A recent piece in Scroll (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 political engineering designed to erode any sense of a shared public life.
Routine politics
Gated communities, caste enclaves and hyper-surveilled colonies are not mere housing solutions; they are metaphors for our political time. Feeding on separation, fear and managed hostility, they normalise suspicion and embody principles that reward exclusion and punish presence. This is routine politics enacted at the level of the residential block.
In this landscape, there are no collective struggles, only micro-disputes. No public grievances, only private ones. Neighbours who become enemies because of their proximity.
In The Coddling of the American Mind, social psychologists Jonathan Haidt and Greg Lukianoff describe a mindset they call “vindictive protectiveness”. It refers to a social phenomenon where people defend themselves, or their imagined values, by punishing others for perceived transgressions. It’s a culture that encourages defensive aggression, transforming disagreement into offence, and discomfort into justification for revenge.
Citizens no longer imagine themselves as active participants in a democracy, but as stakeholders guarding a fortress – be it their home, their gated community or their nation. As fortress politics deepens, trust erodes, and fear takes root. Consequently, the neighbour becomes a liable threat, the Muslim tenant a source of suspicion, the domestic worker a potential thief and the dog feeder a nuisance.
This is what it means to be socially and politically abandoned but intimately policed. We have no tools to demand change, but every mechanism to punish deviation, whether it’s a broken rule, a jarring noise or a person who doesn’t belong.
In the 2007 Hollywood film I Am Legend, the infected creatures (not quite zombies, not quite human) display remarkable solidarity when pursuing the living, but turn feral without a clear antagonist. Without direction, they turn on one another.
This is our urban condition.
Urban zombification
The puzzle is not why neighbours fight, but why their anger doesn’t travel upwards, toward the elites and institutions that fuel our anxieties. For historian Michael Katz, the answer lies in the strategic “incapacitation” of a vibrant citizenry, through “selective incorporation, mimetic reform, indirect rule, consumption, repression, and surveillance.”
Under neoliberalism, where individual responsibility is glorified and structural critique discouraged, rage is deflected laterally. As bureaucracy turns opaque and the political class is insulated, our neighbours become the obstacle, not the system that makes housing unaffordable, schools inaccessible, or healthcare exploitative.
When dissent is criminalised and solidarity pathologised, people increasingly channel frustration from systemic disappointment into interpersonal conflict. Not because they are irrational, but because punishing a neighbour feels more attainable than demanding systemic reforms.
This is not an urban breakdown. It is urban zombification: a condition wherein public life exists without memory, meaning or direction.
There was once a political language of the commons in India. Of maidan, basti, adda, sangathan, and andolan. Even when imperfect, these spaces created friction alongside fraternity, not against it. Today, we have replaced the commons with controlled access. Neighbourhoods no longer train us to live together; they teach us to avoid one another.
No wonder many live in religious or caste-exclusive territories to preserve peace. But peace without encounter is not peace. It is withdrawal.
When public schooling collapses, when the poor are fenced out of parks, when protestors are jailed and free speech stifled, the idea of a shared future is strangled. What rises in its place is a politics of resentment, where difference becomes injury and proximity a provocation. This prepares fertile ground for authoritarian populism. It does not need loyal citizens. It needs paranoid neighbours.
The remedy to our urban predicament is not etiquette workshops or WhatsApp reminders about being respectful to our neighbours. In fact, it is not moral at all. It is political.
We must recover the language of common purpose through public housing, neighbourhood councils, shared transport, and accessible education. Alternatively, we must fight for the right to cohabit meaningfully, not resentfully.
Today, our neighbourhoods need more playgrounds, not surveillance; more assemblies, not FIRs; more forums, not fences.
But it is one thing to call for constructing the commons and quite another to organise it. So, we must ask: who will champion the cause of the commons? And how can we build the solidarity that survives the atomisation, isolation, and mistrust of our times?
Umesh Joshi holds an MPhil in Sociology from the South Asian University. His research interests include contentious politics, urban sociology, class conflict, and inequality, among other areas.
