Lawbreakers, not quite citizens: ‘Bulldozer’ reportage shows how little India cares for urban poor

 Broken News

Published in Newslaundry on April 28, 2022

Link: https://www.newslaundry.com/2022/04/28/lawbreakers-not-quite-citizens-bulldozer-reportage-shows-how-little-india-cares-for-urban-poor

Predictably, Jahangirpuri has slipped off the radar. The high drama of April 20, as excavators – or bulldozers, in popular parlance – razed homes, shops, walls, gates, food carts, awnings, and temporary and permanent structures has ended, at least for the moment, as we await the verdict of the Supreme Court of India.

But in the court of popular opinion, as determined by the tone and substance of the media coverage of Jahangirpuri, the verdict has already been delivered. And it reads: “The state has the right to use force to deal with ‘illegals’ and ‘encroachers’, and to punish those suspected of rioting, even if there is no proof.”

The other message, barely hidden, is that this is what awaits Muslims who so much as dare to raise their heads, even if a few Hindus also suffer as collateral damage.

Television news in this country has already fallen so low that it is hard to imagine it could go lower. But it has and it did, on April 20. There are no words to describe the craven, callous and gross coverage of the brutal actions by the municipal authorities in Delhi that not only rendered people homeless and crushed their sources of livelihood, but also sent out a frightening message to lakhs of others like them.

Instead of showing an iota of sensitivity, a section of TV journalists shouted, climbed onto bulldozers, and remained in perpetual exclamation mode as they recorded the mayhem. To get a glimpse of this, take time to watch this edition of TV Newsance by Newslaundry. It will illustrate better than any words what television news has been reduced to in this country. To term it farcical would be a gross understatement.

The behaviour of some TV reporters and anchors on April 20 has also underlined how far the media, and many journalists, have travelled from the concepts that undergird the role of the media in a democracy. Our job is not to kick people who are already crushed by poverty and unemployment; it is to hold to account the people with power. On April 20, we did just the opposite.

Apart from the basic message that the demolitions at Jahangirpuri, as well as in Madhya Pradesh’s Khargone and in Gujarat, seek to send out, there is a backstory that also needs to be understood and addressed by the media.

Our job is not to kick people who are already crushed by poverty and unemployment; it is to hold to account the people with power. On April 20, we did just the opposite.

This is the egregious ways in which governments, and city authorities, constantly use and misuse laws against the urban poor.

I live in the city of Mumbai where an estimated 50 percent of the population lives in semi-permanent housing. In the eyes of the authorities, some of these settlements are “encroachments” on land marked for other purposes, even if that purpose has remained unfulfilled for decades.

As a result, the sword of demolition hangs over the heads of lakhs of poor people who continue to find work and survive in this so-called Maximum City.

The reality, of course, is that in Mumbai, even the very minimum by way of basic services is not provided to close to half the population.

A recent study prepared under the Mumbai Climate Action Plan noted that 41.7 percent of the city's population uses community toilets. A toilet in every home is still a distant dream. Many of these so-called community toilets are in such poor condition as to be unusable. Children often squat on the open land in front or behind the toilets. Old people are compelled to use the open drains running past their homes, as even in many of the settled, or "regularised" slums, there is no sewerage system. And increasingly, people are building toilets inside their tiny houses and the waste is being flushed out into open drains that run through these settlements.

This is the state of affairs in India's richest city.

If you are a reporter based in any Indian city, the urban poor are a reality who cannot be wished away. They are driven to cities because they have no means of livelihood in their villages. And many have lived decades in impermanent housing, even on pavements, or alongside railway lines, because even if they found work, they could not find a place to live.

These settlements of the urban poor have a history, linked to migration but also to demolition. Jahangirpuri, for instance, was designated to resettle people pushed out from the heart of Delhi in efforts by the Indira Gandhi government to “beautify” the national capital. That term has increasingly come to mean that you either hide the poor, or send them far away so that urban poverty is invisiblised.

The people who were settled in Jahangirpuri in the 1970s were given small plots on which they were expected to construct their shelters. These people had originally come to Delhi from UP, Bihar, Rajasthan and West Bengal. Over time, as with most other similar settlements, tin and tarpaulin were replaced with brick and mortar, and pucca houses coexisted with temporary structures – all under the benign eye of the authorities.

Yet, this history of the place, and understanding of what it was and how and why it is what it is today, was largely missing from the reporting on Jahangirpuri. We read about events on the day of the demolition, the loss to so many families, and the desperation with which people tried to save their belongings. But for people living outside Delhi, it was hard to understand where this place is, how it was established, and who were the people who lived there.

For the majority of viewers of television, however, the story was complete on that day itself. The municipal authorities had acted, they had removed encroachments and illegality, and they had sent a powerful message to those who think they can get away with violating the law. Laughable as that is in this country, where respect for the law is the lowest amongst the powerful and the well-heeled, it is this distorted narrative that is being pushed by much of the media.

We have seen this happen in the past in many cities. In Mumbai, for instance, demolitions were almost a daily occurrence in some parts of the city, particularly after the 1970s. Newspapers would report these demolitions, but we also read about “slum dwellers and citizens”, as if these were two mutually exclusive categories. Such reporting perpetuated the belief that anyone living in a slum was an “illegal” and that the municipality was right in demolishing such slums.

In Mumbai, demolitions were almost a daily occurrence in some parts of the city, particularly after the 1970s. Newspapers would report these demolitions, but we also read about “slum dwellers and citizens”, as if these were two mutually exclusive categories.

In 1981, at the height of the Mumbai monsoon, the then chief minister of Maharashtra, AR Antulay, conducted a demolition drive against pavement dwellers and slum dwellers that is memorable for its callousness. In response, journalist Olga Tellis and others filed a case in the Supreme Court arguing that even the poor were guaranteed the right to life and livelihood like any other citizen of India and that their shelters could not be demolished without notice and without giving them an alternative. The judgement in the case, delivered in 1985 by a constitution bench, has much in it that is relevant even today.

The court held that pavement dwellers should not be treated as trespassers. “The encroachments committed by these persons are involuntary acts in the sense that those acts are compelled by inevitable circumstances and are not guided by choice.”

Today, this kind of understanding of the reality of the lives of the urban poor is missing, not only amongst the class that does not have to fear loss of shelter, but also in much of the media. As a result, you get reports depicting the poor not only as lawbreakers but also their settlements as eyesores that need to be cleared out to “beautify” our cities.

In the three decades and more since the Olga Tellis ruling, attitudes towards the urban poor have hardly changed. You realise this if you revisit the 1984 documentary Bombay, Our City by Anand Patwardhan. It could have been made in the India of today.

The reporting on Jahangirpuri reminds us yet again how the media “discovers” poor and marginalised people only when something dramatic happens, such as a demolition. They forget that for the urban poor, the very process of survival, as Patwardhan's film so graphically portrays, is a daily drama. These are the stories we ought to be recording and reporting, rather than waiting for their lives to be literally crushed under a bulldozer.

In Modi's 'new India', the bulldozer replaces the justice system

 In the light of the callous actions of the BJP-led municipal corporation on North Delhi, where on the morning on April 20, seven bulldozers accompanied by more than 1000 policemen went on a destruction spree in Jahangirpuri in Delhi, I was reminded of similar events in my city of Mumbai. 

In Delhi, under full media glare, the municipal bulldozers destroyed handcarts, shops, workshops, awnings, the gate to a Masjid and much more.  Crucially, they destroyed the lives of poor people.

Despite the intervention of the Supreme Court ordering them to stop and maintain the status quo, they continued for well over an hour.  The result was a tragic tale that is all too familiar to anyone living in a city in India: arbitrary demolition of homes, shops, sources of livelihood of the poor and often Muslims, with no notice and no chance to find a solution.

Living as I do, in Mumbai, I have followed and written about the lives of the urban poor for decades.  Just to jog my own memory, I am pasting below some of the columns and articles I have written.

The first is from my colum The Other Half, that I wrote for over 30 years, first in Indian Express and thereafter in The Hindu. It was in response to a statement made by Shiv Sena supremo, the late Bal Thackeray,  that Mumbai was not an "orphange" that could accommodate poor people from other parts of India. At that time, one of the main planks of the Sena was the anti-outsider campaign, singling out people from Bihar and UP, without acknowledging that many of these people had lived for decades in Mumbai, worked here, and that this was the only home they knew.

This was also the time the Shiv Sena government in Maharashtra had launched a scheme to rehouse some slumdwellers, only those considered "legal", that is those that had been documented in a survey conducted in 1976.  The large numbers outside this list were "illegal", especially the pavement dwellers, and hence not entitled to an alternative if they were cleared off the pavements, as they were. In the course of time, the "cut-off" date for legality was extended from 1976, to 1980, 1985 and finally to 2000.

As a result, many of the women I write about did finally get a pucca house in a slum redevelopment building.  They could negotiate with the authorities because they were organised.  Others in similar circumstances did not fare as well. Over the last two decades or so, a large number of slums have been redeveloped and poor people have got housing.  But the numbers of the homeless remain virtually unchanged, and pavement slums and so-called "illegal" settlements still exist, on side roads, on patches of low-lying lands, away from the view of visitors to the city. The stories of the people who continue to live like this even today are not very different from Sameena, Madina, Sakina or Kusum. 

The difference between what happened in Jahangirpuri on April 20, and demolitions in Mumbai in the past is that here they were not used to selectively target one community.  The poor were considered to be a problem because they came in the way of infrasturcture or use of land they were squatting on for some other purpose (like building a shopping mall!)  A few times, the bogey of "illegal Bangladeshis" was used by the Shiv Sena to demolish slums where Bengali-speaking mostly Muslim migrants lived.  But never so blatant as what happened in Delhi, and the weeks before this in Khargone, MP and even earlier in UP, during the first term of UP Chief Minister Yogi Adiyanath, otherwise known as "Bulldozer Baba".

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From the archives

 

The Hindu, Sunday Magazine, April 2, 1995

 

The Other Half

 

An open letter to Balasaheb

 

Dear Sir,

 

My name is Seema, or it could be Sakina, or Sameena or Madina or Kusum.  My actual name is immaterial.  I am not trying to hide my identity but as there are so many who are like me, and who feel the same way I do, my acual name is of no consequence.

 

I am writing this letter because I am told that you have declared that Bombay -- Mumbai -- is not an "orphanage" and that it cannot afford to hold out a welcome to other like me.  Why, Sir, do you compare this city to an orphanage and people like us to orphans?

 

I came here 30 years ago from Madhubani in Bihar.  We were a family of weavers but most of us had no work.  We heard that Bombay was a city where the poorest of the poor could earn enough to survive.  So, without ever having stepped outside my village, I caught a train to Bombay.

 

When we arrived here, we were overwhelmed.  The city was huge -- I had never in my life seen such a big place.  It was also frightening at first.  But soon we found that we were not alone.  There were many more like us who had come here for the first time.

 

Although we did not know a soul, we settled down on a patch of pavement and began looking for work.  After some days, we were pleased to discover that there were many others from our district who had also come to Bombay.  Gradually, some of us congregated in the same area.  We have lived there ever since.

 

Every now and then, the municipality comes with its demolition squads to clear us out.  But after extracting some money from us and stealing some our things, they leave us alone.  So we rebuild our shelters and continue our lives.

 

I can think of many terms to use to describe this city, but an orphanage?  No, Sir, Bombay is not an orphanage.  In an orphanage, the children have a roof over their heads and are given food, free of charge, to eat.  Some of them are even adopted by kind-hearted rich people.

 

We, who came here several decades ago, have still not got a roof over our heads and there is certainly no one who gives us free food.  Nor has anyone adopted us. We pay for everything.

 

We have survived because we must, there is no other option.  We sleep wherever we find a vacant space, on a pavement, on the railway platform, in a park, on a empty disused plot of land, along the railway tracks, anywhere.  Today, this little space, where a grown person cannot stand upright, is our only home.  We dream of better days to come but wonder if they will come within our lifetime, or even that of our children.

 

In this place which you call an orphanage, few people have bothered to find out how we survive.  We live by our wits.  Our men, even today, earn a daily wage pushing haathgadis (handcarts) or loading and unloading goods at the different bunders (docks).  We women spend the first three hours of every day, from 4.30 a.m. hunting for water.  Will we get it from the fire-hydrant today, or from a person living in a pucca chawl, or from a hand-drawn water tanker?  After having begged for water, we get on with the day's work -- cleaning other people's houses, cooking food for them, washing their clothes (we usually do not have enough water to wash our own every day), taking care of their children, and whenever there is a moment to spare, doing piece rate work at home to earn a little more.  Our day's work never ends.

 

With what we earn from these multitude of jobs, we have fed ourselves and our children.  It is not a luxurious existence by any standards.  But it is far better than the life we left behind.  Now we hear that you will not permit our jaatwaalas from our village to join us if they are in trouble.  Why?

 

Tell us, in what way are we a burden to the city? Have we demanded free houses? We pay for water.  In fact, we are told that those of us who live on pavements pay up to 20 times as much as those who live in pucca buildings and get a running supply of filtered municipal water.  We also pay each time we use a toilet.  Nothing comes free to us.

 

We hear that you have promised that you will build 40 lakh houses and give them free to people living in slums.  You are worried that such a scheme will lead to people "pouring in" from other states.  You are quoted as having said, "Where will they live and eat and what about hygiene? It could trigger an epidemic. Life here will become miserable."

 

But life is already miserable for millions of people in Bombay, yet all of them live and eat and there are no major epidemics.  It is not a way of life that we would recommend.  But despite such promises, none of us who live like this seriously believe that we will ever be "given" decent houses, free of charge.  Life in this city has taught us to listen to everyone but to believe only what experience has taught us. And if we have no such illusions, why should our brethren back in our home states?  Rest assured, Sir, they will not come pouring in to Bombay even if you do succeed in building some houses and giving them free to a chosen few.

 

In fact, all we want is the right to live.  We are constantly told, specially before elections, that every person living in this country, man or woman, rich or poor, has equal rights.  Yet, now it appears that only the rich have rights.  No one tells them not to move from one city to another in search of better opportunity.  But if we do the same, we are compared to orphans and told we must stay where we are and starve rather than strive for a better life. Is this fair? Or are we not entitled to ask even that question?