[Assam] Now from Tehelka

[Mridul Bhuyan]

Dear Chandan Da,
   
  Atleast my feeling is not hurt. I'll write back in details in a few days as right now, I am busy due to some medical urgency.
   
  Regards
   
  Mridul

Chan Mahanta <cmahanta at charter.net> wrote:
  My apologies if I am hurting anyone's feelings here :-), but what on 
earth is going on in Dilli?

Come-on Kharkhowas from Dilli, would you give us your perspectives or not?

cm






EDIT-OPINION

http://www.fromallangles.com/newspapers/country/india/tehelka.com.htm

Opinion

Lambs at the Law's Guillotine

The new elite desire cities cleansed of the 'mess' that comes with 
democracy. The judiciary and the media have dutifully beheaded 
Delhi's poor

Nivedita Menon & Aditya Nigam

In a leading English daily, a congratulatory report on "the improved 
quality of air in Delhi" after slum demolitions was jubilantly 
endorsed a day later by a letter from a worthy citizen who had 
noticed this too. But, alas, this is scarcely enough. All is not well 
in Delhi-en-route-to-Paris. There is bad news on the teledensity 
front. On the very morning of the day that was to see police firing 
on massive protests against the sealing of hundreds of small shops in 
Seelampur, concerned newspaper readers learnt from a front-page 
report in another daily that even "strife-torn Sri Lanka" has crossed 
the 17 percent "mobile teledensity" mark, while in India the 
teledensity in rural areas is "roughly where it was at Independence". 
Shame.

Two days prior to this, a small news report on the inside pages 
stated that a washerman, Satan Singh, allegedly threatened to kill an 
official of the Gurgaon administration at her residence. He used to 
come regularly to her house to collect laundry, but had reportedly 
lost his mental balance after his house was demolished in a drive 
conducted by her department a few weeks earlier.

Psychiatrists from institutions like vimhans have been reporting an 
increasing incidence of depression "that is pushing several towards 
suicide and extreme reactions". For every one person who comes to the 
notice of vimhans, there are hundreds of others who cannot, and about 
whom we will only know when something untoward happens. They are the 
Satan Singhs who will increasingly haunt Indian cities of the future, 
leaving the elite nervous about stopping their cars at traffic lights 
for fear of being robbed or killed, and forcing them to enjoy their 
fresh air within the confines of high-security, gated neighbourhoods.

Far-fetched? But this is precisely the scenario in many South 
American cities since the 1980s, and in most big cities of that great 
dreamland of the Indian elite, the USA. According to recent studies 
of Brazilian cities, since the 1970s, urban inequality and exclusion 
in places like Sao Paulo and Rio de Janeiro have been steadily 
increasing. Forced removal of people from the countryside in the 80s 
contributed to the swelling of an already crowded urban periphery. 
Fear of crime has become the overwhelming national problem. Terrified 
middle and upper classes have sought refuge in high-security 
buildings. As Gianpaolo Baiocchi has pointed out, the most recent, 
must-have item for wealthy elites is a helicopter - one of the 
growing fleet of personal helicopters that crowd Sao Paulo's skyline 
at sunset as businesspeople avoid traffic and crime below.

The celebratory party of the Indian elite, however, continues, 
unmindful of the explosive situation that is developing all around 
us. Propelled by a judiciary with no accountability and a media that 
is deeply implicated in this new game, there has emerged a 
technocratic elite which desires hypermodern cities cleansed of all 
the 'mess' and 'irrationality' that comes with democracy and the 
people.

But who are the hundreds of thousands who need to be driven out of 
the cities? Where do they all come from? They come from another 
India, where the cataclysmic crisis of agriculture has produced 
farmers' suicides in alarming numbers, while those who do not kill 
themselves drift into the margins of cities. These ghosts haunting 
urban slums are not characters in that best-selling story, the one in 
which the heroes are mall-builders, or telephone companies and 
mobile-toting shoppers heroically raising the nation's teledensity. 
They are the tragic heroes of another story, one punctuated by police 
firings.

Tribal people displaced by mining interests in Kalinga Nagar, Orissa 
(police firing). Farmers of Dadri, Uttar Pradesh, who lost their 
lands when the government acquired them cheaply to be handed over to 
a private company (police firing). Fisherfolk thrown out of their 
livelihood by the construction of the Gangavaram port in 
Vishakhapatnam (police firing).

Not to mention the thousands driven off their land to destitution by 
big dams past and future, and from lost towns like Harsud, drowned by 
the Indira Sagar dam on the Narmada. All of them pouring relentlessly 
into the cities. Who can stop this avalanche of development refugees? 
The judiciary ensures, and sections of the media celebrate, the 
dispossession of Indian citizens both from out there (their villages) 
and right here ('our' cities). Principles of justice aside, instincts 
of sheer self-preservation ought to tell them this cannot go on 
forever. (These days, when judges condemn the "violation of natural 
justice", they mean that multinational corporations, poor things, did 
not get their say, as when the Kerala government cruelly banned 
colas.)

Responding to a plea against slum demolitions recently, a Supreme 
Court judge said sharply - humne unko yahan nahin bulaya. We did not 
invite them here. Your Honour, aap hi ne bulaya. Every court 
judgement allowing big dams and other mega-development projects, 
ignoring petitions from popular movements, drags thousands to the 
backyard of your air-conditioned homes - which you then proceed to 
clean up mercilessly.

So what about illegal encroachments in Delhi? You would have to be 
particularly stupid (or motivated) not to notice where the sealings 
and demolition drives began. Seelampur and Nangla Maachhi, not South 
Extension and Khan Market. Why does the court refuse to take 
cognisance of the fact that none of the big land sharks have been 
touched? The choice to start sealings with "unauthorised commercial 
structures" in these soft, even "sensitive" (read Muslim-dominated), 
neighbourhoods suggests a deeper nexus operating a different levels. 
The effort is to completely obliterate the distinction between actual 
violations by land grabbers and the subsistence activity of the poor 
for whom small-scale 'commercial activities' from their homes are 
their only means of survival. These are people who use one corner of 
their tiny over-crowded houses to do home-based or piece-rated work, 
or to cook different kinds of eatables that they then sell on the 
streets in their rehris and khomchas.

Such is the rhetoric of self-righteous anger and indignation in 
sections of the corporate media at the violation of thecourt's orders 
by "commercial and business interests" that you might begin to wonder 
whether they have turned Leftist! The truth is that they are 
deliberately whitewashing this absolutely crucial difference between 
land sharks on the one hand and the poor on the other, clinging 
precariously to the margins of the city.

The self-delusion of the media and the new technocratic elite knows 
no bounds. They insist that these eruptions are the doing of a 
handful of miscreants who are all portrayed as encroachers and 
illegal settlers. One newspaper, for instance, discovered only 
several days after the violence and firing that "contrary to popular 
belief, none of the arrested 120 people in Seelampur is a trader, 
they are all daily wage labourers". Popular belief? Anyone travelling 
in buses or the metro or autorickshaws in those days, or anyone who 
simply talked to ordinary people, would have picked up what everyone 
was saying on the roads of Delhi - garib aur kya karenge. From the 
word go, the popular belief was that lakhs of daily wagers, who were 
losing their jobs and habitat, were out on the streets. Boss, yeh 
public sab janti hai. What you self-servingly call popular belief is 
your own delusion.

Here's another "anguished" cry from the heart of a high court judge - 
"They are murdering the Delhi Master Plan (DMP)!" So here's a crazy 
suggestion. Just Do It. Murder the thing, and in its place let the 
people live. What is this "mixed land use" the courts and the makers 
of the DMP consider the most hideous sin? It simply means lively 
organic neighbourhoods, with local markets, local networks, local 
schools, local everything, so that people are not travelling for 
hours every day back and forth, choking the roads with 
ever-increasing traffic. The DMP is out-of- date, based on 
discredited notions of urban planning, and promotes unsustainable 
cityscapes.

Meanwhile, a question for the world's largest democracy. Who is 
sovereign? The will of the people? Or the will of the technocratic 
elite accountable to nobody? Governments elected by the people are 
answerable to them alone, and the usurpation of this power by a 
judicial coup d'etat is no less troubling than an Army takeover. 
Indeed, every Army coup legitimises itself with the same language - 
order, discipline, cleaning up the mess created by uncontrolled 
democracy.

Meanwhile, there was a military coup d'etat in Thailand. TV viewers 
watching the mayhem in Seelampur were therefore reassured by the 
strip of text below, continuously reiterating that all Indians in 
Thailand were safe. On the streets of Delhi, they certainly were not.

Menon is a Delhi University reader in political science, Nigam is a 
fellow of the Centre for the Study of Developing Societies

Oct 07 , 2006

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