The ‘truth’ of urban housing in India looks very different when you gaze from a shanty up at a tower and when you look down from a multi-storey apartment complex into a slum.
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NEARLY every global event organised in Delhi, from the Asian Games in 1982 to the Commonwealth Games in 2010, has been accompanied by an exercise in city beautification and sanitisation, often involving the displacement of slum-dwellers and an experience of homelessness for people.
During the G-20 Summit held in Delhi in early September 2023, the authorities went a step further, not only evicting what activists estimate as 300,000 people but also hiding unplanned areas behind cloth screens, presumably to shield global delegates from seeing them.
As if the existential uncertainties that come with living in fear of eviction were not enough to provoke fear and anxiety among the residents of Delhi’s legally precarious bastis (slums), the state’s attempt at visual erasure has been the unkindest cut of all.
Several media reports captured the utter disbelief and outrage at what residents considered an ultimate violation of their dignity and denial of their rightful place in the city.
As if the existential uncertainties that come with living in fear of eviction were not enough to provoke fear and anxiety for the residents of Delhi’s legally precarious bastis (slums), the state’s attempt at visual erasure has been the unkindest cut of all.
An act of rendering invisible what is very much in existence can be understood as a way of obfuscating the truth. Nevertheless, a pertinent question here is for whom and why?
As we commemorate another birth anniversary of the Father of our Nation, whose entire life’s work hinged on the upholding of truth, it is worth contemplating what such obfuscation signifies for the future of our cities and the fate of the disadvantaged poor populating them, within India’s democratic and constitutional context.
Truth as chimera: Encroachers or city-makers?
Gandhi derived his entire philosophy of political action from the notion of truth. To him, ahimsa was the means, truth was the end. It carried a moral force and led him forward like a clear, shining light. But today, in 2023, though admirable, Gandhi’s clarity of position is very hard to relate to.
We live in a world where the truth has turned into a chimera. It is pliable and subject to interpretation. Because multiple versions of truth co-exist on any given issue, we have lost the ability to forge common understandings and move towards resolutions.
Also read: Tughlakabad eviction drive lays bare changing nature of citizenship – The Leaflet
The endless distortions possible in the post-truth world have destroyed our public lives and transformed electoral politics into an elaborate and dangerous game of polarised opinion-shaping, where contending parties opportunistically weaponise various versions of the truth for self-interest.
The housing rights discourse in urban India has been an apparent victim of this truth-shaping game, in which not just politicians but the judiciary, urban elite, working-class movements and civil society have been involved. One side sees inhabitants of informal settlements as city-makers. They envisage the working class in cities as essential labour, who: (i) build the city, e.g., as construction workers; (ii) as service providers, e.g. as domestic workers, drivers, delivery workers, street vendors, waste collectors, etc.; and (iii) contributes to urban industrial production.
Based on their economic contributions to the city and a concomitant failure of governments to provide formal affordable housing, they articulate the urban poor’s claims on land and self-built housing assets.
Housing rights activism has brought recognition for the rights of the urban poor, who settled in the city by occupying available land but valorised it over time and laid claim to it via political negotiation and access to patronage.
We live in a world where the truth has turned into a chimera. It is pliable and subject to interpretation. Because multiple versions of truth co-exist on any given issue, we have lost the ability to forge common understandings and move towards resolutions.
Housing rights organisations and the courts have also strongly argued for housing as an intrinsic part of the right to life. In the infamous Olga Tellis & Ors versus Bombay Municipal Corporation case of 1985, concerning the impending eviction of slum- and pavement-dwellers by the Bombay Municipal Corporation, the Supreme Court took a humanistic and activist approach, enlarging the right to life to include housing and livelihoods, and holding that governments are liable to offer evicted slum dwellers alternative shelter.
More recently, a Delhi High Court division Bench went a step further in Ajay Maken versus Union of India, a case about the legality of demolitions in Shakur Basti in Delhi.
Invoking the ‘right to the city’, a concept championed by British geographer David Harvey and used widely in urban social movements worldwide, the Bench held that slum-dwellers possess the right to housing and should be protected from forced and unannounced eviction.
The urban elite hold an opposing view often championed by nativist politicians. Here, slum-dwellers are portrayed as migrant outsiders who are illegal encroachers on urban land.
While the influx of rural migrants into metropolitan centres was always a concern for politicians and planners, post-liberalisation, well-located and serviced urban land became crucial for accommodating urban infrastructure and commercial office space for India’s growing modern services sector.
At the same time, private developers invested heavily in producing mid- and high-end housing for urban India’s burgeoning white-collar workforce. Neoliberal city-making projects often displaced the poor from prime locations in the city and, combined with the preference of elites for gated and high-rise housing, created increasingly segregated cities.
This widened disparities between elites and the working class, and occupancy urbanism through squatting on available public and private lands, which had been the dominant mode of housing provision in India’s metropolitan cities, came under elite criticism.
As activist-scholar Gautam Bhan points out in a 2009 article, 21st-century slum evictions were distinct in that they were often driven by the courts, with city governments either complicit or silent, and a distinct lack of empathy from media and the public.
Both Bhan and legal scholar Anuj Bhuwania have written extensively about the role of the courts in upholding and propagating a narrative that vilifies slum-dwellers as encroachers, unscrupulous citizens, usurpers, nuisances, insanitary and so on, without holding governments accountable for planning and making provision of housing and basic services.
An impasse: Implicit agreements, explicit differences
The intractability of these opposing views, where contending parties cannot even agree on the terms of the debate regardless of the facts presented, illustrates the difficulties of navigating the terrain of truth in our times. The housing rights developments over the past few decades demonstrate the political and moral convenience of obfuscating the truth.
Unfortunately, given an ever-shrinking public attention span, contemporary politics can only be practical by reducing complex facts to simplistic clickbait tropes.
By nurturing and vociferously championing these two opposing narratives about slums and slum-dwellers, stakeholders have fed this desire for simplistic narratives and succeeded in obfuscating the more complicated truth.
Yet, in Delhi, where significant parts of the housing rights debates have played out, there have been rare but important moments of political reconciliation.
Invoking the ‘right to the city’, a concept championed by British geographer David Harvey and used widely in urban social movements worldwide, the Bench held that slum-dwellers possess the right to housing and should be protected from forced and unannounced eviction.
In a notoriously fractious political landscape, where Centre–state relations are severely strained owing to the Union government’s control of land, security and important administrative clearances, opposing political parties, Aam Aadmi Party (AAP) and Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) arrived at similar solutions to Delhi’s housing issues.
In 2015, under the AAP-led state government, the Delhi Urban Shelter Improvement Board pushed through a new housing policy favouring in-situ rehabilitation for evicted slum-dwellers.
In the same vein, in the run-up to the Delhi legislative assembly elections in 2020, the BJP supported in-situ redevelopment and rehabilitation and adopted the slogan “jahaan jhuggi wahaan makaan”. They also enacted a new law for the regularisation of unauthorised colonies in 2019.
Unfortunately, these measures were never seriously adopted. The scale of evictions accelerated through the pandemic and now appears to be part and parcel of the state’s modus operandi, especially when informal settlements stand in the way of prestigious development projects or mega events like the G20 with significant reputational importance.
Indeed, evictions are marked by a blatant disregard for due process and a failure of the courts to offer even temporary relief. Even so, that moment of consensus demonstrated an implicit acceptance of urban poverty as a systemic issue that deserves a humane approach involving the principle of least disruption to human lives and livelihoods.
The moral imperative of truth also lies in whether you confront or ignore it.
In the end, there is no doubt that political differences, bureaucratic disregard and elite apathy have failed the urban poor in cities such as Delhi.
Take the example of Pappu (name changed), a resident of a demolished Kidwai Nagar slum, who was given an allotment letter by the Delhi Urban Shelter Improvement Board for a flat under its rehabilitation scheme upon furnishing the requisite documents and the down payment.
In 2020, when the Union government brought in the Affordable Rental Housing Complexes (ARHC) scheme in the wake of the Covid migrant crisis, Pappu was told he might not receive this flat after all.
The urban elite hold an opposing view often championed by nativist politicians. Here, slum-dwellers are portrayed as migrant outsiders who are illegal encroachers on urban land.
The Union government was appropriating all housing produced with its funding into the ARHC scheme, leaving the Delhi government without adequate flats to resettle evicted families.
Thus, even when unequivocal facts produce agreements, they remain tenuous and always susceptible to being broken down by political imperatives. Political negotiation will not likely lead us to a sustained pursuit of truth.
Can we forge a new compact?
When Gandhi refused any compromise with truth, he emphasised the importance of a morality unwaveringly committed to the right ideals, where truth is a moral imperative and a bedrock for justice, empathy and inclusiveness.
Gandhi was not unaware of the complexities of truth. He wrote, “An error does not become truth by reason of multiplied propagation; nor does truth become error because nobody sees it. Truth stands, even if there is no public support. It is self-sustained.”
However, solutions can only emerge through disruption when issues are mired in intractability and opportunism.
Just as Gandhi disrupted the terms of engagement between imperial powers and the ordinary people of India through satyagraha, a new morally motivated compact between elites and the working poor will need to be forged if urban India’s problems of persistent poverty, housing precarity and planning must be solved.
Just as Gandhi disrupted the terms of engagement between imperial powers and the ordinary people of India through satyagraha, a new morally motivated compact between elites and the working poor will need to be forged if urban India’s problems of persistent poverty, housing precarity and planning must be solved.
This will need a form of political participation where individual and class or caste interests are resolved within the moral framework of inclusive democracy, which, ironically— and hopefully— has been the cornerstone of India’s G-20 Presidency.
