India, Jan. 9 -- Walk through Mumbai's gaothans and there's a palpable sense of community, tightly knit, lived-in and deeply rooted. There's also a quiet anger born of decades of neglect. These are ancestral village settlements where families have lived long before the city swallowed them whole.

Today, across the 189 gaothans in Mumbai and an additional number in the wider Mumbai Metropolitan Region (MMR), residents say the civic elections are less about party politics and more about survival. The overriding fear is being labelled as slums and forcibly pushed into redevelopment frameworks that do not reflect how gaothans function.

Encroachments around gaothans, often by slum settlements or commercial projects, have made it easier for st...