Bangalore’s elitist policy, programmes and modernist developmentalism In 1998, S.M. Krishna, then chief minister of Karnataka, portrayed Bangalore as India’s ‘Silicon Valley’ as part of his vision to transform the city into another ‘Singapore’. Such rhetoric was also seen as a lesson for the country’s economic development and as a justification for high-grade infrastructure and services to particular Master Plan-designated areas and to counter ‘non-planned development’ and ‘slums’ (Benjamin 2000). Fifteen years later in 2013, Bangalore, a city of around 11 million inhabitants, was urged by international development agencies to address its failed infrastructure.1 Other public controversies that have gained political ground are those of land regularisation via ‘Akrama Sakrama’ (setting prior wrongs right). A previous work explored how Bangalore’s elite capture and rationalise the space of plan and policy via the rhetoric of ‘good governance’ (Benjamin 2010). The city’s vastly increased territorial boundary locks mega-projects, rationalised within a master-planning frame, towards a competitive ‘productive’ city. When accompanied by a political shift towards empowering special-purpose agencies under the rubric of hi-tech modernism, this frames other practices of governance within a binary of ‘traditional and customary’ (Benjamin 2010, 2014). Bangalore drains off its 3,200 ft plateau into three major valley systems, via a series of wetlands of ‘tanks’ or ponds called ‘kere’ in the local language, Kannada.2 The keres are sites of intense contestations, which are revealed when one looks closely at the reworking of land tenures: a range of tenures connected to various seasonal agro practices, including fishing rights. This chapter points to the politics of these territories being conflated by higher levels of the government, but also via elite actions mobilising the judiciary into a homogeneous wasteland categorised as ‘public’; this re-categorisation feeds a land acquisition process used under eminent domain. It also opens up territory to large private developers for high-end housing or landscaped lakes under more recent forms of ‘public-private partnership’ management with elite resident welfare associations (RWAs).3 The important conceptual point here is that the homogeneous re-categorisation of wastelands portrays a singular logic of territoriality where both ‘urbanisation’