‘Safe City’ project of the Uttar Pradesh government: Rhetoric of protectionism

This piece critiques the Uttar Pradesh government's Safe City project for restricting the rights and mobility of women and perpetuating a form of 'Hindutva Urbanism'. 

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THE government of the north Indian state of Uttar Pradesh has recently launched the 'Safe City' project to ensure women's safety.

The project comes with conditions such as installation of CCTV cameras to identify crime hotspots, monitoring of coaching institutes to identify potential troublemakers and most inexplicably, prohibition of late-evening classes for women and girls.

Such projects curtail the rights of women to the city and aim to transform the latter into an exclusionary space, under the garb of 'affirmative' actions.

The project is paternalistic and revanchist in nature

The Safe City project is not only paternalistic but also revanchist in the sense that it provides full-fledged access in public spaces solely to men by restricting the mobility of women— a phenomenon of yesteryear, until women marched on the streets of cities and towns to gain access to these spaces.

It allows men to 'claim back' the spaces that were rightly and rightfully appropriated by women after a prolonged struggle. Such actions also delimit the access that women have to other public institutions which further affects their career choices and life chances.

By restricting the physical mobility of women, the project will directly contribute to restricting their already stunted social mobility.

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By constraining the rights of women to public spaces in the city, the rights of women in the private spheres are also limited, rendering them more duty-bound to their households— duties that fail to translate into rights.

Many a time, public spaces in cities act as a spare room for survivors and victims of domestic violence and abuse. At other times, they serve as spaces where gender minorities perform acts of freedom that are restricted within their homes.

The Safe City mission denies even the recognition of a possibility of domestic violence within the household that is inflicted mostly on women and young girls.

It implies that survivors and victims are responsible for protecting themselves and remains ignorant of the State's failure to equip cities with considerable social infrastructures such as adequate street lights, women-only transport facilities and active helplines.

Instead, it promotes the installation of CCTV cameras in identifying 'hotspots' of crime as an elemental part of the project.

Such identification, that fails to recognise structural inequities behind geographical inequalities, will go on to revive the notions of 'delinquent neighbourhoods', attributed to places sheltering informal settlements, poor working-class localities with minimal street lights and more often than not, Muslim neighbourhoods in a state like Uttar Pradesh, infamous for its communal history, especially under the current regime.

Such stigmatisation might as well be an attempt to displace and dispose of certain communities. This project has also been launched at a time when city governments across nations and continents have been adopting models of 'diversity neighbourhoods', no matter how flawed they are, to promote inclusivity in urban settings!

Leaving behind unhoused women and girls

Most fervently, it bypasses the question of safety for unhoused, pavement-dwelling women and young girls who do not have the privilege of what is conventionally perceived as home and who are most susceptible and vulnerable to abuse and violence.

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According to the 2011 Census data, India has a soaring population of 1.7 million homeless or unhoused people, with more than 87 percent of them living in the urban areas.

Not only have civil society organisations challenged this data for underestimating the number of unhoused people but the population of unhoused people has also witnessed a gradual uptick due to the rapid increase in urban population coupled with social inequality in the last decade.

A study conducted in 2014 on cities and homelessness in India found that unhoused women are more vulnerable to police violence. Instead of being dealt with by women constables, they face verbal and physical abuse inflicted by male constables, more often as a part of cleaning drives carried out in the cities.

The study also reported that unhoused women constituted a significant portion of young women who had been victims of sexual trafficking, rape and drug abuse.

But, as Shilpa Phadke, Shilpa Ranade and Sameera Khan in 'Why Loiter? Women and Risk on Mumbai Streets' (2011) have argued, "This endemic violence is treated as separate from violence against women and often elicits much less public outrage even though they are in fact fundamentally connected."

Through Safe City and similar projects, the State further invisibilises and erases the unhoused population from the urban discourse.

Endorsing Hindutva Urbanism: Reproduction of a traditional Hindu womanhood

Projects such as Safe City ensure that cities become laboratories for the aspiration of a homogenised Hindu Rashtra, where women are supposed to be bound by their traditional roles within the premises of their homes.

Such infantilisation of women is also bolstered by the narratives of 'love jihad' whereby Hindu women need to be protected by the State-employed 'anti-romeo' squadrons from being 'lured away' by men of other religions, and specifically Muslim men— a phenomenon typical to the states ruled by the right-wing Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP), especially Uttar Pradesh.

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Why Loiter? addressed the question of women's restricted access to public spaces as inherently rooted in concerns regarding their safety— not as much as being vulnerable to violation but rather resuming lines of forbidden contact with the undeserving Other.

It is unfortunate that even after more than a decade of its publication and of other scholarly works accompanied by movements and campaigns, governmental bodies in states such as Uttar Pradesh procure an indomitable spite to come up with policy projects as such.

It is not to say that cities have been truly democratic spaces. Instead, the parasitic history of urban planning speaks volumes of the plight of the marginalised and excluded.

Shopping malls, parks and plazas came up as spaces for men, young and old, to watch women walk, without any disruption and intervention. Urban planners profiteered from such structures built to facilitate the male gaze.

In an ethnographic study of two plazas in Costa Rica, conducted in the late 1990s, urban anthropologist Setha Low (1996) shared accounts of how architects produced design features that were best appreciated from the male point of view.

Men who frequented the plazas did so because they were designed to facilitate the 'best girl-watching view'.

With sociological and feminist interventions in the field of urban studies and growing critiques of the then persistent model of urbanisation, such planning policies were vehemently challenged for being rooted in patriarchal and misogynistic practices and for limiting the rights of women and other gender minorities to public spaces in the city.

However, there was always an urge to frame cities as democratic and secular spaces, to draw more people into them. What has kept the capitalist, neoliberal process of urbanisation intact is the façade of the city being a democratic and secular space.

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It is not to say that they have been exact replicas of spaces that facilitate equal opportunities and socio-economic mobility. Not even close, as the discrimination and differences tend to become more pronounced in cities, instead of being mitigated.

However, the Safe City project initiated by the government of Uttar Pradesh, as part of the Smart City mission, breaks free of all pretence and promotes cityscapes as desegregated spaces.