ABSTRACT
On December 16, 2012, six men raped a young woman in Delhi on a moving bus, acting with such unrestrained violence that she later died of her injuries. The event shocked the city, the entire nation, and indeed the world, and it brought long overdue attention to the topic of sexual violence against women in urban India. Prominently noted in the reporting of the incident was the fact that all of the perpetrators were either first- or second-generation migrants from the relatively poor states of Rajasthan, Bihar, and Uttar Pradesh, and all of them resided in Ram Das Camp—an “unauthorized” slum in South Delhi—one of 643 such settlements in the National Capital Territory (Planning Department 2013). The gang rape focused a spotlight—yet again—on urban slums as “zones of incivility and ‘nuisance’” (Ghertner 2011b), further stigmatizing the slums’ entire population and making the middle classes more distrustful of them.
