ON 26th July and the week that followed, Mumbai was devastated by floods. It is ironical that more than 400 people died in the most modern city of India directly due to the floods. Another 4-500 people died a few weeks later in outbreaks of various diseases. This disaster has exposed the vulnerability of the city, which has been growing rapidly and haphazardly over the last two decades, without any consideration for the environment or the vast majority of the population. A small river called Mithi runs through the north of the city, emptying its waters on the western coastline into the sea at Bandra. Over the years, this river has been encroached upon by human settlements. The two major developments which have blocked the natural course of the river are the Bandra Kurla business complex and the international airport at Sahar. Needless to add, slums have come up all along the river’s bank, on low lying marshy land, which was considered too worthless to ‘protect’ from the poor.
Having worked in one such slum for the last five years, we have been able to observe the city’s perverse logic at work. These two large fixed structures have been created using public money at a great cost to serve the commercial interests of the city. Any suggestion that they be relocated or demolished would be met with indignation and complete disbelief. On the other hand, removing a few thousand hutments along the river’s bank would be easily accomplished and would meet with the approval of the middle class and the popular media. The state would prove that they have taken ‘concrete’ steps to tackle threats facing the city and everyone would go back home happy - till the next disaster.
In the period between December 04 and February 05, the present state government displaced nearly a lakh people by conducting arbitrary demolitions. This campaign was finally stopped when the local MPs, MLAs pressurized the Congress high command to rein in the state government. During the campaign, the deputy chief minister announced with great satisfaction that all those displaced were ‘going back to the villages’ and they were successfully reducing the population of the city. For someone who has worked in Mumbai slums, its easy to see that nothing could be farther from the truth. While the immediate response may be to return to the village, most migrants come back. They simply look for more degraded land to settle on, where they will not come in the way of the interests of builders-politicians who are running amok all over the city. Much of this is land which is unstable and dangerous (river banks, hillsides, bogs, marshes, etc). Over the years, this lobby has pushed the poor to the brink. Even the land which they thought was valueless is catching the eye of the builders. Hills are blasted and leveled to create land for buildings, marshes are filled up, open spaces are taken over.
Given the anti-poor policies of the present state government and the obsession of the city’s elite with making Mumbai into a ‘world-class’ city, it is difficult to predict how long public pressure will be able to prevent the demolition of hutments along the Mithi. Of course, this time the people can take solace in the fact that they are being made homeless for their own ‘safety’. Till date, the poor had not threatened the elite of the city beyond being an ‘eyesore’, which deflated their mood as they went about in their cars. If the state is able to convince them that the illegal hutments caused the flooding which damaged so much property and cost several lives, there will be a much stronger public support for carrying out demolitions.
Over the decades, the governments have learnt to talk of ‘rehabilitation’ rather than demolitions. This has been prompted partly by pressure by activists groups as well as international agencies that baulk at the prospect of being seen as ‘human rights violators’ on Indian soil. A much more effective factor has been the realization by politicians and bureaucrats that there is a lot of money to be made from rehabilitation. However, the fact even after two decades of slum ‘rehabilitation’ programmes, the proportion of slum population has increased shows that they have been nothing more than a cosmetic change, which wins good publicity and does not disturb the status quo.
With the decline of all working class movements in the city, political parties are the only avenue left for the working class. This has dragged the entire issue out of the realm of progressive politics and human rights into the politics of populism. Inspite of knowing that political parties have no real commitment to the interests of the vast population of slum dwellers in the city, they are compelled to depend on ad hoc strategies to manipulate the political system for their survival. So the people are resigned to getting 10 kgs of rice as relief material in one week and facing the lathis and bulldozers in the next.
– Neha Madhiwala