An eight-year-old boy picking out coins and tetra packs from his father’s demolished juice box; a woman weeping and begging before the authorities as a JCB razes her house and shop; people kneeling down over the rubble, scrambling to collect pieces of what’s left.
The North Delhi Municipal Corporation’s snap ‘anti-encroachment demolition drive’ in Delhi’s Jahangirpuri area has left behind a wreckage — of shops, houses, and hope and aspirations.
This wasn’t your usual demolition. North MCD mayor Raja Iqbal Singh called it “normal routine work”, but the bulldozers that reached the area early Wednesday morning seemed to be marching forward on the same wheels that propelled them in Uttar Pradesh, Gujarat and Madhya Pradesh — to teach a lesson to the accused and alleged rioters. The Jahangirpuri demolition came soon after Delhi BJP President wrote to the civic body’s mayor, asking him to identify “illegal encroachments” and constructions by those arrested after communal violence broke out in the area during a Hanuman Jayanti rally Saturday.
Demolitions often carry the political messaging, with governments having used bulldozers in the name of development, beautification and the promise of building mega cities. Both the AAP and the BJP had used the tagline ‘Jahan Jhuggi, Wahan Makaan’ while campaigning for the 2015 assembly elections and the 2017 municipal elections in Delhi.
However, the past few months have made bulldozer a weapon to further the anti-Muslim narrative, giving them their big communal break. And that is why demolitions is ThePrint’s Newsmaker of the Week.
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Masterplan, is it?
Delhi’s first master plan, chalked out in 1962, aimed to create a clean, ordered and planned city. Research notes that while construction workers and labourers migrated from neighboring states to help achieve this vision, the plan did not ensure any legal settlement for these workers.
Consequently, scholars point out, the building of planned Delhi was mirrored in the simultaneous mushrooming of unplanned Delhi.
Since then, demolitions in Delhi have been synonymous with ‘clearing spaces’, ‘cleaning up the city’, ‘beautification’, and as being directly linked to the creation of new spaces for the ‘rising culture of malls and parking lots’. Successive governments have cited one or more of these reasons to conclude that ‘squatters’, slum dwellers and hawkers simply do not spark joy, as Marie Kondo would call it, and have used the bulldozers to demolish entire settlements.
Take 1970s, for example. During the Emergency imposed by the Indira Gandhi government, within a mere 21 months, an estimated 700,000 people were displaced from slums and commercial properties, including large areas of the Old City. A total of over 150,000 structures were demolished. This is usually attributed to Sanjay Gandhi’s “beautify Delhi” plan.
In December of 2015, at the peak of Delhi’s cruel winters, 1,200-odd jhuggis of Shakur Basti in Delhi were razed to the ground, rendering over 5,000 residents homeless, also leading to the death of a six-month-old child.
In 1990-91, the Delhi government adopted a three-pronged strategy for dealing with squatter settlements, which was reiterated in the Master Plan for Delhi 2021. This included upgrade of some clusters, which are on public land not needed by any authority for any project for the next 15-20 years, relocation of jhuggi-jhopdi clusters that are located on land required for such projects, and environmental improvement of urban slums. However, reports indicate that the focus has remained on removal of squatter settlement and “selective relocation, often conditionally and in the middle of the school year, in far off unserviced land in the outskirts of the city”.
Also read: Under BJP, Muslims are becoming new ‘bottom’ of society. It’s a message for Dalits, OBCs
‘Do you think we’re mad to create another Pakistan?’
Soon after the demolition in Jahangirpuri, AIMIM president Asaduddin Owaisi attacked the Congress, BJP and AAP all at the same time, when he called the Jahangirpuri demolitions “Turkman Gate 2022”.
Owaisi was referring to this 1976 episode.
David Selbourne’s eye-witness account, published during the Emergency, recalls, “In clouds of dust, and with children weeping beside their smashed and bulldozed hovels, as I saw myself, trucks now drive the displaced away and dump them without food, sanitation, water or building materials for “resettlement” in the name of a new politics of “discipline” and “development”.”
Similarly, the Shah Commission, which was appointed by the Janata Party government in 1977 to inquire into the illegalities committed during the Emergency, had concluded that “the manner in which demolitions were carried out in Delhi during the Emergency is an unrelieved story of illegality, callousness and of sickening sycophancy by the senior officers to play to the whims of Sanjay Gandhi.”
Shops in Jama Masjid area, including those belonging to the Waqf Board were demolished by the civic bodies. As per the Shah Commission report, this was done “in pursuance of the beautification plans drawn up by the DDA”. The commission was told that “10-12 companies of DAP and CRPF were deployed and at one stage tear gas was used on a limited scale to disperse the crowds”.
Amid this ‘beautification drive’ came arguably the most infamous of demolitions in the history of national capital in May 1976 in the Muslim neighbourhood of Turkman Gate, where the police had to open fire before completing its operations.
Before the demolition, when a delegation of Turkman Gate residents, anxious of losing their livelihoods, approached the Delhi Development Authority to ask if the people might be resettled together in a single colony, then DDA vice-chairman Jagmohan is reported to have replied, “Do you think we are mad to destroy one Pakistan to create another Pakistan?”
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‘Slum demolition machine’
There are provisions to ensure safeguards around demolitions generally. For instance, the Delhi Municipal Corporation Act 1957 provides a comprehensive procedure for a notice to be served ahead of demolishing any building that has been constructed illegally, without sanction, or in violation of building bylaws. No demolition, it says, unless the person has been given a reasonable opportunity of showing cause as to why their building shouldn’t be razed.
While another provision of the same law allows removal of anything being illegally sold on a public street or a public place without notice, Supreme Court’s interventions and subsequent schemes have ensured that street vendors and hawkers also receive adequate notice before their stalls are demolished.
Courts have also spoken about the “right to the city”, laying down tall principles on the rights of slum-dwellers to adequate housing, and protection from forced evictions.
However, when it comes to slum dwellers, experts have even explained how public interest litigations in courts have also served as a “slum demolition machine”. The judiciary has, in several cases, blamed the slums for the solid waste problem, asserted that “rewarding an encroacher on public land with a free alternate site is like giving a reward to a pickpocket”, and even ordered slum demolitions in Delhi–from Yamuna Pushta to Nangla Machi.
Even in the celebrated Olga Tellis case, which is often cited to evoke the right to livelihood as a fundamental right, the eviction of pavement and slum dwellers was finally upheld.
Also read: Indian Constitution was bulldozed between Ram Navami & Hanuman Jayanti. It needs to be rescued
The big communal break
However, over the past few months, demolitions now seem to have finally gotten their big communal break, produced, directed and written by the Yogi Adityanath government in Uttar Pradesh. What was initially a regional production is now beginning to be adapted by various other ‘production houses’–each success making the newer version ‘bolder and grander’, as they say, until the bulldozers finally reached the national capital.
While the people of Jahangirpuri were still collecting the remains of their possessions through the rubble, photos and videos of British Prime Minister Boris Johnson jumping onto a bulldozer and waving from it at a new JCB factory in Gujarat went viral.
The Supreme Court ordering status quo in Jahangirpuri has put a brake on these bulldozers for now. But who knows when they will appear in any other part of the country, ready to make a statement and send a message to the ‘target’ group?
(Edited by Anurag Chaubey)