Demolishing Delhi: World-Class City in the Making

Amita Baviskar

Vol 2 #3, Autumn 2006

Banuwal Nagar was a dense cluster of about 1,500 homes, a closely-built beehive of brick and cement dwellings on a small square of land in North West Delhi, India. Its residents were mostly masons, bricklayers and carpenters, labourers who came to the area in the early-1980s to build apartment blocks for middle class families and stayed on. Women found work cleaning and cooking in the more affluent homes around them. Over time, as residents invested their savings into improving their homes, Banuwal Nagar acquired the settled look of a poor, yet thriving, community. It had shops and businesses; people rented out the upper floors of their houses to tenants. There were taps, toilets and a neighbourhood temple. On the street in the afternoon, music blared from a radio, mechanics taking a break from repairing cycle-rickshaws smoked bidis and drank hot, sweet tea and children walked home from school. Many of the residents were members of the Nirman Mazdoor Panchayat Sangam (NMPS), a union of construction labourers, unusual for India where construction workers are largely unorganised.

In April 2006, Banuwal Nagar was demolished. There had been occasions in the past when eviction had been imminent, but, somehow, the threat had always passed. Local politicians had provided patronage and protection in exchange for votes, municipal officials could be persuaded to look the other way, the NMPS union would negotiate with the local administration, squatters could even approach the courts and secure a temporary stay against eviction. Not this time. Eight bulldozers were driven up to the colony and trucks arrived to take people away. With urgent haste, the residents of Banuwal Nagar tore down their own homes, trying to salvage as much as they could before the bulldozers razed everything to the ground. Iron rods, bricks, doors and window frames were dismantled. TV sets and sofas, pressure cookers and ceiling fans, were all bundled up and clouds of dust and the sound of hammers and chisels filled the air. There was no time for despair, no time for sorrow, only a desperate rush to escape whole, to get out before the bulldozers came in.

But where would people go? About two-thirds of homeowners could prove that they had been in Delhi before 1998. They were taken to Bawana, a desolate wasteland on the outskirts of the city designated as a resettlement site. In June’s blazing heat, people sheltered beneath makeshift roofs, without electricity or water. Children wandered about aimlessly. Worst, for their parents, was the absence of work. There was no employment in Bawana, and their old jobs were a three-hour commute away, too costly for most people to afford. Without work, families ate into their savings as they waited to be allotted plots of 12.5 square metres. Those who needed money urgently sold their entitlement to property brokers, many of them moonlighting government officials. Once, they might have squatted somewhere else in Delhi. Now, the crackdown on squatters has made that option impossible. They will probably leave the city.

The remaining one-third of homeowners in Banuwal Nagar couldn’t marshal the documentary evidence of eligibility. Their homes were demolished and they got nothing at all. Those who rented rooms in the neighbourhood were also left to fend for themselves. One can visit Bawana and meet the people who were resettled, but the rest simply melted away. No one seems to know where they went; they left no trace. What was once Banuwal Nagar is now the site of a shopping mall, with construction in full swing. Middle class people glance around approvingly as they drive past, just as they watched from their rooftops as the modest homes of workers were dismantled. The slum was a nuisance, they say. It was dirty, congested and dangerous. Now we’ll have clean roads and a nice place to shop.

Banuwal Nagar, Yamuna Pushta, Vikaspuri – everyday another jhuggi basti (shanty settlement) in Delhi is demolished. Banuwal Nagar residents had it relatively easy; their union was able to intercede with the local administration and police and ensure that evictions occurred without physical violence. In other places, the police set fire to homes, beat up residents and prevented them from taking away their belongings before the fire and the bulldozers got to work. Young children have died in stampedes; adults have committed suicide from the shock and shame of losing everything they had. In 2000, more than 3 million people, a quarter of Delhi’s population, lived in 1,160 jhuggi bastis scattered across town. In the last five years, about half of these have been demolished, and the same fate awaits the rest. The majority of those evicted have not been resettled. Even among those entitled to resettlement, there are many who have got nothing. The government says it has no more land to give, yet demolitions continue apace.

The question of land lies squarely at the centre of the demolition drive. For decades, much of Delhi’s land was owned by the central government, which parcelled out chunks for planned development. The plans were fundamentally flawed, with a total mismatch between spatial allocations and projections of population and economic growth. There was virtually no planned, low-income housing, forcing poor workers and migrant labourers to squat on public lands. Ironically, it was Delhi’s Master Plan that gave birth to its evil twin: the city of slums. The policy of resettling these squatter bastis into ‘proper’ colonies – proper only because they were legal and not because they had improved living conditions – was fitfully followed, and, over the years, most bastis acquired the patina of de facto legitimacy. Only during the Emergency (1975–7), when civil rights were suppressed by Indira Gandhi’s government, was there a concerted attempt to clear the bastis. The democratic backlash to the Emergency’s repressive regime meant that evictions were not politically feasible for the next two decades. However, while squatters were not forcibly evicted, they were not given secure tenure, either. Ubiquitous yet illegal, the ambiguity of squatters’ status gave rise to a flourishing economy of votes, rents and bribes that exploited and maintained their vulnerability.

In 1990, economic liberalisation hit India. Centrally planned land management was replaced by the neoliberal mantra of public-private partnership. In the case of Delhi, this translated into the government selling land acquired for ‘public purpose’ to private developers. With huge profits to be made from commercial development, the real estate market is booming. The land that squatters occupy now commands a premium. These are the new enclosures: what were once unclaimed spaces, vacant plots of land along railway tracks and by the Yamuna river that were settled and made habitable by squatters, are now ripe for redevelopment. Liminal lands that the urban poor could live on have now been incorporated into the profit economy.

The Yamuna riverfront was the locale for some of the most vicious evictions in 2004 and again in 2006. Tens of thousands of families were forcibly removed, the bulldozers advancing at midday when most people were at work, leaving infants and young children at home. The cleared river embankment is now to be the object of a Thames-style makeover, with parks and promenades, shopping malls and sports stadiums, concert halls and corporate offices. The project finds favour with Delhi’s upper classes who dream of living in a ‘world-class’ city modelled after Singapore and Shanghai. The river is filthy. As it flows through Delhi, all the fresh water is taken out for drinking and replaced with untreated sewage and industrial effluent. Efforts to clean up the Yamuna have mainly taken the form of removing the poor who live along its banks. The river remains filthy, a sluggish stream of sewage for most of the year. It is an unlikely site for world-class aspirations, yet this is where the facilities for the next Commonwealth Games in 2010 are being built.

For the visionaries of the world-class city, the Commonwealth Games are just the beginning. The Asian Games, and even the Olympics, may follow if Delhi is redeveloped as a tourist destination, a magnet for international conventions and sports events. However wildly optimistic these ambitions, and however shaky their foundations, they fit perfectly with the self-image of India’s newly confident consuming classes. The chief beneficiaries of economic liberalisation, bourgeois citizens want a city that matches their aspirations for gracious living. The good life is embodied in Singapore-style, round-the-clock shopping and eating, in a climate-controlled and police-surveilled environment. This city-in-the-making has no place for the poor, regarded as the prime source of urban pollution and crime. Behind this economy of appearances lie mega-transfers of land and capital and labour; workers who make the city possible are banished out of sight. New, apartheid-style segregation is fast becoming the norm.

The apartheid analogy is no exaggeration. Spatial segregation is produced as much by policies that treat the poor as second class citizens as by the newly instituted market in real estate, which has driven housing out of their reach. The Supreme Court of India has taken the lead in the process of selective disenfranchisement. Judges have remarked that the poor have no right to housing; resettling a squatter is like rewarding a pickpocket. By ignoring the absence of low-income housing, the judiciary has criminalised the very presence of the poor in the city. Evictions are justified as being in the public interest, as if the public does not include the poor, and as if issues of shelter and livelihood are not public concerns. The courts have not only brushed aside representations from basti dwellers, they have also penalised government officials for failing to demolish fast enough. In early 2006, the courts widened the scope of judicial activism to target illegal commercial construction and violations of building codes in affluent residential neighbourhoods. But such was the outcry from all political parties that the government quickly passed a law to neutralise these court orders. However, the homes of the poor continue to be demolished while the government shrugs helplessly.

Despite their numbers, Delhi’s poor don’t make a dent in the city’s politics. The absence of a collective identity or voice is, in part, the outcome of state strategies for regulating the poor. Having a cut-off date that determines who is eligible for resettlement is a highly effective technique for dividing the poor. Those who stand to gain a plot of land are loath to jeopardise their chances by resisting eviction. Tiny and distant though it is, this plot offers a secure foothold in the city. Those eligible for resettlement part ways from their neighbours and fellow residents, cleaving communities into two. Many squatters in Delhi are also disenfranchised by ethnic and religious discrimination. Migrants from the eastern states of Bihar and Bengal, Muslims in particular, are told to go back to where they came from. Racial profiling as part of the War on Terror has also become popular in Delhi. In the last decade, the spectre of Muslim terrorist infiltrators from Bangladesh has become a potent weapon to harass Bengali-speaking Muslim migrants in the city. Above all, sedentarist metaphysics are at work, such that all poor migrants are seen as forever people out of place; Delhi is being overrun by ‘these people’ – why don’t they go back to where they belong? Apocalyptic visions of urban anarchy and collapse are ranged alongside dreams of gleaming towers, clean streets and fast moving cars. Utopia and dystopia merge to propose a future city in which the poor have no place.

Delhi, Mumbai, Kolkata and many other Indian cities figure prominently in what Mike Davis describes as a ‘planet of slums’. Slum clearances may give India’s capital the appearance of a ‘clean and green Delhi’, but environmental activism has simply shifted the problem elsewhere. The poor live under worse conditions, denied work and shelter, struggling against greater insecurity and uncertainty. Is Davis right? Has the late-capitalist triage of humanity already taken place? Even as demolitions go on around me, I believe that Davis might be wrong in this case. Bourgeois Delhi’s dreams of urban cleansing are fragile; ultimately, they will collapse under the weight of their hubris. The city still needs the poor; it needs their labour, enterprise and ingenuity. The vegetable vendor and the rickshaw puller, the cook and the carpenter cannot be banished forever. If the urban centre is deprived of their presence, the centre itself will have to shift. The outskirts of Delhi, and the National Capital Region of which it is part, continue to witness phenomenal growth in the service economy and in sectors like construction. Older resettlement colonies already house thriving home-based industry. The city has grown to encompass these outlying areas so that they are no longer on the spatial, or social, periphery. This longer-term prospect offers little comfort to those who sleep hungry tonight because they couldn’t find work. Yet, in their minds, the promise of cities as places to find freedom and prosperity persists. In those dreams lies hope.