On 4 July 2023, a footage of Pravesh Shukla, a leader of the Bhartiya Janata Party, (BJP) urinating on Dashmat Rawat, an Adivasi man, in the Sidhi district of Madhya Pradesh went viral on social media. The BJP government in the state immediately stepped in to dispense ‘justice’ or rather to make a spectacle out of it. Within two days, part of Mr. Shukla’s house was bulldozed. ‘Bulldozer justice’ is hardly the exception now. The Uttar Pradesh Chief Minister Yogi Adityanath has made a name for himself by dispensing it. He has even been christened as Bulldozer Baba!
This form of justice has usually been deployed by the BJP governments against Muslims – citizens, dissenters, or gangsters. The demolition of Shukla’s home was a clever ploy statement to accord legitimacy to the state’s bulldozers. It was a response to democratic citizens who rightly believe that this is essentially a form of majoritarian justice.
Beyond the brutality and spectacle of Hindumajoritarianviolenceperpetrated by the state, bulldozers are being extensively used to evict and demolish homes of the rural and urban peasants and workers. The national capital territory of Delhi has witnessed demolitions on an unprecedented scale over the last one year. The demolitions have been accompanied by police violence and have often violated the procedures of law laid down by previous governments in Delhi.
There are many reasons behind the recent escalation of demolitions in Delhi. The beautification drives due to the upcoming G20 sites, the inadequacies of the Delhi Master Plan 2041, Bhartiya Janata Party’s (BJP) vendetta politics and the Aam Aadmi Party’s (AAP) convenient silences, the lack of protection accorded by the courts, and sometimes the eager encouragement of the courts, have all come together to displace large numbers of people without even the promise of rehabilitation. The bulldozers have not even spared kid’s footballs and milk bottles lying in the rubble.
Dispossession in Urbanizing India
Let us look at some of the recent demolitions in Delhi. In Kharak Satbari, Chhattarpur, officials of the Delhi Development Authority (DDA) – a union government agency –arrived on 21 October 2022 with a full police battalion, without any prior notice, and without even carrying an official demolition order. In their hurry to demolish the homes, they even refused to let a mother take her child’s medicines out of the house with her. The child subsequently died. Many men and women were injured as the police beat the residents to submission. The courts have failed to censure the DDA for its actions.
On 1 May 2023, bulldozers arrived in Tughlakabad to demolish hundreds of homes. The demolition started at 9 am, givingpeoplehardlyanytimetotakeout their furniture, clothes, utensils, medicines, and other essential items. Over the next three days, over 2000 homes were demolished. On 11 January 2023, the Archaeological Survey of India (ASI) – a union government agency, had issued eviction notices to all ‘unauthorized’ households within a radius of 100 meters of the historic Tughlakabad Fort, upon orders of the Supreme Court. The demolition happened after several months of back and forth between the ASI, the courts, and the residents. The displaced people have not been provided with rehabilitation so far and it does not look likely in the foreseeable future.
The people being dispossessed are all workers who build and sustain the city through their labour. They largely belong to Dalit Bahujan and Muslim communities. Most of the homes are actually concrete constructions, built after a generation of work and earning in the city. Many families were on the cusp of inter-generational upward mobility when their homes were demolished. A despondent lady in Mehrauli quipped soon after her home was bulldozed: ‘they snatched our jobs and now they are snatching our homes, where will we go, what will we do?’
The situation in Delhi suggests that as urbanization increases, as land becomes more scarce and the environment becomes vulnerable, land wars begin to feature in towns small and big, in the cities and in urban peripheries, in addition to villages and forests. The continuation of pro-elite development policies means that it is the poor and working people who bear the burden of development through displacement. In areas such as Gyaspur in the Yamuna Flood Plains, the homes have been demolished to make way for amusement parks! At the same time, Hindu supremacist forces are keen to use these land wars to further exclude (socially and spatially) already marginalized Dalit and Muslim populations.
The ‘Encroacher’ Discourse
The courts and the government claim that the affected people are all encroachers. This is not quite correct because in many places the houses were built on land purchased by the residents through the power of attorney. Power of attorney of course has no legal standing as proof of ownership. Still, the purported illegalities need to be contextualized.
‘Illegal’ colonies are seldom settled without the cooperation of political parties, local landholders, the administration, and the police. Subsequently, electricity connections are provided, and government identity cards issued at these addresses. These addresses form the basis of voter lists and are deemed legitimate for election purposes. This is a kind of ‘planned illegality’. Yet when the state and its agencies wish to take possession of land, they dispossess citizens at will, while courts remain mere spectators if not eager facilitators of such dispossession. The documents which fetch votes to parties are deemed inadequate to ensure adequate and dignified rehabilitation. Isn’t it a form of violent disenfranchisement of India’s precarious and exploited working classes? The misleading ‘encroacher’ dovetails with similar phrases that were sounded to root out ‘non-citizens’ through the National Register of Citizens (NRC), where once again the ‘document-poor’ were de facto labelled as people whose citizenship is suspect.
‘Unauthorized’ colonies comprise 60%-70% of Delhi’s residential areas. Elite farmhouses, hotels, government schools, dispensaries can all be found in such ‘unauthorized’ areas, but bulldozers fall invariably on the houses of the working classes. In the midst of the government and judiciary enabled ‘encroacher’ discourse, some crucial questions are falling through the cracks. Why do workers live in ‘unauthorized’ colonies? If the state does not provide housing facilities to workers arriving in towns and cities in search of work, what options other than low-cost private housing in these colonies do they have?
