ON THE MORNING OF JUNE 16, a vacation bench in the Delhi High Court sat down to hear the plea of jhuggi-dwellers from Wazipur, a north Delhi municipality, facing an imminent demolition of their homes, trailing alongside bustling railway tracks. Already on June 2, around a hundred homes had been razed to dust, just two weeks after a notice pasted by the Railway Administration, Northern Railways, had warned of bulldozing homes within a week. But the residents, most of them migrant wage workers and domestic helpers, had not gotten any effective hearing, and were left overnight shelterless in Delhi’s sweltering heat. There was another issue.
While the notice stated that the jhuggis had to be removed due to difficulty in spotting the railway traffic signal by train pilots owing to blockade by upper floors of some jhuggis, when the bulldozers came, they razed down entire buildings. There was almost no rhyme or rhythm to which homes were targeted, or why.
Three days after the demolition, came a second notice, a replica of the previous one, warning of further demolitions. Before Justice Tejas Karia in the High Court, one defining question was whether a stay could be imposed - on paper, there seemed to be violations with the Draft Protocol for removal of Jhuggis and JJ Bastis in Delhi, notified in 2016, which had outlined a clear sequence of procedural compliances before any bulldozer touched a house. Justice Karia issued notice, but there was no stay.
That day, around 200 police personnel had marched into the jhuggi area in Ashok Vihar - different patches of jhuggis around the region would be demolished in huge drives, slowly and slowly, until on June 25, heavy bulldozer machinery reached the homes beside the railway tracks too.
