[Assam] Now from Tehelka

Mon Oct 2 23:38:08 PDT 2006

Dear Chandan Da,

  Thanks for the concern. My son was having viral fever and due to the outbreak of Dangue in Delhi, I was concerned and was busy in doing various pathological tests. Now, he is fine.

  Well, my perspective on the issue is:

  To find the root of the problem, one need to go back to the history. People from various places of India have migrated to this city in search of livelihood. After independence, people who fled Pakistan were allotted lands in Delhi in locations like Lajpat Nagar, Greater Kailash, Chittaranjan Park, Malviya Nagar etc., which have now become posh locations with a premium price tag attached to it. If u have a plot in one of these locations u need not have any other means to lead a comfortable life.

  As per the original master plan of Delhi, these places were earmarked as locations meant for residential purpose. However, due to centrality of these locations, these locations started having very lucrative commercial value and the residents started using these locations for various commercial activities with the connivance of DDA officials. 

  Secondly, various people (people who do not have much education) from other parts of India have come to Delhi in search of livelihood, who do not have any other means to survive in this costly city and lives in jhugi-jhupris, which have become the source of criminal & illegal activities. In absence of any other means to survive they started opening shops & began commercial activities illegally on road sides, obstructing the roads, which in turn creates havocs as far as traffic is concerned.

  However, few years back the RWAs (Resident Welfare Associations) started protesting against these activities and the supreme court started interfering in these illegal activities and ordered demolition of these illegal structures and sealing of the properties used for commercial activities. The sealing of these properties have raised large protests from the people using their residences for commercial activities and for quite sometime now and have disrupted normal life in Delhi. As per the protestors, the sealings have threatened their livelihood and they shall oppose it with every possible means, which have led to the untoward incidents like in Sheelampur. Now, Delhi Govt. in order to sort out things proposed changes in the master plan and proposed allowing commercial activities in some of the areas and the supreme court as well as the RWAs have objected to these proposed changes in master plan. The traders say that all this have happened due to the nexus between the
 lobby of the mall owners with the Govt. of Delhi.

  Now, who is to blame??? Thats the great question. As far as the slum dwellers are concerned the Govt. can do a lot better. Instead of playing politics, alternative arrangements such as low cost housing can be arranged for these people with the huge revenue the Municaipal Corporation of Delhi is earning and the huge grants received from the GOI.

  Regarding commercial activities in locations like Greater Kailash, Malviya Nagar, Sheelampur and so many areas of Delhi, the DDA and its corrupted officials are to be blamed for permitting these commercial activities to grow. However, all these traders are far better-off then most of the other people and they may be allotted commercial spaces by planning some malls in the city, for which Delhi have ample spaces.  

Chan Mahanta <cmahanta at charter.net> wrote:
        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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