Hindutva Urbanism

The transformation of India’s cities is not simply about beautification or heritage. It is a political project — one that uses infrastructure to embed Hindu majoritarianism into the very fabric of urban life. These remade cities are becoming campaign stages and ideological showrooms, shaping the terrain where the battle over identity and belonging is fought.

In recent years, cities like Ayodhya, Varanasi, and Ujjain have become showcases for a new kind of state-driven urbanism. These cities are not just undergoing upgrades in roads or public services; they are being reshaped as sacred landscapes, aligned with the political ambitions of Hindu nationalism. Infrastructure is now a tool of ideology, and urban planning is no longer neutral.

Following the consecration of the new Ram Mandir, Ayodhya is being reimagined. The Uttar Pradesh state government has announced a government plan worth approximately US $108 million (900 crore rupees) to construct a 20-kilometer ceremonial road called Bharat Path, linking the temple to key sites across the city. Chief Minister Yogi Adityanath calls it a global religious and cultural hub. In other words, a Hindu civilizational capital.

The numbers back up the ambition. In just the first nine months of 2024, Ayodhya saw 135 million visitors, surpassing Agra — home to the Taj Mahal — as the most visited destination in the state. Hotels, homestays, and roads have multiplied. Through a government app called Divya Ayodhya, nearly seven million tourists booked accommodation, part of a broader state effort to fuse religious tourism with economic growth.

At a glance, this might look like a success story: a historic city modernized, the local economy revitalized, and technology integrated into governance. But this isn’t just about development. It’s about narrative control. The redevelopment is making the city speak a particular language, one rooted in a majoritarian myth.

Sectarian Corridors

A similar story is unfolding in Varanasi, Prime Minister Narendra Modi’s parliamentary constituency. The city has undergone a dramatic facelift through the Kashi Vishwanath Corridor project.

The corridor connects one of Hinduism’s most important temples to the Ganges River. To build it, over 300 homes and shops were demolished. Officials labeled the project as beautification. Residents, many of them Muslim, called it erasure.

In Ujjain, the Mahakal Lok Corridor expanded the area surrounding the Mahakaleshwar Temple. Here, too, informal settlements and working-class neighborhoods were cleared out, all in the name of access and aesthetics. The goal in all these cases is to monumentalize Hindu religious sites while removing the urban clutter that contradicts the streamlined, sanitized vision promoted by the state.

These projects are not just improving pilgrimage routes; they are rewriting cityscapes. Temples are magnified, processional routes widened, and symbolic architecture installed. Simultaneously, Muslim shrines, Dalit neighborhoods, and mixed-use communities are marginalized. The message is clear: the city belongs to one tradition, one identity.

This kind of transformation has a cost. In Varanasi, centuries-old homes and shrines were razed with little notice or compensation. Families who had lived there for generations were displaced, their histories reduced to rubble.

In Mathura, another prominent Hindu pilgrimage site, authorities demolished Muslim homes near the Krishna Janmabhoomi Temple under the pretext of clearing illegal encroachments. Residents protested. Courts got involved. The bulldozers came anyway.

The pattern continues in Delhi, India’s capital. Following communal violence in 2020, municipal authorities targeted Muslim-majority neighborhoods with demolition drives. They claimed it was about removing illegal construction. Civil rights groups called it something else: collective punishment by urban policy.

Bulldozer Baba

The bulldozer has become more than a machine. It is now a political symbol. In BJP-ruled states, images of bulldozers flattening buildings appear in official campaign material. Adityanath has earned the nickname “Bulldozer Baba” — a badge of honor in party circles. What gets demolished matters just as much as what gets built. This is development by exclusion.

In these new urban landscapes, legality becomes a weapon. Authorities label structures as unauthorized or encroached to justify their removal. But those labels are selectively enforced. They’re less about property and more about power. In effect, the state is drawing new maps of belonging; deciding who has the right to exist in a city and who doesn’t.

These developments signal a shift in how cities function. Traditionally, cities are places of diversity, negotiation, and memory. In India’s temple towns, they are becoming tools of civilizational assertion. Tourism boards, real estate developers, and religious trusts align with state governments to push a single narrative.

Roads are widened not just for traffic but for processions. Facades are polished not just for visitors but for cameras and campaign ads.

This is a form of soft authoritarianism that doesn’t rely on bans or overt censorship. It works through cement and glass, through zoning laws and heritage branding. It tells a story of national pride while burying stories that don’t fit. Urban planning becomes storytelling, not through books, but through buildings.

The Memory of Cities

And yet, cities remember. Even when their surfaces are scrubbed clean, their histories linger. Resistance may not always be loud. Sometimes it is quiet: families refusing to leave, neighborhoods persisting against odds, memories passed down despite displacement. The battle over India’s cities is not just about space. It is about whose story gets to be told and whose is paved over in the name of progress.

We often see infrastructure as a neutral phenomenon, the stuff of engineers and planners, not politicians and ideologues. Roads, flyovers, and drainage systems are rarely treated as ideological terrain. But in today’s India, infrastructure is no longer just about movement or services. It’s about meaning. And increasingly, it is being used to tell a story about who belongs in the nation, and who doesn’t.

Under Modi’s government, the Smart Cities Mission promised to modernize India’s urban core through digitization, efficiency, and “world-class” amenities. Yet beneath this technocratic language lies a political blueprint. These cities are not only being upgraded; they are being rewritten to reflect the priorities of a Hindu nationalist state and a neoliberal economy. What gets built, what gets demolished, and who gets displaced are not accidents of development but rather decisions based on ideology.

The new roads in Ayodhya guide visitors to the Ram temple, lined with billboards and murals that reinforce a majoritarian narrative. The widened ghats of Varanasi stage a purified, tourist-ready version of Hindu spirituality. Surveillance cameras, QR-code signboards, and uniform facades present a seamless image of order, devotion, and control.

This convergence of infrastructure and ideology is not incidental. It reflects the logic of soft authoritarianism: cities designed not to empower citizens but to manage them, direct them, and filter them. This is development as spectacle — where urban space becomes a stage for political messaging, religious symbolism, and tightly choreographed belonging.

Storyboards of Power

Behind it all is a web of interests: real estate developers, temple trusts, tech companies, and state governments, working together to monetize cultural capital. Heritage becomes a business model. Religion becomes a land-use category, public space a stage. Public space becomes privatized, in spirit if not always in law.

Most insidiously, all of this is cloaked in the language of progress. Unlike earlier forms of state control that ruled through fear or coercion, this version rules through cement, steel, and signage. It doesn’t demand silence, it floods the space with curated noise: LED screens, devotional music, digital maps.

This is why the bulldozer and the broadband line are no longer opposites — they are allies. One clears the past; the other programs the future. Together they produce a city where politics is not argued but built. India’s smart cities aren’t just construction zones — they are storyboards.

The redevelopment of cities like Ayodhya, Varanasi, and Ujjain isn’t merely about roads, drainage, and temples. It’s about scripting a civilizational narrative into concrete. The streets are being designed to do something that textbooks and speeches alone can’t: tell a living story about the nation’s past, present, and future, one rooted in a singular religious identity and mass political consensus.

In Ayodhya, the Ram Path is a pilgrimage in infrastructure. From the moment a visitor enters the city, they’re immersed in the architecture of devotion, saffron banners, LED-lit arches, sculptures from Hindu epics, and curated “heritage” facades. Urban space is choreographed like a temple procession, reinforcing one message: this is the sacred heart of the nation, and you are walking through its myth.

The Kashi Vishwanath Corridor follows the same script. The path between the temple and river is now a spectacle, designed not just for pilgrims but for cameras, influencers, drone footage, and campaign videos. In a political culture obsessed with optics, myth and media blend seamlessly.

This isn’t mythology in the abstract. It’s myth made material and through zoning laws, architectural tenders, heritage branding, and digital apps. Urban planning has become a genre of storytelling, one that edits out contradiction and heterogeneity.

Control by Design

What’s omitted is as important as what’s built. In Varanasi, historic Sufi shrines, old Muslim neighborhoods, and small temples outside the sanctioned narrative are removed or hidden. In Ayodhya, centuries of lived history — Mughal, colonial, socialist — are scrubbed from the landscape. The new cities do not remember; they proclaim.

The state is curating a sense of awe, belonging, and timelessness. The point is not simply to inform citizens but to immerse them and to produce reverence and pride as spatial experiences. This is nation-building by affect: where the city makes you feel like you’re standing inside a civilization reclaimed.

The tools are familiar from other locations: Benjamin Netanyahu’s reshaping of Jerusalem or Modi’s previous makeover of New Delhi’s central vista. What’s new in India is the fusion of Hindutva and urbanism, backed by a machinery of state policy, private capital, digital platforms, and cultural spectacle. This is an attempt to root a majoritarian vision so deeply into the physical world that it feels inevitable.

But cities have long memories, even when their surfaces are scrubbed clean. Resistance may not always look like slogans and marches. Sometimes, it’s in the insistence on staying, in refusing to be moved, erased, or rewritten. The city, after all, is not only a product of state plans. It’s a battleground of claims, and the struggle over what kind of future gets built is far from over.