[Reader-list] Wishing away urban homelessness

[Shivam Vij]

Slums razed to suit Delhi's middle class
Tens of thousands are made homeless to make way for a
leisure complex

By Raekha Prasad in Delhi
The Observer / 2 May 2004
http://www.observer.co.uk
http://groups.yahoo.com/group/zest-india/message/547 

Mohammed Ibrahim woke to Delhi's sun and waited for
his life to collapse. He had
known it was inevitable from the blaring megaphone
driven past his door the day
before. By 6 am three generations of the rickshaw
driver's family had ferried
their possessions into the open. Just after 9 am, six
bulldozers crushed to
rubble the two-room home he had built.

With the machines, Ibrahim says, came more than 1,000
police officers carrying
tear gas and batons. They destroyed his neighbours'
houses too. Up to a third of
a million people living in Delhi's biggest slum are
being evicted under a
government plan to transform the banks of the city's
Yamuna river into a tourist
and leisure centre.

'Ibrahim said: 'Without my home, I feel like a dead
man.'

Most of the 150,000 people whose homes have been
destroyed in the past fortnight
earn around 2,000 rupees a month (£25) as domestic
servants, rag pickers,
construction workers and rickshaw drivers. They have
no option but to live among
clumps of rubble, facing police intimidation when they
try to erect makeshift
shelters.

Slum clearances are central to the government's plan
to make over the capital.
Delhi is India's richest city, with a burgeoning and
vocal middle class
impatient for the trappings of a twenty-first-century
consumer lifestyle.

Road building and the construction of a metro have all
swept away slums.

'The guilt about inequity and poverty of 10 years ago
has vanished with the
triumph of the middle class,' said Ravi Agarwal,
director of the environmental
group Toxics Link. 'Now discrimination against
landless, lower-caste people is
dressed up in language about a "clean future".'

Neighbouring the half-demolished slum is one of the
world's great Islamic
imperial sites - the seventeenth-century city of Old
Delhi. There is the
sprawling heritage site of the Red Fort, the Jama
Masjid - India's biggest
mosque - and the renowned market Chandi Chowk.

Slum clearances have proved problematic for
administrations trying to reconcile
development with the interests of poor people. Their
role in authoritarian and
violent episodes in Indian recent history has been
vividly dramatised in novels
such as Rohinton Mistry's A Fine Balance and Mira
Nair's Salaam Bombay.

Temples, some dating back 30 years to when the first
dwellers moved in, are all
that's left of the Yamuna slum. Those still living
among the rubble pull out
plastic bags stuffed with their voting and ration
cards, without which the poor
are deprived of everything.

India's Tourism and Cultural Minister, Jagmohan, is
spearheading the Yamuna
evictions and talks of reviving the area. As the
right-hand man of Indira
Gandhi's son Sanjay, Jagmohan - who only uses his
surname - gained notoriety in
the 1970s for taking charge of slum clearance
programmes during Indira Gandhi's
'Emergency', when India's democracy was suspended.

The exercise then, as now, was to reclaim the city
from the 'illegal
encroachments' that had enveloped many of Delhi's
monuments.

Dunu Roy, director of the Hazards Centre, a charity
that supports community
groups, said of the present clearances: 'All
citizenship rights have been
snatched away. It's ruthless and inhuman.'

In the midst of India's general election, activists
argue that Jagmohan, a
member of the ruling Hindu nationalist Bharatiya
Janata Party (BJP), will
benefit from the timing. Delhi goes to the polls this
week and the majority of
the slum dwellers are Muslims who traditionally
support the opposition Congress
party. Although contingencies for relocating evicted
families were promised by
the Government, relief agencies estimate that only a
quarter have been moved.

For a plot the size of a garden shed on Delhi's limits
some 35km away from the
slum, they must pay the equivalent of three months'
wages. Unable to afford to
travel such a long journey, many have lost their jobs.

Jai Narayan Mahot is one of them. Standing in front of
a brick pile that was once his home on the relocation
site of Holambi Kalan, he is waiting to rebuild. His
cigarette shop inside the slum was also destroyed. He
will travel back to the banks of the river to vote for
the Congress party.

'I want to defeat Jagmohan and the BJP for putting us
here. They have done nothing for us,' he said.
'They're against the poor.'


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