How the uncivility in India's gated communities is the result of deliberate political design

A recent piece inScroll (Many Indians can’t stand living with each other – today’s uncivil politics reflects this) explored the paradox of Indian urban life, where the aspiration for peaceful, well-serviced housing enclaves often gives way to everyday violence and hostility.

It astutely laid bare the contradictions of India’s fraying urban fabric, where dreams of harmonious living collapse into a theatre of squabbles, a war zone of parking disputes, fistfights, and even urine-splashed vengeance.

Longing for a more civil, collective ethic of neighbourliness, the author Ajay Gudavarthy concludes with a wistful reflection: Have Indian cities become “urban battlefields” because we are constitutionally incapable of living with difference?

But what if this incivility is not rooted in moral failure, or the overflow of casteism and communalism, but is a consequence of governance driven by free-market capitalism?

In Indian cities, the dominant aspiration is not a shared commons but secure boundaries. From luxury towers to middle-income colonies, the urban dream has been reduced to a desire for private order with CCTV surveillance, biometric entry and exclusive schools.

These spaces are more than class conveniences. They are miniature models of the larger political ethos. The disintegration of everyday life in the metropolis is not just a sign of social fragmentation; rather, it is a product of...

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