This paper ethnographically explores the repercussions of the large‐scale displacement and resettlement of slum‐dwellers in the city of Ahmedabad, India, where state‐sponsored urban development aimed at the creation of a slum‐free world‐class city is strongly personified around the figure of Prime Minister Narendra Modi. Based on ten months’ fieldwork in the slum resettlement site of Sadbhavna Nagar in 2015–2016, I explore the intricacies of betrayal resulting from world‐class city making. First, I suggest that infrastructure interventions and futuristic imaginaries invoked dreams of a better future among the poor, but resulted in a sense of having been betrayed by both Modi and the state when people were physically and discursively excluded from the world‐class city. Second, I demonstrate how resettled people have engaged in micro‐level practices of betrayal by mobilizing middle‐class “nuisance talk” (Ghertner 2012) to denigrate their new, unwanted neighbors. I argue that the perceived betrayal by the state trickles down and translates into a betrayal of neighbors in the resettlement site, reinforcing the pre‐existing inequalities of caste and religion among the urban poor [Displacement; Urban Development; World‐Class City; Resettlement; India].