In the end the bulldozer wins every argument. The war for real estate in India is waged brutally and with precise, cold blooded violence and the builder-politician mafia wins every time because we are not a democracy. We are a country where people like you and me rights only in theory and you just had to see the images from Mumbai’s Campa Cola compound playing out on your television screen to register the level of violent corruption we as citizens have to accept and live with if we want to be left with some vestiges of human dignity.
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As a toothy bulldozer razed the main gate to the ground, hundreds of policemen like khaki locusts swarmed the grounds with BMC officials to make sure not one defenseless, innocent citizen was spared. One image stayed with me long after I switched off the news. A young girl in glasses shouting at a group of police men and they shouting back threateningly, “Aye Nepali! Aye Nepali!” As if her facial features had dehumanized her into what was considered to be an insult. Women being pushed around, men being jostled and pushed, one police man kicking down a barricade with almost perverse glee and a sense of his own manhood that perhaps gets vindicated only when he is allowed to bully and terrorise ordinary people who cannot fight back beyond a point.
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And all because over 28 years back, unscrupulous builders built more floors than they were supposed to so now more than two decades later, the residents of the apartment complex who had nothing to do with this deviant greed, have to pay with their homes where perhaps their life-time of savings were invested. They won’t go without a fight or so they thought. We saw petitions being signed and peaceful dharnas but the zeal with which the law enforcement agencies in this country attack the rights of ordinary citizens is unequalled.
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We saw it during the Anna Hazare and the Nirbhaya agitation where people were tear gassed and lathi charged. This must be one unique nation where bloody wars are waged by the State against its own citizens under one pretext or another. In a country where politicians salt away crores in scams, build palatial homes and get kick offs and are almost never asked to account for their inordinate wealth, the poor and the middle-class citizens are often kicked out of their homes to make way for progress, for malls and high rise buildings.
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A few months ago, I saw the naked might of the law as a few hundred protesters ready to march to the demolition site of Bangalore’s Ejipura were blocked by hordes of policemen. A few nights before that, hundreds of families were evicted from their homes and years of their lives reduced to rubble as police protected bulldozers swooped upon a colony earmarked for the poor and flattened it to make way for a mall. Not just in this instance but in so many others in different parts of the country, police might is used as a violent means to an end…the suppression of democratic rights of those who have no bargaining currency.
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Yes, the Campa Cola compound demolition has been stayed but similar battles are lost everyday by ordinary citizens while power hungry leaders drum up frenzy over monumental statues of departed leaders , politically connected sons and daughters and sons-in-law amass unaccounted wealth. Recently in Bangalore, a Metro route was proposed towards the road where our apartment complex is built because a well-connected private hospital management had to be allegedly appeased and would not part with the land required to accommodate the original Metro route. If we lose the battle, there will be an enormous price to pay in terms of the space that will be appropriated and diminishing real estate value of properties middle-class families have sunk all their savings in.
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As I watched the Campa Cola siege the other day, and young women being violently pushed around and abused by policemen, I felt I was there with them because I could have been them, could be them tomorrow or the day after. Who can argue with 200 policemen and their lathis and a bulldozer mowing down your boundary walls and the gate? If some politicians had not arrived at the Campa Cola compound to milk the situation, if the TV cameras had not been recording violence, the demolition would have been complete that day. Because the worst of bullies afterall do not want be caught on camera doing their stuff. Maybe that is the answer. To become trench warriors in your backyards and fight like the Campa Cola residents did till someone notices and hears you and the battle becomes public for the whole world to see. Maybe democracy acts like a democracy only when the white hot collective gaze of citizens eyeballs a bulldozer and asks, “Why?”
picture courtesy: http://www.jagran.com/
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Reema Moudgil has been writing for magazines and newspapers on art, cinema, issues, architecture and more since 1994, is an RJ, hosts a daily Ghazal show, runs unboxed writers, is the editor of Chicken Soup for The Indian Woman’s soul, the author of Perfect Eight (http://www.flipkart.com/perfect-eight-9380032870/p/itmdf87fpkhszfkb?pid=9789380032870&_l=A0vO9n9FWsBsMJKAKw47rw–&_r=dyRavyz2qKxOF7Yuc ) and an artist.