Forging unity, marking distinction: Mumbai’s middle-class tenants’ struggles for defending rent control in the post-liberalisation era

Middle-class sections in India have faced threats of eviction and displacement due to transformations in the built environment and the legal regime regulating these transformations in the post-liberalisation period. This article is about one such segment of Mumbai’s middle class which has resorted to collective political struggles to defend their right to stay put. These are the protected tenants who came to acquire statutory tenancy rights over a 50-year period due to restrictive rent control protections but have been facing aggravated threats of decontrol since the 1990s. Using contemporary newspaper reports, interviews with tenant-activists and social media posts, I have reconstructed the course of protected tenants’ mobilisations that emerged at two critical moments—1998 and 2015. Drawing insights from Pierre Bourdieu’s work, I could identify a two-pronged classification strategy deployed by tenant-activists to bring about symbolic unification of the heterogeneous sections of the protected tenant base and to mark their distinction from contractual tenants and other housing-insecure groups. Through these struggles, the protected tenants transformed into a political force and played a crucial role in preserving rent control protections in the post-liberalisation period.