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.

The road to nowhere

My rant in Mumbai Mirror against the crazy idea of building a coastal road in Mumbai.

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If you are one of the lucky seven per cent of Mumbai's citizens, you are in for good times. As a car owner, you are being promised a smooth, scenic ride along the city's gorgeous coastline. But if you are one of the unfortunate 93 per cent of the Mumbai's population, you must continue to live with the existing public transport system with a few incremental crumbs thrown your way.

Put simply, this is what the grand Western Coastal Road plan that the Maharashtra government is pushing ahead with means - Rs 12,000 crore and more to be spent for less than seven per cent of the population. The enormous cost to benefit a few is not the only reason we, as Mumbai's 93 per cent, need to wake up and understand the consequences of this foolhardy plan. It is a plan that runs counter to received wisdom from around the world about what makes cities liveable for all citizens.

The supreme irony of the government's grand project is that the Dutch government has offered to help. In Holland, cars are discouraged; people walk, cycle, use buses and trains. For a country that has learned to live with the sea, a road along its coastline for cars would be inconceivable. Yet, with investment opportunities drying up in Europe, the Dutch have found a reason to encourage this foolishness on other shores.

Forget the Dutch, for a moment. What about us Mumbaikars? Our litany of complaints about the way this city is managed never ends. Yet, we seem to wake up to disasters only when it is too late.

The spirited opposition to the municipal corporation's Mumbai Development Plan 2034 earlier this year ultimately resulted in it being abandoned (although one is not confident that a new version will really be better). The process of information, consultation, and participation by the people of Mumbai proved that it is possible to reverse and even stop the government's plans if enough people decide to intervene. No such process has taken place so far on the coastal road.

Initially, the government gave hardly a month for objections. Many questions remain about the process by which the plan was finalised. For instance, how was the Environmental Impact Assessment done? And how did the Ministry of Environment and Forests give environmental clearance with such alacrity despite the adverse impact the road will have on mangroves and the tidal patterns?

The deadline for objections has been extended to August 27. But even today people living along the coast where the road will be built are not aware that this project is imminent.

If the plan goes through, what will certainly happen is that Mumbai's uniqueness, its undulating coastline, will be destroyed by an eight-lane highway running alongside it, or under it in some instances. The ramps for entry and exit from the tunnels will destroy the rocks that emerge on many parts of this coastline during low tide.

Furthermore, the planners of the project seem to be unaware that Mumbai has changed drastically in the last decade. Hence, inexplicably, the road begins in Nariman Point, an area that is getting depopulated as business has moved north for more than a decade now. It ends in Kandivali even though areas beyond that are crying for better connectivity.

If the government has Rs 12,000 crore to spare, why, we should ask, does it not invest it in public transport - enhancing and improving what exists, and adding to it? Why not put every effort to speed up the metro rail, improve existing bus systems and the commuter trains that are stressed to almost breaking point?

You don't need to be a planning wizard to realise that cities improve if you invest in whatever benefits the majority of people. Choosing public transport over private cars is a no brainer. But somehow, this kind of common sense has escaped our government. Our only option then, as citizens, is to assert our right to question and object to a road that is going to lead nowhere.