ABSTRACT
This chapter argues that while opposition to existing urban democratic politics may have certainly existed in middle-class activist discourse, over the course of their civic emergence, middle-class resident welfare associations (RWAs) also became heightened sites for traditional political engagement in Delhi, covertly if not overtly. Market Traders and Industrial Area Associations were not invited to participate despite their official inclusion in the Bhagidari programme, the trader leader suggested. The ingenuity of the Bhagidari plan, as one senior Bhagidari official told the author in 2006, was that while it did not require the actual transfer of large funds to the RWAs. The special emphasis on the legal and the more middle-class neigh-bourhoods through the Bhagidari programme did not preclude the Congress Party, in its various dimensions, from having and building other, poorer or ‘illegal’ constituencies in the city.
