[Assam] Now from Tehelka

[Chan Mahanta]

Good to hear from you Mridul. No, I was not 
worried that you or others in Dilli would be 
offended. I am worried about my ex-pat friends 
with delicate sensitivities :-).

But I will be very interested in hearing about your perspective on things.

In the meantime all the best to whoever is not 
well. I hope it is nothing serious.

c-da









At 1:12 AM -0700 10/1/06, Mridul Bhuyan wrote:
>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 her'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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