[Reader-list] yamuna pushta

[Monica Narula]

Dear all

Today morning Diya and I visited the site for
demolitions at Yamuna
Pushta New Delhi to take photographs which could be
circulated into the 
wider public. Nothing I saw there, can I really
describe in words, or at 
least in a few words. What was earlier a human
settlement was now rubble. 
Bombed and razed.War zone. Somewhere black and burned.
Everywhere debris, with 
the landscape broken by human faces and a numb
everydayness as people 
cooked in private places turned public and bathed in
the open. Vegetable 
sellers with fresh vegetables which contrasted the
black mortar and grime only 
served to highlight the will of a human being to
maintain a sense of dignity 
even when a state can in a moment reduce people to
rubble.

It is a site of power. The police are arresting those
who has the
termity to question or the dignity to stand up. A
local woman, sitting on a 
charpoy outside a blackened wall and a frontless home
, could no longer 
hold her fury. "May his (Jagmohan's) grave be here. In
this the park he is 
going to build, over the fury of the poor?." Other
looked on, cynical and unspeaking.

A man was furiously digging to implant a rope peg for
his makeshift
tent, in a sea of rubble. Another man somewhere must
have with even less 
effort signed a paper authorizing such destruction.
How a hand can do such different things. One vested
with the brutal power of the state and another with
just the power to wield a hammer. What then did
citizenship mean? Or nationhood?

However not to turn this into a lament, but just as a
reminder that here in Yamuna Pushta is taking place a
complete subjugation of what may consider human. It
has so many  dimensions, as also I am sure so many 
narratives, that encompassing all one felt and
underwent in a couple of hours 
is impossible. While some people are trying to have
those arrested 
bailed, or trying to raise the stoic media. or
planning srtatergy to resist 
and subvert, for others just a visit to the site can
be a grim reminder 
of the grim times which we live in. Of times which
have probably remained unchanged.

ravi agarwal

H-2 Jangpura Ext.
New Delhi - 110014
ph: 24328006/ 24320711
fax: 24321747



	
	
		
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