By Ranjit Devraj
NEW DELHI, May 4 2004 (IPS)

Shahnawaz cannot vote in India’s current parliamentary elections. His voter’s identity card is somewhere in the rubble to which his family home was reduced when bulldozers raged through Yamuna Pushta, the capital’s biggest slum cluster on the banks of the Yamuna river.

”Forget the elections. I don’t even know how my family is going to survive,” said Shahnawaz, a plumber.

He is one of 150,000 people, mostly poor Muslim settlers from eastern Bihar and Bengal states, who have been displaced by the relentless demolitions that began in April and are still continuing.

Delhi state, which houses the national capital, goes to polls on May 10 in the fourth and last phase of general elections that began on Apr. 20. The voting has been staggered to accommodate the logistical and security needs of what is billed as the world’s biggest democratic exercise.

The demolitions are being led by Jagmohan (one name), the minister for tourism and culture in the right-wing and pro-Hindu Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP), which leads India’s central government.

Jagmohan is contesting the parliamentary constituency in which the Yamuna Pushta falls. But he has few stakes in the 30,000 slum dwellers within that constituency, because they are poor and Muslim and not likely to vote for him.

If Jagmohan – a bureaucrat-turned-politician with a long track record of demolishing slum clusters – has his way, what was once a sea of polythene-roof shanties will very soon metamorphose into parks and promenades worthy of the national capital of a country the size of India.

When complete, Jagmohan’s planned tourist-cum-culture complex will form a verdant belt separating the Yamuna waterfront from the red sandstone ramparts of the mediaeval city of Shahjehanabad, famed for the palaces and marble pavilions of the Mughal emperors and their capacious imperial mosque, the Jama Masjid.

This 88-hectare complex will, according to Jagmohan’s grandiose proposals, become ”one of the greatest hubs of cultural tourism for domestic and foreign tourists” and rival the ”South Bank of the Thames”.

But the cultural complex is only a small part of a development plan for a 9,700-hectare area on the riverbed, to be developed through 60 percent private participation. In short, critics say, the slum dwellers are being evicted for commercial real-estate development without adequate compensation.

Political opposition to the demolitions, the biggest ever undertaken in the city, have been feeble, even from the BJP’s arch rival for national power, the Congress party that is now demanding that voting booths be set up amidst the rubble.

Kapil Sibal, a high-profile lawyer and Congress party spokesman, said the evictions and relocation of the slum dwellers are inevitable in view of a March 2003 order by the Delhi High Court to remove all ”unauthorised constructions”. But, he said, there is no need to rush it before the elections.

Jagmohan, who has been trying to get the Yamuna Pushta shanties bulldozed ever since the days when he was lieutenant governor of Delhi in the 1980s, has accused the Congress party of using the slum dwellers as a ”massive storehouse of bonded voters” and of frustrating attempts to develop the area.

While he cannot gain the votes of the Yamuna Pushta inhabitants, he can count on support from Delhi’s affluent middle class, which is anxious for its city to have the kind of comforts and amenities that its members increasingly have the opportunity to see in other world capitals.

”Basically, at this point, both the BJP and the Congress party are agreed that the slum should go. They only differ in the timing, whether it should be before or after the elections,” said Dunu Roy, who leads the voluntary organisation Hazards Centre that has been working with the slum dwellers.

Even Syed Ahmad Bukhari, the hereditary ‘Shahi Imam’ (imperial priest) of the Jama Masjid, seems to have forsaken the slum dwellers. For calculations that have bewildered his flock, he decided to back the BJP and ”give it a chance” in the elections. He did make a few visits to the demolition site in his luxury car.

Roy said the main political parties were in any case now under ”severe pressure from the forces on international capital” on the one hand, and on the other by ”a growing political assertion by the middle class”.

What is happening at Yamuna Pushta is part of the increasing privatisation of public goods, he said. ”Working people are not only being evicted from their homes, they are also being evicted from their work, their space, their routes of travel, their access to civic service and now even their identity as citizens.”

Any resistance to the demolitions made by the hapless residents of Yamuna Pushta has been quickly and easily beaten down by the liberal use of teargas and batons – and the systematic arrest of anyone capable of organising it. ”The armed might of the state is being ruthlessly unleashed on poor, defenceless people,” Roy said.

Police chased after the rickshaw pullers, sex workers and servants as they desperately tried to put up makeshift shelters against the summer sun, and intimidated people who agreed to rent space to them far away from the site of the demolitions.

”Authorities in charge of the demolitions spread the word that the slum dwellers were illegal immigrants from Bangladesh, although most settlers from the neighbouring country were bundled into trains headed for the border in a drive two years ago,” said Roy.

According to estimates made by the Hazards Centre, not more than 5,000 people have managed to get alternate plots in resettlement colonies. But these areas are devoid of basic sanitation and facilities like schools and public health centres, and are typically 40 kilometres away from their usual places of work.

Roy said that effectively, the evictions have disenfranchised a large section of the population of the national capital, because even those who have managed to get plots are not sure where or if they can vote at all in the ongoing poll.”There is going to be a lot of confusion on election day at Yamuna Pushta,” he said.

Diya Mehra, an activist with Visthaapan Virodh (Resettlement Resistance), said most of the allocations were made on a politically selective basis – and that only after the payment of huge bribes to officials, besides the ”share money” of about 200 U.S. dollars for a plot that is yet to be demarcated.

Jagmohan’s own ministry has deposited less than half of the 14 million dollars it was supposed to have paid up as its contribution to the relocation costs.

Much of Delhi’s housing problems, according to the Hazard Centre, are the creation of successive local governments. They were to have created 1.6 million affordable dwelling units between 1982 and 2001, but built just 500,000 and then allowed higher and middle income groups to corner them at premiums.

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