Utsav in Mumbai, the Ganapati mandals, or committees that manage the festival's celebrations all over the city, including the immersion processions of the enormous idols, get into protracted negotiations with the BMC to fix the thousands of potholes created in the aftermath of months of incessant rains. The BMC, and the several civic authorities in charge of the construction and maintenance of the city's roads, make public announcements of their deadlines to rid the city of potholes.

The Ganapati Utsav had been styled as an inherently political event in the nineteenth century. Although the Peshwa rulers had celebrated the festival in a quasi-public manner in the seventeenth century, after their decline the festival was consigned to the realm of more private domestic and temple worship. The public form of the festival was a clever circumvention of the British colonial injunction against political gatherings, as it began to be used for political lectures, and debates on current issues, all under the rubric of religious rituals and ceremonies. The politicisation of the festival also brought the popularity and iconicity of Ganesh outside the Brahmin communities (Kaur 2004). By 1893, the festival had elicited the involvement of many different Hindu castes, and not just the Brahmins, which created rifts with other communities, notably, the Muslims. The scale of the festival was designed to both imitate and match the Muharram processions, in which Hindus were known to participate (Kaur 2003, Masselos 1991). After the riots between Hindu and Muslims in 1893 in the Bombay Presidency, some leaders involved in the politicisation of the festival directed Hindus to refrain from participating in Muharram, and instead put all their energies into the Ganapati celebrations (Cashman 1975). This call for Hindus to use the public form of the festival would introduce a sense of Hinduised patriotism wherein the Hindu identity would stand as the true patriot to the exclusion of other identities (Tejani 2008). These programmatic attempts at the consolidation of a unified Hindu identity did not succeed, since not only did the celebrations take place through caste-segregated community networks, they did not put an end to Hindus celebrating Muharram. However, the reimagination of the Ganapati Utsav as performative politics provided an ideological, affective and linguistic space for the articulation of the notion of Muslims and the British as ‘outsiders’ (Tejani 2008: 58–60).

In contemporary times, the Ganesh Utsav has undergone several changes in scale and political patronage, and while the Ganesh idols are temporary occupants of the city, Ganesh, already a popular deity, has become a prominent political icon in the city (Hansen 2001. Projects such as the expansion of the now massive Siddhivinayak temple complex, constructed over a period of time when the city's name was changed from Bombay to Mumbai, show the ever-growing entanglement of state power and performative religion (Dwyer 2015). It is also no secret that political parties of all stripes make enormous donations to the Ganapati mandals, which have accumulated much political capital. Political parties make donations through non-governmental organisations (NGOs) directly to a particular Ganapati mandal.⁵ The number of Ganapati mandals registered to the umbrella co-ordination organisation keeps expanding exponentially. In 1896, there were seventy mandals, and in 2018 there were twelve thousand. The Ganesh Utsav supports an economy of flower vendors, tent-makers, electricians, bamboo sellers, transportation facilities owners, artisans and food vendors, amongst many more, adding up to a business turnover of more than $10 million. So, when Ganapati mandals request that the BMC fix potholes in the path of the idol processions, they bring with them the weight of enormous funding, a history of mobilisation, and immense political power.

In cities like Mumbai, civic authorities, which are some of the nation's richest such bodies, allocate a sizeable portion of their budgets towards preparations for Ganapati. Yet, every year the High Court reprimands the BMC and other civic authorities in charge of Mumbai's roads for using substandard materials in an ad hoc manner to repair potholes. Potholes in Mumbai's roads do not just slow down traffic, but claim lives. In Mumbai, every year the city's residents file Public Interest Litigations (PILs) detailing the stretches of roads pockmarked with huge craters. This pothole citizenship does indeed ‘create thickenings of publics’ (De Boeck 2012), which pressure and challenge state power. But not all such publics are able to use their heft to fix potholes in Mumbai. The Bombay High Court rulings, as well as the PILs that prompt these rulings, unsurprisingly, come up every year just in time for Ganapati. In response, in 2017, for instance, the BMC announced before the festival that it had earmarked 20 per cent of the imported pothole-fixing material for repairs just before Ganapati, the period when it receives the maximum number of complaints about the city's roads. These repairs are planned along roads that constitute the idol procession routes, while thousands of craters, like the one in Shivaji Nagar, remain gaping. Embedded in Babli's sarcastic reminder of Vighneshwar's arrival is a critique of the BMC, here a stand-in for the ‘government’, and, in turn, state power. In these parts, what may appear as conceptual slippages that supplant state power with the government and, in turn, with civic governance is a critique of state power that bears down with a coalesced force through a concerted withholding of its care. That is, state power is felt in places like Shivaji Nagar in a temporally dispersed manner, for instance, through the deferred promise of fixing potholes.

‘If not this year, then next Ganapati BMC will come’, Munna told me when I related Babli's and my experience of getting stuck in traffic the previous day. ‘Aane hi wala hai. A brand-new road’, he continued. That day when I returned to Shivaji Nagar, I found that the giant pothole had been filled to the brim by the residents of the neighbourhood with rubble collected from the garbage dump. This was not a brand-new road, and certainly did not offer a smooth ride, but the residents of this neighbourhood had much experience in repurposing the treasures found at the garbage dump. The contents of the garbage dump, especially valuable discard such as buildings materials, are regulated and closely guarded by a machinery of local mafia, police and municipal officers. And yet, the residents had defied this dispersed power by filling the giant pothole with rubble appropriated from the dump. While Ganapati is the time when potholes in the procession routes and around neighbourhoods that see pandal foot traffic may get repaired, Shivaji Nagar's new road remains in abeyance. If this section addresses how local state apparatuses, inflected through a national Hindu majoritarian prism, reproduce social inequities through the temporal modality of deferred infrastructural promises, the next section explores how minoritised communities experience the impending threat of flattening community identity as a force about to strike them like Damocles’ sword.

Woh Subah Kaise Toh Aayegi?

I had entered Rahmina's hut in the midst of a heated argument she was having with her brother, Akbar, and his friend, Shaukat. A committee meeting had been held in a nearby masjid to discuss talaq-e-biddat, also known as triple talaq. As I tried to get my bearings, I gathered that the argument had begun with why women had been excluded from the community meeting, which was discussing a matter affecting women. Akbar, in response to Rahmina's question, merely said: ‘Since in Islam, men and women are equals, we went in your place!’ ‘We are not equals’, Rahmina shot back at her brother, ‘and, more importantly, we are not interchangeable! I have so many questions. Did any of you ask any questions?’ After welcoming me into the conversation, Akbar teased Rahmina: ‘Why, you wanted to ask if women can keep many husbands?’ ‘Not keep, but marry!’ Rahmina retorted. As a way to diffuse the tension, Shaukat, who had been mostly silent except to laugh when Akbar looked to him for support while teasing Rahmina, began to sing the song ‘Woh Subah Kabhi Toh Ayegi’ (‘That Morning Will Arrive Someday’). Rahmina, unimpressed by Shaukat's soulful rendition of the song, and his symbolic plea for patience, cut him short, singing over him: ‘Woh subah kaise toh aayegi [That morning, how will it ever come]? We do not get the opportunity to ask. And as we wait for that morning to come, the Unified Civil Code will be here!’ In this section, I navigate the fraught narratives around triple talaq amongst a few of Shivaji Nagar's women to examine what spaces remain for women like Rahmina to articulate their position on issues of gender justice with the spectre of the UCC hanging above them that threatens to weaponise their lives against their communities.

As mentioned above, implementing a uniform civil code had been on the BJP's political agenda since the 1990s. In 2019, the UCC became one of the key campaign promises of the BJP's Sankalp Patra (Election Manifesto). The UCC refers to the application of a uniform set of laws to all citizens in matters pertaining to family, marriage, divorce, adoption, custody and inheritance. In India, currently, under the right to freedom of religion different religious communities are governed by a system of personal laws, such as the Hindu Personal Law, the Muslim Personal Law, the Christian Personal Law and the Parsi Personal Law. A potential UCC has long been at the centre of divisive debates, especially amongst feminists and women's rights activists in India. The debates arise from the tension between women's rights as individual citizens and as members of collectives. On the one hand, personal laws have been discriminatory towards women across religious communities, but, on the other hand, since personal laws are meant to secure community identity, they are considered to be a form of constitutional commitment towards secularism. Thus, these laws work within and undergird India's secular constitutional framework. Indeed, as Partha Chatterjee (1998) has argued, the autonomy of communities has also been a way of challenging state power, which the impending UCC threatens to curtail. Many in India argue that the BJP's promised legal reform of the UCC is imminent, especially given the recent trajectory of the issue of triple talaq, and, with that, a further limiting of potential challenges to state power.

The community meeting to which Rahmina was referring had been held in Shivaji Nagar to discuss triple talaq after an affidavit was submitted by the Union Law Ministry in the Supreme Court of India in 2016 in response to a cluster of petitions challenging polygamy and triple talaq. In this affidavit, the central government stated that this step was necessitated by its duty to uphold ‘the principle of gender justice and the overriding principle of non-discrimination, dignity and equality’. Presenting the argument thus clearly isolates Muslims and locates gender justice outside of Islam. In August 2017, in the landmark Shayara Bano v The Union of India, the Supreme Court judgement declared triple talaq unconstitutional. Within four months of the judgement, the government introduced the Muslim Women (Protection of Rights on Marriage) Bill, which subsequently in 2019 became the law criminalising triple talaq. The Union Minister of Law and Justice, Ravi Shankar Prasad, categorically denied that the central government's position on triple talaq had anything to do with the UCC. Yet, the enthusiasm with which the government has sought to reform Muslim Personal Law, purportedly to secure Muslim women's rights, has followed a familiar path of what Zakia Pathak and Rajeswari Sundar Rajan call ‘saving Muslim women from Muslim men’ (1989: 566). While polygamy and the abandonment of women are issues that adversely impact women of all religious communities in India, they have been framed by the central government as issues affecting only Muslim women. As scholars have emphasised, out of 2.3 million separated and abandoned women in India around 2 million are Hindus, against 280,000 Muslims (Shariff and Khalid 2017). Further, although in popular construction triple talaq has been narrativised as a practice widespread amongst all Muslims, only a minority of Sunni Hanafi Muslims practice it, and divorce amongst Muslims is much lower than amongst Hindus (Shariff and Khalid 2017).⁶ By focussing on the reform of Muslim Personal Law as the sole arena where gender justice may be pursued, ‘the larger implications of culture, class and region on the lives of Indian Muslim women are deferred’ (Sherin 2016).

During my dissertation fieldwork in 2016–2017, the Supreme Court had not begun hearing the challenges to triple talaq, but the groundwork for the case had been set in motion and rumblings of the UCC being implemented were already being heard in 2015. During the hearing of a Hindu succession case, a Supreme Court bench requested the Chief Justice to set up a special bench to examine whether Muslim women faced discrimination through the practices of triple talaq and polygamy. Legal scholars have noted that the manner in which triple talaq and polygamy were brought up through stray remarks made by an advocate was unprecedented (Agnes 2019). Several subsequent writ petitions by Muslim women, the Rashtriya Swayamsevak Sangh (RSS)-affiliated Rashtrawadi Muslim Mahila Sangh and the All India Muslim Personal Law Board (AIMPLB) were attached with the original reference. That same year, BJP activist Ashwini Upadhyay filed a petition in the Supreme Court to enact a UCC. The Chief Justice dismissed the petition by stating that if a case of triple talaq were to come before the Supreme Court, it would hear the same, but that since the latter's job was to declare and interpret laws rather than to make them, the enactment of a UCC fell to the legislature. The Court did indeed get such an opportunity when Shayara Bano's husband sent her a talaqnama (deed of divorce) by post as she recuperated from an illness in her parents’ home. In 2015, another crucial event contributed to the fraught mobilisations around triple talaq. The Bharatiya Muslim Mahila Andholan, an NGO that had been working with Muslim women, released a report, Seeking Justice within Family, that tackled the issue of triple talaq amongst several other issues adversely affecting Muslim women in India. The NGO became an important voice in the debate, with its argument that, even though triple talaq affected a small minority of Muslim women, it violated their fundamental right to equality, since Muslim women did not have an analogous right by which they could divorce their husbands instantly by saying ‘talaq’ thrice. But crucially, their argument was intent on reforming the Muslim Personal Law rather than on making a demand for a UCC (Niaz and Soman 2015), and their argument reflected many of my interlocutors’ beliefs.

Rahmina suggested that just as Muslim women like her were excluded from community meetings in Shivaji Nagar, they were kept out of the national debate that would determine their future. As citizens of India, and as followers of Islam, these exclusions paradoxically fanned their expectations of future inclusion. However, organisations affiliated with the BJP's ideological fountainhead, the RSS, stepped in to ventriloquise Muslim women and portray them as victims. ‘They keep having community meetings without us, and we keep waiting for the AIMPLB to declare triple talaq un-Quranic! The Supreme Court is now forced to adjudicate what the AIMPLB should. That gives the RSS women's wing a chance to step in and speak for us in our name’, Rahmina explained. Scholars have suggested that the AIMPLB's delegitimising of triple talaq by issuing a statement against it would have a more significant effect on Muslim communities nation-wide than another law banning it (Chakrbarti and Ghosh 2017). Legal precedents that invalidate arbitrary triple talaq have existed since 2002. The Bombay High Court held in Dagdu Pathan v Rahimbi that a Muslim husband cannot dissolve a marriage at will and that for triple talaq to be valid the facts of the due talaq procedure should be proven in court. That same year, the Supreme Court invalidated arbitrary and instantaneous talaq in the milestone Shamim Ara v State of Uttar Pradesh. Shamin Ara paved the way for several verdicts that invalidated triple talaq while upholding women's rights. But as scholars have pointed out, many women who have been divorced instantly via triple talaq do not possess the means to go to a court of law, and yet another law does not change the situation on the ground much (Solanki 2011; Chakrabarti and Ghosh 2017; Vatuk 2017). Rahmina was unsure as to how she would feel were the Supreme Court to declare triple talaq unconstitutional:

There are so many issues to be considered. Rather than wasting a good opportunity to do something that would really improve women's lives, we are just asking the SC to ban triple talaq … Even if Shayara [Bano]'s husband took her back, why would she want to go back, and if she did not, how would she take care of her two children? We'll just have to wait and see if this will actually change anything for us.

After the triple talaq judgement, many suggested, as Rahmina foretold above, that we wait and see how it would affect Muslim women, since judicial reforms frequently have unexpected consequences. This was seen in the aftermath of the Shahbano case, which came to be creatively used by individual judges to secure reasonable compensation for divorced Muslim women (Agnes 2019). While the Muslim Women (Protection of Rights on Divorce) Act, 1986 worked in favour of Muslim women from high-income families, it proved impossible to enforce with poorer families, where the husband did not always have the means to pay the contractual maintenance (Vatuk 2017). But instead of waiting to gauge the impact of the triple talaq judgement, only after four months the government hurriedly drafted up the Muslim Women (Protection of Rights on Marriage) Bill, and eventually passed it in 2019, criminalising triple talaq. Legal scholars have questioned the need for criminalising triple talaq and creating another pretext for incarcerating Muslim men (Mustafa 2017). Criminalising triple talaq leaves Muslim women more precarious, for if a husband is imprisoned for three years, which is the proposed punishment, then not only can he divorce the wife from prison following the approved Quranic procedure of pronouncing talaq over three months, he may also no longer be able to fulfil his kharcha (‘maintenance’) obligations.

Rahmina told me that it was unusual for women in her neighbourhood of Kamala Nagar (an area within Shivaji Nagar) to approach a secular court for a divorce-related issue. She suggested that women routinely resolved family conflicts through neighbourhood and community mediation forums such as a darul qaza, or a sharia court. ‘It is not even a court, really, but mainly a mediation centre. Everyone outside seems to think that darul qazas issue fatwas, and that is all. But in fact, [the] darul qaza's role in mediating disputes is its most important role, I think’, Rahmina explained to me, and continued: ‘More and more women are taking advantage of that and coming out. Once the UCC comes, it will again push women back into their homes’. Rahmina suggests that these community mediation forums have enabled many women in her neighbourhood to eke out a political way of being that inhabits spaces otherwise not enabled by secular courts. Women bring in nearly all the cases that the Govandi Darul Qaza mediates. One of my interlocutors, Akhtar, asked me to accompany him to the darul qaza for his divorce proceedings. He was nervous because he did not read English, and his wife had drawn up the khulanama (deed of divorce) in English: ‘My English is weak, that is why to belittle me one last time’. When Akhtar turned twenty-one, he had married the love of his life, Anjum, after much persuasion. ‘I'm tenth-fail, and unemployed, and she is a school topper, and does computer work in a big company. She is the most beautiful girl in Shivaji Nagar, and can have anyone she wants’, Akhtar said explaining why she needed to be persuaded. I had met Akhtar through his sister, Shamim, who was involved with an NGO that had been working in the area. Shamim frequently teased her brother, as he sat watching TV all day, that his wife would leave him for a better man. Shamim told me that Anjum would get frustrated seeing Akhtar lukkha (‘slack off’), and had even given him a beating now and then. ‘But my brother is soft-hearted, and lazy too. He'll keep sitting!’ A few months into their marriage, Anjum initiated a khula (divorce initiated by a woman). Anjum had consulted the qazi who had officiated their wedding, and the neighbourhood jamaat (committee), and determined that she could ask for khula on the basis of Akhtar's unemployment, which, she argued, caused her both emotional and financial harm.

Akhtar told me as we both hurried to get to the darul qaza on time: ‘I cannot take it anymore. I love her still, but her behaviour towards me is intolerable. She says she cannot stand my face’. When we reached the room where the divorce proceedings were to take place, Shamim greeted Akhtar and me. His parents were seated there too. Anjum was sitting with her friend. Her family had refused to attend, as they felt humiliated. As the qazi handed the khulanama to Anjum and Akhtar, he gestured to them to sit next to each other for the duration of the formalities. The couple signed the khulanama, with Akhtar barely able to hold back his tears. As soon as he finished signing, he stood up and flung his pen across the table, took out his copy of the nikahnama (deed of marriage) and tore it into pieces. Then he looked at Anjum and yelled at her in anger and with tears now rolling down his face: ‘talaq, talaq, talaq’. Anjum sat on her chair, her eyes fixed on an invisible point on the table and her right index finger and thumb constantly pinching the veins on her left hand. Akhtar continued: ‘Now you say it too. Why am I the only one saying it? If I am dead to you, then you are dead to me!’ Shamim pleaded with her brother to calm down, but Akhtar was noticeably upset. Anjum looked at Akhtar and said: ‘We do not need all that. No one has to say anything. This is not your talaq, it is my khula’. While Anjum's parents did not come to support her, and while she knew Akhtar would never be able to pay her kharcha, she had taken control of the narrative, even if briefly.

Later, Rahmina introduced me to her friend Sabiha, whose husband had recently divorced her over the phone, calling her from Muscat. When I met Sabiha, she was in the middle of her period of waiting, or iddat, before which she could not remarry. She told me then that she was sick of him too, and did not really want to live with him. Before leaving for Muscat, he beat her and accused her of having affairs with other men. ‘He is a bastard, and I am happy I don't have to live with him, and the divorce was quick. But now it has been months, and he has not given me any kharcha. So, I went to the darul qaza’. The darul qaza had drawn up a settlement favouring Sabiha, and pressured the husband's family to pay her kharcha so she could take care of their five-year-old daughter. She said:

When he was living with me, he beat me every day. I miscarried thrice after getting thrashed by him. If I did not have a daughter, I would have left him long ago. When he said he was leaving for Muscat, I was the happiest woman in the world. But then he abused me over the phone, accused me of having affairs. He started spreading ugly rumours about me, shaming and humiliating me. I was fed up. I was thinking about asking him for a khula. But I kept procrastinating, so when he called me from Muscat and during a fight said ‘talaq, talaq, talaq’, I felt that Allah had answered my prayers. Yes, people will still blame me, because even the qazi said that only when there is something lacking in a woman does a man divorce her. People will say this no matter how he had given me talaq. Even if I had managed to get a khulanama, that is what people would have said. So, I do not care about triple talaq much. I care about the kharcha, and that, I am getting.

Community leaders and mediation centres do not necessarily present themselves as emancipatory forces for women, and instead often reinforce community norms which penalise, shame and blame women for divorce proceedings. As Rahmina, Anjum and Sabiha know, communities constitute themselves as such by circumscribing women's roles and agency within the normative and patriarchal institutions of marriage and family. The community meeting, after all, excluded all women from a discussion of triple talaq. So, what does it mean for women to attempt to inhabit these fraught spaces? The examples described above were not exceptional cases where the darul qaza was able to get a divorcee the promised maintenance, or help a woman initiate khula. As scholars have noted, elsewhere in India darul qazas routinely enforce maintenance orders that family courts decree but cannot enforce (Chakrabarti and Ghosh 2017). These community forums give women a setting for the redress of family conflicts. Before the triple talaq judgement, there were already several legal and community-based mechanisms available to Muslim women that offered them a chance at outcomes far better than those offered by the criminalisation of triple talaq. As the UCC looms over my interlocutors, they must walk the tightrope between supporting an agenda of ‘gender equality’, co-opted by the Hindu right, and the persistence of personal laws which relegate the question of gender squarely into the private domain. Yet, in the meantime, these negotiations at mediation centres that women like Sabiha and Anjum are involved in, looking to resolve what are classified as personal conflicts, facilitate their public and critical engagement with religious and cultural injunctions. As Saba Mahmood reminds us, what might not appear as political is radically so: political engagement does not necessarily rest in the ability to ‘realize one's own interests against the weight of custom, tradition, transcendental will, or other obstacles’ (2005: 8), but in the inhabiting of those spaces which have historically been foreclosed. Navigating different community and neighbourhood mediation centres enables women in Shivaji Nagar to participate as political beings in the political processes that define their lives. While both community and national legal regimes aim to contain Muslim women's political action in India, the process of inhabiting described above opens up a kind of political and critical engagement that exceeds the narratives of subversion and the reinscription of norms.

Conclusion

I have argued in this article that the state's power is experienced by citizens through governance by deferral, which is both a technology by which the state appears to expand its presence and a means of dehistoricising citizens’ marginalisation by promising a reprieve or threatening a punishment in an indeterminate future. These techniques of expansion and dehistoricisation, in turn, aim to temporally circumscribe the domain of political action by dislodging it into an unspecified future. The aane wala hai form of governance bears down with sharp force in a neighbourhood like Shivaji Nagar, whose complex histories of entanglement and exclusion are shaped by its location on the city's periphery, bounded by Mumbai's municipal abattoir on the one side and one of Asia's largest garbage dumps on the other. The municipal region in which the neighbourhood is located consistently ranks lowest in terms of the quality of life that people have, measured by aggregating indicators of health, education and finance. As I have shown elsewhere, municipal funds allotted to the neighbourhood consistently remain unutilised owing to political inaction by the local officials (Chatterjee 2019). The neighbourhood's residents also share an inheritance of the bodily and affective burdens of living and working in an area negatively valued by outsiders owing to its proximity to the abattoir and the garbage dump. Like the kohra that residents negotiate daily in this neighbourhood, the aane wala hai mode of governance spectralises itself, and in that vein expects to expand its durability and pedagogical purpose.

Scholars examining bureaucratic delays have suggested that the long wait for public entitlements, official documents, infrastructural repairs, housing, food stamps, among others, effectively mould ‘a particular submissive set of dispositions among the urban poor’ (Auyero 2012: 9). In postcolonial states, waiting is used as a convenient technique of governance whereby a majority of the public is trained to become citizens through systems of selective, and often, haphazard rewards and punishments in the form of differential access to goods and services (Appadurai 2007 Ferguson 2006; Jeffrey 2010; Mbembe and Nutall 2004). If the indeterminacy associated with this temporal abeyance is productive for governance, it is also generative for subjectivity. The first section describes one aspect of this modality of governance by deferral, namely, through a promise of better infrastructure realisable at a time in the future. The second section explores another aspect of this modality of governance, namely, through a threat of an impending legal reform that portends a flattening of the few spaces of political engagement available to my interlocutors, and the responses such a threat educes. Mumbai's municipal corporation, the BMC, may repair the potholes in Shivaji Nagar just as it did in other parts of the city someday; the UCC with all its social and political force may indeed also arrive someday. In the meantime, in the gap between now and someday Shivaji Nagar residents wait. As the potholes’ temporary cure and many women's everyday negotiations with community forums evince, ‘in the meantime’ is a generative time. In this time, subjects are seldom what they are meant to be, even as they look to an indeterminate future for a life otherwise. So in both examples, focussing on the aane wala hai form of governance (local and national) under intensifying Hindutva logics, unexpectedly, makes visible ways of not being docile or compliant, and ways of, instead, being politically active.

Attending to the aane wala hai form of governance enables me to explore the inclusive exclusion that characterises governance in places like the neighbourhood described above. On one level, the inside-outside location of Shivaji Nagar incarnates a subject who resides uneasily in neither but also in both – that is, inside and outside Mumbai. Through this indeterminate subject position, my interlocutors not only resist classification (Alexander and Sanchez 2019), but also chart a future path that is unknown and unknowable. In both the examples described above, tactics of deferral produce the residents of this neighbourhood not merely as ‘informal workers’ whose exclusion is incidental to capitalist progress and state neglect, but actively as ones whose indeterminate subject position may indeed propel them towards political action. On another level, both the examples are concerned with the how governance – local and national – is experienced. The rhetoric of citizenship and belonging fuels the tactics of promises and threats, offering subjects like my interlocutors a place in or threatening expulsion from the projected Hindutva imaginary of India.

In the present, residents are invited to be subjects who would be worthy of better roads, and better social relations, in a forever-deferred future. Waiting, whether for a desired promise or feared threat, affects people differentially, sometimes reproducing socio-economic inequalities. I argue that for the residents of Shivaji Nagar a complex and sedimented matrix of class, caste and religious relations, whose force is not entirely external, works in tandem with the imaginaries of achhe din to defer their sense of belonging both to the inside/outside neighbourhood and the national imaginary. While the state and its technologies of governance expand their power temporally through the deferred expectations of belonging they engender, we may glimpse both the willingness to accept and challenge these modes of deferral towards a provisional sense of belonging.