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?

Fighting urban fires

Cityscapes column on InfoChange India News & Features

By Kalpana Sharma The urban poor do not worry about earthquakes or floods as much as they do about fires that frequently destroy their inflammable, densely-packed dwellings. In Mumbai, where half the population lives and works from slums, there is no disaster management plan, and only 1,503 fire hydrants out of 10,371 work. This year the monsoon seems to be taking its time to recede. Just when reports began appearing in the media about the monsoon ending, vast swathes of Karnataka, Andhra Pradesh and parts of Maharashtra were flooded as unusually heavy rains led to widespread devastation. While seasonal floods are a hazard faced in many parts of India (and they usually get more coverage in the media if they also affect the bigger cities), the frequent disasters that visit particularly poor people in urban areas throughout the year are often overlooked. Even during the rains, the poor suffer far more than those living in permanent housing. Each year, the monsoon rains in Mumbai bring with them landslides that bury scores of hutments occupied by the city’s burgeoning population of urban poor. Despite repeated notices from the municipal corporation, these people continue to perch on hill slopes and remain optimistic that they will survive the monsoon, because they simply do not have an alternative. Perhaps in recognition of this, the Slum Improvement Board, under the Maharashtra Housing and Area Development Authority (MHADA), builds retaining walls on vulnerable hillsides. But every year, most of these retaining walls give way under the weight of accumulated silt and water seepage, which weaken the walls. When the wall breaks, it is like a dam that has burst. The force of the water, boulders and mud is much greater than in a normal landslide. In its path, flimsy homes and the belongings of scores of poor people are swept away. On September 4, 2009, a huge landslide killed 11 people in Mumbai’s Saki Naka area. Not far from the site of this disaster is another site that was affected during the July 26, 2005, rains and where 73 people died. Earlier, in the year 2000, 78 people were killed in a landslide in Azad Nagar, Ghatkopar. Of the 107 landslide-prone areas identified by the BMC, most are in the Saki Naka area. Many of the retaining walls are, in any case, notional. In 2009, for instance, according to newspapers, the Maharashtra government sanctioned Rs 17.4 crore for 183 retaining walls to be repaired, constructed or built. But work sanctioned in 2007 was still pending -- of the 199 works sanctioned that year, only 111 were completed, 58 were still being worked on, and 30 had not yet started. Such disasters cannot be called ‘natural’. Nature might help speed them up, but they are waiting to happen at any time. And the solution for these disasters is not just emergency measures and disaster plans but a long-term vision of how to deal with the housing crisis for the poor in cities like Mumbai. Even landslides get their due in the media when they happen. But there is one category of urban disaster that is not taken seriously; nor are the root causes of these accidents or disasters acknowledged. This is the disaster caused by fires that break out with uncanny regularity in the slums of most big cities. Fires in well-known locations -- in high-rises where the better-off live and work -- draw considerable attention from the government and the media. Usually, after a fire in an office building in a metro city, the media runs articles on fire hazards in high-rises, raises questions about whether the fire department is adequately equipped to deal with such fires, whether buildings are following the fire safety norms, whether the space around the buildings is adequate for fire engines and for firemen to operate during such disasters, etc. But increasingly, a major section of India’s urban population does not work and live in such buildings. In Mumbai, for instance, more than half the population lives and works out of informal structures, many built of extremely inflammable material. Fires in slums are so common that they pass unnoticed except when they spread and threaten nearby formal structures, or when there is notable loss of life. Mike Davis, in his book Planet of Slums, points out: “The urban poor do not lose much sleep at night worrying about earthquakes or even floods. Their chief anxiety is a more frequent and omnipresent threat: fire. Slums, not Mediterranean brush or Australian eucalypti as claimed in some textbooks, are the world’s premier fire ecology. The mixture of inflammable dwellings, extraordinary density, and dependence on open fires for heat and cooking is a superlative recipe for spontaneous combustion. A simple accident with cooking gas or kerosene can quickly become a mega-fire that destroys hundreds or even thousands of dwellings. Fire spreads through shanties at extraordinary velocity and fire-fighting vehicles, if they respond, are often unable to negotiate narrow slum lanes.” (To read the rest of the article, click on the link above)