Rana Dasgupta - Capital - The Eruption of Delhi

Around me is an open plain where trash is sorted. The sacks full of plastic bottles are each the size of a car. In one area are piles of cushions, mattresses and sofas which boys are cutting open for the cotton stuffing inside. There is another area where resounding, syncopated hammers flatten out steel dustbins and casings from old air conditioners. There are phenomenal piles of twisted tyres.

It has rained recently and the ground is waterlogged. Pigs and dogs bathe in the water, which stinks of chemicals.

We are in the far north of the city. Walking here is uncanny after the city jam because there is just so much space. The sky is vast above and there is an almost pastoral openness to the landscape. The land slopes down to a reservoir where buffalos soak and storks keep watch on the banks. Buffalo manure has been collected for fuel, village style: here and there are conical piles the size of a large man, which are sheathed in tarpaulin against the rain.

Bhalswa Colony itself is squeezed into a tiny area of this generous tract of ground, a thick mass of brick cubes piled unevenly on top of each other, and reaching out, like saplings in a forest, into any unoccupied patch of air. The houses are flecked with lime green: the bricks have been taken from previous buildings whose painted walls survive here in fragments. From outside, the entire township seems blind: there are no windows in the walls, so the houses cannot see the giant sacks of trash that surround them on every side.

As we walk towards the colony, everyone emerging from it seems to be in uniform. A crowd of laughing school girls in blue dresses, for a start, their hair in wagging bunches tied with ribbon. And a music band, all military hats and epaulettes, departing with trumpets and drums for some distant nuptial.

I am walking with Meenakshi, who is not from this colony, though she is its self-appointed guardian. In her early thirties, she talks hurriedly and with gravity.

“When they had the idea of creating a city, they had to invite people to run it from elsewhere because they had no labourers. You can’t run a city if you live in a mansion. A city is run by people who live in huts and slums. Rickshaw drivers, vegetable vendors, cobblers, construction workers, other working people: these are the people who run any city.

“So people from Bihar, Rajasthan and Uttar Pradesh who didn’t have work moved from their villages to Delhi. In Delhi they found they had work but they did not have anywhere to live. So they began to make little houses for themselves on areas of vacant land on the edges of the city. Since they represented a vote bank for the government, the government decided to register them as voters in Delhi and to provide them with water, electricity and ration cards. Their families began to join them and they lived a normal life for thirty years.

“People kept coming to Delhi. There was lots of work. The Delhi Metro required thousands of workers. They built huts for themselves under the government’s eyes and the government said nothing. But then the government thought: ‘They are dirty people, they don’t look nice in our city.’ The city had grown, the areas where they were living were no longer on the periphery, and the government wanted to profit from that land. So they came to those people and told them they were illegal and they had to go.

“One of these settlements was on the banks of the Yamuna river and it housed some 30,000 families. In the year 2000, they decided to evict them from that place so that they could make the city beautiful. On that site they built the new headquarters for the Delhi government, which is one of the ugliest buildings in the world.

“Of those 30,000 families, 20,000 were declared illegal and were simply kicked out with nowhere to go. No one knows where they went. The others were resettled in various places around the periphery of the city. If they had come to Delhi before 1990 they were given six-by-three metre plots, if between 1990 and 1998 they were given four-by-three metre plots. Families had to pay 7,000 rupees (then $160) for these plots.

“Some of the families that were resettled came here to Bhalswa. But the relocation plan was very cunning. Of the 30,000 families in the Yamuna settlement, only 529 were sent to Bhalswa. The others were sent to other places. They made sure the townships were split up into different places so that they would not be able to unite.

“At the same time, they were destroying other settlements and many of those people came to Bhalswa too. The ones from Nizamuddin were Muslims. The ones from the Yamuna bank were Hindu. There were people from dalit communities. All of them had different cultures and religious practices, and the government knew that if they were all made to live in one place they would definitely fight each other. It was very intelligent.

“What does ‘resettlement’ mean to you? I’ll tell you what it means to me. Resettlement means that people are settled in a complete manner. It means that all the facilities they had in the first place are provided to them in the new place.

“But it was nothing like that. People were evicted from townships they had built over forty years and thrown into places where there were not even the most basic requirements for life. There were no shops. No ration stores. No schools. No buses. Forget about electricity or water. The land was totally bare. There was nothing. The first people to come had to begin from scratch. The government provided nothing.

“Children had to drop out of school, as there were no schools there. Most men lost their jobs. Rickshaw drivers were thrown thirty-five kilometres from their homes into a wilderness where no one ever went. Of course they had no passengers. The same with the shopkeepers. They couldn’t source vegetables anymore, and they had no customers. Everything was finished.

“The women of that slum used to work as housemaids in middle-class houses in south Delhi. They could not let this work go because their husbands had no income. So they used to leave home at 5 a.m. and travel all the way down to their places of work and come back at six in the evening. They could not take care of their children, who were at home since they had no schools to go to.”

We enter the streets of the settlement, which are strikingly well-made compared to the streets of rich south Delhi neighbourhoods. The surface is brick, with a gentle camber. Bright yellow and blue washing is hung across the street; bicycles are parked in front of the houses. Inside, people are making household brooms: in one house they are cutting bristles, in another they are making the handles. There is a smell of frying garlic.

Meenakshi stops at a front door and calls in, “Hello! Have you received your ration card yet?”

“Yes. It came a while ago!”

“Why didn’t you tell me?” She is quite irritated. “You have to tell me these things!”

The task Meenakshi has set for herself — for no one has invited her to do it — is to be the political representative of this community. She is the one who organises their official documents — many of them cannot read or write — lobbies on their behalf with the city authorities and, when necessary, organises political action. It is a role, I can see, that possesses her utterly.

“As I told you before, all these communities were from different cultures. The government planned to build for them apartment blocks with common spaces in between. We said this layout would create problems because everyone would fight over those common spaces. The Muslims would want to slaughter animals there, which would offend the Brahmins, who would want to use the same space for prayers and devotions. There would definitely be clashes.

“The residents said they wanted individual houses, and refused to accept the government plan. The government said it had been designed by a Scandinavian architect and so it could not be changed. They said, ‘If you don’t accept this plan we will just leave you there in the wilderness.’ So the residents said, ‘We have been living in the wilderness for six months, there is no reason why we cannot continue.’ So for one whole year they lived in small tents under the open sky. They protested. They went to court, to the media, they went on marches. Finally they forced the government to abandon its plan. The government drew up a plan of row houses, allocated plots to individuals and left them on their own.”