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The Ai-City Fiasco: From Congress’s Western Servitude to BJP’s Nationalist Slavery
Bidadi AI City is caste poured in concrete. It is the final solution to the Dalit question that both parties have wanted since 1976.
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Bangalore never expanded. Bangalore was made to expand by eating Dalit stomachs, by milling the migrant labour that built its apartments, and by extracting groundwater, ragi, coconut, silk, milk, and finally the very breath of the poor and their commons. For that is how cities have been built throughout history not by planning, but on the brutal, unmarked graves of the vulnerable whom the Master Plan never counts.
On July 4, 2026, women of Mandalahalli village, Bidadi Hobli, chased government surveyors with brooms, and the police, ever faithful to property, filed attempt-to-murder cases under the BNS. The crime was not assault. The crime was refusal — refusal to surrender fertile, living land for what Deputy Chief Minister D.K. Shivakumar, the real-estate pontiff of Kanakapura, baptizes as India’s first AI City, as if AI descends from the clouds and not from dispossession. Their brooms are not new. Dalit-Pourakarmikas in Bangalore have been sweeping away surveyors since 1976, and each time they sweep, the state returns with a new acronym.
To understand Bidadi’s Greater Bengaluru Integrated Township (GBIT) — 9,000 acres, Rs 20,000 crore, a Rs 12,511 crore HUDCO loan taken from public savings to build private towers, with 2,000 acres reserved for so-called AI industries — we must understand fifty years of Bangalore’s development not as successive governments but as a single, unbroken, bipartisan class-caste project of the Congress and the BJP, where land is violently transferred from Dalit-Bahujan labour, which tilled it for generations, to real estate capital, which has never tilled anything except electoral bonds.
Genealogy Of How Bangalore Ate Its Resources
What is called planning is, in Marx’s phrase, primitive accumulation the forcible separation of the producer from the means of production and in Ambedkar’s phrase, graded dispossession. In 1976, the Karnataka Congress under Devaraj Urs, who otherwise spoke of land reforms, created the Bangalore Development Authority to “plan” Bangalore. Its first act, like that of every development authority in India, was to notify 15,000 acres for Banashankari, Jayanagar Extension, and Indiranagar, where ownership on paper was Vokkaliga and LingayatDominant Caste Groups in KarnatakaTwo of the most influential and numerically significant land-owning and politically powerful caste communities in the Indian state of Karnataka. landlordism, but the tiller, the jeeta, bonded labourer, was Holeya and MadigaScheduled Caste Communities in KarnatakaHistorically marginalized Dalit communities in Karnataka, often subjected to landlessness and manual labor., whose name never entered the mahazar, whose hut was never counted as a family, and whose compensation was therefore zero. The BDA Act, drafted by landlords for landlords, has no clause for the landless and the labouring masses, and that absence of the landless from the law is not an oversight but the law itself. That model has never changed.
In the 1990s, through BDA’s Arkavathy and Kempegowda Layouts, and later under S.M. Krishna’s Congress regime (1999-2004), which rebranded Bangalore as the IT capital for the American client, BDA acquired 35,000 acres to manufacture Whitefield and Electronic City. Thereupon began the great Indian innovation called denotification, where the Chief Minister’s office acquires land from the farmer at Rs 6 lakh per acre and denotifies it for his caste-builder at Rs 3 crore per acre, gifting crores, for which Yediyurappa went to jail in 2011. Shivakumar now confesses without shame, “I am not ready to go to jail like Yediyurappa by denotifying lands,” which is an admission that jail is an occupational hazard of the land business, not its exception, while in Arkavathy, Dalit-Bahujan families who surrendered land in 2003 still wait in 2026 for a 40×60 site that will never come.
From 1995 to 2006 arrived NICE Road, the original Bidadi model, where the BJP-JDS combine gifted Ashok Kheny 6,999 acres for the Bangalore-Mysore Infrastructure Corridor, a toll road laid on the backs of the same Bidadi-Ramanagara-Mandya peasants whose sons are now told to become AI coolies. Farmers got Rs 2 lakh per acre and Kheny sold plots as NICE Townships at Rs 2 crore. The Supreme Court upheld the acquisition but called it fraud. That fraud road is now the spine of GBIT, repackaged as a 300-metre business corridor linking the STRR, NH-209, NH-275, and NICE Road, where the 90-metre tar road inside is flanked by 210 metres of commercial real estate to be sold to Prestige, Sobha, and Brigade, so that the same road built on farmer’s blood will now carry AI City labour in air-conditioned buses that the farmer’s child will never board except as a driver.
In 2006, H.D. Kumaraswamy notified 9,684 acres at Bidadi plus 16,232 acres at Sathanur and 12,525 acres at Solur for five townships. DLF signed an MoU. The 2008 crisis hit, the project was shelved, and the entire belt was painted red zone, where red does not mean no construction. Red means the Dalit farmer cannot sell, cannot mortgage, and cannot get a loan. His price is frozen at Rs 6 lakh while the landlord’s benami encroachment on Bagair Hukum continues, because both Congress and BJP need the red zone to depress prices to buy cheap later. That is exactly what happened when Congress returned in 2023 and D.K. Shivakumar, now Bengaluru Development Minister, revived the 2006 file, expanded it to 9,000 acres, and rebranded it as AI-powered, zero-carbon, zero-waste, work-live-play. He issued a preliminary notification in March 2025 and a final notification on June 11-12, 2026, for 518.45 acres — Kempayyanapalya 384, Mandalahalli 71, Vaderahalli 63 — not as development but as a second Chief Minister’s chair after Siddaramaiah.
What Ai City Eats
I remember fresh greens and vegetables in the red BTS bus crossing six lakes on my way from Ambedkar Nagar, Ramamurthynagar, to St. Patrick’s School on Brigade Road. The fragrance of greenery now has an RTI number, because the Horticulture Department in February 2026 states that GBIT will fell 87,903 coconut, 83,536 arecanut, 12,550 mango, 2,344 chikoo, and 3,06,506 banana plants — a total of 2 lakh trees and 3 lakh banana plants — plus ragi on 231 acres, paddy, groundnut, 6 lakh litres of milk daily, and silk. This is not barren land as DKS claims because Byramangala lake is dead. It is a garden that was made barren because Bangalore’s 500 MLD sewage from Whitefield — which itself ate six lakes — is dumped into Byramangala’s 1,000 acres, a tank that Kempegowda built precisely because Bangalore had no river. Now the solution is not to clean the lake for the farmer but to rejuvenate the lake for the NRI swimming pool.
Compensation exposes the class war: the landlord gets Rs 2.07 to Rs 3 crore per acre or a 50% developed plot. The landless agricultural labourer — 40% Holeya and Madiga, mostly women — gets Rs 25,000 per year as an annuity, that is Rs 2,083 per month to lose her motherland forever. Kushki gets Rs 30,000, tari Rs 40,000, bhagait Rs 50,000, which is one week’s wage for the construction worker who will build the AI tower on his mother’s field.
India As Dump Yard; Congress As Servant, BJP As Slave Trader
Bidadi AI City is not an Indian AI City. It is American AI’s dump yard planted on Indian soil because American AI, which needs 500 million litres of water to train one model; which needs thousands of Kenyan, Filipino, and Indian workers to label gore, porn, and beheadings for $1.5 an hour to teach AI what not to show; which needs GPU e-waste graveyards that California refuses, has found Bangalore, which has been a dump yard since the 1990s when S.M. Krishna said Bangalore will be Singapore, meaning Bangalore will be a servant quarter for America where the Indian engineer works the night shift to fix American bank code for a green card dream while Bellandur and other lakes froth and burn.
The Congress dump yard is servitude with a secular varnish. Rahul Gandhi talks AI in US universities, DKS and MODI kind of governance invite US to bring Palantir\-type military-tech complexes that make Maven that bombs Gaza, then needs Bidadi to label bomb targets, and calls it secular AI, zero-carbon for America which has already emitted for 200 years and now wants Indian farmland for carbon credits, zero-waste for America which wants to dump AI waste into Byramangala.
The BJP dump yard is slavery with a saffron varnish. AtmanirbharSelf-Reliant IndiaA policy vision by the Indian government aimed at making the country self-reliant across various sectors. speech, Make in India speech, but it sells 6,757 acres of NICE land lying unused without lawful authority as per the Governor’s letter of August 14, 2026, sells BDA Kempegowda’s 4,000 acres with 60% denotified for RSS builders, sells Vrishabhavathi as an open sewer to make Bidadi produce cancerous crops, then declares the land barren and says it must be given to AI, where Modi hugs Trump and brings an AI deal: America gives AI, India gives land and cheap labour. Consequently, the Indian child becomes a data-labeller at Rs 15,000 per month, cleaning the racism of AI that labels a white man as human and a black man as gorilla, while e-waste of 1 lakh tonnes per year, already burned by Dalit pickers on Mysore Road who die of cancer, will become tenfold. America keeps the profit, India keeps the waste — waste land, waste water, waste humans — and Congress says we dump with Ambedkar’s photo in the office, BJP says we dump with Modi’s photo and call it VishwaguruWorld Teacher/LeaderA term used in India to describe the aspiration for the nation to become a global leader or spiritual guide.. Both lie because a Vishwaguru is not a servant who cleans American AI’s toilet.
Outright Conclusion: Annihilate This Brahminical Ai City
Ambedkar did not say reform caste; he He said annihilate it. Bidadi AI City is caste poured in concrete. It is the final solution to the Dalit question that both parties have wanted since 1976—a 9,600-acre agraharaBrahmin SettlementHistorically, a land grant by kings to Brahmins, often forming exclusive settlements. Used here metaphorically to denote an exclusive, privileged area. for Vokkaliga-Lingayat-Brahmin capital funded by HUDCO public money, built on Holeya-Madiga labour, and guarded by police who file Section 307Attempt to MurderA section in the Indian Penal Code (or its successor, BNS) dealing with the offense of attempting to commit murder. on women with brooms. There will be no better compensation, no 50% developed plot, no Rs 25,000 annuity, because you cannot compensate for a mother who gave ragi, coconut, milk, and silk, and whom you first raped with sewage and then called barren and then put up for sale. Therefore our demand is not compensation but abolition. Abolish the compensation logic. Recover 3.5 lakh acres of Bagair Hukum and 12 lakh acres of Panchami lands encroached by dominant castes as per CAG 2021. Give joint patta in Dalit women’s names in Bidadi itself. Abolish the red zone blackmail that froze prices for 20 years and return land with interest. Abolish the work-live-play varna where Shudra works, Vaishya lives, and Brahmin plays. Abolish the Congress-BJP twins who both take the same loan from the same HUDCO to give the same land to the same Prestige-Sobha-Brigade who built on Bellandur lake bed and will now build on Bidadi farmland.
Bharathiyar, the renowned Tamil philosopher-poet, said; thani oruvanukku unavillai enil indha jagathinai azhithiduvom, if one goes without food, destroy this world; meaning destroy that world which causes scarcity of food and resources. Ambedkar added: educate, agitate, and organize to destroy the Jagath that denies food. That Jagath today is AI City, which denies ragi to a child to give a data centre to the war-mongering, ever-interfering, racist and murderous empire, America.
The broom women of Mandalahalli are not protesting for a cheque. They are sweeping away 50 years of BDA, BMIC, and GBIT. They are sweeping away both the Congress servant and the BJP slave slave-trader. They are sweeping away dump-yard India, and their broom, which once cleaned your septic tanks in HSR Layout where Dalits died in 2018, will no longer clean your AI City septic tanks. If you take one acre of fertile land, we will destroy your sterile Jagath, not as violence but as Annihilation of Caste, as Birsa’s Abua Raj, as Savitri-Fatima’s school with egg meals, as Ayyankali’s bullock cart on the forbidden road, as 9,000 acres for cooperative farming, not for AI. It is time to choose Ambedkar’s plough or Brahmin’s AI. There is no third, and history will remember Mandalahalli brooms as the plough that refused to become data-labellers.
Disclaimer:The views and opinions expressed in this article are those of the author(s) and do not necessarily reflect the official policy or position of The Rift.
*Urban DevelopmentAI CityBangaloreCaste PoliticsDalit RightsEnvironmental JusticeIndian PoliticsLand Acquisition
