My apologies if I am hurting anyone's feelings here :-), but what on earth is going on in Dilli?
Come-on Kharkhowas from Dilli, would you give us your perspectives or not? cm EDIT-OPINION http://www.fromallangles.com/newspapers/country/india/tehelka.com.htm Opinion Lambs at the Law's Guillotine The new elite desire cities cleansed of the 'mess' that comes with democracy. The judiciary and the media have dutifully beheaded Delhi's poor Nivedita Menon & Aditya Nigam In a leading English daily, a congratulatory report on "the improved quality of air in Delhi" after slum demolitions was jubilantly endorsed a day later by a letter from a worthy citizen who had noticed this too. But, alas, this is scarcely enough. All is not well in Delhi-en-route-to-Paris. There is bad news on the teledensity front. On the very morning of the day that was to see police firing on massive protests against the sealing of hundreds of small shops in Seelampur, concerned newspaper readers learnt from a front-page report in another daily that even "strife-torn Sri Lanka" has crossed the 17 percent "mobile teledensity" mark, while in India the teledensity in rural areas is "roughly where it was at Independence". Shame. Two days prior to this, a small news report on the inside pages stated that a washerman, Satan Singh, allegedly threatened to kill an official of the Gurgaon administration at her residence. He used to come regularly to her house to collect laundry, but had reportedly lost his mental balance after his house was demolished in a drive conducted by her department a few weeks earlier. Psychiatrists from institutions like vimhans have been reporting an increasing incidence of depression "that is pushing several towards suicide and extreme reactions". For every one person who comes to the notice of vimhans, there are hundreds of others who cannot, and about whom we will only know when something untoward happens. They are the Satan Singhs who will increasingly haunt Indian cities of the future, leaving the elite nervous about stopping their cars at traffic lights for fear of being robbed or killed, and forcing them to enjoy their fresh air within the confines of high-security, gated neighbourhoods. Far-fetched? But this is precisely the scenario in many South American cities since the 1980s, and in most big cities of that great dreamland of the Indian elite, the USA. According to recent studies of Brazilian cities, since the 1970s, urban inequality and exclusion in places like Sao Paulo and Rio de Janeiro have been steadily increasing. Forced removal of people from the countryside in the 80s contributed to the swelling of an already crowded urban periphery. Fear of crime has become the overwhelming national problem. Terrified middle and upper classes have sought refuge in high-security buildings. As Gianpaolo Baiocchi has pointed out, the most recent, must-have item for wealthy elites is a helicopter - one of the growing fleet of personal helicopters that crowd Sao Paulo's skyline at sunset as businesspeople avoid traffic and crime below. The celebratory party of the Indian elite, however, continues, unmindful of the explosive situation that is developing all around us. Propelled by a judiciary with no accountability and a media that is deeply implicated in this new game, there has emerged a technocratic elite which desires hypermodern cities cleansed of all the 'mess' and 'irrationality' that comes with democracy and the people. But who are the hundreds of thousands who need to be driven out of the cities? Where do they all come from? They come from another India, where the cataclysmic crisis of agriculture has produced farmers' suicides in alarming numbers, while those who do not kill themselves drift into the margins of cities. These ghosts haunting urban slums are not characters in that best-selling story, the one in which the heroes are mall-builders, or telephone companies and mobile-toting shoppers heroically raising the nation's teledensity. They are the tragic heroes of another story, one punctuated by police firings. Tribal people displaced by mining interests in Kalinga Nagar, Orissa (police firing). Farmers of Dadri, Uttar Pradesh, who lost their lands when the government acquired them cheaply to be handed over to a private company (police firing). Fisherfolk thrown out of their livelihood by the construction of the Gangavaram port in Vishakhapatnam (police firing). Not to mention the thousands driven off their land to destitution by big dams past and future, and from lost towns like Harsud, drowned by the Indira Sagar dam on the Narmada. All of them pouring relentlessly into the cities. Who can stop this avalanche of development refugees? The judiciary ensures, and sections of the media celebrate, the dispossession of Indian citizens both from out there (their villages) and right here ('our' cities). Principles of justice aside, instincts of sheer self-preservation ought to tell them this cannot go on forever. (These days, when judges condemn the "violation of natural justice", they mean that multinational corporations, poor things, did not get their say, as when the Kerala government cruelly banned colas.) Responding to a plea against slum demolitions recently, a Supreme Court judge said sharply - humne unko yahan nahin bulaya. We did not invite them here. Your Honour, aap hi ne bulaya. Every court judgement allowing big dams and other mega-development projects, ignoring petitions from popular movements, drags thousands to the backyard of your air-conditioned homes - which you then proceed to clean up mercilessly. So what about illegal encroachments in Delhi? You would have to be particularly stupid (or motivated) not to notice where the sealings and demolition drives began. Seelampur and Nangla Maachhi, not South Extension and Khan Market. Why does the court refuse to take cognisance of the fact that none of the big land sharks have been touched? The choice to start sealings with "unauthorised commercial structures" in these soft, even "sensitive" (read Muslim-dominated), neighbourhoods suggests a deeper nexus operating a different levels. The effort is to completely obliterate the distinction between actual violations by land grabbers and the subsistence activity of the poor for whom small-scale 'commercial activities' from their homes are their only means of survival. These are people who use one corner of their tiny over-crowded houses to do home-based or piece-rated work, or to cook different kinds of eatables that they then sell on the streets in their rehris and khomchas. Such is the rhetoric of self-righteous anger and indignation in sections of the corporate media at the violation of thecourt's orders by "commercial and business interests" that you might begin to wonder whether they have turned Leftist! The truth is that they are deliberately whitewashing this absolutely crucial difference between land sharks on the one hand and the poor on the other, clinging precariously to the margins of the city. The self-delusion of the media and the new technocratic elite knows no bounds. They insist that these eruptions are the doing of a handful of miscreants who are all portrayed as encroachers and illegal settlers. One newspaper, for instance, discovered only several days after the violence and firing that "contrary to popular belief, none of the arrested 120 people in Seelampur is a trader, they are all daily wage labourers". Popular belief? Anyone travelling in buses or the metro or autorickshaws in those days, or anyone who simply talked to ordinary people, would have picked up what everyone was saying on the roads of Delhi - garib aur kya karenge. From the word go, the popular belief was that lakhs of daily wagers, who were losing their jobs and habitat, were out on the streets. Boss, yeh public sab janti hai. What you self-servingly call popular belief is your own delusion. Here's another "anguished" cry from the heart of a high court judge - "They are murdering the Delhi Master Plan (DMP)!" So here's a crazy suggestion. Just Do It. Murder the thing, and in its place let the people live. What is this "mixed land use" the courts and the makers of the DMP consider the most hideous sin? It simply means lively organic neighbourhoods, with local markets, local networks, local schools, local everything, so that people are not travelling for hours every day back and forth, choking the roads with ever-increasing traffic. The DMP is out-of- date, based on discredited notions of urban planning, and promotes unsustainable cityscapes. Meanwhile, a question for the world's largest democracy. Who is sovereign? The will of the people? Or the will of the technocratic elite accountable to nobody? Governments elected by the people are answerable to them alone, and the usurpation of this power by a judicial coup d'etat is no less troubling than an Army takeover. Indeed, every Army coup legitimises itself with the same language - order, discipline, cleaning up the mess created by uncontrolled democracy. Meanwhile, there was a military coup d'etat in Thailand. TV viewers watching the mayhem in Seelampur were therefore reassured by the strip of text below, continuously reiterating that all Indians in Thailand were safe. On the streets of Delhi, they certainly were not. Menon is a Delhi University reader in political science, Nigam is a fellow of the Centre for the Study of Developing Societies Oct 07 , 2006 _______________________________________________ assam mailing list [email protected] http://assamnet.org/mailman/listinfo/assam_assamnet.org
