Rana Dasgupta - Capital - The Eruption of Delhi

It was remarkable, in Delhi, for example, how many women from the richest families, women who treated their inferiors with deliberate fear and contempt, devoted their spare time to caring for stray dogs: taking out food and blankets for them, taking them to the vet when they were injured, taking them into their homes when they were sick. You couldn’t help feeling, watching such women, that human beings were endowed with a specific quantum of sympathy, and if its expression were entirely blocked in one direction, it had to emerge from another.

But the question of what would happen to the great mass of India’s economic refugees was impossibly taxing, and good feelings were not enough to solve it. It was a question, in fact, which undid the entire logic of India’s new economy — and indeed of global capitalism itself. And yet it seemed impossible to imagine that there could be another way of organising things, for everything was now aligned in that way. So the only ‘solution’ to the question, ultimately, was to ignore it. And that, pretty much, was what middle-class India did. The hundreds of millions of their country’s poor were dazzlingly absent from their world, not only as a matter of individual obliviousness but as a matter of policy. Delhi’s official urban strategy was to not see those millions of people, to treat them as ghosts who periodically contributed their labour to the feast, but who did not themselves require food or shelter or anything else.

Worker housing — that simple acknowledgement that workers had a bodily existence — did not exist. Faridabad, the industrial city set up in 1947, had no worker housing, for instance: workers were expected to find or build a place wherever they could. This became the norm for all of the Delhi region’s ‘planned’ cities — Okhla, Noida, Gurgaon — which had immense labour requirements but conspicuously — obstinately — no place for workers to live. It was as if labour were an immaterial force, one that magically operated machines and built houses, but one that had no physical existence, or needs, outside of these activities. Large numbers of workers bounced between Delhi and their villages: men, especially, left their families behind in the countryside and came for a few months to earn what cash they could working on a construction site or driving an auto-rickshaw, and they sought to spend as little as possible on accommodation or anything else. They rented basement rooms fifteen at a time, they lived in tents on construction sites, they slept in rickshaws or on the pavement. But this still left great numbers whose work kept them all year in the city and who had to find some way of subsisting in it. This is why the other great boom in Delhi, apart from its property prices, was that of informal living. In the late 1970s, it was estimated that Delhi’s total slum population was 20,000. By the early twenty-first century, many millions — perhaps one half of the city’s population — lived in some kind of unauthorised housing — slums, squatter settlements, lean-tos and the like — while many tens of thousands lived without any shelter at all. 34

The places where the poor collected were constantly under attack by the authorities, who wanted to ensure at all costs that they never began to imagine some real claim on city space. After a devastating series of slum demolitions spearheaded in the 1970s by Nehru’s grandson, Sanjay Gandhi, many of Delhi’s working poor bought plots in new slum areas in order to secure their situation in a city that suddenly seemed much more inhospitable. Slums had a thriving real-estate market of purchases and rentals, much like the rest of the city in fact, with the exception that the entire enterprise was unauthorised: the land belonged, theoretically, to the government, which could dismantle the whole system at will and so deprive people of a lifetime of investment. And as we have seen, the turn of the twenty-first century was the time when the government called in all these dues. There was a new spate of slum demolitions, so that even those of Delhi’s working classes who had come to the city in the 1970s and ’80s often found themselves suddenly homeless. At a time when a hundred thousand or more poor migrants were washing up every year in Delhi from a rural situation that had become so desperate that they could no longer survive there, the total space where poor people could make a semi-permanent home in Delhi was systematically decreased. The ‘surplus’ piled up in the millions: people who could not go back and could not stay.

Some of those slum demolitions were by official order, in accordance with the Land Acquisition Act and under the banner of the 201 °Commonwealth Games; some of them were carried out after a series of suspiciously convenient fires destroyed the slums and scattered their residents. A number of these slums had been established soon after the demolitions of the 1970s, and by now they each housed 100,000 people who had, during that time, built themselves brick houses, water and sewage systems, schools, temples and mosques. They were vibrant townships that were an essential resource for the city as a whole, since they housed so many of its factory workers, domestic servants, security guards and the like. When bulldozers were sent in to these places, it brought to mind nothing so much as a devastating military assault. Grown men and women sat on the mountains of bricks, weeping at the destruction of what they had often built with their own hands; some of them argued with the police and bureaucrats who had come to superintend the process. Children roved what had once been streets, wide-eyed at the miracle of the razed houses and schools. Many of them had already been set to work gathering undamaged bricks for new builders to use: they piled them in great walls at the edge of the site and were paid 2 rupees for every hundred bricks. On the main road, Biblical lines of refugees set off with pots and pans and bundles of clothes, looking for a place to settle.

Those who could prove that they had lived in these places for many years were given land in compensation, though the process was tortuous. Since there was only a limited number of these plots the government was forced to inflate the requirements whenever they found out that too many people qualified. “We said you have to be able to prove that you have been living here since 2000. Well, now you have to prove you have been here since 1998… ” And when one visited the new areas — like Bhalswa — one was incredulous at the condition of the land and the distance from jobs. But most did not get any place to live at all. Some went back to villages to see what remained for them there. Some joined the human detritus living in underpasses around Connaught Place, blasted out of their minds, shivering under tattered blankets. Some joined the armies living under blue and yellow tarpaulin around factories and building sites.

In these latter places the punishment would go further. It was not enough to deny workers physical space. They should be given nothing, in fact, to suggest they were anything other than entirely dispensable units broken off from the infinity of India’s masses. Often not even shoes or gloves, which might have given the mistaken impression that their bodily well-being was significant, were provided to the construction workers who built Delhi’s much-vaunted real estate. Construction workers were regularly injured and even killed because they had no helmets or harnesses and only the most rudimentary information about what they were doing. During the ‘beautification’ of the city prior to the Commonwealth Games, one could see men, women and children painting kerbs and fences with their bare hands, their arms stained with paint up to their elbows. It was as if the whole thing were a cold joke played on the underclass, reminding them constantly that their existence, outside the pure fact of their labour, was nothing and would never be acknowledged. Building contractors, many of whom made enormous fortunes during the boom, did absolutely everything to shave bits off their workers’ salaries. Not only did they not pay minimum wages — let alone the mandated social security payments — but they charged workers rent to erect tents on the building site and they deducted money for the boots and gloves they handed out. It was so emphatically petty that it felt that money was not even remotely the issue. It seemed to be not so much a financial strategy as a class lesson: people like you have no claims to comfort and safety, you are not people like us, you are on the outside of this story and you may never come in.