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 6am three generations of the rickshaw driver’s family had ferried their possessions into the open. Just after 9am, 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 (about R300) 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.’ – Guardian Unlimited Â