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Carol Upadhya, the two anonymous IJURR reviewers and the handling editor for generous and generative comments on drafts of the article. All errors remain our own.

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This paper theorises the political entrepreneurship of local political actors variously described as brokers, fixers or leaders, by examining their consistent and flexible labour towards gaining and maintaining political influence in informal settlements. Through close attention to how two exemplary individuals work and network with a combination of political parties, non-governmental organisations (NGOs) and local associations, I reveal the crucial role of political entrepreneurs in organising or representing local populations as legible ‘communities’, and thus, in mediating relations between communities and external agencies such as the state, political parties, non-governmental organisations (NGOs) and also academic researchers. Observing informal settlements in this relational framework sheds light on how political entrepreneurs compete to become obligatory intermediaries between various institutions. This approach destabilises conceptions about the social infrastructure and social capital of a locality which underlie many community development programmes. Further, I argue that in the long-term, the careers of political entrepreneurs are punctuated by structural constraints in the form of limits to political party patronage, volatile NGO funding and the transient presence of academic researchers. The work of reproducing the social capital of the neighbourhood becomes a persistent and anxious striving with few actual opportunities for mobility.

In this article, I track a housing scheme introduced in Hyderabad, India, to redevelop slums (in situ) into two-bedroom apartments. Drawing on ethnographic fieldwork, I argue that existing forms of governance cyclically enact a suspension of poor people's lives and often dispossess the poor of one set of rights in the process of delivering another set. In their own descriptions of these schemes, displaced communities emphatically account for the forms of suffering they repeatedly incur, which are unaccounted for in the records of the state. In their experience, governance is not only arbitrary and labyrinthine, but it also entails necessary experiences of dispossession that ironically accompany schemes for their development. This regime of dispossession that chronically underlies schemes for poverty alleviation is what I call ‘cruel governance’. Over time, this mode of development accompanied by dispossession has resulted in cynical realignments of subaltern politics towards the state and its projects.