Critically, the engagement of Bengali tech workers within the lifeworld of migrant Bengali lower-class workers unfolded through their regular access to the bastis, which enjoyed spatial fixity. This provided tech workers a grounded connection to their social space and their multilayered livelihood struggles. Notably, the bastis display a deeply rooted struggle over social citizenship—an existential fight that the tech workers and educated Bengali migrants, who have found their place in the city’s corporate landscape, never had to face. With most of these workers being Bengali-speaking Muslims were routinely subjected to illogical harassment, random identity checks, and a societal witch-hunt that labels them as illegal citizens or Bangladeshis, and city administration’s threat of eviction of the bastis, many of Bengali tech-worker and educated migrant volunteers discovered that many of the workers in these bastis, whose children they teach on weekends, face imprisonment at the hands of local authorities when they are unable to satisfy official demands or clear doubts about their citizenship status. Therefore, the spatial fixity of the bastis was not merely a site where Bengali tech workers and educated classes found a space for civic intervention; it was also a learning site where, unlike tech workers, lower-class Bengali migrant workers faced significant challenges beyond workplace issues.
9 TRANSVERSAL UNIONISM: RESISTING AND NAVIGATING
245