Uncivil City: Ecology, Equity and the Commons in Delhi [1 ed.] 9353289408, 9789353289409

Table of contents :
Dedication
Contents
Publisher’s Acknowledgements
Acknowledgements
1 Introduction: An uncivil city
Remaking Landscapes and Lives
2 Making plans and places
3 Sealing factories and fates
4 Playing games
Contesting the Commons
5 Cows, cars and cycle-rickshaws
6 The River
7 The Ridge
Conclusion and Coda
8 City limits and beyond
9 Climate change, uncertainty and the city
Glossary
Bibliography
About the Author
Index

Citation preview

UNCIVIL CITY

ECOLOGY, EQUITY AND THE COMMONS IN DELHI

AMITA BAVISKAR

Uncivil City

Uncivil City Ecology, Equity and the Commons in Delhi

Amita Baviskar

Copyright © Amita Baviskar, 2020 All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced or utilized in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopying, recording or by any information storage or retrieval system, without permission in writing from the publisher. First published in 2020 by

SAGE Publications India Pvt Ltd B1/I-1 Mohan Cooperative Industrial Area Mathura Road, New Delhi 110 044, India www.sagepub.in

YODA Press 79, Gulmohar Enclave New Delhi 110049 www.yodapress.co.in

SAGE Publications Inc 2455 Teller Road Thousand Oaks, California 91320, USA SAGE Publications Ltd 1 Oliver’s Yard, 55 City Road London EC1Y 1SP, United Kingdom SAGE Publications Asia-Pacific Pte Ltd 18 Cross Street #10-10/11/12 China Square Central Singapore 048423 Published by Vivek Mehra for SAGE Publications India Pvt Ltd. Typeset in 10.5/13pt Adobe Caslon Pro by Fidus Design Pvt Ltd, Chandigarh. Library of Congress Control Number: 2019952123

ISBN: 978-93-5328-940-9 (HB) Sage YODA Team: Amrita Dutta, Syed Husain Naqvi, Arpita Das, Ishita Gupta and Tanya Singh

for J.P.S. Uberoi H.Y. Mohan Ram B.S. Baviskar Kusum Baviskar

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Contents

Publisher’s Acknowledgementsix Acknowledgementsxi 1

Introduction: An uncivil city

1

Remaking Landscapes and Lives 2

Making plans and places

33

3

Sealing factories and fates

55

4

Playing games

83

Contesting the Commons 5

Cows, cars and cycle-rickshaws

109

6

The River

141

7

The Ridge

169

Conclusion and Coda 8

City limits and beyond

195

9

Climate change, uncertainty and the city

212

Glossary219 Bibliography222 About the Author238 Index239

Publisher’s Acknowledgements

Chapter 2. ‘Between Violence and Desire: Space, Power and Identity in the Making of Metropolitan Delhi.’ International Social Science Journal 175: 89–98. 2003. © UNESCO. Reprinted with permission. Chapter 3. ‘Public Interest and Private Compromises: The Politics of Environmental Negotiation in Delhi, India.’ In Law Against the State: Ethnographic Forays into Law’s Transformations, edited by Julia Eckert, Brian Donahue, Christian Strümpell and Zerrin Özlem Biner, 171–201. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. 2012. © Cambridge University Press. Reprinted with permission. Chapter 4. ‘Spectacular Events, City Spaces and Citizenship: The Commonwealth Games in Delhi.’ In Urban Navigations: Politics, Space and the City in South Asia, edited by Jonathan Shapiro Anjaria and Colin McFarlane, 138–161. New Delhi: Routledge. 2011. © Jonathan Shapiro Anjaria and Colin McFarlane. Reprinted with permission of The Licensor through PLSclear. Chapter 5. ‘Cows, Cars and Cycle-rickshaws: Bourgeois Environmentalism and the Battle for Delhi’s Streets.’ In Elite and Everyman: The Cultural Politics of the Indian Middle Classes, edited by Amita Baviskar and Raka Ray, 391–418. New Delhi: Routledge. 2011. © Author. Reprinted with permission of The Licensor through PLSclear. Chapter 6. ‘What the Eye Does Not See: River Yamuna in the Imagination of Delhi.’ Economic and Political Weekly 46 (50): 45–53. 2011. © Author.

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Chapter 7. ‘Urban Jungles: Wilderness, Parks and their Publics in Delhi.’ Economic and Political Weekly 53 (2): 46–54. 2018. © Author. Chapter 8. ‘City Limits: Looking for Environment and Justice in the Urban Context.’ In Rethinking Environmentalism: Linking Justice, Sustainability, and Diversity, edited by Sharachchandra Lele, Eduardo S. Brondizio, John Byrne, Georgina M. Mace, and Joan Martinez-Alier, 85–97. Strüngmann Forum Reports, vol. 23, Julia Lupp, series editor. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press. 2018. © Ernst Strüngmann Forum. Reprinted with permission.

Acknowledgements

It was on bus rides from Connaught Place to Delhi University in the late 1990s that the question of the urban environment first struck me. Boarding DTC’s sau number (Route no. 100) on Parliament Street after hours whiled away with friends at the People Tree shop, studio and adda, I would travel home in a tumult of traffic past Paharganj, Jhandewalan, Ajmal Khan Park, Bara Hindu Rao, Barafkhana and Malkaganj to Maurice Nagar. As the packed bus lurched and crawled forward, I’d look out at leisure on run-down mills, the tyre market, men headed to prayers in a mosque, a row of masala sellers on the railway bridge, and porters loading trucks at cavernous godowns. I’d amuse myself by drawing dotted lines between all these activities, imagining the outspread web of rail and road transporting industrial goods into and out of the city. Each time I saw them, I’d puzzle over the anomalous presence of the spice vendors. I’d grin at the irony of ‘Model Basti’ and savour the faded glamour of Filmistan. In those days, my research lay in the Narmada Valley in Madhya Pradesh (and, briefly, near the Great Himalayan National Park in Himachal Pradesh). I wrote about people living in villages and their struggles for rights to forests, fields, pastures, streams and rivers. So too did other scholars in the growing thicket of studies on ‘environment and society’. The countryside was where environmental politics in India seemed to naturally reside. But that near-daily drive through the heart of Delhi, with my senses crowded and jostled by being inside the bus and by what I glimpsed through the window, pushed me to notice what was present around me: the city. Paradoxically, the unremarkable, unprepossessing features of an urban place became provocative. Where is Nature here, I wondered. Is it just those pigeons wheeling around the dome of the mosque? What does environmental politics look like here? Is it that traffic cop furiously blowing his whistle and waving a smoke-spewing overladen truck to the side? As these

xii  Uncivil City

questions multiplied in my mind, I began to move away from rural and agrarian research. Like the ride on sau number, my Urban Turn was a long, trundling journey. Happily, however, I had a busload of companions to help me along the way. Professor J.P.S. Uberoi first got me thinking about urban geography and the relationship between the Ridge and the River. The relief map of Delhi that he unfurled on his living room floor sparked off my interest in the physical landscape and the flows of subterranean water beneath. Even today, a Delhi Jal Board map of drainage can quicken my pulse. I am also indebted to J.P.S. for a walk through Shahjahanabad that brought alive the syncretic history of its streets: a field of domes atop the Kali Masjid recalling an encampment of Turkoman tents, the memory of moneychangers outside Fatehpuri who would honour promissory notes from Kabul, the bridgehead established by the British on Church Mission Road. Much more than the grand monuments in which Delhi abounds, it was the history embodied in this lived landscape that captivated me. I have also been inspired by historian Narayani Gupta whose research on Delhi combines scholarly rigour with a joyful lightness of touch. From conversations with architect and urban planner K.T. Ravindran I came to better appreciate bureaucracies and the realpolitik of land. My interest in Delhi emerged while I taught at the Department of Sociology at Delhi University. Following in J.P.S.’s footsteps, I took students for walks around the city but I soon became aware that I needed to study the urban environment literature more systematically. A two-year stint as a Ciriacy-Wantrup Fellow at the Institute of International Studies, University of California at Berkeley in 2002–2004, introduced me to the wealth of scholarship on political ecology and urban studies around the world. Thanks to Michael Watts’s electric presence and astute leadership, the Environmental Politics Colloquium crackled with erudition, warmth and wit. For that Berkeley buzz that got me going, I owe much to Michael, Iain Boal, Gillian Hart, Jake Kosek, Donald Moore, Anand Pandian, Nancy Peluso and Isha Ray. Their appetite for ideas and their generosity in including me in their intellectual feasts will stay with me always.

Acknowledgements  xiii

Fieldwork for this research began while I was at Berkeley but continued in a sustained way only after I joined the Institute of Economic Growth, Delhi, in 2006. Environmental economist Kanchan Chopra was Director that time and I appreciate her gentle encouragement, urging me to cross disciplinary divides. She fostered a culture of serious scholarship and collegial engagement at the Institute that remains my ideal. Today, more than ever, I am conscious of what an astonishing privilege it is to be allowed to conduct independent research and to be provided with a congenial environment to do it in. I am deeply grateful to my colleagues at the Institute who have supported me in ways too numerous to mention. I was fortunate that my research coincided with the formation of Saajha Manch, the joint forum of organisations working for the rights of squatters, labourers, homeless people and other members of the urban under-class. At the core of the Manch was Hazards Centre, where a team led by Dunu Roy, working out of a tiny office in Munirka village, produced path-breaking analyses of the inequities in urban planning. Dunu’s stimulating questions and critiques were important in clarifying my initial ideas. Through Saajha Manch, I was introduced to activists and members of Nirman Mazdoor Panchayat Sangam, Dilli Shramik Sangathan, Ankur, Mobile Creches, Aashray Adhikar Abhiyan and others who organise, support and advocate for Delhi’s overlooked poor, powerless and destitute citizens. They in turn introduced me to people in Bhalaswa, Bawana and Sundarnagari. My thanks to Anita, Lalit Batra, Subhash Bhatnagar, Leena Dabiru, Darshana, Raminder, Bhupender Singh Rawat, Sarita, Jaya Shrivastava, Arun Singh, Thaneshwar and Urmila for letting me into their world (many activists don’t use surnames). I salute their efforts to wrestle challenging circumstances to the ground while upholding a larger vision of what a just city should be. Early versions of these chapters benefited from close and critical questioning by students and peers at a number of forums where they were presented. Some parts of this book were written while visiting other institutions. My understanding of cities and spectacular events discussed in Chapter 4 developed during a semester at the Department of Anthropology at Yale University in 2009, for which I am grateful

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to K. Sivaramakrishnan and William Kelly. A short stay hosted by the Center for South Asia Studies at the University of Michigan, Ann Arbor, in 2018 enabled me to start knitting these essays into a coherent whole; and I am indebted to Farina Mir and Will Glover for their generous hospitality. I finally completed the manuscript at the Stanford Humanities Center in May 2019 and I am thankful to Jisha Menon at the Center for South Asia and her colleagues for nominating me for the International Visitors Program and to Kelda Jamison for making my stay so fruitful and well-fed. Arpita Das at Yoda Press persuaded me that my essays were worthy of a book; without her encouragement and well-judged editing this volume would not exist. The book is richer for Orijit Sen’s inimitable illustrations that perfectly capture the city that I write about. Acknowledgements are usually about thanking people and institutions, but I must mention a place to which I owe so much: the Delhi University campus. My father Baburao Baviskar taught in the Department of Sociology. In 1970, he suffered a heart attack while in Kohima, Nagaland, in connection with the Department’s outreach programme in North-East India. After he returned to Delhi, he received an ‘out-of-turn allotment’ of staff quarters on ‘compassionate grounds’ so that he would be saved the stress of commuting from Karol Bagh, where we rented a small flat off Ramjas Road. At the age of six, I came to live in Maurice Nagar. The move changed my life. The campus allowed my nascent love for nature to flower. On early morning walks with my father, I’d catch the scent of murraya blossoms in the St Stephen’s College hedge. While he jogged around the university cricket ground, I would daydream, straddling the low trunk of a putranjiva tree. As a teenager, I would walk our dog Gundi around the campus, straining to maintain a dignified mien as children from the F-quarters rudely yelled ‘Desi kutta! Desi kutta!’ The campus was made for walking and the habit it instilled in me remains a source of ineffable pleasure. Much of my familiarity with Delhi comes from exploring it on foot from an early age. Credit for this must also go to my mother Kusum Baviskar, not only for letting us wander about freely, but also for leading by example by being the first female flâneur in the family. Her job as a social worker with the Municipal

Acknowledgements  xv

Corporation of Delhi took her all over the city and even today, at the age of 85, she makes her own way from Azadpur to Zamrudpur, walking and catching buses. The move to Maurice Nagar was a major step in social mobility too. It gave me an entrée into an English-speaking world and the attendant cultural capital of knowing its books, music and films (Would I have learned to love jazz on Ramjas Road?). Most important, I was introduced to a precocious group of school and college students, children of academics and journalists, which went on to become Kalpavriksh, the environmental action group. As a member of Kalpavriksh, I got to travel to other parts of the country, from the Garhwal Himalaya in the company of Chipko activists to Ambur’s tanning factories in Tamil Nadu, studying environmental issues from up close. A long stay in Amarkantak in 1984 led eventually to my PhD research on adivasi relationships with nature in the Narmada valley. Without Kalpavriksh, I couldn’t have gone from helping put together a mobile exhibition on Delhi’s environment in 1982 to researching factory closures and evictions in 2000 and, ultimately, questioning the definition of urban ecology itself. Though my association with Kalpavriksh ebbed in the 1990s, I was fortunate to find another, more dispersed, group of like-minded peers who were exploring urban questions in India. Among the host of scholars who generously shared their ideas and experiences with me, Lalit Batra was an invaluable ally and knowledgeable sounding board. Karen Coelho, Asher Ghertner and Vinay Gidwani were crucial interlocutors and comrades. For their intellectual fellowship, I am also grateful to Nikhil Anand, Jon Shapiro Anjaria, Gautam Bhan, Bharati Chaturvedi, Satish Deshpande, Véronique Dupont, Julia Eckert, Will Glover, Ashish Kothari, Frédéric Landy, Manoj Misra, Anne Rademacher, Usha Ramanathan, Ursula Rao, K. Sivaramakrishnan, Sanjay Srivastava and Carol Upadhya. Finally, friends: those intimates and co-passengers who pushed me when my engine sputtered and stalled, cheered and clambered back on board when I roared back to life. Where would I be without you? Thanks to Sanjay ‘Bunny’ Barnela, Vasudha Dalmia, Will Glover,

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Bernadette ‘Burny’ Joseph, Brij Kothari, (the late) Saba Mahmood, Farina Mir, Isha Ray, Raka Ray, Vasant Saberwal, Ambuj Sagar and Nandini Sundar. In connection with this book, a special thanks to Kai Friese for giving me the space to write better and for our shared nerdy enthusiasms about Delhi stuff. Happy walks with Pradip Krishen deepened my pleasure in plants and I am grateful to him for making me look beyond botany at the larger landscape, wild and cultivated. Meeta Mastani’s curiosity, clear eyes and empathy have given me insight into this city’s changing social fabric. I am grateful to Rahul Ram for many things but here, most of all, for his delight in the ridiculous around us, his humour redeeming the everyday irritations and outrages of life in Delhi. Thank you all.

1

Introduction: An uncivil city

I Waiting at the red light at the Delhi School of Economics intersection on the Delhi University campus on a dark afternoon last August—the sky pregnant with rain, neem and jamun trees a fresh green above the confusion of cars and rickshaws—I was transported back to another monsoon about 25 years ago.1 Then, at this very place, a heavy downpour had caused a section of the road to cave in, sinking a Maruti van’s right front wheel in the mud. The owner—a stout Punjabi man—was out in the rain, drenched to the skin, struggling to lift the wheel out. His plight attracted drivers from a nearby taxi stand who waded over to help him as the rain pelted down. Watching this little drama from our cars stuck in stalled traffic, we saw the car-owner bend over to grip the front bumper of his car. As he did so, his trousers slipped down, revealing the cleft of his buttocks to the world. There was a brief pause. Then the taxi drivers—burly Jat Sikhs, big guys with turbans— started jumping up and down with glee, pointing at the man and shouting, ‘Shame, shame, puppy shame! Shame, shame, puppy shame!’ Places are made meaningful by the memories they accumulate, as much as by the everyday practices that animate them. Delhi University’s campus is very different today from what it was two 1

Neem is Azadirachta indica; jamun is Syzygium cumini.

Illustration: Orijit Sen

Introduction: An uncivil city  3

decades ago. For one, the taxi stand was closed down after a driver named Bubbal was murdered by a colleague. Yet, despite the almost overwhelming presence of the now embodied in the rush of traffic and crowd of students, even when the present insists on demanding all one’s attention, the mind still makes room for older associations between personal and public biographies. This is where the antiMandal protesters blocked the road in 1992, renaming the crossing Kranti Chowk (Revolution Square). This is where the chrome yellow tapers of the candle-bush grew along the rainwater ditch before they paved it over to widen the road.2 This is where David, a colleague visiting from England, hit his head against the jutting corner of a metal hoarding and bled all over his shirt. The trivial and the momentous, the mundane and the dramatic, merge together, creating the personal history albums that we carry around in our heads. Some sudden cue may cause this record of our relation to a place to flutter open, even as our bodies re-enact the familiar motions of walking and driving and crossing the road. Decades later, the long-gone taxi drivers still linger in my mind. Perhaps their spirit of generosity and playfulness remains vivid because it is these very qualities that seem scarce in the everyday life and larger politics of the city today. A sense of place may be personal and idiosyncratic but it is also a product of shared experiences. It cannot be separated from the layers of collective meaning that gather over time, imparting to a place its patina of grace—or for that matter, its aura of grubbiness or ghastliness. One cannot always rely on the stability of these shared meanings. Whenever I return to Delhi on a train from western India, I look out for the dome of Humayun’s tomb with the white marble Damdama Sahib gurudwara beside it. The tomb tells me I’m home, back in this city with its magnificent history. More generally, I had thought that the tomb was safely lodged in our collective list of Great Monuments To Be Proud Of. Imagine my dismay when, in the early 1990s, as our train entered the city, a little boy in the compartment pointed to the dome and asked his father what it was and his father, instead of simply saying ‘Humayun’s tomb’, replied, ‘Beta, yeh hamaari ghulami ki nishaani hai’ (Son, this is a sign of our slavery). 2

Candle-bush is Senna alata.

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If the collective meanings of places became more contested in the 1990s with the spread of Hindutva, they have been radically redefined in the last 20 years as the city seeks ‘world-class’ status. This aspiration has taken a concrete shape as policies of economic liberalisation have unrolled, creating a real estate and construction boom in what used to be a sluggish, state-controlled landscape. The city’s economy has shifted decisively towards the service sector as older manufacturing firms have been shut down, partly due to a crackdown by the courts on air and water pollution. In the last 20 years, tens of thousands of workers in these industries have lost their jobs. Almost a million people have been evicted from squatter settlements and pushed to the city’s periphery. At the same time, plans are afoot to densify Delhi, demolishing low-rise residential colonies and replacing them with tall towers of commercial and office space.3 The judicial activism that has led to many of these changes has been prompted by a section of uppermiddle-class citizens, the prime beneficiaries of liberalisation. For them, pursuing the ‘public interest’ by removing pollution has been congruous with banishing the city’s working-class population out of sight, their labour available yet invisible. Enhancing elite lifestyles has meant protecting a sense of place based on bourgeois ideas of urban beauty and order, and prosecuting those who violate it.

And it is the driving beat of this lifestyle that powers where the city is going: close to a hundred shopping malls built in 20 years;4 cars that outnumber the combined total of the other three metros; and a surge of media devoted to shopping, eating and drinking out. Every opportunity to consume is exploited to the fullest, for what is the good life but ‘changa khao te changa pehno’ (eat well and dress well)? And now lifestyle includes being ‘environmentally conscious’ through slogans— Say no to plastic straws; Ban firecrackers; Plant a tree. These token gestures of caring for the city and the planet are a sop to the conscience but no substitute for addressing the deep-seated, systemic problems at hand. Runaway consumption has left a trail of mountains of waste, foul air and water in its wake, yet everyone wants to climb higher to

See Baviskar (2018a). Renjhen (2015). Also see The Tribune, 20 March 2019, https://www. tribuneindia.com/news/business/mall-culture-grips-north-india/746011.html. Accessed on 26 May 2019. 3 4

Introduction: An uncivil city  5

the giddy delights of acquiring more stuff. Delivery men on motorbikes with giant rucksacks on their backs criss-cross the city. Even in an economic downturn, the markets are abuzz with business. For those who can afford it, consumerism is all-consuming. To this already heady brew are added the ambitions of governments that want to make Delhi a ‘world-class’ city. Their vision is focused on infrastructure: not so much in terms of providing basic amenities like housing, clean water and sanitation, health and education, but mainly by expanding certain forms of mobility.5 Building infrastructure is an opportunity for multi-million-rupee mega-projects paid for by public money, all of which entail construction on an unprecedented scale. The Delhi Metro, new highways, flyovers and bridges, and an expanded airport are milestones along the path of this rainbow we’ve been chasing since the turn of the century. If not this year, then surely next year we will be ‘world-class’.

Photo: Author 5 On the tensions between the promise of modernity contained in capitalintensive infrastructure and the complex social relations its implementation must negotiate, see the essays in Anand et al. (2018).

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‘World-class’ is a term that is hard to define.6 But as the Judge famously said about obscenity, ‘I know it when I see it’. Regardless of whether we have been to Singapore or Shanghai, we know when we are in the presence of something ‘world-class’. Like obscenity or divinity, ‘world-classness’ provokes a response from within, an instant shock of recognition. It is more than an aesthetic; it is a total sensuous experience. Stepping into the metro the first time, breathing the airconditioning, feeling the smooth silver seat beneath, listening to the clear announcements—this was world-class, we knew! It is the seductive power of ‘world-class’—its promise of streamlined ease and efficiency—that keeps us hooked as we fight our way through the congestion, commercialisation and clangour that currently define Delhi. ‘World-class’ also means we’re-as-good-as-anyone-else, a profoundly important feeling for a nation where the elite has always been haunted by its insecurity and sense of inferiority vis-à-vis the West (and, more recently, the East too). Becoming ‘world-class’ has meant shedding the city’s rather rumpled and shabby image. Until the 1980s, much of Delhi had the stamp of a sarkari city, a low-rise sprawl of standardised Public Works Department buildings in the architectural style best described as Budget Bauhaus. These were interspersed with colonies of private kothis (Punjabi Baroque). 7 There was also the Old Delhi of Shahjahanabad, the ‘urban villages’ that the city had swallowed, and designated markets, but the ruling urban ethos was shaped by the bureaucratic character of the capital. Growing up in the red-brick houses of the Delhi University Staff Quarters, we could not but be conscious of social hierarchies. The professors lived in sprawling C-type bungalows and the karmcharis in F-type tenements. There was an air of rundown-ness about the place but something suggested that the houses were poorly-built to begin with: after all, sarkari contractors weren’t less corrupt in the past. Colonial-era wiring meant that if one switched on the toaster, all the lights in the house would flicker ominously. The standard jaundice-yellow whitewash, the 6 See Dupont (2011) and Ghertner (2011) for a discussion of ‘world-class’ city-making and its aesthetics. 7 The term ‘Punjabi Baroque’ was coined by architect Gautam Bhatia (1994).

Introduction: An uncivil city  7

draughty door and window fittings, the primitive kitchen—all contributed to a sense of decrepitude which we vainly tried to disguise with ethnic bedspreads and wall-hangings. But the dilapidation of our private premises was offset by the spaciousness of the public areas that surrounded us—even the F quarters had access to a large maidan for cricket and the community Ram Leela. And—it’s a cliché but still true—one knew people across social distances. The Gorkha chaukidar, whose chief task was to swing a desultory lathi at the cows that wandered into the compound in the afternoons, also doubled as the doodhwala. We would sometimes visit his house to deposit milk bottles, just as we would go over to the dhobi’s quarters with its huge vat for boiling bedsheets. Now, in the gated neighbourhood where I live, the security guards are employed through a contractor who, incidentally, barely pays them the legal minimum wage. Just when one might begin to find out where a chaukidar or maali lives, they get replaced by a new set of faces. Without housing or pension benefits, they come and go, part of a shifting precariat. It’s easy to be nostalgic for the spaces and social fabric of the past from the vantage of a place of privilege. I don’t suppose that the young sweeper who collected our garbage in those days thinks back through a warm golden haze to the leftover food she received and was expected to be grateful for. Nor have I forgotten that, as an adolescent and young woman, every bus ride and walk on the streets meant running the gamut of men’s groping, rubbing and pinching, their stares and leers, lewd suggestions and vicious remarks. And I remember 1984 when plumes of smoke slowly drifted into the clear October sky as homes and shops owned by Sikhs were burned down, ordinary people murdered and raped, forced to hide and flee from state-sponsored mobs. No. The Delhi of those times was a deeply flawed social landscape, as it is now. But when I remember the open spaces that we took for granted while growing up, I now know what I could not then: that our city was ecologically far superior to the place we now inhabit. Being a sarkari city, large areas of Delhi were owned by the government and, until the 1990s, a lot of land just lay about in a state of benign neglect. On the higher ground of the Ridge, there were

8  Uncivil City

gnarled trees tangled with lianas, sweet-smelling shrubs and the insistent call of the Grey Francolin. By the river’s west bank were tamarisk groves and giant tufts of kaans grass with white feathery plumes that caught the light.8 Mongoose and peafowl were commonplace. The wild and the rural existed in the heart of the built-up and urban. This paradox was one to be proud of. In which other city of this size could one sit in a tiny patch of garden and count more than fifty species of birds? Where else could you stand in the middle of a city and be surrounded by fields of vegetables, fruit and flowers while the metro sweeps past overhead? Despite the grievous assaults on its wilderness, Delhi still encompasses all this and more. Last year, while walking home along the ganda nala, I casually glanced at a peepal tree overhanging its spume-flecked water and spotted a party of Grey Hornbills deftly plucking berries off the branches with their clumsy-looking beaks.9 This year I watched farmers plant melons on the sand-banks in the middle of the Yamuna. I enjoy these incongruities, but I appreciate even more their importance for the ecological well-being of the city. The Ridge and the river—the geographical parentheses that enclosed the city for hundreds of years—give us water and clean air, a space to breathe, a place to rest one’s eyes and soul. These are our commons—open to all, from the labouring women who collect firewood for their chulhas to the young boys who glean plastics for recycling from the river’s flotsam. Crucial though the Ridge and the Yamuna are to Delhi’s ecology, few seem to care about them except as places ripe for redevelopment. Major sections of the Ridge in Delhi have been destroyed to make space for hotels and malls, and even larger areas are being built upon and quarried in the neighbouring states of Haryana and Rajasthan. The Yamuna floodplain has been constricted by embankments so that land that should accommodate the river’s monsoon swell can be used for luxury apartments, malls, a metro depot and the Akshardham temple complex. This commodification of the commons is also a privatisation of public land. Places that, with a careless generosity, welcomed all—different species of living things as well as different 8 9

Kaans is Saccharum spontaneum. Peepal is Ficus religiosa.

Introduction: An uncivil city  9

classes of people—are now being parcelled out into the custody of the privileged few and placed out-of-bounds for everyone else. Instead, paying customers are invited to the new ‘public’ spaces— sanitised, surveilled and air-conditioned—where desire consists of ogling at things to buy and pleasure is conditional on spending money. In certain quarters, shopping malls are the subject of much moralising and exaggerated shuddering and I don’t have much to add to those voices. Here, I would rather view them as part of a city-wide assault on the commons by Construction, Commerce and Cars—the three monsters we have sheltered and fed. Construction of ‘infrastructure’ as well as ‘prestigious’ projects accelerated before the 2010 Commonwealth Games and, after the global downturn, is again picking up speed as the government partners with private firms to commercialise public lands in south Delhi. Razing long-established residential neighbourhoods, their old trees and parks, and replacing them with high-rise offices and shops creates a ‘world-class’ skyline and packs many more people and businesses into limited space. But while this vertical development may take up less room on the ground, its ecological footprints on the city’s water, energy, sewage and traffic maps go far deeper. Not only will it bring about a sea change in what Delhi looks and feels like, it will further flout environmental limits that the city should by now have learned to respect. We already have a public health crisis caused in great part by vehicular pollution. The Yamuna is a flow of untreated sewage and we get our drinking water by damming distant Himalayan rivers. Smouldering mountains of our garbage poison the air and ground. Summer temperatures soar because of the heat island effect caused by glass-concrete-tarmac and waste heat from air-conditioners, generators and vehicles. We can’t handle any of these problems and yet the government wants to build more, crowd more into an already congested city. Is this what we should be constructing: more ecological mayhem? Like construction, commerce and trade are not inherently evil, but they can suffocate a city when they take over every inch of space, as is the case today. In Delhi, wherever one looks, there is a new shop or a row of shops all selling apparently the same clothes, shoes and electronic goods. This repetition is tedious and frustrating. A good market

10  Uncivil City

is one that is useful and fun. Mukherjee Nagar market near where I live is both. Its potholed lanes and dingy buildings contain shops that will make you cotton mattresses and photocopies, repair a pressure cooker or a puncture, make hot jalebis and fresh fruit juice, and do Special Waterproof Bridal Makeup so that you can sob your heart out during bidaai and still stay unsmudged for the camera. This marvellous miscellany is the result of being surrounded by middle-class households, where money must be prudently husbanded and where haggling with the sabziwala over the price of desi timatar is de rigueur. Being near the university, the market houses hundreds of coaching classes that cater to aspiring entrants into the civil services. There are bookshops where you can buy the works of Pushkin and Premchand and every other literary figure who features in the university syllabus. There is also a food delivery service for students called Home Touch. This market will sell a pair of jeans to a college-goer and a hundred grams of cooking oil to a mason’s daughter. In catering to all kinds of people and needs, it is a diverse, inclusive place. Delhi is dotted with several such lively, all-purpose commercial hubs.

Photo: Author

Introduction: An uncivil city  11

But as the city gentrifies, many of the humbler trades can’t afford the rent. Or they have been targeted by municipal clean-up crews. Several essential services that survive in the city’s interstices: the artisanal economy of welders, dyers of cloth, sellers of gobar ki khaad, have all been pushed out or put on notice. The vegetable vendors and the thelawala whose mobile stall sells plates of rice and dal to rickshaw drivers keep a keen lookout for the kameti-wale—the municipal squads who might suddenly swoop in and confiscate the tools of their trade. The raids are an occupational hazard that even regular hafta-paying can’t insure against. The Street Vendors Act of 2014 has made only a small difference.10 The municipal pendulum swings between extortion and eviction, and small-time vendors fend off being bludgeoned as best as they can. Their small-scale commerce is a blemish in the eyes of ‘world-class’ city-makers. It’s a different story when it comes to legalising encroachment and unauthorised land use by the big guys. In a move designed to please property owners and developers, the Urban Development Ministry changed the rules in 2006, allowing houses along the wider roads in residential areas to be put to commercial use. These invite more coming and going but there is nowhere to walk since the pavements have shrunk to make space for parking. The social and ecological disaster that is Delhi’s streetscape is impossible to escape. An avalanche of cars thunders down Delhi’s roads, spitting cyclists and pedestrians out of its way. We walk in fear, huddling together for safety to cross the road, squeezing ourselves onto shrunken sidewalks, skipping out of the way as the next wave of menacing motors screeches past. And, instead of discouraging them, the government welcomes cars, strewing their path with wider roads, bigger parking lots, flyovers and underpasses, elevated roads and underground roads—cars everywhere, over, under and around us. This total surrender to big capital and the comfort of the automobile-owning classes is driving Delhi over the edge—there’s a shrillness to the city, a note of nerves stretched 10 See Baviskar (forthcoming) on the grounded political effects of the Act in Delhi. See Anjaria (2016) for a more detailed examination of the implementation of the Act in Mumbai.

12  Uncivil City

taut. Each commute is an ordeal; people venture onto the road like warriors going into battle. In a city, it is the streets that witness collective life, the everyday and the extraordinary. Despite its diminution by construction, big commerce and cars, the republic of the streets somehow manages to survive. There is still the civilised oasis of the street chai shop. Under a tree, with seats made from salvaged paving stones or a felled concrete electricity pole, it’s a space that invites you with its tidiness—the clean floor, the row of washed glasses,11 the line of plastic jars with savouries and biscuits. And even when the chaiwala has packed up and gone home for the day, the tidiness remains, a telltale sign that someone tends this part of the pavement. When the shop is open, auto-rickshaw drivers and clerks sit next to students and shop assistants—all mostly male, alas, for women don’t generally get to hang out much in public spaces.12 But if you’re there, you can casually tune in and out of the conversations around you: cricket scores, current affairs, something that happened to a guy called Guddu. Each tea shop creates a community of regulars, as do paan shops. And it’s notable that, for men at least, these gatherings allow everyone in, for both chai and paan are modest pleasures that even ordinary folk can afford.13 A more anonymous sense of community—and one that includes even solitary women—can be found in Connaught Place (CP), where the architecture of extramural corridors and pavements is wide enough to allow striding, strolling, standing and sitting about looking at the world passing by. The metro, which has otherwise fuelled intense commercialisation along its routes, has been kinder to CP, bringing in crowds of people who are there simply to enjoy the feeling of being 11

cups.

Now increasingly replaced, I’m sorry to say, with flimsy throw-away plastic

12 For a spirited manifesto on women’s rights to the street, see Phadke et al. (2011). 13 Now the popularity of paan has been overtaken by paan masala and gutkha sachets but the shop remains a locus of male sociality. These spaces have not attracted the scholarly attention bestowed on a similar social institution in Calcutta: adda. See, for instance, Chakrabarty (1999). For a path-breaking account of public spaces and working-class pleasures in Banaras, see Kumar (1988).

Introduction: An uncivil city  13

there. This is also true of India Gate, where ice-cream and balloons are accompaniments to a civic ritual centred on green lawns and a grand vista. Over time, the romance of these places has come to emanate not only from their stately buildings and pleasing environs, but from their place in our collective memory. This is what thousands of people do on 15 August: they go to India Gate, to enjoy being part of a public on a patriotic holiday. But, as they buy tricolour flags from scrawny children in ragged clothes, how many stop to think of the unfinished project that is the Republic? How many subscribe to the nastiness of nationalism—the chest-thumping jingoism, the celebration of military might? These darker currents pulse through even the most innocuous public gatherings. Yet, though they colour the character of communitas, they do not altogether evacuate it of its potential to be generous and playful. That new meanings can be found for older places is both a source of despair and hope. If one’s heart sinks on seeing the Yamuna’s shrinking riverbed, there’s a measure of gladness at the new Millennium Park planted over what used to be a gigantic garbage dump on the Outer Ring Road near Nizamuddin bridge. Ah, we note with vicarious satisfaction, canoodling couples from Jamna-paar finally get a roost of their own. And fortunately, some parks like Roshanara Bagh in north Delhi remain local and ungentrified, their basic charms still untampered with. The rhythms of the seasons and the passing of the day bring different people to its overgrown lawns: purposeful morning walkers, children messing about at play, ladies doing satsang, card-playing cronies on lunch-break—all casually sharing space with the daughter of a Mughal emperor. So, despite the incursions of capital, spaces of leisure that are open to almost everyone and that are relatively untouched by the urge to buy and sell can still be found in the city, although concentrated in its older and more affluent areas. But when I think beyond leisure about all the other collective activities that our public spaces made room for, the republic of the streets seems to be a shadow of its former self. As students and young adults in Delhi, we must have taken part in dozens of protests and demonstrations—the peace marches in 1984 past still-smouldering shops on the Grand Trunk Road; the rallies

14  Uncivil City

against sexual harassment on the Delhi University campus; the massive juloos of the National Alliance of People’s Movements in front of the Red Fort; anti-nuclear protests in 1998 that started from Mahatma Gandhi’s Samadhi; and the numerous dharnas in support of the Narmada movement outside various Ministry offices.14 These events were a part of our growing up and learning to be political—there was a collective effervescence to marching, singing and shouting slogans, to demonstrating what one stood for by putting one’s body on the line, to risking arrest and detention. And to feel that, in doing so, we were touching a thread of history that united us with far more courageous people who had gone before. Rallies disrupt daily life—that is one of their intended effects. That is how they give voice to concerns that would not otherwise be heard. But the public space of political protest has been squeezed out by traffic. Now the general consensus seems to be that street protests are a nuisance and nothing more. Unlike Sikh, Hindu or Muslim religious processions which are considered ‘sensitive’ and accommodated with elaborate traffic diversions, secular political rallies are strongly discouraged. For years on end, the Delhi Police has imposed Section 144 of the Criminal Procedure Code to prohibit public gatherings in most of New Delhi. It’s ironic that the capital of India, where the nation’s rulers decide the fate of its citizens, should be closed off to democratic expression by the ruled. The Boat Club, where rallies could be noticed by the country’s elected representatives, was declared out of bounds for security reasons in the 1990s. Instead, a side-street near Jantar Mantar was designated as a ghetto for people with grouses. And even this space is grudgingly conceded; the prevailing opinion is that politics should not be on the street but on television. Even the rallyists seem to have come around to this view; the slogan-shouting picks up fresh energy when the TV camera crews visit. Events like the Gay Pride parade fleetingly capture some of the exhilaration that used Recourse to public demonstrations usually occurs after other channels of petitioning and voicing protest have proved infructuous. So, while saluting the collective spirit is made visible in these protests, we must acknowledge the desperate straits that drive people to take to the street, the failure of mandated procedures of dispute resolution. See Mitchell (2018). 14

Introduction: An uncivil city  15

to mark marches of the past, but otherwise there’s a feeling that rallies are now an anachronism. A rare exception was the massive outpouring of protests after the gang rape of Jyoti Singh Pandey (Nirbhaya) in December 2012 when a wide swathe of citizens came together to decry Delhi’s public culture of violence against women. However, more organised marches by farmers and workers’ organisations from other parts of India are blocked at the city’s borders and barely tolerated within its precincts. I am ambivalent about this change: perhaps many rallies had anyway become a form of political theatre devoid of serious content. But I can’t help thinking that our public spaces are poorer without them. And that our collective life is diminished when we stop participating in an embodied way in something larger than ourselves. For this, surely, is what a city is all about—a whole that is greater than the sum of its citizens and their built environment. It was there before us and it will go on after we are gone. It is a living embodiment of what humans can create: the marvellous, the moving, the absurd and the awful. But first and foremost, this city is a collective endeavour, an ongoing public works project that involves us all. Yet we deny the interdependencies that make the city possible, forever seeking to undermine the dense fabric of social and ecological relations that gives Delhi its distinctive identity. If the Ridge and the river are destroyed, then so is the air and water and the habitats of other species with whom we share this place. If the republic of the streets is conquered by commerce and cars, we lose something precious that belongs to us all, rich and poor—the chance to recognise and rejoice in our common humanity. The death of Delhi’s commons will be the end of Delhi, and that will be tragic. Over the years, a story narrated by Jyotindra Jain, and recounted in Paul Greenough’s fine essay on the Crafts Museum in Delhi, has stayed with me:15 An illiterate adivasi, a maker of decorated terra-cotta roof tiles, was invited to the museum from his village in the Raigarh region [of what is now Chhattisgarh], to demonstrate his craft. He had 15

See Greenough (1996).

16  Uncivil City

never been in a city before or even on a train, and a museum aide had accompanied him to New Delhi. One evening during his stay, two museum guards obtained country liquor as prasad from the Bhairav temple [across the road from] the museum. The guards invited the Raigarhi tile maker and a Gorakhpuri potter to drink. When the potter eventually got up to go about his business, the tile maker followed him. The potter crossed the busy road in front of the museum and got onto a bus, but the tile maker, dizzy with drink, was injured trying to ascend; suddenly he disappeared from the potter’s sight. The latter got down and returned to the museum to report the disappearance to the director [Jyotindra Jain]. Where had the Raigarhi tile maker gone? For three days, the director went from hospital to hospital and even to the city morgue in an effort to find him. A missing-persons bulletin was broadcast over New Delhi television, to no avail. The director became disheartened and wrote out a letter of resignation to his superior, […] acknowledging responsibility…. Two days later the tile maker reappeared at the museum. He explained that after he had fallen from the bus, someone had taken him to the hospital; he quickly left, but could not find his way back to the museum. Reasoning that he had arrived from Raigarh by train, he began to follow a nearby set of railway tracks, resolved to walk the nine hundred kilometres home. Unknowingly, however, he had trudged in a circle along the commuter rail line that engirdles the city, ending up before the crafts museum, which he recognised from the traffic light configuration. During this time he had foraged his food, and he offered the director a cucumber tied up in his garment.

Because I have known less happy endings—an adivasi from the Narmada valley who came to Delhi for a rally lost his bearings and his mind in the harsh cacophony of the city and was never found—I love this magical story. It’s about the kindness of strangers—someone taking the tile maker to hospital—the ethic of giving without expecting any return. It’s about the ability to find food—from a kitchen garden, from a gurudwara’s langar—and share it with others. It’s about eyes alighting on a set of traffic lights that signal safety and refuge. It’s about going round and round along a set of railway lines in a strange city and, quite by chance, coming home.

Introduction: An uncivil city  17

II I began writing these essays on environmental politics in Delhi almost 20 years ago. Fresh from the Narmada valley in central India, where claims about rights to nature and belonging in the nation were at the heart of a vibrant social movement (Baviskar 1995), I was struck by the sheer absence of such subaltern activism in the urban context. Although city dwellers shared environmental problems, it was remarkable how the most vulnerable sections of the population were not only absent from the conversation but were vilified and victimised by the proposed solutions. At the same time, those who were best placed to address ecological issues were blinded by their privilege, unable to acknowledge their complicity in creating the mess that we were in. The concerted direction of their initiatives only worsened our common predicament. These essays trace how bourgeois environmentalism has transformed landscapes and lives in the capital in the last two decades. I have brought them together in this volume because their intertwined strands convey a fuller account of the far-reaching changes that Delhi’s environment is going through. Recounting these moments from the city’s recent history is also important because we are often captive to the present. We forget how places and people used to be; we fail to see how the remembered past might inspire actions to recast social and ecological relations in the future. When our imagination is imprisoned by the minutiae of everyday life, we need to stand back and reflect on what was and what might be. As cities have overtaken the countryside as habitat for most of humanity, the question of their ecological capacity to sustain lives worth living has become all the more critical. Yet when we listen closely to debates about city planning and governance, and carefully observe urban environmental campaigns, we notice that they often have little to do with ecology or justice. The terms of the discourse— what is an environmental issue, who is authorised to speak, and which modes of action count as legitimate—are partial, particularistic and perverse. Why is this so? This book makes three arguments. One, the power to define and deal with an issue as an ‘environmental problem’ is unequally distributed. Social location and cultural capital shape interpretive frameworks and capacities to act. Selective and superficial

18  Uncivil City

framings of environmental issues derive from economic and political inequality. Two, the urban environment poses a peculiar perceptual problem because it does not seem to be composed of commonly understood features of ‘nature’. The predominantly artefactual aspect of the urban environment complicates understandings of ecological issues based on the template of rural environments. Three, urban environments have primarily been managed in terms of securing spatial and social order. This logic continues to dictate environmental politics in the city, to the detriment of ecology and justice. I pursue these arguments across different aspects of the city, looking at homes and workplaces, ordinary streets and extraordinary spectacles, the river and the Ridge. Chapter 2 provides a historical overview of Delhi as a planned city, where state monopoly over the regulation of space was meant to promote the public interest. An enlightened state would guide urban growth, moulding it to the ideals of a modern city. I discuss how these ambitions about spatial and social order were thwarted by internal contradictions that subverted state capacity and by the sheer complexity of the social world that they sought to control. Slums and squatter settlements were not, I argue, violations of the Plan but its inevitable outcome. Despite this paradox, the planned city ideal prevails and provides a fertile field for structuring desire and violence. Bourgeois environmentalists approach the courts to seek decisive action to impose the spatial and social order essential to their sense of well-being. Government officials use the Plan as a weapon that empowers them to extract rents and displace people. Instead of being a force for good, the Plan has reproduced the vulnerability of migrant workers whose labour keeps the city going. At the turn of the century, how bourgeois environmentalist discourse about air and water pollution invoked the notion of ‘public interest’ and persuaded judicial authority to shut down factories and firms is the subject of Chapter 3. A series of sweeping court orders ended Delhi’s life as an industrial city, just when liberalisation had opened up the prospect for land to be converted to real estate. Larger manufacturing firms stood to gain from redeveloping the land their closed-down factories stood on, but smaller firms were forced to

Introduction: An uncivil city  19

mobilise to save their businesses. Ultimately, neither the court’s directives nor the subsequent process of political bargaining and accommodation served to secure environmental goals. What they did achieve was a surge in distress for the city’s industrial workers who lost their livelihoods but were not even allowed to represent their concerns before the court. Seeking what’s good for Delhi, but in a manner that silenced and impoverished a substantial section of the city’s underclass, bourgeois environmentalists added epistemic violence to the structural violence of the Plan. That publics get constituted through desire as much as violence is a theme in Chapter 4 where I discuss the 2010 Commonwealth Games as an event intended to bring the city together. Spectacular events such as these are occasions for a city’s self-presentation to global viewers as well as to citizens. Anxieties about national honour and prestige that pervade these moments enable the exercise of power in exceptional ways. Plans and regulatory procedures are suspended even as the purse-strings of the public exchequer are opened wide. I show how such episodes that seem to interrupt the planned progression of urban development are, in fact, intrinsic to the logic that makes cities crucial sites for accumulating capital and acquiring legitimacy. Governments and businesses team up in new ways to transfer public money and land into private hands. The Games appeal to the sentiments of citizens, temporarily papering over differences and discontents to create the fragile façade of civic solidarity. I argue that such events are also junctures that project the concept of the ‘world-class’ city on a wider social canvas, persuading even those who might stand to lose that such a transformation is desirable and inevitable. How an aspiring ‘world-class’ city deals with anachronistic elements like cows and cycle-rickshaws in the embodied public sphere that is its network of streets is the subject of Chapter 5. I focus again on bourgeois environmentalism as an initiative to create urban order that comes undone because of its failure to comprehend and come to grips with the complex interdependencies of life in the city. This chapter develops the argument that bourgeois environmental campaigns serve neither ecological nor social justice. It also points out that such actions come from elites who choose to ignore how their own consumerist

20  Uncivil City

lifestyles, especially their toxic enchantment with personal motor vehicles, are disproportionately responsible for environmental harm. Conflicting and contradictory interests and actions create an unruly republic of the streets. If the previous chapter brought in cows as non-human living beings whose presence in the city is an embarrassment that incites bourgeois environmentalists to action, Chapter 6 deals with another non-human entity, although of a rather different order, that has been targeted for control: the river Yamuna. It analyses how the Yamuna floodplain, a neglected ‘non-place’ populated by low-key working-class settlements, swam into view as a place of value in the real estate economy. Once part of the city’s commons, large sections of the floodplain came to be enclosed and commodified, excluding those who depended on them the most. I argue that resistance to the seemingly relentless process of making the floodplain a place of capital accumulation arises not so much from the people who are pushed out by redevelopment, but from the river itself, especially the powerful pulse of its seasonal rhythm. Just as efforts to tame the Yamuna must contend with its fluid dynamism, the desire to domesticate another urban common— Delhi’s green wilderness—must deal with unruly trees (and humans). Chapter 7 shows how the city’s green areas and publics have shaped each other, giving rise to new identities, understandings and unexpected alliances. Villagers engulfed by urban sprawl came together with upper-class beneficiaries of that same process of suburban takeover to fight against the destruction of an old-growth forest. An encounter with wilderness made an impressionable youth turn towards environmental activism. On the more mundane terrain of everyday life, the conversion of wilderness into parks has enabled the cultivation of middle-class urban personae: it allows morning walkers to pursue bodily fitness through exercise regimes. These public spaces also provide privacy to young people exploring romantic and sexual relationships. I argue that the production of urban nature is simultaneously a process of creating new forms of class- and age-based sociality. Chapter 8 brings together contrasting yet convergent voices on the urban environment to highlight the cross-cutting themes that run

Introduction: An uncivil city  21

through the previous essays. It asks how bourgeois environmentalist discourse might be replaced by other claims on nature, especially by working-class citizens. It concludes by laying out some of the conceptual and organisational challenges to social and ecological justice in the city. The Coda in Chapter 9 discusses how climate change complicates and yet, in many ways, conforms to the analysis in the previous pages. A crisis that affects everyone is largely ignored and its consequences evaded through time-honoured strategies of elite escapism. The future of the republic is more uncertain than ever.

III When a city has more than 18 million people and extends over 1480 square kilometres, it would be foolish to claim that any account of it can be comprehensive. There are, however, some books that capture important dimensions of Delhi’s past and present (Dalrymple 1993; Singh 2001; Sengupta 2007). Anand Taneja (2017) provides a nuanced narrative of how history informs present-day practices of placemaking. A biography by Aman Sethi (2011) illuminates the lives of labourers in the city. Several essays insightfully observe particular neighbourhoods, fragments of an urban whole (Friese 2000; Sengupta 2001). Delhi’s colonial environmental history is the subject of Awadhendra Sharan’s book (2014) and Michael Mann’s essays (2007; Mann and Sehrawat 2009), while Bharati Chaturvedi’s edited volume (2010) addresses current environmental concerns by bringing in the voices of those usually left out of such conversations. The eviction of slum-dwellers and the larger politics around remaking the city is admirably analysed in the work of Veronique Dupont (2011), Asher Ghertner (2015) and Gautam Bhan (2016).16 K. Sivaramakrishnan (2017) has ably examined the role of courts and their ecological imagination in reshaping Delhi. Other Indian cities have also inspired outstanding scholarly and journalistic investigation.17 Together, these Also see Datta (2012). See, for instance, Nair (2005) on the development of Bengaluru and Roy (2002) on slum-dwellers in Kolkata. For Mumbai, see Hansen on communal violence (2001); Boo (2012) and Weinstein (2014) on squatter-settlements; 16 17

22  Uncivil City

scholars and several others whose work is cited in the following pages make up the urban studies commons to which my work is indebted. These essays were written over the course of several years. The first dates back to 2002 and the last to 2018. Inevitably, much has changed. Yet much remains the same. In Chapter 5, for instance, I write about cars, cows and cycle-rickshaws on the streets of Delhi. This essay was completed in 2011 and, since then, cycle-rickshaws have been out-numbered by electric rickshaws. Also, many old-style cycle-rickshaws have been retrofitted with electric motors that make manual pedalling obsolete. However, the perverse politics that I described for cycle-rickshaws still prevails around e-rickshaws. In 2014, the Delhi High Court banned e-rickshaws when it should have been clear to the dimmest intelligence that they were a nonpolluting transport option that should be encouraged in the city. After the central government permitted them to ply, the High Court in 2017 again recommended that the number of e-rickshaws be capped. Caught between the courts and the administration, rickshaw owners and drivers contend with continued uncertainty about their future. And when it comes to cows wandering on the street, sauntering from dalaos to dairies, nothing has changed either. Five years of a Hindu nationalist central government committed to protecting cows, and the mobilisation of gau-rakshak vigilante squads across north India, have made no difference. Nor has there been any check on the exponential growth of motor vehicles on Delhi’s roads, even though their emissions have made the city the most polluted capital in the world. Chapter 4 lays out some of the financial boondoggles around the commodification of public land during the lead-up to the Commonwealth Games 2010 in Delhi. While Suresh Kalmadi, the chairman of the organising committee of the Games, was indeed tried, convicted and jailed for another corrupt deal associated with the Games, he was an exception. The transfer of public lands for private gain continues unabated. The politicians and bureaucrats who facilitate these moves carry on with business as usual. The 2018 uproar over the rebuilding of Björkman (2015) and Anand (2017) on water politics; and Anjaria (2016) on street vendors and public space.

Introduction: An uncivil city  23

government-owned residential areas in south Delhi is only the latest in a string of such controversies. Chapter 3 examines the tense tango between the courts and administration over the closing of small industries in the year 2000 on the charge of polluting air and water. I show in this essay that this accusation was largely unproven and unjustly targeted already precarious working-class livelihoods. Such court-directed sealing drives still go on. The action against automobile scrap dealers in Mayapuri in west Delhi in April 2019 is the most recent. Firms that provide a valuable service by dismantling old cars and trucks for recycling, ridding the city of vehicles that clog its arteries, are being shut down. Even though they are located in a ‘conforming area’, their work spills out into the open and is an affront to the visual order that the courts seek to impose. As was the case 20 years ago, a panicked administration has preferred to close down everything instead of examining the merits of each case. The tensions between judicial fiat and executive compliance, between the ideals of urban order and the gritty realities of an ecosystem that accommodates a rentier state as well as the exigencies of electoral politics, continue unresolved. Such an enduring impasse shows the limits of judicial activism. Confronted with an environmental problem, the court tends to behave like a distracted parent who suddenly notices that his child is misbehaving, smacks her and walks away, without waiting to discover what caused the mischief in the first place. The outcomes of such punitive paternalistic action rarely match their intentions. They penalise the wrong people and push the problem somewhere else: outside Delhi, into the future. They do not create long-term administrative capacities and accountability. Most important, they do not substitute for the difficult work of understanding the dynamics of urban life and shaping them through a democratic dialogue about the city. If this process of shaping the city is deeply flawed, so is the faith that administrators place in techno-managerial fixes of the ‘Smart City’ kind. Despite the launch of the Smart Cities Mission in 2015, the term remains ambiguous.18 Analysts point out that making cities 18

See Datta (2015).

24  Uncivil City

‘smart’ seems to chiefly focus on improving ‘efficiency’ (rather than equity) by employing corporate consultants to offer solutions based on information technology (Khan et al. 2018). Heavily weighted towards securitisation and the surveillance of populations, and designed to side-line the question of democratic accountability, such ‘solutions’ to urban problems demand closer, more critical scrutiny. While they certainly offer new opportunities for profiteering at public expense, their much-hyped potential to improve the urban environment remains unknown.

Photo: Author

Against these top-heavy techniques of urban governance, some scholars propose a radical rethinking of how cities should be organised and run. They point out that cities in the Global South have conspicuously refused to conform to plans. When the governments of newly independent nation-states imported models of urban design from affluent, industrial countries, they failed to accommodate local political, economic and cultural forms (Holston 1989). This mismatch has led to the proliferation of ‘unintended cities’ (Sen 1996) where people

Introduction: An uncivil city  25

left out of plans have made their own arrangements, cobbling together homes and workplaces from the modest materials available to them. These informal dwellings are easier to afford and can better accommodate people’s specific needs and styles of living and working. They embody ingenuity and entrepreneurial energy. They wrest control over land and housing from the state into the hands of the poor. Their only handicap is the fact that they happen to be illegal. Given formal recognition, such bastis could be the basis for a democratic process of city-making from below.19 This is a beguiling argument. It appeals on populist as well as pragmatic grounds. It suggests that informality is not only the signature of cities in the Global South but their strength. Rather than unsuccessfully trying to stamp it out, governments should support such efforts at self-provisioning, trusting people’s innate ability to devise solutions that work best for them. This celebration of jugaad, innovative fixes that make the most of scarce resources, makes a virtue of wretched necessity.20 Most squatter settlements, even old established ones where people have invested a great deal to improve their habitat, lack basic amenities such as piped water and sanitation which cannot always be retrofitted. The dangers of fire and building collapse are greater in neighbourhoods where homes are constructed from substandard materials and do not meet safety regulations.21 Bastis are often located on land that is prone to subsidence and flooding, next to hazardous industries, along drains and railway lines. Legalising such settlements would indeed remove the stigma of criminality and the burden of uncertainty that working-class people labour under; and there is no doubt that such crippling conditions of existence must be done away with. But such a reprieve runs the risk of consigning On urban informality around the world, see Bayat (1997); Simone (2004); Roy and AlSayyad (2004); Holston (2008); Fischer et al. (2014) and Swyngedouw (2018). On informal settlements in India, see Benjamin’s writings on ‘occupancy urbanism’ (2014); Rao (2013a); Weinstein (2014) and Bhan (2016). 20 See Birtchnell (2011). 21 Of course, the enforcement of these rules in formal neighbourhoods is far from perfect. Fires from poorly maintained electrical systems in high-rise buildings, overloaded with air-conditioners, are common enough. But it is better to strive for stronger compliance than to jettison the rules altogether. 19

26  Uncivil City

the city’s working population to a second-class life. There is a double standard at work when those who are privileged to live in formal, well-appointed neighbourhoods advocate the perpetuation of substandard dwellings in the name of poor people’s rights. When it comes to the urban environment, such advocacy of informality also elides an important issue. The ecological question demands not only that we think of human populations as heterogeneous and shaped by hierarchies that empower and constrain, but that we keep in mind their obligations to future generations and with other living beings. An ecological vision that respects these principles and applies them to the complexities of urban life is unlikely to emerge from any one social group. It requires vigorous debate and sustained collaboration between different citizens, experts and administrators to move cities towards environmental sustainability. The solid waste problem, for instance, cannot be solved by waste-pickers, sorters and recyclers alone; it needs concerted action at the level of national, municipal and neighbourhood organisations to cut down the quantities of waste generated (a goal that may go against the short-term interests of wastepickers); it calls for technically-informed inputs about materials and safe methods of recycling; it requires experienced and energetic managers to operate systems that work at different scales; it demands enabling, enforceable rules and regulations.22 All aspects of urban life throw up these complex challenges but the environment all the more so, for it means championing social justice in the present, yet doing so without sacrificing the causes of those without a voice. The claim to speak for future generations and non-human species has so far been the prerogative of bourgeois environmentalists who have stood by and shrugged at the denial of rights and displacement of poorer people that their actions precipitated. Wresting from them that privilege of speaking for the Future and Nature can only be done by new alliances that spark new ways of thinking. Such a comprehensive re-examination of the ecological question requires that a range of social relations be challenged. Respecting the cultural logic of informality and recognising rights to housing is important but these steps, by themselves, do not enable wider claims upon the city as a 22

See Doron and Jeffrey (2018).

Introduction: An uncivil city  27

whole. They do not allow the working classes to contest how the urban commons—land, water, air, green areas—are shared and used, managed and transformed. Environmental justice requires a more expansive and inclusive process of decision-making, which the grant of housing rights does not guarantee. Neither populist policies nor authoritarian diktats have served the cause of ecological justice. We need a conversation about the commons based on the core criteria of citizenship and civility.

Photo: Author

28  Uncivil City

For working-class people, informal ways of city-making have been essential for survival. But they are keenly aware that these ‘weapons of the weak’ are no substitute for substantive forms of citizenship. Instead of always trying to stay below the radar of state surveillance as described by scholars of ‘political society’, the urban poor and propertyless also strive to be recognised, investing tremendous energy into securing the legal titles and formal documents that will allow them entry into ‘civil society’.23 They realise that being denied citizenship is also a form of discursive disenfranchisement: their priorities and concerns are left out and regarded as illegitimate by those with the power to determine what the city should be. The struggle to gain the substantive rights due to all citizens is one of the hardest there is. But the route to ecological justice does not have shortcuts. Securing citizenship requires making claims upon the state to uphold the Constitution, the foremost covenant of Independent India. Babasaheb Ambedkar had pointed out that the deeply illiberal values of Indian society needed a strong state to intervene on the side of equality and justice. But what does one do when the state itself protects and promotes illiberal ideologies and practices? As the chapters in this book detail, the role of the state in urban environmental politics has generally been pernicious. Governments committed to facilitating capital accumulation in the name of ‘world-class’ city-making have privatised public lands and displaced the poor. They have allowed bourgeois environmentalists to hijack the principle of ‘public interest’ which is, in fact, the first prerogative of an elected government, from which its claim to legitimacy derives. Instead of working to secure citizenship for all citizens, the state has generally colluded in the reproduction of inequality. This book shows that, unlike small farmers and labourers in rural India facing displacement from large dams, mining projects and other state-backed modes of land alienation, the urban proletariat in Delhi has not been able to come together and claim its rights to the city. Their collective agency has been fractured by state policies of recognition that divide-and-deny. Despite this handicap, they have mobilised electorally to vote for parties that promise 23 See Chatterjee (2004) and response by Baviskar and Sundar (2008). Also see Rao (2013b).

Introduction: An uncivil city  29

patronage and protection, and they have adopted more personalised avenues of upward mobility, seeking respect through strategies of ‘consumer citizenship’ (Baviskar 2018). Ultimately, the environmental politics of the city is anchored in the quest for substantive citizenship for all. Without it, there can be no social or ecological justice. It is useful to remind ourselves that the promise of equality and justice was originally thought to be intrinsic to the urban form. The texture of everyday life, woven out of encounters with strangers and interdependencies with those different from oneself, was supposed to generate new solidarities based on the shared experience of being citydwellers. It is ironic that modern cities that were meant to foster freedom from ascribed identities and facilitate new forms of association have, in fact, grown into ghettoes (Gayer 2012), re-inscribing caste relations (Chandavarkar 1994), and violently excluding the poor, powerless and stigmatised (Mander 2015). Discussing Ravidas, Tukaram and the other radical Bhakti poets, Gail Omvedt (2008: 106–7) notes that their visions of Dalit emancipation invoke the city of Begumpura, ‘a place with no pain’, and allude to sundar nagari, or the beautiful city, a place of justice and harmony where even the lowly can hold their heads high.24 How can Indian cities become places where mutual recognition of a shared humanity is not a minor miracle but a mundane matter-of-fact reality? While this ideal of egalitarian sociality rests on the bedrock of citizenship, it also needs sedimented layers of civility.25 That is, beyond an exercise of rights mediated and backed by the state, cities must cultivate citizens who, while acknowledging their differences, can treat each other with respect. This notion of civility goes deeper than the cosmetic courtesies that make social hierarchies slightly less offensive: the affluent college-goer who says ‘Thank you, bhaiyya’ to the auto-rickshaw driver is being polite, but her words only smoothen the surface of a status quo steeped in inequity.26 This ‘mask Also see Jha (2019). See Thiranagama et al. (2018) for a nuanced discussion of the possibilities and limits of civility. 26 Holston (2011) points out that civility is compatible with structural violence and coercion. In the United States, the term has been used as an excuse to close off uncomfortable debates. Rademacher and Sivaramakrishnan (2013) argue that bourgeois notions of civility exclude and marginalise subalterns. 24 25

30  Uncivil City

of civility’ (Sennett 1975) is a procedural device that allows people to get along without breaking through the walls that divide them. In a context where what one eats and wears, how one worships and works, is increasingly incendiary, a pragmatic approach that avoids violent confrontations over perceived differences and, instead, practises the ‘civility of indifference’ (Bailey 1996) is a blessing of sorts. But it is nowhere near enough. We need forms of city-wide neighbourliness where mutual respect, reciprocity and restraint can bring about radical change (Thiranagama 2019) by being aligned with democratic principles. In an uncivil city, the commons can be a model and metaphor for creating a shared space of politics. To be open and accommodating to the needy and vulnerable, to the ant and the banyan tree. To stand fast against the bullying of bureaucrats and the encroachment of big business. To believe that the value of something only grows when it is shared. To keep alive the hope that city-making can be based on social and ecological justice. I draw inspiration from the striving of subaltern citizens and from the protean character of cities. As Raymond Williams wrote in his classic work The Country and the City: H. G. Wells once said, coming out of a political meeting where they had been discussing social change, that this great towering city [London] was a measure of the obstacle, of how much must be moved if there was to be any change. I have known this feeling, looking up at great buildings that are the centres of power, but I find I do not say ‘There is your city, your great bourgeois monument, your towering structure of this still precarious civilisation’ or I do not only say that; I say also ‘This is what men have built, often so magnificently, and is not then everything possible?’ Indeed this sense of possibility, of meeting and movement, is a permanent element of my sense of cities… (Williams 1973: 5–6).

To that sense of possibility, of meeting and movement, in Delhi and all other cities, I dedicate this book.

Remaking Landscapes and Lives

Illustration: Orijit Sen

2

Making plans and places

On the morning of 30 January 1995, Delhi was waking up to another misty winter day. In the well-to-do neighbourhood of Ashok Vihar, early risers were emerging from their warm homes for morning walks, bundled in woollen jackets, scarves and caps to keep out the chill. Some of them had pet dogs straining at the leash. As one of these gentlemen walked into the neighbourhood ‘park’, the only open area in the locality, he saw a thin, poorly clad young man walking away with an empty bottle in hand. Outraged, he caught hold of the man and called out to his neighbours. Someone phoned the police. Within minutes, a group of angry house-owners and two police constables descended on the youth and beat him to death. That young man was 18-year-old Dilip. He had come to Delhi to watch the Republic Day parade in the capital. He was staying with his uncle in a jhuggi (shack) along the railway tracks on the edge of Ashok Vihar. His uncle worked as a labourer in an industrial estate nearby. Like all other planned industrial zones in Delhi, this one too had no provision of housing for workers. Although the jhuggi cluster had more than 10,000 households, it had only three public toilets, each one with eight latrines. In effect, each latrine had to be shared between more than 2,000 persons. For most residents, then, any large open

34  Uncivil City

space, under cover of dark, became a place to defecate. Their use of the ‘park’ for this purpose brought them up against the more affluent residents of Ashok Vihar who paid to have a wall constructed between the unsightly jhuggi basti (settlement) and their own homes. The wall was soon broken, not only by people looking for a place to defecate, but also to allow the traffic of domestic workers who lived in the jhuggi basti but walked across the railway tracks every day to cook and clean the homes and cars of the rich, wash their clothes and mind their children. Dilip’s death was thus the culmination of a longstanding battle over a contested space that, to one set of residents, embodied their sense of gracious urban living, a place of trees and grass devoted to leisure, recreation and doggie walks, and that to another set of residents, was the only available space that could be used as a toilet. If he had known this history of simmering conflict, Dilip would probably have been more alert and wary. He might have run away when challenged, and perhaps he would still be alive.1 This incident made a profound impression on me. During my research in central India, the site of struggles over displacement due to dams and forestry projects as well as the more gradual but no less compelling processes of impoverishment due to insecure land tenure, I had witnessed only too often state violence that tried to crush the aspirations of poor people striving to craft basic subsistence and dignity (Baviskar 1995, 2001). Now I was watching a similar contestation over space unfold in my own backyard. I had previously analysed struggles over the environment in rural India. Now my attention was directed towards how, in an urban context, the varied meanings at stake in struggles over the environment were negotiated through different projects and practices. This concern grew stronger as I witnessed two sets of processes, each an extraordinarily powerful attempt to remake the urban landscape of Delhi at the turn of the century. Through a series of judicial orders, the Supreme Court of India initiated the 1 The violence did not end there. When a group of people from the jhuggi basti gathered to protest against this killing, the police opened fire and killed four more people (PUDR 1995).

Making plans and places  35

closure of all polluting and non-conforming industries in the city, throwing out of work an estimated two million people employed in and around 98,000 industrial units. At the same time, the Delhi High Court ordered the removal and relocation of all jhuggi squatter settlements on public lands, an order that would demolish the homes of more than three million people. In a city of twelve million people, the enormity of these changes was mind-boggling. Both these processes, which were set in motion by the filing of public interest litigation by environmentalists and consumer rights groups, indicated that ‘bourgeois environmentalism’ had emerged as an organised force in Delhi, and upper-class concerns around aesthetics, leisure, safety, and health had come significantly to shape the disposition of urban spaces.2 As I tried to make sense of these changes in the city in which I had lived since birth, I found that there was a Delhi I knew nothing about. Even though Ashok Vihar was close to my home in north Delhi, I had never ventured into its jhuggi bastis or the industrial area adjoining it. Geographical proximity did not translate into social familiarity. In my mental map of Delhi, such places had simply been invisible. It was only when I put aside my taken-for-granted sense of the city, my privilege as a well-off resident, and started exploring bastis and factories and other urban places beyond the bourgeois gaze that I realised just how segregated this city was. When I delved into the history of urban planning, I discovered that while this spatial configuration was a product of deliberate design guided by benevolent intent, its inherent biases led to perverse outcomes. In jhuggi bastis with their open drains and gut-churningly filthy latrines, I came to realise that spatial segregation also created an apartheid of the imagination. Although the majority of Delhi’s citizens lived in such settlements, well-off sections of the urban population simply didn’t see or care about them. Despite the dense fabric of daily economic transactions that brought them into contact with domestic workers, vendors, I am using the terms ‘bourgeois’ and ‘upper-class’ to refer to the group that is instantly recognisable in Delhi by dress, deportment, and language: the padhelikhe (educated) and the propertied, white-collar professionals, and those engaged in business: the owners of material and symbolic capital. For other accounts of middle-class place-making in cities, see De Neve and Donner (2007). 2

36  Uncivil City

security guards, courier deliverymen, sales assistants and restaurant staff, Delhi’s upper classes remained socially incurious and spatially oblivious to where and how the working classes lived. Unless, of course, a jhuggi basti got up their nose and obtruded on their sense of urban order. Then they moved the courts petitioning for the summary eviction of working-class settlements, their actions further intensifying the persistent contradictions between a shared economy of work and a segregated ecology of shelter, between capitalist accumulation and social reproduction. This chapter looks at the chequered career of urban planning in Delhi as part of ‘state-making’ or the process of creating subjects and places in order to produce and perpetuate relations of power that facilitate projects of rule. Viewing development in the form of industrialisation and urbanisation as a particular form of state-making, scholars and activists have rightly highlighted the coercive and often traumatic nature of displacement effected by such projects (Escobar 1995). Here, I argue that the power of the planning and development discourse stems not only from its repressive apparatus, but also from the multiple ways in which it is able to address the desires of different social groups for better lives. Violence and desire are fused together in the practices of development and displacement. By examining the conflicts around planned urban development and environmental improvement in Delhi, I show how the project of making Delhi a ‘clean and green’ city is riven by powerful contestations around urban place and personhood. I examine state attempts to control and restructure urban space and argue that, through strategies of compromise as well as resistance, working-class struggles to secure housing and employment reconstitute the relationship between environment and development that urban planners and the bourgeoisie seek to impose.

The logic and limits of the planned city Bourgeois environmentalism converges with the disciplining zeal of the state and its interest in creating legible spaces and docile subjects (Scott 1998). According to Alonso (1994: 382), ‘modern forms of state surveillance and control of populations as well as of capitalist

Making plans and places  37

organisation and work discipline have depended on the homogenising, rationalising and partitioning of space.’ Delhi’s special status and visibility as national capital have made state anxieties around the management of urban spaces all the more acute. Delhi matters because very important people live and visit there; its image reflects the power of the nation-state, its capacity and competence to govern. These expectations were especially urgent at the time of Independence when around 450,000 Hindu and Sikh refugees flooded the city from what had become Pakistan. In 1941, the population of Delhi had been 917,000. By 1951, the city had grown more than 50 per cent because of the refugee influx. Sewage from their bastis on the periphery of the city had contaminated municipal water supply, leading to 700 deaths from jaundice in 1955 (Saajha Manch 2001: 5). So ‘to check the haphazard and unplanned growth of Delhi’, the Delhi Development Authority (DDA) was constituted in 1957 by an Act of Parliament. With the help of American expertise provided by the Ford Foundation, India’s modernist ambitions came to be embodied in the first Master Plan of 1962. The Master Plan envisaged an urban landscape in the ideal of Nehruvian socialism, where enlightened state control engineered the ordered separation of activities, leaving a sanitised slot for history by protecting monuments deemed archaeologically important, noble remnants of Delhi’s pasts (Khilnani 1997). To do this, huge tracts of agricultural land were acquired from villages close to the city and vested with the DDA which had the monopoly of transforming these spaces into zones appropriate for a modern capital: commercial centres, institutional areas, housing colonies, industrial estates, sports complexes and green areas. Thus, concerns about the physical and social welfare of concentrated human populations were channelled into the desire for a planned city, where they converged with the high nationalist fervour for modernisation. Fulfilling this desire seemed to be pre-eminently a responsibility of the state: the legitimacy of a national government that had the prestige of fighting for freedom added fresh power to an older development regime established by colonial capitalism (Ludden 1992) that gave the state primacy in the mission of Civilisation and Improvement.

38  Uncivil City

The land that the DDA surveyed was no empty space, but already vivid with embodied practices. There was the presence of the two imperial Delhis still extant cheek-by-jowl: Shahjahanabad and New Delhi (Gupta 1981), and the new ‘urban villages’ whose lands had been acquired by the DDA. Shahjahanabad, the Mughal walled city built and rebuilt from the 16th century onwards, was a mosaic of mixed-use practices, where homes, work-places, shops, places of worship and governance were piled on top of each other in untidy profusion. To colonial eyes, this apparent anarchy had to be regulated in order to prevent the spawning of seditious thought and action. After the First War of Independence/Mutiny in 1857, the colonial state demolished large parts of Shahjahanabad, laying down railway tracks that tore through its heart. The city was depopulated and ethnically reconstituted in 1947 when its large Muslim population fled to the new state of Pakistan at the time of Partition. To the south of Shahjahanabad and looking down upon it, the British had built New Delhi in 1918, shifting the locus of empire on the subcontinent from Calcutta to Delhi. The cartography of colonial power was visible in the city’s spatial design. There was the Central Vista where the Viceroy’s Palace surmounted the Parliament House, the Secretariat and the palaces of the Native rulers. New Delhi’s wide avenues segregated the white rulers from the brown babus (office workers) in a finely calibrated hierarchy of status, made visible through bungalow size, while also creating sites such as offices and shopping areas where rulers and natives could transact business in a regulated fashion (Legg 2007). The building of New Delhi had entailed the displacement of ‘Untouchable’ castes who had lived south of Shahjahanabad and who were now banished to the western periphery of the new city.3 Thus the building of the capital of independent India began by encompassing both Shahjahanabad and New Delhi, as well as appropriating the lands of numerous villages around the city. The presence of these urban villages, with their traditional residential settlements and their suspended rights to dispose Even today, the west Delhi parliamentary constituency of Karol Bagh is reserved for Scheduled Caste candidates since they continue to be numerically significant in this area. See Prashad (2000) for a social history of this community. 3

Making plans and places  39

off their agricultural lands, continues to be an anomaly that actively contradicts the logic of the planned city. From the beginning, the process of planning had to contend with multiple ways of imagining the city. There was the model of Shahjahanabad, built around encouraging mixed land use, recognising and adapting to the complexity of a multi-ethnic, multi-class society with spatially overlapping functions. A stream of opinion within the urban planning movement, represented by Patrick Geddes who had travelled widely in India and had designed plans for several Indian towns, espoused this model of the planned city (Geddes 1915). Then there was the modernist model of spatial segregation of populations and functions. Planners did not weigh the pros and cons of these and other models in order to judiciously choose the one ‘best’ suited to Delhi’s projected needs. While ostensibly a scientific-rational process that is free from politics, urban planning has always been about the exercise of power. In the case of Delhi’s Master Plan too, the disciplinary aspects of creating and controlling subjects and spaces shaped urban design. Crucial for the project of effective control was the generation of information: the enumeration of populations through the decennial census was supplemented by their classification into various economic categories. These were then mapped onto separated zones partitioning work and residence, industry and commerce, education, administration and recreation. Regulatory systems such as licensing, tax collection, labour and pollution inspection, and so on attempted to keep tabs on a burgeoning economy. Delhi’s Master Plan envisaged a model city, prosperous, hygienic and orderly, but failed to recognise that this construction could only be realised by the labours of large numbers of the working poor, for whom no provision had been made in the plans. The DDA, the body responsible for planned urban development, preferred to facilitate the building of middle-class homes rather than working-class ones; flatted housing for high-, middle- and low-income groups (in DDA parlance, HIG, MIG and LIG, respectively), has far outstripped the provision of housing for the EWS—economically weaker sections. Even before this, the DDA’s predecessor, the Delhi Improvement Trust, had partnered with the private developer firm Delhi Land and Finance

40  Uncivil City

(DLF) to carve out large areas to the north and south of the city as expansive housing estates for moneyed people (Mehra 2013). Even as bungalows and kothis (mansions) came up in Model Town and Rajouri Garden, in South Extension, Greater Kailash and Hauz Khas, there was no concomitant allotment of land for the city’s less well-off residents.

Photo: Author

Thus, the building of planned Delhi was mirrored in the simultaneous mushrooming of unplanned Delhi. In the interstices of the Master Plan’s zones, the liminal spaces along railway tracks and barren lands acquired by the DDA, grew the shanty towns built by construction workers, vendors and artisans. As masons and bricklayers set up shacks near the places they were building, and as industrial labourers made makeshift homes next to workshops and factories, an unauthorised, ‘unintended city’ came into existence (Sen 1996). The development of such bastis or slums was, then, not a violation of the Plan; it was an essential accompaniment to it, its Siamese twin. The ‘legal geography’ (Sundar 2001) created by the Plan criminalised vast sections of the

Making plans and places  41

city’s working class, adding another layer of vulnerability to their existence. At the same time, the existence of the slums over time was enabled by a series of ongoing transactions: the periodic payment of bribes to municipal officials, and the intervention of local politicians. Planners’ attempts to map inflexible legal geographies became a resource by which state officials and political entrepreneurs could profit, as they brokered deals that allowed slums to stay. Planners lamented the absence of ‘political will’, the apparent impotence of the municipal authorities to enforce the law, but failed to recognise their own complicity in creating a situation where illegal practices could flourish. Erasing (through criminalising) the necessary presence of the working class was thus not an oversight but, rather, intrinsic to the project of producing and reproducing powerful inequalities. This misrecognition was wilful and systematic, an institutionally organised and guaranteed strategy of devising ‘sincere fictions’ with the aim of reproducing relations of power between the state, spaces and subjects (Bourdieu 1977: 171). The presence of this pool of cheap labour enabled the planned city to grow, even as its proximity raised the spectre of dirt, disease and crime, a monster threatening the body civic that the state has since then been trying unsuccessfully to leash. The project of disciplining the poor was thus shaped by contradictory processes as planners, politicians, and municipal officials brought different agendas to bear upon the issue. Particular historical circumstances created conditions for negotiation and accommodation as well as repression and violence. A conjuncture that permitted the playing out of the totalitarian ambitions of planners was the Emergency (1975–77) where Prime Minister Indira Gandhi’s government suspended civil liberties in order to remain in power.4 With the active involvement of Gandhi’s son, Sanjay Gandhi (the unconstitutional power beside the throne), Jagmohan, the Lieutenant-Governor of Delhi, planned and supervised the demolition of slums from the heart of the walled city and their relocation on the swampy eastern 4 Gandhi’s election as a Member of Parliament had been overturned by the Allahabad High Court on grounds of procedural irregularities, and her government faced a rising tide of opposition from trade unions and the students’ movement.

42  Uncivil City

edge of Delhi.5 Emma Tarlo’s study of Seelampuri (2003), one such resettlement colony, locates the Emergency as a ‘critical event’ (Das 1995) that revealed the structural violence tying control over sexualised, communalised subjects to space. The strong public opposition to these excesses in the aftermath of the Emergency meant that disciplinary desires lay dormant for the next two decades. In the late 1970s, when preparations began for the Asian Games to be held in Delhi in 1982, there was a new spurt of construction. Jagmohan, the efficient bureaucrat of the Emergency, returned for a second term as Lieutenant-Governor of Delhi to once again pursue his mandate with determined despatch. The Asian Games, represented as a project where national prestige was at stake, provided the grounds for the DDA to violate its own Master Plan and suspend procedural rules. The building of flyovers and sports facilities around the city and luxury apartments at Siri Fort (to house participating athletes, which have since become homes for senior bureaucrats and other politically connected people), brought to the city an estimated one million labourers from other states. Once the construction was over, these workers stayed on, often in shanty settlements in the shadow of the concrete structures they had built, seeking other employment. In the early 1980s, their presence was tolerated and even encouraged by local politicians who secured for them water taps and ration cards for subsidised provisions. The populist governments at the Centre were willing to allow the migrants some recognition, albeit of a limited nature. While their concern did not extend to the provision of low-cost housing or civic amenities such as sanitation, 5 After a period of exile when the Congress was thrown out of power at the end of the Emergency, Jagmohan’s political career revived with his appointment as Governor of Jammu and Kashmir in 1984 during the height of insurgency in that state. Later, he changed sides and, having joined the BJP, was appointed Union Minister for Urban Development in 1999, from which position he continued the urban cleansing projects that he had initiated during the Emergency. It was during Jagmohan’s tenure that the judicial orders to close down industries and relocate slums were vigorously pursued. While he won the accolades of the bourgeoisie, BJP politicians in Delhi who were concerned about the fallout from Jagmohan’s zeal on their electoral fortunes succeeded in getting him transferred from the Urban Development Ministry in September 2001.

Making plans and places  43

electricity, schools and health clinics, it did give workers a temporary reprieve in the battle to create homes around their places of work. In the late 1980s, when newly instituted economic liberalisation policies threatened to end its monopoly, the DDA began to imagine a new role for itself in partnership with private builders. One of the steps towards this was the transfer of land on lease to co-operative group housing societies, usually of urban professionals, who constructed their own apartment complexes, in east and north-west Delhi.6 More affluent families shifted to the new suburbs being developed by private real estate firms on the south-western edge of the city in Gurgaon and on its south-eastern border in Noida.7 The unsatisfied demand for housing and spaces for commerce and recreation (and the two came together in the idea of shopping as a leisure activity) by this class, drove up the value of real estate in the city, pressuring the DDA and the Delhi government to accelerate their mission of urban development, partly so that they could enjoy higher profits, legal and illegal. The hurry to develop the land for commercial ends and gigantic urban projects—highways, flyovers, river-front development, necessitated the removal of the jhuggi settlements that encroached on public land.

Environment, industry, work: Negotiating contradictions Stepping into the breach between the Master Plan and practices on the ground, the courts have sought to orchestrate a transformation that will make Delhi an ideal urban space governed by the project of rule: the national Capital, in both material and symbolic terms, clean and green. But the judges’ desire to impose order has been continuously thwarted by the inherent unruliness of people and places. The limitations of modern techniques of power crucial for the planning enterprise soon became evident. Accurate numerical data essential for 6 See Benjamin (1996) for the simultaneous growth of industrial activity in east Delhi. 7 On the development of Gurgaon, see Oldenburg (2018) and on its current spatial cultures, see essays in Srivastava (2014).

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modern policy initiatives such as present and projected estimates of populations and their production and consumption patterns, proved impossible to generate because of the magnitude, dynamism and complexity of the reality they sought to capture. Appadurai (1993: 317) has described how practices of enumeration were central to ‘the illusion of bureaucratic control and a key to a colonial imaginary in which countable abstractions, of people and resources at every imaginable level and for every conceivable purpose, created the sense of a controllable indigenous reality’. While being armed with data remains an important technique for justifying intervention, its dubious accuracy and failure to yield expected outcomes constantly renders it open to challenge. Thus, for example, not only has the Delhi government been repeatedly reprimanded in the Supreme Court for supplying multiple and contradictory estimates of industrial units in Delhi and being unable to provide precise information about their production processes, but its inability to regulate these units was also manifested by the continued presence of high levels of air and water pollution in the city. Economic activities spill over and out of the taxonomies created by the state to regulate urban populations. For instance, the term ‘household industry’ blurs the lines between work and home, involving as it does a combination of family labour and hired workers, with varying skills and terms of employment. Similarly, the mapping of functionally specific land-use zones is obliterated by a spectrum of unauthorised practices: workers without shelter (and unable to afford commuting costs) who crowd around their places of work; brokers who mediate between municipal authorities and those with the capital to acquire and use land illegally (Dasgupta 2014); and political leaders who facilitate encroachments with an eye towards cultivating electoral support among insecure squatter settlers. From the interdependence between squatters and their political patrons, profiteering property brokers and those looking for land, and lower-level bureaucrats who benefit through turning a blind eye to violations, emerges powerful collaborations that undermine the bourgeois dream of re-making the city. The state’s Master Plan is undone through resistance both internal and external. The displacement that

Making plans and places  45

the creation of a clean and green Delhi entails has been held in check by the delicate political equations on which state legitimacy hinges. The orderly manipulation of people and places cannot rely on brute force alone, even though there have been several violent encounters in the process of enforcing the Supreme Court directives. Politicians across the party divide in the city recognise that their electoral fortunes depend on the support both of financiers and of the numerically important poor. Negotiating the contradictions between these disparate constituencies, the city administration’s responses to judicial orders have been heterogeneous: playing for time, pleading to change the rules, placating the judges with new plans, even as it hastens to assure threatened groups that it would protect their interests. The fractures within political authority, partly a consequence of Delhi being not just a city but the capital of India, help to create ambiguous spaces and irregular practices—jurisdictional twilight zones—where the buck can be passed to a bewildering number of authorities and little action is taken. As expected from a heterogeneous group, the court orders for closure elicited a diversity of responses from the owners of industrial units in the city. For a few large industrialists, those who owned factories in the centre of the city, the crisis was an opportunity to convert land to more profitable commercial or office space. Others moved to a new periphery, to industrial estates in nearby Rajasthan and more distant Himachal Pradesh, where they continue to pollute without check. Many owners of small firms asserted that the installation of pollution control equipment, or the switch to non-polluting technologies, would render their operations economically unviable. That is, their profits depended on exploiting the environment and passing the costs to the public. Many small-scale producers simply went out of business as manufacturing moved elsewhere and made way for more capital-intensive technologies. Others shifted their capital into commerce and the service economy. The ability to weather displacement varies with the material and symbolic capital at one’s command. The Supreme Court issued directions about compensating factory owners as well as their employees. However, workers’ entitlements were conditional upon their being

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recognised as employees, their eligibility dependent on officially being on the rolls. Yet the same logic of keeping costs down that made factory owners resist the enforcement of pollution laws operated to keep workers off the rolls. The intricacies of contracting and subcontracting labour, designed to keep labour costs low and capitalists in control, prevented most workers from being recognised as displaced and liable for compensation from specific firms. Workers dependent on daily wages, who were among the most vulnerable of the city’s poor, were rendered destitute by this process of restructuring the urban economy. The insecure, constantly changing conditions of work that prevented their political organisation also makes invisible the violence done to them. ‘Free’ in Marx’s doubly ironic sense to sell their labour wherever they please, without owning any capital, much of Delhi’s working-class experiences displacement as a constant fact of life. In 1996–97, the trade unions that represented the minority of officially recognised industrial workers tried to protest against the closure of industrial units and the displacement of workers in the courts and through mass demonstrations.8 Their arguments represented environmental concerns as antithetical to workers’ interests. A common accusation was that ‘sheher ko sundar banane ke liye ameer log mazdoor ke pet par laat maar rahe hain’ (to make the city beautiful, the rich are kicking workers in their belly). But this is only a partial account of the complex politics leading to displacement. Bourgeois environmentalism and Master Plans converge with other ongoing processes of capitalist restructuring and real-estate development. Nor is environmentalism necessarily an agenda that is antagonistic to working-class interests. Those most vulnerable to environmentally hazardous living and working conditions are most often the working classes. The economic compulsion of working in hazardous conditions 8 They have been constrained by the highly regulated nature of Delhi’s public spaces. For decades, no protest events have been allowed within a certain radius of the Parliament and in parts of the city where they can actually intrude upon public consciousness. Incarcerated within ‘permitted’ venues such as the grounds near the Red Fort and an unfrequented lane off Parliament Street, massed bodies of protestors have limited impact in terms of making their cause visible and audible.

Making plans and places  47

and the political powerlessness of being unorganised, combined with the state’s failure to implement labour and environmental regulations, structure the conflict in terms of a perceived opposition between jobs and the environment. Delhi is a city where the majority scrabble to find a precarious foothold in the crowded contest for space and work, their housing concerns focused on getting access to sanitation, water and electricity in squalid settlements. For these people, the sheer uncertainty of employment makes it impossible to ask questions about conditions of work, wages, security and environmental hazards. Workers’ organisations have generally been ineffective in pointing out that a safe and clean working and living environment is equally a priority for workers. As Ravindran (2000: 116) observes, ‘Four decades of urban planning in Delhi, which progressively marginalised both the urban environment and the poor, is now faking an encounter between the two.’

Reclaiming place, resisting stigmatised identities Bourgeois desires for a clean and green Delhi have combined with commercial capital and the state to deny the poor their rights to the environment. Although environmental concern is seen as a luxury for those who can barely carve out a livelihood, focusing on the struggles for work and home allows us to appreciate what the environment means across time to different groups as they are reconfigured by the contestations around place-making. The proliferation of deplorable squatter settlements, and the criminalisation of the working poor who live in them, is a direct consequence of processes of displacement written into the Master Plans. State monopoly over urban land, combined with the state’s failure to build or facilitate the construction of legal low-cost housing, makes slums the only possible option. While the bourgeois gaze regards these encroachments as disfiguring the landscape, for the residents the jhuggis represent a tremendous investment of capital and labour that goes into making a habitable place: co-ordinating with other builders, laying out plots and lanes, improving building materials, negotiating with the municipal authorities, petitioning for toilets, schools and health care. The visible difference

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between relatively new and old jhuggi settlements makes clear the incremental efforts that go into the making of homes and habitable neighbourhoods. With the passage of time, plastic sheets and bamboo thatch shacks are replaced with more sturdy plaster and brick, roads and drains are laid out, the tentative hope of permanence signified also by the carefully cultivated marigold and tulsi (sacred basil) plants in recycled plastic containers that are lined beside the front doors.

Photo: Author

The hope of permanence is not a foolhardy fantasy. Slum-dwellers know that if they endure the hardship and hazard of being illegal residents, the fait accompli of encroachment can be a powerful argument for recognition and legal status (Benjamin 2014). Over time, the claims of jhuggi-dwellers to be regularised become stronger, with the state either legalising their settlement or granting them alternative sites in resettlement colonies on the edge of the city. Having learnt to anticipate this sequence of conflict and compromise, the poor and their political patrons willingly collaborate in the enterprise of encroachment, negotiating the risk of displacement in the hope of securing

Making plans and places  49

future recognition and permanent tenure. The slums, like the nonconforming and polluting industries that are a violation of law in the eyes of the Supreme Court, are for their residents the manifestation of years of negotiation in which law enforcement agencies have been fully complicit. Preying upon working-class hopes and dreams of a better future, these cycles of prevarication and promise are embedded in profound structural violence. The collective efforts of slum-dwellers who mobilise to improve and defend their modest homes, confronting demolition crews and doggedly rebuilding after the destruction, are sabotaged because the state provides limited housing sites in resettlement colonies. Driven by the desire to secure legal housing and a stable foothold in the uncertain economy of the city, slum-dwellers abandon their collective struggle for individual gain. When the municipal trucks arrive to take people to the bleak resettlement sites on the city’s outskirts, and the municipal officials begin handing out the slips of paper that promise a plot in these wastelands, there is a scramble to dismantle the homes painstakingly built brick by brick over the years, to be the first to board the trucks. Arriving at the resettlement sites, bare tracts of land without any services, the poor tackle once again the arduous challenge of imagining and crafting liveable places. The civilising and improving mission of the state is thus realised by the labours of the precariat, their sweat and blood and dreams. The making of Delhi’s working class is also bound to the perpetuation of their identity as migrants. A migrant identity, with its implication of belonging elsewhere, keeps the poor from being recognised as full residents of Delhi entitled to the full complement of civic rights and social opportunities. Despite Delhi’s history as a city of migrants, where the overwhelming majority of the population consists of first or second-generation migrants, the fact of migration is selectively used to stigmatise certain social groups. While attempts by the bourgeoisie to construct a genealogy explaining its presence in Delhi are granted legitimacy, similar strategies are denied to the property-less. Perceiving the poor as migrants and as newly arrived interlopers on the urban scene is a strategy to disenfranchise them from civic citizenship. This treatment is also inflected by discriminatory communal identifications. When the Hindu nationalist Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) was in power both at the Centre and the Delhi state government

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during 1996–99, the names of thousands of Muslim slum-dwellers were deleted from electoral rolls, on the grounds that they were illegal Bangladeshi immigrants. The presence of Bengali-speaking Muslims (alleged to be from Bangladesh) was used to strip large numbers of Muslims of their right to vote, in a context where there was no firm proof of national identity. In 2019, the BJP’s president, Amit Shah, has reiterated the party’s intention of instituting a National Register of Citizens that would discriminate against Muslim ‘infiltrators’, a mechanism for keeping the country from being swamped with migrants.9 Such gatekeeping systems that exclude and stigmatise certain cultural identities, play upon bourgeois anxieties around the breakdown of urban infrastructure, their apprehensions about the scarcity of water and electricity, the increase in crime and disease, and the proliferation of unruly places and peoples.

Photo: Author

9 https://thewire.in/politics/bjp-article-370-nrc-across-india-amit-shah. Accessed on 21 May 2019.

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In Delhi, the working classes have responded to such disciplining attempts by adopting varied strategies of enterprise, compromise and resistance. They have exercised their franchise as citizens—the ‘vote banks’ that the bourgeoisie holds in contempt—to secure the rights and entitlements that are their due. They have deployed their kinship networks to find work and shelter and craft community in a new setting. They have entered into unequal agreements with employers and politicians while trying to mobilise collectively through neighbourhood associations to strengthen their bargaining power. In the 2000s, they came together in a coalition of slum-dwellers’ organisations, trade unions, and NGOs called Saajha Manch (Joint Forum). The Manch created a powerful critique of Delhi’s Master Plan: it pointed to the absence of participatory processes in its formulation and highlighted the sharp inequalities in the consumption of urban resources. It raised two issues that go to the heart of urban planning: Who decides what the city should be? Who is responsible for the scarcity of land and water, for air pollution and traffic congestion? Through their multiple practices, simultaneously social and spatial, the working classes have tried to democratise urban development even as they have challenged dominant modes of framing the environmentdevelopment question. This chapter has shown that planned urban development, like other modes of state-making, attempts to transform the relations between populations and spaces, in the process displacing and impoverishing large sections of citizens. In Delhi, state-making is not only about reproducing the state nationally and internationally and securing resources for capitalist restructuring, it also includes interventions aimed at improving the environmental quality of life for Delhi’s bourgeoisie. For the bourgeoisie as well as for poor migrants, processes of place-making are marked by both violence and desire (Malkki 1992: 24), as displacement collides with dreams of a better life. Yet desire and violence can be hard to disentangle. The line between consent and coercion is always blurred by the structural violence that implicitly shapes ‘choice’. For instance, rural labourers accept and take as given agricultural work and wage rates, access to land and capital, and the social and political hierarchies that govern their lives, ‘choosing’ to migrate to cities. Or, slum-dwellers who are promised titles to

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plots of land on the barren edge of the city may, on the basis of that slender hope, dismantle the homes that they have painstakingly built over the years. When the decision to move is throughout informed by the paucity of legal affordable housing close to one’s place of work, and by the overwhelming threat of state violence if slum-dwellers were to resist, can the process be termed ‘voluntary’? For poor workers, such layering of structural, epistemological and physical violence makes it hard to mobilise in an organised struggle against displacement. At a public meeting to discuss the courtmandated displacement in Delhi, Darshana, a recently-evicted slumdweller described the horrific living conditions at the resettlement site to which her family had been sent. Appalled and angered by her plight, an activist-researcher demanded, ‘But why didn’t you fight? Why did you let them move you? Why didn’t you simply refuse to go?’ Darshana, a widow with two young children who worked as a domestic helper, washing clothes and dishes in middle-class households, wiped her tears and said: You think I didn’t fight? Two years ago, when I was coming home from work, my neighbour ran up to me and said, ‘Hurry, they’re about to demolish your jhuggi. I rushed there and grabbed the police constable by the collar, yelling at him, ‘Couldn’t you have let us know first? Don’t you see that there are young children in the house?’ The policeman shook me off and landed a few solid whacks with his lathi (stick) on my back. I couldn’t work for a month. Even now, when it’s cold, I feel the ache in my bones from those blows. So you tell me, sahib, how should I have fought this time?

Darshana’s encounter with the police is not exceptional. Slum-dwellers are acutely aware of how little they have and how easy it is to lose it all. Yet, in other cities and at other moments, slum-dwellers have resisted evictions. They have managed to stay on in Chennai (Coelho and Raman 2013), secured titles and amenities in Mumbai (Appadurai 2000; Anand 2017), bettered their lives and laid moral claim to the city in Kolkata (Chatterjee 2004). Why they have been unable to do so in Delhi in the last two decades is a question that directs attention

Making plans and places  53

to the spatial and temporal specificities of histories of struggle and how they shape the universe of political possibilities. Basti-dwellers’ strategies to craft work and home, the central axes of social being and identity, are grounded in the negotiation of multiple and shifting fields of power. How they seize opportunities and expand political capabilities can radically mess up the place maps that planners and bourgeois environmentalists dream up. That is why, rather than seeing place-making as a project of rule, we should direct attention toward the accomplishment of rule (Li 1999), the contradictions and compromises that radically transform this project. Such an analysis seeks to identify and understand the complexities in the exercise of agency by subaltern subjects, as they attempt to intervene in the unequal processes of creating spaces and identities that are intrinsic to the project of urban development.

Illustration: Orijit Sen

3

Sealing factories and fates

Air pollution and everyday life in the 1990s ‘I was waiting this morning for the school bus to pick up my son, and I noticed that three of the four kids at the bus stop carried inhalers in their pockets. Man, that’s scary!’ said Anand Kapoor. Kapoor is an architect who lives in Delhi’s affluent Defence Colony neighbourhood, and has a 10-year-old who is asthmatic, a condition that seems to be more and more common among children in the city. Oft-quoted statistics in the media, that 25 per cent of Delhi’s children suffer from some chronic respiratory ailment or the other, provide a numeric gloss to the everyday experience of this impairment, visits to the doctor and pharmacist, and the anxiety and expense suffered by parents. Driving through Delhi’s rush-hour traffic, air pollution manifests itself in the smoke belched out by trucks and the acrid smell of unburnt hydrocarbons that cause burning, streaming eyes, coughing bouts and later, blinding headaches. Many people on ‘two-wheelers’ (as scooters and motorcycles are called), who have no windows to roll up as they drive at the level of vehicular exhaust pipes, tie an ineffectual handkerchief across their nose and mouth. When asked whether it works, they shrug.

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At some of the major traffic intersections in Delhi, the Central Pollution Control Board (CPCB) has installed giant digital displays of pollution levels as they are monitored. As people wait for the lights to change, they can check exactly what toxic cocktail—lead, carbon monoxide, and suspended particulate matter—and how much of it they are imbibing. The metro news broadcast by the NDTV news channel regularly features a ‘Pollution Watch’ that follows the weather report. It records the levels of pollution recorded every day in the four major Indian metropolitan cities.1 A child’s body, a drive through the city, a set of statistics reported on television—these scattered sites are now strung together on a chain of signification. Somatic symptoms are linked to proximate causes; diagnosis is coupled with remedy. The narrative that is created—the problem of air pollution in Delhi—conjures up a cause and a constituency, authorises action and enables exclusions, and obscures as much as it reveals. Air pollution as an objectively verifiable series of chemical changes has been present in Delhi for some time. However, it only came to be recognised as a problem, and especially one that demanded public action, at a particular conjuncture in the economic and political life of the city. That is, there is no ‘natural’ movement from the phenomenon of worsening air quality to the growth of collective concern. If there had been such a straightforward link between air pollution and public action, we would not be at the pass we find ourselves in where, despite Delhi being the world’s most polluted capital, there is no commensurate sense of urgency or resolve to tackle the issue. In the 1990s, however, a common-sense narrative about the ‘problem of pollution’ came to be crafted by the judiciary, media and an assertive upper class. This hegemonic understanding of pollution was not altogether wrong, but it was exceedingly partial. That is, it was selective in who it chose to blame and it was biased in what it turned a blind eye towards. Yet this narrative legitimised authoritarian Two decades after the 1990s, AQI or Air Quality Index has become a household term among the bourgeoisie. Not only is it routinely reported in newspapers and weather apps, it constantly blinks from the visual display windows of home air purifiers. Meanwhile, face masks have become part of the standard kit of traffic policemen. 1

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interventions in the lives of the city’s working classes employed in large and small industrial firms. Thanks to these ‘public-spirited’ actions, not only did workers lose their livelihoods, but an opportunity to seriously address the issue of environmental management and to collectively evolve a long-term ecological vision for the city was also lost. Even though 64 per cent of Delhi’s air pollution in 1993–94 came from motor vehicles and only 12 per cent from industrial sources, the courts chose to focus on closing down factories.2 In response to litigation filed by M.C. Mehta, an environmental activist-lawyer, the Supreme Court of India issued a series of directives in the latter half of the 1990s that resulted in the closure of thousands of industrial units in Delhi. The petitions and the court’s actions addressed the issue of air and water pollution and were justified as being in the ‘public interest’. The media and middle-class citizens widely supported the environmentalist initiative. Affected factory-owners and workers’ organisations did not succeed in getting the court to amend its decision. As a result, not only did many factory-owners suffer significant financial losses, thousands of poor workers lost their only means of livelihood. This pursuit of the ‘public interest’ deprived a large section of Delhi’s working class of their means of subsistence. Presumed environmental benefits—cleaner air and water—were obtained at the cost of losing working environments, resources that sustained some of the most vulnerable citizens of Delhi. How did the elites succeed in presenting environmental hazards and spatial order as concerns that superseded the welfare of Delhi’s working class? How did the priorities of workers—jobs, food, shelter—come to be overlooked? Why were affected workers not represented in the decision-making process? Why was action routed through a judicial authority when the Indian government has an extensive administrative set-up for monitoring 2 Pollution from motor vehicles only came to the Court’s attention four years after it had targeted factories and then too in a selective manner. Privately-owned vehicles were exempted from action. The Court’s primary focus was on cutting emissions from public transport vehicles. The consequent shrinkage of public transport adversely affected working-class commuters while affluent commuters went unscathed. See Baviskar (2006), Kathuria (2002, 2005) and Véron (2006).

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and regulating pollution? Was the closure of factories the most effective way of improving air quality? These issues indicate that, in the larger climate of economic liberalisation, environmental initiatives came to be detached from the principles of social justice. At the same time, environmental action moved away from the ground-level collective mobilisation of social movements like Silent Valley, Chipko Movement and the Narmada Bachao Andolan, even eschewing the popular outreach attempted by NGOs such the Centre for Science and Environment’s ‘Slow Murder’ campaign against vehicular pollution (CSE 1996). Instead, environmental action leaped directly into the lofty precincts of India’s High Courts and Supreme Court. The central question this chapter then sets out to examine is this: How did courts facilitate the capture of ‘public interest’ by the particularistic concerns of urban elites? The context in which the court acted against air pollution was that of economic liberalisation. As the real estate market opened up to private developers, the land on which factories were situated became more valuable than ever before. Global and national restructuring also influenced the shift in Delhi’s production economy from manufacturing to services and commerce. This process eroded an industrial economy that, like construction, services and commerce in the city, relied heavily on ‘informal’ labour—ill-paid workers without any job security, who lived in illegal shanty settlements in the city, were often migrants, and were denied recognition as legitimate urban citizens (Bhattacharya and Sanyal 2011). The invisibility of workers in the air pollution debate can also be related to the rise of corporate-owned media, in which ‘infotainment’, or selling consumer products through the coverage of ‘news’ about health, beauty, and lifestyles, earns more revenue and occupies more space than the grim realities of starving workers’ families, hazardous industrial working conditions, and dwindling public transport. Connecting these processes, practices and positions enables an understanding of how a ‘public interest’ around the problem of air pollution was created such that working-class interests and aspirations were left out. It must be recognised at the outset that there have been several environmental initiatives simultaneously under way in Delhi, of which

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the campaign against air pollution is only one. There is the removal of encroachments and squatter settlements from public lands, ordered by the courts in response to several public interest petitions filed by consumer rights organisations and affluent resident welfare organisations (Ghertner 2008; Menon-Sen and Bhan 2008; Baviskar 2009). Other contentious issues where environmental concerns have been raised include litigation about the construction on the floodplain of the river Yamuna, the building of luxury hotels and shopping malls in green areas in south Delhi, and the removal of cows and monkeys from urban environs (see Chapters 5 and 6). Each of these initiatives brings together a range of social actors working across multiple scales—courts, elected governments (both state and central), different administrative departments, residential and business associations, transnational funding agencies, NGOs, media, and even schools. Each of these initiatives merits examination on its own, as do the linkages between them. For the purposes of this chapter, however, they form the larger context within which to understand the air pollution case.

Jump-starting environmental action In 1985, environmental activist and lawyer Mahesh Chander Mehta filed a public interest petition asking the Supreme Court of India to order the closure of stone crushing units in Delhi ‘which caused dust pollution, affecting half a million people. More than 2,000 tons of dust was being emitted into the air.’3 Mehta contended that these industries violated the Air Pollution Act of 1981, as well as Delhi’s Master Plan. After winning this case in 1992, Mehta went on to petition the Court to move 1,200 industrial units away from Delhi, arguing that, since many of them were located in residential and commercial areas, they contravened the Master Plan’s zoning provisions. As the following account shows, this category of ‘nonconforming’ firms (those that violated urban zoning regulations), and the charge that they were also polluters, was to become a major bone of contention in debates on pollution in Delhi. In another petition, 3

Interview with M.C. Mehta, Frontline, 22 December 2000.

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Mehta approached the court to act on the issue of the pollution of the Ganga and its tributaries, including the river Yamuna which passes through Delhi. The issue of air and water pollution in Delhi was therefore on the Supreme Court’s agenda from the late 1980s. Every now and then, judges would issue statements and directions. But little definitive action was taken until 1994, when the court suddenly took notice of a newspaper report about the pollution of the Yamuna.4 A year later, it asked the Delhi Pollution Control Committee (DPCC), the statelevel unit under the Delhi government, to categorise all industrial units in the city according to their pollution hazard, using the classificatory system employed in the Master Plan. It ordered the Municipal Corporation of Delhi, the agency responsible for licensing commercial activities in the city, not to renew the licences of erring industries. In February 1996, the court directed the Delhi state government to construct common effluent treatment plants (CETPs) to deal with the water pollution issue and appointed the National Environmental Engineering Research Institute as a consultant to this process. It stipulated that industries that failed to install effluent treatment plants by 1 January 1997 would have to close. In April 1996, the court ordered the relocation of all industries from residential areas. These overlapping, even contradictory, orders that demanded prompt action from several state and private actors with different organisational capacities had little immediate effect beyond signalling the court’s desire to address the pollution issue. Yet this spate of judicial orders precipitated several processes that unfolded over the subsequent decade. Although the various orders and their effects are inter-related, for purposes of clarity, they are presented here in three parts: (1) the closure of hazardous, large and heavy industries in 1996–97; (2) the closure of industries that discharge effluents into the Yamuna in the year 2000; and (3) the closure and relocation of nonconforming industries, also in 2000.

4

‘And Quietly Flows the Maily Yamuna’, Hindustan Times, 18 July 1994.

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The first closures: Hazardous and heavy industries In July 1996, the Supreme Court targeted 168 factories classified as ‘H’ (noxious and hazardous). These factories, the court ruled, violated the 1990 Master Plan and would have to relocate or shut down within five months. If factory owners chose to relocate within the National Capital Region—adjoining districts of the states of Rajasthan, Haryana and Uttar Pradesh—they would have to pay each worker monthly wages during the period of the move, as well as one year’s salary as a resettlement bonus. If owners opted to close their industrial units, workers would be entitled to six years’ wages as a retrenchment allowance. Two months later, in September 1996, the court ordered the relocation or closure of another 513 non-conforming units by January 1997. In October 1996, it added another 46 hot mix plants, 21 arc/induction furnaces, and 243 brick kilns to the list. All these firms were closed down by 1997. The events around the closure of the initial 168 ‘H’ category factories have been documented by the Delhi Janwadi Adhikar Manch

Photo: Author

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(DJAM – Delhi Socialist Rights Forum). The Manch, a federation of Leftist trade unions and other human rights organisations, was formed in 1996 as a response to the Supreme Court’s orders. It immediately started investigating the impact of the judicial orders on workers, organising meetings and public hearings, publishing reports (DJAM 1997a, 1997b), and attempting to represent workers’ concerns before the court. However, when lawyers for three trade unions affiliated with the Manch asked the Bench that they be heard in the air pollution case, the judges brushed them aside, saying that the court would protect workers’ interests and did not need the intercession of the unions. Imminent factory closure had already spurred owners to take preemptive action. Those who had larger units saw the court’s order as an opportunity to profit from the sale of the land on which their factories stood. They were quite reconciled to the prospect of shutting down their industries and selling off capital assets. In several cases, they had received land from the government at subsidised rates. With economic liberalisation, the huge rise in the price of real estate in the heart of the city made closing aging manufacturing units and converting the land to commercial use a very attractive proposition. The Supreme Court had stipulated that a certain portion of vacated factory land would have to be handed over to the government (30 per cent for industries below a certain size and 60 per cent for industries above), but this transfer has still not occurred.5 Anticipating closure, managers had begun retrenching workers well in advance of the Supreme Court deadline (DJAM 1998). Some factories declared that they were moving out of Delhi but failed to take along or compensate the majority of workers who were, in effect, laid off. Furthermore, factory managers limited their liability to the narrowest possible definition of ‘workmen’, those who were on the rolls as permanent employees. However, the Manch’s survey showed that up to 90 per cent of workers in some firms were not permanent, even after decades in service. Thus, large sections of 5 A similar process happened in downtown Mumbai, when the closure of ‘sick’ textile mills opened up prime real estate for commercial development, at great profit to mill-owners (D’Monte 2001).

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workers employed year after year as badli—casual workers or those hired through contractors—were denied compensation. Permanent workers fared a little better. According to the Manch, ‘Of those entitled to compensation… our survey shows that compensation has not been paid to any worker although more than one year has passed since the order was issued’ (DJAM 1997b).6 When the Manch approached the Supreme Court and pointed out that its orders were being violated, the court suggested that they should take complaints to the Labour Commissioner, an official whose previous inaction had already demonstrated his apathy toward protecting workers’ interests. Clearly, the attempt to clean Delhi’s air and water had a severely adverse impact on workers’ livelihoods but the court dismissed it as a minor issue, one that pertained to a particular section of society, and not as a justiciable public concern. It is difficult to assess the scale of displacement. Notably, the only source of data on the number of workers rendered jobless by the Supreme Court orders is a survey conducted by the Manch (DJAM 1997b). No detailed figures are available with any government agency and, as the case of casual and contract labourers indicates, factory owners systematically under-report the number of people they employ.7 The Manch estimated that ‘in th[e] first phase, no less than 50,000 workers have lost their jobs and been dislocated with their families’ (ibid.). To this estimate should be added the number of workers in ancillary industries supplying materials and services to the closed or relocated factories. Of Delhi’s total population of 12 million at that time, the number directly affected by loss of employment exceeded 250,000 workers and their families, a significant section of the city’s population. 6 The Manch report goes on to note that Ayodhya Textile Mills, the only government-owned unit among the affected factories, was an exception to this rule, giving six years’ wages to its workforce. 7 Under-reporting is a strategy to circumvent the provisions of the Labour Act and the Industrial Disputes Act, which mandate that firms employing more than 10 workers provide them with certain entitlements. Under these laws, firms are required to contribute to workers’ pension, provident funds and other social security benefits, and must allow collective bargaining.

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The closure of water-polluting industries The second phase of factory closures occurred in 2000. As mentioned above, in February 1996, the court had stipulated that industries that failed to install effluent treatment plants by 1 January 1997 would have to close. Although the Delhi government drew up plans and costsharing mechanisms for joint public-private financed CETPs, a number of factory owners refused to participate, arguing that the scheme was too costly and that some of them were being unfairly targeted.8 The Delhi government and industries could not come to any agreement and, over a three-and-a-half-year period, no treatment plants were built. In 1999, after the government failed to meet further deadlines, the Supreme Court forbade the discharge of untreated effluents from any factory in Delhi and Haryana into the Yamuna. In late 1999, the DPCC sent notices of closure to 1,142 industrial units. These firms were identified through a survey conducted by 29 Sub-Divisional Magistrates (administrators) of the Delhi government and DPCC engineers, and from information provided by various industrial associations. To ensure effective closure, not only were the factories’ gates locked, their supplies of water and electricity were also cut off. The closures caused much consternation. On 12 February 2000, factory owners in the Seelampur area of the city confronted the government’s ‘vigilance squads’ and stopped them from closing their units. Many other industrial units and associations also protested, arguing that they did not discharge effluents and met existing standards, or had already installed treatment plants. Of these units, 372 were allowed to re-open by January 2000. The process of closing and re-opening continued throughout the year. By July 2000, while 3,177 units had been issued closure notices, only some had been actually sealed. Others were allowed to stay open or re-open (Adve 2000). There was chaos. Almost all the affected firms were small in scale, most reporting that they employed fewer than 10 workers. The court issued no directions about workers’ compensation and, since almost all the firms employed unorganised labourers, there is no documentation about the scale and impact of closure. 8 For an analysis of the complex technical and regulatory issues regarding effluent treatment plants, see Adve (2000).

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The closure of non-conforming industries The third, related, set of closures focused on ‘non-conforming’ industries (industries that violated the zoning provisions of the Master Plan). In 1996, the DPCC contracted schoolteachers to conduct a survey of industrial units.9 They found that, of the 126,218 industrial units in the city, 97,411 (almost 80 per cent) were non-conforming. Impelled by the Court’s deadlines and threats of punitive action against government officials, the Delhi administration was galvanised into action. In October 1996, the Delhi State Industrial Development Corporation (DSIDC) began to acquire land on the north-west edge of the city in Bawana to relocate small-scale industries from residential areas. By July 2000, 52,000 applications for alternate plot allotments had been received, but not a single firm had been relocated. Evidently, Bawana only had enough land for 16,000 plots and the DSIDC officials could not decide which among the flood of applications to select.

Photo: Author 9 School teachers in India are often conscripted to conduct enumeration exercises for the government, such as collecting census data and conducting election polls.

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The Supreme Court apparently decided that enough was enough. On 12 September 2000, the judges announced that ‘All polluting industries of whatever category operating in residential areas must be asked to shut down.’ Two months later, on 14 November, the court issued a show cause notice to the Chief Secretary, Delhi government, and the Commissioner of the Delhi Municipal Corporation, asking why they should not be punished for contempt of court for not implementing the court’s orders. In panic, the Delhi government ordered the immediate closure of all non-conforming industrial units (and not just the polluting ones). This order, which affected more than 97,000 units, was unprecedented in scale. Over the next few days, as government officials, escorted by heavily armed policemen, went around sealing factory premises, there were riots in Delhi. Factory owners and workers were out on the streets protesting. There was a city-wide bandh (shutdown) on 20 November. Protestors set fire to government buses and stoned municipal officials. Police retaliated by firing on the protestors. Three workers were shot dead and hundreds were injured. Even the media, which had reported only desultorily on the progress of the litigation in the Supreme Court, took note of this outbreak of violence. Yet, restricted as they were to the industrial pockets of the city, even these dramatic events received only a few inches of column space for a few days. There were no in-depth accounts of how workers or small factory owners were affected, nothing that indicated that a huge section of the city’s population stood to lose its livelihood. On 28 November 2000, the Supreme Court chided the Delhi government for not distinguishing between ‘polluting non-conforming’ and ‘non-polluting non-conforming’ firms. The judges criticised the government for its tardiness and set a deadline of 15 December 2000 for identifying all the non-conforming units, and a deadline of 7 January 2001 for shutting all polluting units among them. On 15 December, the Delhi Pradesh Congress Committee, the statelevel unit of the political party then ruling Delhi, and the Delhi Manufacturers’ Association staged a large demonstration near Parliament, trucking in thousands of workers. The target of their protests was the central government’s Urban Development Ministry, which controlled the DDA, the body that prepared and implemented the city’s Master Plan. The protestors blamed the Urban Development

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Minister, Jagmohan, for trying to remove all industries from Delhi. It was not clear how the Authority defined polluting industries, they said. Moreover, the livelihood of hundreds of thousands of workers and factory owners was more important than the Master Plan, and the protestors saw no reason why it could not be amended.10 The protest thus attributed the crackdown on non-conforming units to the arbitrary land-use classifications mandated in Delhi’s Master Plan. This was also an attempt to deflect criticism from the Congress-led government of Delhi state and blame the closure fiasco on the BJP-led central government. The Delhi government proclaimed a nyaya yuddha (battle for justice) against the central government and BJP members of Parliament elected from Delhi. Between 2001 and 2003, many polluting industries shut down. The Supreme Court extended the deadline for closing all ‘polluting nonconforming’ industries to 31 December 2002. The Delhi government submitted a revised list of 33 categories of polluting industries to the Supreme Court and announced that units under these categories would be closed down in phases.11 The government also conceded that those industrial units that were non-conforming but did not pollute would be allowed to operate from their present premises for the time being. By November 2002, construction had started in the new Bawana Industrial Area, where 14,500 plots had been allotted by the DSIDC. In February 2001, the Delhi government announced that it would approach the Ministry of Urban Development to ‘regularise’ (or redesignate as industrial) 24 areas classified as residential in the Master Plan. It argued that more than 70 per cent of the land in these areas was occupied by industrial units, thus their de facto industrial status simply needed to be retrospectively legitimised. Such a step would prevent the closure or displacement of 20,000 industrial units.12

The Hindu, Delhi edition, 16 December 2000. According to the Delhi government, the list of polluting industries was ‘worked out by experts after a thorough study’. Of the 44 industries categorised in the earlier list, nine were deemed to be non-polluting, reducing the number to 35. 12 The Hindu, Delhi edition, 13 February 2001. 10 11

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The Delhi government proposed another deft sleight of hand: changing the definition of a ‘household unit’ from a firm employing up to five workers and using up to 1 kilowatt of power, to a unit employing up to 20 workers and using up to 5 KW of power. This move would literally domesticate the problem by reclassifying many current industrial units as ‘household industries’, giving them immunity from the court’s orders. But even this expansion, complained the Association of Small-scale Industries, did not go far enough. Almost two years later, on 12 December 2002, the DDA reversed its stand and accepted the Delhi government’s proposal for in situ regularisation in 24 areas of the city. This move signalled the government’s willingness to appease factory-owners, an important political constituency, by finding a legal escape route that would protect their interests, a compromise that would pass muster under the court’s scrutiny. This change of heart in the Urban Development Ministrycontrolled DDA was criticised in the English press. Voicing the opinion of its white-collar professional readership, The Hindu reminded its readers that the Ministry had earlier rejected change of land use from residential to industrial ‘keeping in view the already deteriorating environmental conditions in Delhi and the ever-growing menace of illegal constructions and unauthorised encroachments’.13 The newspaper darkly hinted that ‘There are political and other interests involved in the exercise which on the face of it seeks to prevent the closure or displacement of nearly 20,000 industrial units but in reality overlooks not only the interests of residents of these colonies but all other citizens of Delhi as well.’14

The Hindu, Delhi edition, 21 December 2002. It was rumoured that Jagmohan, the Urban Development Minister, had been divested of his post because his intransigent attitude on factory closures was adversely affecting the popularity of BJP members of Parliament from Delhi. Small manufacturers and traders form a significant chunk of the BJP’s electoral base in Delhi. Jagmohan was replaced by the more ‘adjusting’ Ananth Kumar who was willing to accommodate the concerns of his party members. 13

14

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Troublesome definitions and tangled practices The Supreme Court orders about the closure of factories contained many vexed assumptions and ambiguities. What is a polluting industry? The common-sense notion that a manufacturing unit must actually pollute—generate noxious or hazardous wastes (or noise) in excess of permissible levels—in order to be identified as a ‘polluting industry’ did not hold in this case. The 1990 Master Plan identified 27 polluting industries based on a list produced by the Central Pollution Control Board. The designation of a unit as polluting was not based on emissions but on what it produced and whether the manufacture of that product was generically classified as polluting or not. Also, the classification of products in the 1990 Master Plan had anomalies: ‘While corrugated boxes are listed under category A, paper products are in category F and, in many cases, corrugated box manufacturers have been targeted for closure by the sealing squad under the argument that it is also a paper product’ (Kathuria 2001: 194). Rather than investigate the specificities of each case and the particular practices adopted by individual units, the Court used only categorical designations devised by the CPCB as an approximation. Thus, even if the industrial unit controlled its emissions to permissible levels, it could still be designated as a polluting industry. Yet this distinction became moot because the DPCC was woefully understaffed and incapable of checking emissions for every unit. Workers’ organisations and the Manch tried to downplay the importance of industries’ contribution to air pollution, arguing that the vehicles of more affluent urban residents should be targeted before workers’ livelihoods. But other analysts pointed out that industrial emissions were also a serious hazard, especially for those who worked in these industries (Ramachandran 2000: 18). While relocation, which merely transfers the problem elsewhere, out of the Supreme Court’s sight, was no answer, those who argued that closing down polluting industries would protect workers’ health failed to acknowledge that, if workers were not provided safe alternate livelihoods, they were merely exchanging one form of vulnerability with another. The Manch had initially dismissed pollution as the concern of privileged elites who did not care that workers were being deprived of their livelihood.

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But when confronted by the growing concern about air pollution in the media and courts, the Manch went on to acknowledge that pollution was not a trivial issue. It modified its stand to assert that the primary victims of polluted working conditions were labourers and yet neither the court nor the government had addressed their plight. In the words of a commentator affiliated with the Manch: ‘If the aim is to fight pollution and improve the health of the citizens then it should begin by addressing the issue in terms of the disproportionately high impact of pollution on the lives of the underprivileged sections of the population’ (Navlakha 2000: 4471). Another key concept on which the court’s orders hinged was that of the non-conforming industry, an industrial unit that violates the land use provisions of Delhi’s Master Plan. As discussed in Chapter 2, the Master Plan of 1962 designated functionally segregated zones for residential, commercial, institutional and industrial purposes. To pursue the goal of rapid industrialisation set out in the nation’s second and third Five-Year Plans (1956–61, 1961–66), industrial estates were established on the outskirts of the city to support small-scale industries. However, this Plan and its successors were based on projections about the rate of growth of Delhi’s population and the city’s anticipated and desired industrial and commercial profile, figures that were more than 30 years old at the time of the court’s rulings and that had been proved wrong by several orders of magnitude. Inevitably, industrial growth outpaced the limited space provided in these zones. Thousands of small industrial units sprouted up around the industrial estates and commercial centres to take advantage of the proximity of labour, materials and markets. With no more room in the designated industrial estates, new firms were forced to occupy non-conforming sites. Despite being in violation of the Master Plan, most of these units were recognised by the government in that they were licensed, registered with the sales and excise departments, received government subsidies and bank loans. Also, since the Plan had made negligible provision for housing workers, squatter settlements had mushroomed all around the factories. Such violations were not merely tolerated, they were actively encouraged by politicians and corrupt bureaucrats. Government

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practices regarding encroachments on public lands and non-conforming industrial units have often been at cross purposes. Different, often conflicting, pronouncements and acts have generated a fertile field for enterprising power-brokers. The possibility of eviction provides the context for negotiating bribes to look the other way, to condone and compound the offence by collecting fines rather than closing the firm down. The simultaneous possibility of ‘regularisation’, or retrospective legalisation, spurs encroachers and non-conforming units to stay on and stake a claim. Thus, the shortcomings of the Plan, as well as the tangled skein of state practices around it, structure the fields of action of factory owners and workers. It should be noted that the most egregious violator of the Master Plan has been the DDA itself, following a policy of ad hoc accommodation of new buildings whenever it has been politically expedient. The biggest ambiguity in the Supreme Court order was the fate of the several thousand workers who were laid off by one stroke of the judicial writ. Ostensibly, the court had been benevolent; it had stipulated norms for compensating permanent workers employed in the units being relocated or shut down. But the vast majority of workers who were affected by the court order were ‘casual labourers’ not officially registered as employees of particular firms. Under-reporting the number of workers employed is a common strategy and all the more so as industrial production is subcontracted to smaller firms in the ‘informal’ economy (NCEUS 2007). Much of this ‘informal economy’—an umbrella category encompassing complex myriad arrangements of work, from family labour to seasonal employment— escapes the state’s regulatory apparatus. Not being organised, not recognised as employees, hundreds of thousands of workers found no way of representing their point of view before the judge or the media and lost their livelihoods. The judicialisation of the problem of air pollution choked off a larger public debate about alternative strategies. As noted earlier, the overwhelming contribution to air pollution came from automobile emissions, yet the court focused on industrial pollution. (Similarly, the chief source of water pollution in Delhi is untreated domestic sewage, not industrial effluents, yet judicial orders failed to address this). The Manch marshalled evidence to make its case in a series of public

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hearings, arguing that it is the vehicles of affluent citizens that should be the target of public action. Yet it was only in the late 1990s that emissions from public transport vehicles became the subject of court action. Since closing down factories would take away the livelihoods of lakhs of industrial workers, was it necessary to act against nonconforming units that did not pollute but were only in violation of the Master Plan? And was closure the only way of dealing with polluting industries? A few firms chose to relocate outside Delhi, and presumably continue to pollute in their new locations. Neither the courts nor the government seriously examined the option of helping firms adopt cleaner technologies or install pollution control equipment. In one of its orders in 1996, the court had directed industrial units to set up common effluent treatment plants but did not pursue the matter. The lack of consideration of alternatives highlights the fact that the flurry of unilateral action by the court completely foreclosed a democratic process of representation, discussion, and informed decision-making. In the ‘public interest’ of preventing air pollution in Delhi, the rights of an entire class of poor workers to basic subsistence were summarily denied. One reason for the court’s swift and peremptory decisions has been the presence of Justice Kuldip Singh, later famous as a ‘Green Judge’. Singh’s reputation rested on his speedy dispatch of complex legal cases and his issue of strong diktats to recalcitrant bureaucrats, failure to implement which would lead to censure and the threat of senior officials being jailed for contempt of court. Singh drew legitimacy from the radical tradition of Public Interest Litigation of the 1970s where the Supreme Court permitted itself to become, not the last resort, but the first body to which petitioners appeal. Though this short-circuited the administrative process and even weakened it in the long-term (Dembowski 2001; Bhuwania 2016), this new way of doing business was hailed by the middle class because it cut through red tape and obviated a painful, long drawn-out struggle for administrative responsiveness and accountability. As M.C. Mehta, the lawyer who initiated the pollution litigation, said: If there is a law, you respect it, you obey it, you enforce it…. You cannot set up hazardous and polluting industries in Delhi…. The law was there and all the industries, all the associations knew it very

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well…. Everybody knew. So if the law was there, then… they [should] have voluntarily… gone out of the city. Instead of doing that, they started lobbying with the government. All these politicians, they are vote-hungry people. They are all the time looking out for their seats and for their elections…. So they were doing that [and] all these industries were influencing them…. Nobody is complying with [the law]… [There is] negligence on the part of the industries, on the part of the government of India, on the part of the state government and every possible machinery. So when they failed to protect the life and health of the people in this city then the court came into play.15

What this account leaves out is that environmentalists like Mehta made no attempt to directly influence or even address politicians, manufacturers, or regulatory agencies, presuming that they are corrupt and compromised. Perceiving the political process as broken and illegitimate justified approaching the Supreme Court directly. The partnership of M.C. Mehta and Kuldip Singh, advocate and judge, resulted in directives that affected the lives and livelihoods of hundreds of thousands of workers and their families, people who had no representation in court. This was the new efficient dispensation of justice in the ‘public interest’ that middle-class people acclaimed. As strong individuals who seemed to galvanise a moribund system, Mehta and Singh were vigilante icons who commanded the admiration and support of a broad public (excluding of course the workers and their supporters).16 Both received prestigious awards and frequently figured as invited speakers and celebrity guests at public events of the kind organised by the Rotary or Lions Clubs. Together, they attracted the accolades of the upper classes, partly because they embodied effective state action, and partly because they were seen as serving ‘the public interest’ by protecting the environment, with clean air and water appearing as transparent, universal goods that supersede questions of political economy. How did clean air become such a transcendental value, one that could trump issues of livelihood and social justice, and for whom? 15 16

Interview with Kavita Philip, 25 October 2002. On police vigilantism and public acclaim, see Eckert (2005).

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Pollution and the constitution of a public For a subcontinent with a centuries-old obsession with matters of purity and pollution, a matrix that still organises much of social life, the problem of air pollution seems strangely inassimilable into older frames of understanding. While orientations to people, objects and spaces, especially in practices around food and sexuality, are shaped by concepts of caste and life-cycle event-related pollution, that set of concerns seems to be curiously at odds with a western biomedical discourse around toxicity and risk. How do Hindu mourners in Delhi, who cremate their relatives on the bank of river Yamuna, believe that they are cleansed of death’s pollution by bathing in water made filthy by sewage and industrial sludge? One may trace beliefs about the relative harmlessness of water and air-borne wastes to Ayurvedic notions of the elements—air, water, fire, earth, ether—as marked by constant traffic and flow of energy, such that their movement dilutes and diffuses the danger that these substances embody (Rosin 2000). In this view, sulphur dioxide from the Indraprastha thermal power plant, for example, is simply borne away by the wind, and cannot be a form of pollution that matters. The persistence of these beliefs acts as a powerful obstacle against mobilising public concern around the issue of pollution. The transformation of public perceptions of environmental hazard was produced by a different discourse, one already made familiar by colonial and post-colonial health and hygiene projects.17 Colonial ideas of ‘Improvement’, of husbanding resources, controlling lands and peoples for the purpose of conservation, better management for more efficient exploitation, were an intrinsic part of colonial enterprise (Cowen and Shenton 1996; Mehta 1999). Empire was justified as an 17 Following Foucault’s lead, there is a substantial body of work on the technologies of bio-power, on practices of rendering legible bodies and spaces, and ordering ‘the conduct of conduct’, which I will not review here. But some indicative references on public health are Anderson (1995) and in particular his discussion on social improvement and smoke abatement in colonial Calcutta (pp. 328–35); Awadhendra Sharan’s detailed historical research on Delhi (2014); Arnold (1993); Greenough (2003); Mitchell (2002); and Tarlo (2003). On the creation of ordered urban spaces, see Caldeira (2000); Holston (1989); and Smith (1996).

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instrument of development, of ‘fostering and leading new races of subjects and allies in the career of improvement’ (Raffles, cited in Drayton 2000: 94). Promoting ‘the internal Improvement… of a Powerful Empire’ concerned ‘the improvement of the people in regard to their health, industry, and morals’, and not merely agriculture, mining, and fisheries (ibid.: 104). The pursuit of improved health and morals ranged over diverse terrain such as school education, agricultural policy, public health and hygiene, population control, prison reform, and personal law. The government as guardian drew upon expertise in new forms of knowledge (Cohn 1997), based on techniques of taxonomic classification and inscription that included maps, censuses, and surveys of all kinds. Enumeration was essential to the act of producing order, rendering unruly reality legible (Scott 1998), and enabling bureaucratic action. It helped shape new collective identities, the modern politics of caste, religion, region and language, and modes of action. The same techniques of government were inherited by the post-colonial state and employed to achieve planned national development (Ludden 1992). It would be misleading to point only to continuities between colonial and post-colonial governmentalities. The post-colonial discourse of sovereign nation-states, anchored though it was in the paradox of aspiring to independence by adopting a development path that required participation in the familiar inequities of global markets, an ‘aid’ regime, and Cold War militarism, created novel political opportunities (Khilnani 1997; McMichael 1996). The post-colonial era opened new institutional arenas for negotiating the conflicting imperatives of accumulation and legitimation—from electoral representation to socialist planning, liberal democracy created the possibility of new freedoms. Ideas of citizenship, forged in the freedom struggle’s crucible, informed the sensibilities of assertive social groups who could make new demands upon the state. The Indian state created a large public sector that included research and educational institutions, capital-intensive infrastructure, and heavy industries, as well as a large bureaucracy to control and regulate this sprawling edifice.18 18 The development of environmental law and policy in the 1980s was a late addition to this apparatus of governance (Divan and Rosencranz 1991).

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The prominent position of the Indian middle classes can be traced to the rise of nationalism in the colonial period (Chatterjee 1993), but its consolidation as a decisive hegemonic power occurred in the aftermath of Independence (Deshpande 1997). Though middle-class people saw themselves as upholders of the public interest, speaking for nature and the nation, their interests and ideologies were shaped by their subject-positions. Their social location in the urban economy—in the professions and in commerce and finance—kept them detached from working-class lives and concerns. The absence of an organised working class in the city meant that opposing points of view could rarely make themselves heard in the public sphere. Instead, middle-class visions of the ideal city came to dominate and drive public action. Images of Singapore inform the model urban lifestyle that middle-class Delhiites desire and to which they aspire.19 The ‘benevolent authoritarianism’ of this city-state appeals to their sense of civic order and security, efficiency and prosperity. A city where spitting on the streets is punished by a hefty fine, and where ‘street food’ is only sold in demarcated off-the-street food courts, is a utopia for urban middle-class Indians, who bemoan Delhi’s chaos, dirt, and routine flouting of rules. The promise of development in post-colonial India, and the dream of model cities, was soon perceived by the middle classes to have been betrayed by a corrupt and inefficient bureaucracy. While they continued to have faith in the optic of enlightened public interest, to be determined by technocrats and judges, they saw the process of governing as subverted by the ‘politics’ of vested interests. Thus, governing should ideally be a rational, technically informed process that ‘takes all factors into account’ to generate enforceable decisions for compliant subjects. The state’s failure to live up to this ideal led to disillusionment, which was only displaced by the emergence of activist-citizens like M.C. Mehta who cut through red tape, disciplining not only erring bureaucrats but also working-class citizens. A middle-class 19 Post-liberalisation, many upper-middle-class Indians have travelled to Singapore on vacation, and a growing number work there in the banking and IT sectors.

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citizen approvingly commented on the success of these initiatives in getting a moribund state to act: In terms of air [pollution] they’ve done a lot—moved to CNG, restricted entry time for trucks. Air quality has improved. [I know] through newspapers, TV. Now they have it on TV, everything about NO [nitrogen oxide], CO2 [carbon dioxide] and dust…. It is only the judiciary and media which [are] keeping these things under control, otherwise the government machinery has failed. It is all because of the interfering politicians…[who] do not support good officials. Two major factors that have led to failure are politicians and corruption. Media and judiciary are the only impartial ones. If they are not there, no one will know the truth.20

Yet this vaunted impartiality, their ostensible distance from ‘politics’ did not necessarily make the courts either just or enlightened. The courts’ impatient dismissal of representations by workers, and their insistence on applying laws and rules that were palpably flawed, indicated an inherent bias in favour of bourgeois environmentalists—a class-based affinity made all the more attractive by the appreciative attention bestowed on it by the media.

Hidden violence, the workplace and ‘free’ labour When middle-class citizens in Delhi praise the action against air pollution, the issue of displaced workers is rarely acknowledged. Middleclass privilege, as reflected in patterns of social and spatial segregation in the city, allows them to screen out facts that may disrupt the comfortable fictions of everyday life. One of these organising fictions is the idea of ‘public interest’. When confronted with the issue of workers’ loss of livelihood, M.C. Mehta defended his campaign: ‘Here twelve 20 B.M. Gupta, retired teacher and a member of the B Block, East of Kailash Residents Welfare Association, in a discussion on public action around environmental issues in Delhi.

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million people are suffering…. What is more important—people’s life and health or jobs to a few people?’ In this view, protecting the health of the population at large is a priority that supersedes the specific suffering of a ‘few people’, even if they may be poorer and more vulnerable to malnutrition and ill health. Such a posing of the issue—benefit to many versus loss to some—conceals the class-specific effects of the air pollution initiative. When critics point out the asymmetrical impact of the air pollution campaign, middle-class residents sheltered behind self-serving reassurances: ‘Oh, the government is bound to do something for workers.’ Mehta asserted, ‘The court has fully protected the interest of the workers….Where is the injustice?’ Mehta took at face value the court’s orders about compensation, without acknowledging that factory owners did not comply with them. When challenged about the efficacy of these orders, he shrugged off responsibility: ‘It was the role of the politicians; it was the role of the trade unions….When the court order was there they should have protected [workers’] rights through that order. If they don’t do anything then [what] can you do?’ This account blames politicians and trade unions for betraying workers, without admitting that the court gave them no room to represent workers’ interests. That the court saw air pollution as a ‘technical’ problem devoid of social impacts is clear from the fact that, besides excluding trade unions as affected parties in its deliberations, its advisory committees contained only technical experts and environmentalists and not representatives of factory owners or affected workers. The media, for its part, also made only token queries about the fate of workers and reported court proceedings without caring to investigate their impact on the ground. Middle-class hegemony, operating through the court and the media, worked to conceal the violence perpetrated on workers. It was only in the back-and-forth negotiations between factory-owners as a political constituency and an elected city government worried about losing votes that working-class concerns were indirectly incorporated. Yet it was precisely this uneven terrain of democratic politics that was decried by elites as corrupt and compromised. That workers’ concerns figured nowhere in official thinking was evident from the remarks made by the then Labour Commissioner

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(LC) for Delhi, the senior-most official responsible for safeguarding the rights of workers in the city: LC:  The main issue of concern before the Delhi government is population—unchecked immigration in the city. This is the basic cause of all problems….It also results in environmental problems. There have been two landmark judgments by the Supreme Court banning vehicles with non-clean fuel and the relocation of industries in non-conforming areas. Interviewer (I):  Landmark judgment… in what way? LC:  The Supreme Court acted on public interest litigation and acted to clean the air. Delhi is the fourth most polluted city in the world. I:  Has it improved? LC:  Oh yes. Recently kids were asked if they could see the sky and stars and they responded that they could see the stars now. It was bad [before], you could not see the sky, only black clouds. I:  But what about the workers? LC:  They were given compensation. I:  But what about the unorganised labour? LC:  Some must have gone back to their villages and others took up [other] jobs in the city. Water finds its own way. In practice no workers were laid off or dislocated. There are large-scale development activities….Overall it seems everyone welcomes the efforts and is happy. Who would want to see dirt and no development? [Emphasis added]

In terms of changing air quality, the middle classes hailed the Supreme Court’s action against air pollution in Delhi as a success. Pollution levels in Delhi were reduced temporarily until they were offset by the spurt in the number of private motor vehicles (Kathuria 2002, 2005). For a brief moment, children could see stars in the sky. Perhaps the incidence of respiratory ailments also declined, though there is no data to that effect. But what of the injuries suffered every day by the children of laid-off workers? They may have breathed cleaner air for a few

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months, but it didn’t fill their bellies. They lived in worse conditions; many were pulled out of school because their parents could not afford the expense. In the quest for cleaner air, why were these children not considered? The effects of the Supreme Court judgement on the vulnerable bodies of poor children, men and women remained invisible in the public eye.

Judicial activism as spectacle The construction of the ‘clean air’ cause by a middle-class constituency with privileged access to the courts, represented ‘the environment’ as a universal good, to be protected in the ‘public interest’, oblivious of the effects on workers. Workers, if they were considered at all, were dismissed as mobile migrants, who could return to their distant villages or find other employment. Middle-class unconcern about the devastating effect of displacement for the poor was exemplified in the Labour Commissioner’s remark, ‘water finds its own way’, naturalising their trauma as the simple ebb and flow of footloose, fancy-free nomads. Officially, the poor did not exist; they were absent from official records and, as long as they did not agitate, they were invisible. Only to the extent that factory owners had some localised political weight that could result in the regularisation of their firms were workers able to hold on to their jobs. Disenfranchised by the legal interpretation of who constitutes the ‘public’ and excluded by the definition of an ‘environmental’ issue that failed to recognise their needs of food, shelter, safety and security, workers were doubly discriminated against. Ironically, this marginalisation and dispossession was accomplished by a legal innovation originally intended to protect their interests. Despite the contradictions and contestations that marked different forms of state action around the issue of pollution in Delhi, at first glance it would seem that the alliance between judges, bourgeois environmentalists, media and the professional middle class had succeeded in what it sought. Certainly, the factories and workshops of industrial Delhi were banished to the periphery or confined in ghettos. Some of the larger factory sites were redeveloped as commercial real

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estate while others remain in limbo, locked in litigation between multiple owners. However, the problem of air and water pollution continued unabated. With the steep annual increase in the number of private motor vehicles in the city, propelled by the shrinking availability of public transport as well as by liberalised access to consumer finance, air pollution is worse than ever. In the case of water pollution, despite additional steps such as the 2004 eviction of more than 200,000 poor squatters from the Yamuna embankment on the grounds that they were polluting the river (see Chapter 6), the Yamuna continues to be polluted because of the discharge of untreated domestic sewage from the city’s ‘developed’ middle-class residential neighbourhoods. It would appear then that the public interest was not served. And yet, perhaps what the judicial activism against pollution did succeed in doing was creating a spectacle of law in action, a bravura performance of grand gestures that, regardless of its actual outcomes, conjured up a utopian vision of decisive action that legitimised the role of the judiciary as being ‘above politics’. Regardless of the private compromises that ultimately prevailed or the political negotiations that partially undid judicial orders, in the India of the liberalised era, the hegemony of a middle-class vision had been asserted through the exercise of law. In the era of economic liberalisation, Public Interest Litigation around the environment became a creature of its times, transformed into the pursuit of elite private interests that excluded the poor.

Illustration: Orijit Sen

4

Playing games

Introduction Since the adoption of policies of economic liberalisation in the 1990s, successive governments have instituted spatial and social changes that converge around a common vision: making Delhi a ‘world-class’ city. This ambiguous yet evocative term has become a potent rallying point for state agencies, corporate capital and bourgeois citizens, who use it to authorise and endorse political action across a variety of scales. From clearing an ecologically-sensitive green area in south Delhi to build luxury hotels and malls, to demolishing the homes and workplaces of hundreds of thousands of urban squatters and migrants to curb air and water pollution (see Chapters 2 and 3), the project of making Delhi ‘world-class’ is radically restructuring the city’s landscapes, livelihoods and lifestyles. This chapter focuses on one particular juncture in the life of the city, when processes of economic and political transformation of the kind described above became crystallised around a spectacular event—the Commonwealth Games 2010. I argue that the study of such extraordinary events is a useful supplement to the focus on social structure and process which has been the mainstay of the social sciences. For urban India, the study of events has largely concentrated on communal riots and disasters such as the Bhopal industrial disaster and the Bangalore toxic liquor deaths (Hazarika 1987; Manor 1993;

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Hansen 2001). These crises have been treated as revelatory moments, condensing and crystallising the symbolic and material structures that constitute the everyday, taken-for-granted aspects of social life (Das 1990). That is, most analyses have tended to concentrate on the continuities between events and the everyday. I would like to suggest another way of interpreting these events, especially those that are not sudden, unexpected moments of crisis but are occasions both anticipated and planned for. Such moments can be understood as a ‘special time’, to use David Gilmartin’s phrase about the period of parliamentary elections when routine politics is suspended by the Election Commission in order to effect a transaction between the state and its citizens, a sacred period set apart within the temporality of secular politics (Gilmartin 2009). What is significant about such events is not only their continuity but their disjuncture from businessas-usual. As Veena Das points out, these ‘critical events’ bring into being ‘new modes of action’ and understanding and enable political actors to acquire new forms and meanings (Das 1995). In keeping with such a perspective, this chapter uses the example of the Commonwealth Games 2010 as a spectacular event-in-the-making to explore the relationship between the everyday life of the city and the extraordinary moments when that life is not only illuminated but transformed. I argue that spectacular events cause normal planning procedures and understandings to be set aside in order to speedily accomplish large-scale social and spatial transformations of questionable economic and social value, changes that would be more difficult to achieve through routine processes. This speed and efficacy is enabled by promoting the belief that national prestige and status is at stake, and by the idea that cities must vie with each other for recognition within a globalised economy, striving to increase their ‘stickiness’ in the fastflowing world of mobile capital. Yet, spectacular events are more than mere means of hurrying along the ordinary business of political economy. Regardless of their success in garnering international capital or prestige, the hosting of mega-events generates a buzz, a collective excitement that changes how citizens orient to the city as a ‘happening’ place. Mega-events manufacture solidarities around an urban place by

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imbuing it with an affective charge, a structure of feeling that is generated by the scale, compression and celebratory content of the event itself. Exceeding the concerns of political economy, these events provide the affective glue that makes the urban exciting and desirable. By re-presenting the city to its citizens, the Commonwealth Games act as a spectacle that drums up consent even for the most egregious waste of public money as well as the spatial and social exclusions engendered by dressing up the city for the Games. The anthropological literature on state spectacles (see Hansen 2000; Mbembe 1992; Osella and Osella 2000; Piot 1999: 91–92; Roy 2007; Sundar 1997: 59–75) has largely focused on their significance as performances of power that make visible the might of the state and that invite citizens and subjects to consent to and collaborate in the affirmation of an imagined community, usually the nation-state. This chapter contributes to such a corpus by highlighting the spatial dimensions of the community forged by spectacular events. It also shows how the community formed and affirmed by the Commonwealth Games is at once abstractly national and intensely local and, perhaps most important, distinctively urban.

Producing new urban spaces and citizens: Stadiums, streets and social etiquette In 2003, India successfully bid to hold the Commonwealth Games 2010 in Delhi, beating the other contender Hamilton, Canada, by a wide margin. The keenly contested bid was led by the Indian sports ministers and included lobbying by internationally renowned sports figures like cricketer Sunil Gavaskar and others. India’s bid projected the country as the most populous member of the Commonwealth and a developing economy that deserved to be given a chance to host an event usually held in the White settler nations of the Commonwealth. The clincher was the Indian Government’s offer of USD 7.2 million, or USD 100,000 to each of the 72 member-nations of the Commonwealth, to cover all training, travel, board and lodging costs for athletes and officials. Jubilating over the ‘win’, the president of the Indian Olympic Association, Suresh Kalmadi, said, ‘This is very

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important for my country…. It’s a big business opportunity, many jobs for many young people.’1 From the beginning, discussions about the Games in Delhi focused almost entirely on two aspects; hosting the Games represented the coming of age of India as a super-power and Delhi as a ‘world-class’ city. This symbolic value accompanied a related discourse about the Games as an opportunity to create infrastructure which would attract tourists, boosting local jobs and incomes. Missing from the media coverage was any discussion of sports, or the Games as an opportunity to inspire and invest in athletic talent.2 However, much attention was given to improving Delhi’s sports infrastructure to meet standards as per the specifications of the Commonwealth Games. This included building four new air-conditioned stadiums and refurbishing eight existing ones built for the Asian Games in 1982, and creating a new Games Village complex to house the 8,500 athletes and officials who would visit Delhi during the two-week period of the Games. More construction was entailed to provide ‘world-class’ transport for Games participants and tourists. The Delhi airport was expanded and upgraded by a joint venture between the Airports Authority of India and GMR Fraport, a German firm. The Delhi Metro Rail Corporation, a public sector firm with Japanese collaboration, laid new underground and overhead rail lines to link the airport to the city and the centre to its eastern and southern suburbs. The Delhi Transport Corporation bought 4,000 low-floor buses of ‘India to host 2010 Commonwealth Games’, The Hindu, 15 November 2003. http://www.hinduonnet.com/2003/11/15/stories/2003111507551800.htm. Accessed on 6 October 2009. 2 Mani Shankar Aiyar, Union Sports Minister, was removed from his post for his outspoken criticism of the Games as a colossal waste of money which would have been better spent in creating sports facilities across the country for ordinary citizens, especially students. See interview in Covert, 18 July 2009. ‘Thousands of crores are being spent on circuses like these while the common children are being deprived of basic facilities to play,’ said Aiyar. ‘I’ll be very unhappy if Commonwealth Games are successful,’ Times of India, 28 July 2009. https://timesofindia.indiatimes.com/india/Ill-be-very-unhappy-ifCommonwealth-Games-are-successful-Aiyar/articleshow/6224739.cms. Accessed on 22 May 2019. 1

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‘international standards’. To provide suitable conditions for their operation, private contractors of the Public Works Department and the municipal authorities re-laid roads to ‘world-class specifications’ and also spruced them up with new lights, redesigned bus-stops, dustbins and other ‘street furniture’. The same agencies built new flyovers and underpasses around the city to ease traffic flow. The Delhi Tourism Development Corporation was in charge of constructing a ‘Signature Bridge’ across the river Yamuna in north Delhi and converting the surrounding 1,000 acres of land into parks and recreational areas. Another major spurt of construction involved hotels. According to the Federation of Hotel and Restaurant Associations of India, Delhi needed 20,000 more hotel rooms to cater to the foreign and domestic visitors who would descend on the city during the Games. To meet this demand, the DDA, the state agency responsible for controlling, developing and managing land in accordance with the Master Plan, allotted plots of land on concessional terms to private firms, in the process allowing green areas in south and south-west Delhi and along the Yamuna riverbank to be converted to built-up commercial spaces.3 While rapid construction on an unprecedented scale was the greater part of the preparations for the Games, improvement of the ‘hardware’ of the city was accompanied by initiatives to reform its ‘software’ as well. The Home Minister P. Chidambaram asked Delhi residents to ‘change their mindset’ and to behave better in order to make a favourable impression on visitors during the Games. Delhi has a reputation for rudeness, aggression and poor civic sensibilities, qualities manifested in public practices like spitting, urinating, ogling and harassing women, pushing, shoving and driving dangerously. According to the Home Minister, people ‘will have to adhere to the behavioural requirement, the discipline of the city’.4 The Chief 3 To accommodate ‘budget’ tourists, the Delhi government launched a ‘bedand-breakfast’ scheme enlisting private homeowners with spare rooms. 4 ‘New Delhi residents told to improve manners ahead of the Commonwealth Games’, The Telegraph, 23 September 2009. http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/ worldnews/asia/india/6223394/New-Delhi-residents-told-to-improve-mannersahead-of-Commonwealth-Games.html. Accessed on 7 October 2009.

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Minister of Delhi, Sheila Dikshit, also urged residents to be good hosts, launching a radio and television publicity campaign on the subject of being courteous to tourists and announcing a civic education programme in partnership with the Confederation of Indian Industry to teach bus and auto rickshaw drivers as well as volunteers to be ‘more caring and sharing’.5 Such attempts at an ‘attitude makeover’—to use the Home Minister’s phrase—emulated the steps undertaken by the Chinese government in the lead-up to the Beijing Olympics in 2008. State attempts to improve public conduct primarily focused on city streets as the major problem area that visitors were likely to encounter. Initiatives to reform how citizens behave on the road were matched by campaigns to remove reminders of India’s ‘Third World’ or ‘backward’ status. Before the Games, Delhi’s beggars, whose numbers are estimated to exceed 100,000, were caught, tried in mobile courts and sentenced to detention in special beggars’ homes.6 Stray dogs were also targeted for stringent discipline. In 2002, the Municipal Corporation of Delhi in partnership with animal welfare nongovernmental organisations (NGOs) began a major drive to sterilise stray dogs before the Commonwealth Games.7 However, despite their efforts, ‘the number of stray dogs also kept increasing at an alarming pace’. Besides beggars and stray dogs, visual embarrassments such as unsightly slums were to be kept out of sight. While Delhi had witnessed large-scale evictions of squatters from public lands since 5 ‘Learn manners, behave better, Chidambaram tells Delhi’, The Hindustan Times, 22 September 2009. http://www.hindustantimes.com/rssfeed/newdelhi/ Chidambaram-to-Delhiites-Learn-manners-behave-better/Article1-456689.aspx. Accessed on 7 October 2009. 6 ‘Delhi to banish beggars ahead of the Commonwealth Games’, The Times of India, 1 September 2009. http://timesofindia.indiatimes.com/news/city/delhi/ Delhi-to-banish-beggars-ahead-of-Commonwealth-Games/articleshow/ 4959566.cms. Accessed on 7 October 2009. 7 ‘A boost for MCD stray dog sterilization drive’, The Hindu, 12 July 2009. http://www.thehindu.com/2009/07/12/stories/2009071260270500.htm. Accessed on 7 October 2009. Among the more bizarre jobs created by the Games was that of the municipal official appointed to count ‘the organs that are removed’ when dogs are sterilised, to ensure that NGOs do not make fake claims to get money from the municipality.

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2002 (Baviskar 2006), a few working-class settlements still remained in the vicinity of the sports venues. The Delhi government approached the governments of the north-eastern states of Assam and Mizoram to purchase bamboo screens to ‘hide slums and other unsavoury sights, including rundown colonies, from the eyes of visitors’, once again borrowing a technique employed by the Chinese government during the Olympics.8 While a range of government authorities invoked the Games in order to legitimise their projects of remaking and reforming the city, the strategy acquired wider social currency as well. For instance, the Indian Medical Association demanded action against the estimated 50,000 quacks operating in the city, arguing that ‘India is organising the Commonwealth Games next year and the Capital is a popular medical tourism centre with foreigners coming over in large number for treatment. Delhi cannot afford to have so many quacks working here.’9 The fact that unlicensed medical practitioners mainly serve the poor and are unlikely to be encountered by foreign tourists did not deter the Medical Association from hitching its cause to the Games bandwagon. In another instance, vegetable vendors whose stalls lined a lane in a north Delhi DDA-built ‘commercial complex’ were removed in November 2009 without any prior notice. The vendors had been selling their produce at this site for more than a decade and many had municipal receipts to back their claims. Although they were in violation of the law, their longstanding presence, history of paying off the authorities, and providing useful items of everyday use without obstructing traffic or creating ‘nuisance’ brought them political and popular support as well as tacit tolerance from the municipality. Hence their unexpected removal by the police took most people by surprise. On enquiring from the legal shop-owners in the area, I was told ‘Games hone vale hain na, isliye hataaya hai’ (They have been 8 ‘Bamboo screens for slums during Games’, The Hindustan Times, 17 August 2009. http://epaper.hindustantimes.com/ArticleText.aspx?article=17_08_2009_ 003_002&kword=&mode=1. Accessed on 7 October 2009. 9 ‘Beware! Delhi has over 50,000 quacks’, The Hindu, 4 October 2009. http://www.hindu.com/2009/10/04/stories/2009100454110400.htm. Accessed on 7 October 2009.

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removed because the Games are going to happen). It was unclear to me how a row of vendors in a distant north Delhi market represented a threat to the Games but, as I discovered later, the shopowners had approached the police to evict the vendors because they occupied potential parking space for their customers, and a newly-appointed chief of the local police station was willing to oblige them so that he could negotiate more favourable commissions from the vendors once they were allowed to return. In the negotiation of these longstanding conflicts over space, the Commonwealth Games were seized as an opportunity by shop owners and the police to ‘clean up’ the city, blending personal benefit with public-spiritedness. Instances such as this reveal that the desire for control over the external images of India’s national culture and Delhi’s urban culture extends beyond state agencies to society at large. Statements by state officials and corporate bodies, as well as discussions in the media exemplified what Michael Herzfeld called ‘cultural intimacy’ or ‘the recognition of those aspects of a cultural identity that are considered a source of external embarrassment but that nevertheless provide insiders with their assurance of common sociality’ (Herzfeld 1997: 3). Commenting on the loutish manners of road users, Raj Kishore, a 35-year-old auto rickshaw driver, offered views that reflect those of many Delhi residents who express their shared sociality through statements that accept their collective flaws—‘yahaan ki public to aisi hi hai: sab apna sochte hain, doosron ka kaun khayal karta hai?’ (the public here is like this only: everyone thinks about their own interests, who cares or looks out for others?)—and approvingly endorse state attempts at civic improvement as urgent and necessary—‘achchhi baat hai jo sarkar kar rahi hai; bahut zaroori hai’ (it’s a good thing the government is doing; it’s very necessary). At the same time, they are cynical and irreverent, convinced of the strong likelihood that these initiatives will fail—‘arre sarkar kuchh bhi kar le, koi farak nahin padta. Log nahin sudharenge’ (the government can do what it likes, it makes no difference. People won’t improve). Such commonplace comments that acknowledge collective failings as well as attempts to overcome them are articulations of cultural intimacy (Hall 1996), at once joining together and enunciating a shared sensibility between the state and its citizens.

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Challenges and contestations From the start, the Commonwealth Games in Delhi were dogged by controversy. An early conflict between Suresh Kalmadi, the head of the Indian Olympic Association who championed the cause of bringing the Games to Delhi, and Mani Shankar Aiyar, Union Minister of Sports and a strident critic, led to the latter being removed from his post.10 The governments at the Centre and in Delhi state came out clearly in favour of the Games as an event meant to showcase the nation’s new image as an emerging superpower. Despite this support, key projects were slow to take off. Delhi is notorious for the multiplicity of its regulatory institutions which hampers coordination around issues of changing land use, environmental clearance, land development and construction. After the lengthy process of making land available and awarding contracts, the economy was hit by the global financial crisis of 2008. Its most severe impact was on the construction industry which found that its contracts for sports-related development were no longer as profitable due to the rising costs of steel and other raw materials. Private firms were also affected by the decline in credit availability, making planned investments harder to finance. The difficulties of undertaking large capital investments in an adverse economic climate were acutely felt by the tourism industry which also had to drastically downgrade its projections of the number of visitors expected during the Games. The government dealt with this unexpected crisis by making good the financial shortfall experienced by private firms and stepping in with additional support. The biggest bail-out occurred with Emaar MGF, the Dubai-based real estate developer contracted to build the Games Village. Under a Public-Private Partnership (PPP) arrangement, the DDA had allotted 27 acres of prime land for free to the company to build 1,168 luxury flats to house athletes and officials. Under the terms of the contract, the firm would sell two-thirds of the flats while DDA would sell the remainder. After the financial downturn, the cash-strapped company appealed to the government for help and the DDA responded by giving it an interest-free loan of 10

See note 2.

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USD 100 million (`500 crore), to be repaid in the form of additional flats.11 This arrangement directly contradicted the Urban Development Ministry’s previously held position that there was no provision for extending a loan to the contractor under the PPP model.12 Even before the global financial crisis, it was clear that the costeffectiveness of the Games or the burden that they would place on the public exchequer were not major concerns for the government. In 2007, the estimated cost of the Games and related construction was estimated to be USD 1.35 billion (`6,783 crore), equal to a third of the entire annual budget for Delhi state in that year. After the Games, the Comptroller and Auditor General of India presented an excoriating report before Parliament, stating that the Games cost USD 4.1 billion (16 times the original estimate of USD 270 million) and earned a paltry USD 38 million.13 Such expenditure on Gamesrelated items represented a huge opportunity cost in terms of forgoing urgently-needed investments in sanitation, education, health, and low-income housing in a city of 14 million people. Public expenditure to create gigantic sports infrastructure that was likely to fall into disuse, as was the case with the stadiums built for the 1982 Asian Games, offered no possibilities of economic return after the initial spurt of job creation during the construction phase. Nor was there any discussion of exactly how much revenue would be generated by the Games through broadcasting rights, corporate sponsorship, tickets, tourism and related spin-offs. According to the Delhi Chief Minister, ‘People say the Games will pay for themselves’, a claim that was belied by all 11 ‘DDA gives `500 crore loan to Emaar MGF’, Economic Times, 13 September 2009. http://economictimes.indiatimes.com/Features/The-Sunday-ET/ Companies/Emaar-MGFs-32-flats-in-games-village-to-be-ready-by-October/ articleshow/5004556.cms. Accessed on 7 October 2009. 12 See statement by Urban Development Secretary, M. Ramachandran, in ‘DDA might bail out Emaar’, Indian Express, 8 January 2009. http://www. expressindia.com/latest-news/games-village-dda-might-bail-out-emaar/408094/. Accessed on 7 October 2009. 13 ‘Commonwealth Games 2010 costs ballooned to over $4bn’, The Telegraph, 5 August 2011. https://www.telegraph.co.uk/sport/othersports/commonwealth games/8683996/Commonwealth-Games-2010-costs-ballooned-to-over-4bn. html. Accessed on 22 May 2019.

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the available data.14 In 2009, the estimated cost of Delhi’s makeover for the Games had shot up to USD 13.3 billion, 10 times the estimated amount in 2007, and 31 times more than the bid estimate of USD 422 million in 2003.15 The actual expenditure was likely to be far greater. However, before the Games, no questions were asked in the media about the wisdom of spending on this scale on what was, at the end of the day, a non-essential activity. Nor were there any calculations about how the costs will be recovered and from whom. Such insouciance about the economic viability of the Games was striking since other government expenditure is stringently monitored and critically appraised. For instance, the National Rural Employment Guarantee Scheme, the flagship programme of the United Progressive Alliance (UPA) government at the Centre, was allocated USD 78 billion (`39,000 crore) in the 2009 budget.16 This amount, which was only six times the 2009 estimate for the Delhi Games but would benefit 44.7 million of the poorest households in the country, was at the centre of heated debate with reams written in policy and media reports about how such massive spending threatened the fiscal stability of the state. Similar critical analyses can be easily found for all other major items of government expenditure. Yet no such standards were applied to the Games (until they were over). The consensus seemed to be that the Games were above such mundane concerns; their importance for securing national prestige placed them beyond the calculus of economic benefits and costs. However, an examination of the flows of government subsidies and concessions shows that, in the name of national honour, the Games’ chief financial beneficiaries were corporate firms in the real estate development, construction, transport and hotel sectors. For them, the Games represented an accelerated and expanded opportunity to profit without having to undergo the rigours Interview with Sheila Dikshit, reported in Baviskar (2007a). Statement by the Delhi state Chief Secretary, reported in ‘Delhi’s makeover to cost USD 13.3 billion’, Outlook, 11 May 2009. http://news.outlookindia.com/ item.aspx?659734. Accessed on 7 October 2009. 16 ‘How green is the budget?’, Down to Earth, 31 July 2009. http://csestore. cse.org.in/full6.asp?foldername=20090731&filename=news&sec_id=4&sid=11. Accessed on 7 October 2009. 14 15

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of the regulatory process or of media scrutiny. The delays in undertaking projects and the consequent anxiety about meeting the October 2010 deadline enabled the remaining vestiges of project evaluation and monitoring to be swept aside. Among the major benefits claimed for the Games was the prospect of expanding employment opportunities. According to a study by Building and Woodworkers International, a total of 500,000 jobs were likely to be created in Games-related activities. Of these, 100,000 were estimated to be for unskilled construction workers.17 In India, at the best of times, the rights of construction workers to fair terms, safety measures, social security, and collective bargaining are respected only in the breach. With the rush to finish Games-related projects on time, while worker compensation rose slightly, work conditions became more hazardous with safety standards being set aside and workers urged to work round the clock to push the projects ahead at top speed. Human rights organisations documented the unsafe and exploitative conditions under which construction workers laboured (PUDR 2009).18 There was a consequent rise in fatal accidents on construction sites such as the Games Village, including those of the highlyrespected Delhi Metro Rail Corporation.19 Activists had hoped that the spotlight on the Games would enable them to push for the implementation of the welfarist Building and Other Construction 17 ‘Citizens for Workers, Women and Children: Fact Sheet’, produced by the Commonwealth Games Coalition-Citizens for Workers, Women and Children. http://www.cwg2010cwc.org/factSheet.php. Accessed on 7 October 2009. 18 A similar effort to highlight the grim circumstances of migrant construction workers from Rajasthan and Uttar Pradesh was started before the 1982 Asian Games when the spurt in building activities brought an estimated one million labourers to the city (see Chapter 2; also see People’s Union for Democratic Rights v. Union of India and Others [A.I.R. 1982 S.C. 1437]). Denied legal, affordable and adequate shelter, most migrants ended up improvising housing close to the sites where they worked. These settlements in the shadows of gigantic stadiums and flyovers flourished for the next 20 years until they were demolished and their residents evicted to make way for the next round of construction before the Commonwealth Games 2010. 19 ‘Metro tragedy claims six’, The Hindu, 13 July 2009. http://www.thehindu. com/2009/07/13/stories/2009071360210100.htm. Accessed on 7 October 2009.

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Workers (BOCW) Act of 1996, but met with little success, even though a committee appointed by the Supreme Court investigated working conditions at the Games construction sites and found serious violations of labour laws.20 Beyond the economic viability of the Games and immediate questions about economic and social changes before and during the event, lay the larger issue of long-term impacts. Concerned about the destruction of the city’s green areas to accommodate the Games Village and the Siri Fort stadium, NGOs in Delhi petitioned the courts in order to stop ecological changes that would do incalculable harm to the city’s climate and water regimes.21 In the case of the Siri Fort forest in south Delhi, 10 hectares of a designated green belt were cleared by the DDA to build basketball and squash courts and a parking area. In response to a public interest petition filed by local residents, the Supreme Court of India sought reports from the Central Empowered Commission (a court-appointed advisory committee of environmental officials and experts) and from Charles Correa, noted architect and then head of the Delhi Urban Arts Commission.22 Both reports criticised the DDA for ignoring all norms while giving the project a go-ahead. The Correa report noted that ‘the site selection was not proper and the design far from satisfactory’ and recommended that

20 ‘Violation of labour laws at Games sites, Court told’, The Hindu, 20 March 2010. http://www.hindu.com/2010/03/20/stories/2010032063660300.htm. Accessed on 24 March 2010. 21 See http://2010commonwealthgamesindia.blogspot.com/ for coverage of all Games-related news coverage, including environmental controversies, and www.yamunajiyeabhiyaan.blogspot.com for details of the debate regarding construction of the Games Village on the Yamuna floodplain. 22 It is a matter of no small irony that the local residents opposing the clearing of the Siri Fort forest happen to be the beneficiaries of exactly the same process in the 1980s when the first large piece of forest was cleared to construct the Games Village for the Asian Games. After Asiad’82, the DDA sold the flats to public sector firms and well-connected individuals, converting the Siri Fort Games Village into an affluent enclave housing some of the city’s top bureaucrats and other members of the power elite. It is the same residents who now oppose further construction since it will adversely affect the quality of their life.

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the structures be relocated and the original forest area restored.23 However, the court decided to allow the construction, remarking that, ‘We do not want people to say that India is unsafe for Commonwealth Games [an apparent reference to the fact that the IPL T20 cricket tournament had been shifted from India to South Africa due to security concerns after the Mumbai bomb blasts of 2008]. We will deal with the environmental concerns after the Games are over.’24 By bringing up the threat of terrorist attacks, the judges introduced an entirely extraneous issue into the litigation on the long-term environmental impact of locating specific Games venues in green areas. The juxtaposition of these two unrelated matters showed that the judiciary regarded both—environmental and security challenges—only as impediments to a project whose overall validity was beyond question. The suspension of environmental regulations in order to facilitate the smooth passage of Games-related projects was justified by the judiciary as a matter of national interest, driven by anxieties about the loss of face in the international arena if the Games were to be cancelled or relocated. Such intermeshing of concerns about symbolic and material capital—public prestige and private profit—was exemplified by the political and economic processes around the construction of the Games Village on the floodplain of the river Yamuna.25 The ‘Siri Fort Games project gets SC’s okay’, Indian Express, 28 April 2009. http://www.indianexpress.com/news/siri-fort-games-project-gets-scs-okay/ 451941/0. Accessed on 7 October 2009. 24 ‘SC okays complex at Siri Fort’, Times of India, 28 April 2009. http://epaper. timesofindia.com/Default/Layout/Includes/TOINEW/ArtWin.asp?From= Archive&Source=Page&Skin=TOINEW&BaseHref=CAP%2F2009%2F04% 2F28&ViewMode=HTML&GZ=T&PageLabel=2&EntityId=Ar00206& AppName=1&FontSize=l1. Accessed on 7 October 2009. 25 For an examination of the river’s cultural and ecological role in the life of the city, including threats to its integrity, see Baviskar (2007b). James Heitzman and Smriti Srinivas (2005) detail similar processes of transformation around lakes such as the Sampangi tank and Koramangala tank in Bangalore, which were used by the Tigala community of horticulturalists for irrigation and as the site for rituals around the Karaga cultural festival, before they were drained to construct sports facilities, including those for the National Games of 1997. Ironically, preparations for the Karaga festival involved wrestling and gymnastic exercises, local sports activities that were marginalised by the national-level games. 23

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floodplain of the river runs through the centre of the city on a northsouth axis and is a critical expanse for accommodating the swollen girth of the river in the three post-monsoon months during which 70 per cent of the annual flow is concentrated. The rest of the year, the area supports small farmers, many of them on long-term leases issued by the Flood and Irrigation Department which owns the land. The expansion of the city eastwards since the 1970s had shifted the relative position of the floodplain out of obscurity to centre-stage, a process accelerated by the rise in real estate prices since economic liberalisation in the 1990s. The floodplain, too valuable now to be left to farmers and wilderness, is being gradually converted to built-up property by constructing embankments that channel the flow of the river. As the Yamuna Jiye Abhiyan (Keep Yamuna Alive Campaign), an alliance of environmentalist NGOs, points out, canalisation of the river not only increases the risk of floods but also prevents groundwater recharge, a major issue in a city that now relies on water brought from distant Himalayan dams. When the Games Village site was announced, the Campaign organised a satyagraha (non-violent protest) at the location, involving displaced farmers as well as environmental movement stalwarts such as Rajendra Singh of the Tarun Bharat Sangh, an organisation renowned for its pioneering work on community-based water harvesting in Rajasthan. The Campaign’s arguments primarily focused on the ecological impact of construction on the floodplain, mustering support from a number of government studies that had been critical of this location. As these reports pointed out, a number of other potential sites, much closer to the main sports venues, were ignored on vague or flimsy grounds. The unsaid consideration appeared to be not so much that athletes be provided suitable accommodation for their fortnight-long stay, but that the floodplain be developed permanently as real estate.26 The Games Village was thus a keystone At the same time, the distance between the Games Village and the main stadiums necessitated the building of elaborate road works including a brand-new elevated corridor, another opportunity for an infrastructure project that benefits private contractors in the guise of ‘decongesting’ roads. On the politics of traffic and road management in Delhi, see Chapter 5. 26

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in a long-term strategy to transform public land along the floodplain into a privately-owned commodity (see Chapter 6). This process exactly replicated the experience of the 1982 Asian Games when large parts of the Siri Fort forest, an ecologically sensitive area in south Delhi, were cleared to build the Games Village. Today, these luxury flats are home to Delhi’s power elite, as was ultimately the case with the Commonwealth Games village. In 2007, when their satyagraha against the privatisation of public land and the ecological degradation of the floodplain proved to be ineffective in stopping or slowing down the Games Village construction, the Campaign decided to petition the Delhi High Court, citing the irreversible damage that permanent structures would cause to the ecological integrity of the floodplain. The court refused to stay the construction but appointed a committee to examine and monitor it. In response, the DDA appealed to the Supreme Court, which summarily overruled the High Court’s orders with the astonishing claim that ‘the Commonwealth Games Village site is neither located on a “riverbed” nor on the “floodplain” ’.27 With this, all further debate about the adverse economic, social and ecological impacts of the Games was closed. The only topic of discussion was whether Delhi will manage to meet the October 2010 deadline and make a respectable showing before the rest of the world.28

Cities and sports mega-events: A political and economic analysis The suppression of debate and the suspension of disbelief about the impacts of the Commonwealth Games were all the more remarkable given Delhi’s previous experience of hosting a sports mega-event, viz., the 1982 Asian Games. Asiad’82 triggered a similar spate of 27 ‘No bar on Commonwealth Games work: Supreme Court’, The Hindu, 31 July 2009. http://www.thehindu.com/2009/07/31/stories/2009073150210100. htm. Accessed on 7 October 2009. 28 Opposition leaders from the BJP kept trying to raise the issue of corruption and wastage of public funds but did not get much media attention until after the Games were over.

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construction in the city and, driven by the same imperative of deadlinebound nationally prestigious projects, created costly and sub-standard concrete edifices that became obsolete and under-utilised once the Games were over. Among the white elephants was the Players’ Building, a hostel for athletes which was not completed in time and which remained an unfinished shell for the next 15 years until it was refurbished as the Secretariat of the Delhi government (Baviskar 2009a). Like the Commonwealth Games 2010, the Asiad’82 legitimised the commodification and privatisation of the city’s commons. While it provided jobs to migrant workers, it incorporated them into the urban economy under terms that reproduced their vulnerability. And in a debacle that repeated itself with the Commonwealth Games, the anticipated hordes of foreign spectators and tourists for Asiad’82 turned out to number a grand total of 200 (Uppal and Ghosh 2006: 10). Yet, despite these striking resemblances, the experience of Asiad’82 was not referred to in media discussions of the Commonwealth Games 2010; in fact, media coverage echoed the same tropes of national pride and anxiety without exhibiting any critical awareness of history. So similar was the tone and substance that news reports from 1981 and 2009 seem interchangeable. It was as if the city had no memory, as if the past had faded away, burnt off by the blazing promise of the future. While most people seem to have forgotten the 1982 Asian Games and the event’s crumbling concrete traces, the economic, social and ecological problems associated with the Commonwealth Games in Delhi were not particularly novel or surprising to sociologists. Nor was the manner in which they were addressed by state agencies, including the judiciary. As the literature on the sociology of sports shows, ‘the allure of global games’ is often justified in terms of their “legacies” —whether social, cultural, environmental, political, economic, or sporting…. At the same time, it seems evident that forecasts of the benefits are nearly always wrong’ (Horne and Manzenreiter 2006: 9). In fact, sports mega-events conjure up a ‘fantasy world [marked by] underestimated costs, overestimated revenues, underestimated environmental impacts and over-valued economic development effects’ (ibid.: 10). Another analyst points to the ‘predictable patterns of hyperbolic promotion, collective gullibility and underappreciated

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opportunity costs and distributional impacts that deserve much closer attention from responsible policy-makers than they typically receive’ (Black 2008: 472). However, ‘once a “Games train” has left the station, there is an almost irresistible incentive to spare no expense to ensure success, because the costs of failure become “too ghastly to contemplate” ’ (ibid.). What then explains the irrational enthusiasm for hosting megaevents like the Commonwealth Games among national and city governments as well as their citizens? Why do governments vie to out-bid each other? Why do citizens become excited at the prospect of an event that is likely to change their city for the worse? Part of the answer lies in understanding how powerful groups profit from the Games. The leaps in telecommunication technology since the 1980s—the so-called third Industrial Revolution—have brought sports to global audiences on an unprecedented scale. Businesses have seized this opportunity and packaged sports events through a ‘tri-partite model of sponsorship rights, exclusive broadcasting rights and merchandizing’ (Horne and Manzenreiter 2006: 5). This is the basis of the sports-media-business alliance that has transformed professional sports since the late 20th century. Another part of the answer lies in how such events are valued as promotional activities for cities and regions, part of a strategy to repackage the city as an ‘urban entertainment destination’, a trend that has been growing since the 1980s (ibid.: 8). As Gruneau argues, local politicians and the media focus on the interests and desires of developers, property-owners and middle-class consumers as ‘synonymous with the well-being of the city’ (2002: ix–x). As a result, which social groups actually benefit, which are excluded and whether these decisions can be contested through a transparent and accountable process, are not questions that are addressed in public discourse. This explains the phenomenon of large subsidies from public funds to private developers as in the case of Emaar MGF. It also sheds light on agreements such as that between the Indian Olympic Association and the Confederation of Indian Industry to use the Games as an opportunity to promote ‘Brand India’, showcasing the nation’s business potential, an activity that would otherwise appear to be tangentially

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related to sports. The sports-media-business triumvirate and its support by the state ensures that issues such as the displacement of the urban poor by the clearing of squatter settlements to make way for sports venues and to generally ‘clean up’ the city, the environmental consequences of building on the floodplain or clearing green areas, and the lack of safety of construction workers, do not get addressed at all. At the same time, routine regulatory and judicial processes that offered some scope for public contestation and critique stand suspended. The Games serve as a ‘special time’ (Gilmartin 2009), marked off from the everyday, yet transforming the everyday-yet-to-come with their long-term legacy of economic, social and ecological change. To a large extent, a discourse of urban improvement through sports mega-events that primarily reflects corporate interests is a relatively recent development. Although the nexus between contractors and politicians must have been a significant factor in the preparations for the 1982 Asian Games in Delhi,29 such connections acquired far more influence in the period of economic liberalisation when there has been a general re-orientation of economic and social policy to the ‘needs’ of business firms. It must be noted that this discourse has become prevalent in a context of intense global ‘place competition’, where mega-events are perceived as a mechanism for attracting mobile capital and people. They are one of the means by which places become ‘sticky’—nations, regions and cities use the attention generated by mega-events to position themselves in the international tourist, migration and business marketplace (Black 2008: 470; Hall 2006: 59). According to Michael Hall, Sports mega-events emerge as central elements in place competition in at least three ways. First, the infrastructure required for such events is usually regarded as integral to further economic development…. Second, the hosting of such events is seen as a contribution to business vitality and economic development. Thirdly, the ability 29 However, these connections were vehemently denied by Jagmohan who, as the then Lieutenant-Governor of Delhi, was the chief architect of the city’s makeover at a time when it was still a Union Territory with a bureaucrat at its helm (Interviewed by the author on 21 June 2007).

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to attract events is often regarded as a performance indicator in its own right of the capacity of a city or region to compete (ibid.: 64).

However, place competition has the potential to be a zero-sum game. The investments and innovations aimed at making particular cities more attractive are soon adopted elsewhere, neutralising any competitive advantage in infrastructure or cultural distinction. Paradoxically, place competition renders all cities similar even in the ways in which they mark their cultural difference.30 It is not established that such re-imaging strategies necessarily pay off in terms of long-term economic benefits. But what the discourse of global competition does create are public-private alliances—‘booster coalitions’, to use Black’s term (2008: 470)—that seek to coerce or co-opt dissidents by creating a ‘community of interest’. Thus the Save Yamuna Campaign found that while it could object to the Games Village being located on the floodplain, it could not question the larger decision to hold the Games in Delhi because doing so would have led to it being branded as ‘anti-national’ and unpatriotic. This conflation between the hosting of the Games and the honour of the nation mobilises civic jingoism such that the Games ‘act as a catalyst for change by persuading people to work together around a common objective and as fast track for obtaining extra finance for getting building projects off the drawing board’ (Law 1993: 107, quoted in Hall 2006: 63). An ‘event of this magnitude concentrates minds and resources in ways that few other stimuli can do’ (Black 2008: 476). Besides speeding up growth, sports mega-events like the Games also accomplish what may be described as the willing suspension of disbelief. That is, the scepticism and scrutiny around the issue of ‘public purpose’ which takes institutionalised form in mandatory procedures such as benefit-cost analyses and environmental impact assessments is set aside. For instance, before the Sydney Olympics of 2000, That is, while the cultural content of what is on offer may vary—different styles of food, handicrafts, performance, or architecture—they are packaged and presented in the same format. Thus, street fairs in Bangkok or Delhi or Edinburgh will be identical in their structure. For a different interpretation, see Black (2008: 471). 30

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the New South Wales government passed a law in 1995 banning city residents from going to court on grounds of environmental and planning violations by the proposed Olympic projects. Ironically, for an event promoted as the ‘Green Games’, all Games-related projects were waived the required environmental impact statements (Hall 2006: 62). In the case of Delhi too, as with the Siri Fort and Yamuna floodplain instances, the requirement of ‘due process’ was suspended to accelerate projects which were implicitly assumed to be in the public interest and therefore beyond criticism. By their construction of a ‘community of interest’, the Commonwealth Games generated social solidarities, mobilising consent and collective action around urban space. These solidarities demand closer consideration because they provide important insights into the life of a city. Even when they mainly benefit elites, mega-events are image- and identitybuilding exercises that signal a city’s upward mobility from ‘Third World’ to ‘world-class’, where the host is re-positioned as ‘accomplished, cosmopolitan and business-friendly’ (Black 2008: 470). They are also occasions for the ‘promotion of a celebratory sense of national [and urban] unity and pride’ (ibid.). In that sense, their audience is as much local as global for, in the process of representing the city to the world, the Games transform the urban body politic’s sense of itself. This is partly a consequence of the character of sports as a set of ‘ritualized, rationalized commercial spectacles and bodily practices that create opportunities for expressive performances, disruptions of the everyday world and affirmations of social status and belonging’ (Horne and Manzenreiter 2006: 1). As Hall points out, criticizing the hosting of mega-events is… to be doubly damned. For one contends not only with the neoliberal discourse of competition… but also with the mythologies of the social benefits of sport… The inherent belief of many that sport is good for you, makes for better citizens, creates pride in the community, and generates a positive image is hard to overcome (2006: 67).

These assumptions are so pervasive and taken-for-granted that, in the case of the Commonwealth Games in Delhi, they were not even raised in public debate, let alone challenged.

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Spectacular events and the city To the commonsensical notion that sports are socially good is added the potent charge of the sports mega-event as a singular, spectacular occasion concentrated in an urban space at a particular moment in time. The spectacle of the Games is fused with the spectacle of the city. Their audience is at once global and intensely local, for urban citizens see themselves reflected in this economy of appearances. Significantly, it is the affect inherent in this cultural politics of image and representation—the glamour and excitement—that is crucial for summoning a sense of belonging. In the Delhi state assembly elections of 2008, the Congress party was handsomely voted back into power. The victory was generally attributed to popular support for the project of re-making the city by hosting events like the Games. Citizens from a wide range of social locations pointed to the expanding metro rail network and other transport-related construction, grumbling about the inconvenience of traffic diversions and dug-up roads but, in the next breath, describing these as temporary frustrations to be tolerated because of the long-term improvement they would bring. In interviews, working-class voters expressed their approval: ‘Achchhi baat hai, sheher mein kuchh ho raha hai’ (it’s a good thing, something is happening in the city). Even though the Games may not directly benefit them— and, in fact, for a large section of Delhi’s working class, the Games have redirected resources away from them, besides causing extensive displacement—these events create ‘structures of feeling’ (Williams 1977: Ch. 9) such that even those who are excluded or marginalised experience the city as a ‘happening place’.31 A small shop-owner in north Delhi said, ‘Haan, raunak aayegi’ (Yes, it will bring brightness), using the term for the celebratory mood created by artificial lights. This urban ‘buzz’—the pleasurable sensation of excitement and anticipation—conjures up consent across social scales in order to swiftly effect symbolic and material transformations. It imparts to cities their charisma, ‘the vaguely magical power of presence, style, seduction and performance [which] is now a widely marketed and desired object of self-making’ (Hansen and Verkaaik 2009: 6). The charisma of the 31

See Ghertner (2015).

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city, heightened by the spectacular nature of the mega-event, makes corporate projects of urban transformation not just acceptable but even welcome across social scales. What implications does this analysis of spectacular events have for our understanding of the metropolis and its micro-politics? It shows that focusing only on the political economy of economic interests is not sufficient, for it does not allow us to appreciate the apparent irrationality of mega-events, or the fact that people want both bread and circuses. Circuses are significant because they allow citizens to participate in a sense of communitas that they find meaningful, however ephemeral or illusory it may be. Jeremy Bentham, the utilitarian philosopher, discussed the irrationality of high-stakes gambling. In the same vein, mega-events seem irrational except to those who profit by them. Clifford Geertz (1973: chapter 15) rebutted Bentham, pointing out that certain forms of gambling were about displaying status; their logic lay in making meaning rather than making money. This also holds true for spectacles in the city: they are extraordinary moments that manifest a sense of urban being and belonging. The legacies they leave behind take the form not only of decrepit concrete but also civic solidarities that may survive despite the cynicism born of systematic abuse.

Contesting the Commons

Illustration: Orijit Sen

5

Cows, cars and cycle-rickshaws

Introduction With their constant traffic between people and things—road space and vehicles, buildings and trees, vendors and pedestrians—city streets bring together many differently located elements, material as well as symbolic, in order to constitute an embodied form of the public sphere. Just as other public spheres—such as the media—have sparked debates about control and management, freedom and discipline, state regulation and citizens’ rights, so also have city streets been the focus of contention. In addition to debates about regulating this public sphere, claims to the street bring to the fore a fundamental question: Who constitutes an urban or civic public? How does political legitimacy accrue to different social groups? How is social belonging and exclusion determined? This chapter examines the ongoing emergence of a public sphere on Delhi’s streets, a process in which middle-class concerns about creating social and spatial order have contended with an unruly ‘republic of the streets’ (Joyce 2003: 216). This republic, which accommodates an anarchic assembly of activities by variously situated social groups and individuals, has faced a ‘relentless momentum towards

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[transformation] as a place of passage and traffic’ above all else (ibid.). The mission of ‘cleaning up’ the street has targeted those who inhabit its margins, including vendors of food and other inexpensive items of mass consumption, beggars and performers (Kumar and Bhowmik 2010; Anjaria 2016; Baviskar forthcoming). On the road, the presence of cows and cycle-rickshaws has attracted attempts at regulation and outright prohibition. In order to understand how a public sphere comes into being, this chapter focuses on bourgeois activists as they deal with three mobile elements—cows, cars and cycle-rickshaws—that navigate Delhi’s streets, and the people who own, use and seek to control them. All three elements have been the subject of strenuous efforts at regulation by courts, citizens’ groups and traders’ associations. I interpret these conflicts as instances of bourgeois environmentalism, the (mainly) middle-class pursuit of order, hygiene and safety, and ecological conservation, through the public sphere. I argue that middle-class activists mobilise the discourse of ‘public interest’ and ‘citizenship’ to articulate civic concerns in a manner that constitutes a public that excludes the city’s poorer sections. As seen in Chapters 2 and 3, similar strategies of exclusion have been witnessed in arenas other than the street. Indeed, since economic liberalisation started in the 1990s, Delhi has undergone large-scale social and spatial structuring resulting in working-class citizens losing jobs and homes (Baviskar et al. 2006; Menon-Sen and Bhan 2008). This displacement was a consequence of the closing down of manufacturing firms and the removal of squatter settlements; both these state actions were prompted by middle-class initiatives in the ‘public interest’ to cleanse the city’s air and water. Economic liberalisation in India has ideologically and materially empowered the urban elite to an unprecedented extent. As a privileged class, the elite feel entitled to live in a ‘world-class’ city, free from the ‘nuisance’—to use the legal term—created by the presence of the poor and their squalid living conditions. With land deregulation, real estate prices have soared. Places occupied by the poor have become prime property, ripe for redevelopment as spaces for elite consumption. The dream of inhabiting a world-class city and enjoying a lifestyle of convenience and comfort is fuelled by real-estate firms, manufacturers

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and retailers of consumer durables, the entertainment and hospitality industries, and, most of all, the media. It is the expansion of this corporate capital in India that provides the context in which urban projects are imagined and pursued. Bourgeois environmentalism is an intrinsic strand in such forms of city-making. However, there is a basic contradiction between elite citizens’ claims to civic responsibility and environmental concern and the simultaneous rise of consumerism in the same social stratum, one facet of which is the explosive growth of personal vehicle ownership. That is, middle-class efforts at championing the public interest by cleaning up city streets are subverted by their own toxic enchantment with the automobile. In analysing the treatment of cows, cars and cycle-rickshaws in Delhi, I seek to address two conceptual and political concerns: one, the production of a hegemonic notion of social and spatial order by bourgeois environmentalists through the public sphere; and two, the limits placed upon this project by the contradictory consciousness of the middle classes, as well as the resistance offered by subalterns and an internally-differentiated state. On hegemony, Nancy Fraser argues that the public sphere produces consent by enabling [the] circulation of discourses that construct the common sense of the day and represent the existing order as natural and/or just, but not simply as a ruse that is imposed. Rather, the public sphere in its mature form includes sufficient participation and sufficient representation of multiple interests and perspectives to permit most people most of the time to recognise themselves in its discourses. People who are ultimately disadvantaged by the social construction of consent nonetheless manage to find in the discourses of the public sphere representations of their interests, aspirations, life problems, and anxieties that are close enough to resonate with their own lived self-representations, identities and feelings (Fraser 1992: 139).

On Delhi’s streets, too, discourses of environmentalism that displace the poor deploy the all-embracing notion of a ‘public interest’, pointing to its self-evident priority over the particularistic interests of cowowners and rickshaw-pullers. Even as their current practices are

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marginalised and proscribed, the poor still subscribe to the notion that these changes are both inevitable and desirable and that, in the future, they too will ultimately benefit from the transformation of landscapes and livelihoods effected by economic liberalisation (see Ghertner 2011). It is the public sphere’s ability to address the aspirations of subaltern groups by invoking the promise of belonging in the urban public—partial inclusion in the sphere of consumption, and perhaps even political participation—that produces consent among those facing displacement. As a hegemonic ideal, the discourse of ‘public interest’ reaches out to and may be embraced by those it excludes. Yet the project of urban cleansing remains incomplete, its success uncertain. The contingent character of this project—the elements that conspire to undermine the creation of a bourgeois social, ‘natural’ and spatial order—is not a result of subaltern antagonism alone, or the resistance offered by the object world or animate species (Mitchell 2002: 29–30), but is as much an outcome of the internal contradictions and limits of the entity we call the state and the social group we call the ‘middle class’. Even state projects which, over time, reveal themselves to have a sustained, coherent thrust—such as economic liberalisation—may be subverted by officials with other, conflicting agendas and understandings such that their success is not a foregone conclusion (Li 1999). At the same time, the middle classes, too, are divided into different fractions (those who feed cows as their religious duty and those who use rickshaws versus bourgeois environmentalists) and riven by their contradictory consciousness. To be modern citizens of a world-class city demands zealous pursuit of the public interest, but through strategies that deny civic rights to a majority of urban residents. However, espousing the discourse of the public is not a simple ruse to preserve elite privilege. It requires reforming the self while also allowing the possibility of reform and upward mobility to subaltern groups. I argue that these contradictory impulses of exclusion and inclusion in the pursuit of public and private interests combine with the complex interdependencies between the middle classes, the state and subalterns in order to enable ‘the republic of the streets’ to survive, albeit in a state of constant siege.

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Knowing the city: Urban order and experience In his celebrated essay ‘Walking in the City’, Michel de Certeau contrasts the panoptical view of New York City gained from the summit of the World Trade Centre with the practices of space enacted by those who walk the city’s streets. The Tower affords a perspective for urban planners and cartographers who would remain aloof from the cityscape spread out before them. Yet this ‘panorama-city’ is a theoretical simulacrum, a picture ‘whose condition of possibility is an oblivion and a misunderstanding of practices’ (de Certeau 1984: 93). In this chapter, I follow in de Certeau’s footsteps to argue that the planned and readable city is indeed a fiction, utopian or dystopian, depending on one’s point of view. However, this fiction has real effects on the lives of those who live ‘down below’. I trace bourgeois visions of the planned and ordered city through everyday practices—in the courts, the media and on the streets—and examine their effects on urban spaces and people. I attempt to show that the distance between bourgeois environmentalists’ dreams and the everyday practices of city-dwellers is marked by tensions and contradictions that act as a form of resistance, impeding the realisation of middleclass ambitions. The spatial and social order that bourgeois environmentalists seek to impose is unravelled by the everyday transactions between state agents and citizens, and by the competing claims of the public and private that need to be reconciled within the bourgeois citizen-self. But first, here is what de Certeau says: The ordinary practitioners of the city live ‘down below’, below the thresholds at which visibility begins. They walk—an elementary form of this experience of the city; they are walkers, Wandersmänner, whose bodies follow the thicks and thins of an urban ‘text’ they write without being able to read it. These practitioners make use of spaces that cannot be seen; their knowledge of them is as blind as that of lovers in each other’s arms…. The networks of [their] moving, intersecting writings compose a manifold story that has neither author nor spectator… (de Certeau 1984: 93).

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Cows Michel de Certeau probably did not imagine that his urban walker could be a cow. His essay speaks of New York and Paris, cities where a cow on the street would be a remarkable sight, even an emergency, attracting fire-engines, wailing police cars and gawking crowds. Yet his observations are uncannily apposite when applied to cows that do commonly frequent Indian streets. Leaving gobar (dung) splatters in their wake, they write an urban text without reading it. Their bovine amble traces maps that are etched deep in memory—associations between particular places and nourishment: this dalao (garbage dump), that row of vegetable vendors. The everyday practices of urban cows delineate a carefully crafted route and set of activities: from home to forage and then to rest, often on road medians where the breeze from passing traffic helps keep flies away, before setting off homewards once again. They swish their tails placidly and rise unhurriedly to cross the road. Motorists may curse but no one dares to harm them. In fact, it is not unusual to see a car stop in the middle of the road, a disembodied hand stretched out of the window to feed stale rotis to the cow in the middle of the morning rush hour traffic.

Photo: Author

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Where do the cows come from? In Delhi University, where the footpaths along the main avenue of Chhatra Marg offer a veritable obstacle course in gobar-dodging, cows come from the ‘village’ of New Chandraval which lurks behind the neat grid of by-lanes and galis (alleys) in Jawahar Nagar and Kamla Nagar. Developed in the 1950s as residential colonies but with the ground floor of most houses occupied by shops, these planned neighbourhoods were built around the settlement of New Chandraval. The village is called ‘New’ because most of its residents were shifted from their original site three kilometres away in order to make way for a waterworks.1 In the spatial classificatory scheme of the DDA, New Chandraval is an ‘urban village’, an oxymoron that neatly sums up its hybrid present. Just behind the neon glare and noise of Kamla Nagar, a dense cluster of narrow streets opens out unexpectedly into a yard where old men sit on a charpai (string-bed) and smoke a hookah; buffaloes chew cud and young women shape cow-dung cakes right next to parked cars. This is where the cows come home when they are done with their roaming through the day. Unlike buffaloes who are too valuable to be allowed to wander the streets by themselves, cows are protected only when they have calved and can be milked. The rest of the year, they are let loose to fend for themselves. The older residents of New Chandraval belong to the Gujjar caste and have kept cattle for generations.2 A century ago, the area that is now Delhi University was their village’s grazing land and cows in this place today signify the continuity between the villagers’ pastoralist past and present.3 When the land was acquired for building the university, Gujjar men were compensated with jobs as chaukidars (guards) in the university while Gujjar women continued to exercise their right to harvest grass from the overgrown corners of what are now the grounds of the Delhi School of Economics and the Law and Arts Faculty. While walls and barbed wire (and chaukidars) 1 ‘Old’ Chandraval village still exists, but its lands have been swallowed by schools, housing colonies, police stations, defence offices and the Delhi Jal Board’s water treatment plant, leaving only the residential basti. 2 The village also has a substantial Jatav Dalit basti, which does not keep cattle. 3 See Gupta (1981) for a detailed history of how land in this area was confiscated and forcibly acquired after the 1857 Mutiny.

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keep cattle out of these compounds, the street is the sole surviving element of Chandraval’s once-extensive commons where their cows have right of way. Chandraval is only one of Delhi’s 275 villages, many of which still have families from traditional cattle-rearing castes—Jat, Gujjar and Ahir—who run dairies supplying fresh milk to neighbouring urban households.4 According to the Municipal Commissioner of Delhi, in 2007, the city had 3,500 dairies and some 35,000 cattle.5 The presence of these dairies, and the cows that issue forth from them into the city’s streets, has long been a source of urban angst. The majority are ‘unauthorised’, a term that covers a long list of crimes and misdemeanours, all condoned as long as the dairy-owners pay off the right people. The fact that Chandraval village also has a side-business in supplying musclemen for local politicians, property brokers and others who need someone to lean on or to do the leaning on for them, also helps give its dairies a degree of immunity from harassment by city authorities. On their part, senior officials in the Municipal Corporation of Delhi (MCD) have wavered between the carrot and the stick. In 2004, they announced a ‘Massive Drive’ against stray cattle and prepared an Action Plan while setting up a Special Task Force comprising officials from the water and power utilities besides the MCD. According to the Commissioner, the Task Force, accompanied by ‘a strong contingent of police, would be moving around the Capital’.6 To begin 4 Most of the milk from the Chandraval dairies is sold directly to individual customers, supplied by bicycle-borne doodhwalas (milkmen) who measure out milk on the doorstep. This seems to be on the decline, however, and the larger dairies sell milk to chilling plants that are part of the more formal milk supply and processing chain. While most dairies are located in Delhi’s villages, some are to be found even in the bungalows of Lutyens’s New Delhi (‘Remove Cows from VIP Bungalows’, The Hindu, 9 March 2007, Delhi edition, p. 3). 5 ‘Drive against Stray Cattle’, http://www.hinduonnet.com/2004/05/23/ stories/2004052307890400.htm. Accessed on 6 March 2007. The Commissioner went on to add that these cattle emptied an estimated 700 tonnes of dung every day into the Yamuna river through the sewage system. 6 Ibid.

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with, power and water supply to these dairies would be disconnected. Then the cattle would be lifted in special vehicles and taken to three temporary gaushalas (cow shelters), which the MCD had recently set up on the outskirts of the city. ‘The very next day these cattle would be auctioned between 11 am and 1 pm,’ he said. However, as dairyowners strongly resisted this move and lower-level municipal officials were reluctant to mess with them, the ‘massive drive’ was a non-starter. Ineffectual punitive campaigns have been punctuated by equally ineffectual incentives. Over the years, the MCD has established seven ‘legal’ areas on the outskirts of the city to relocate these dairies, of which Bhalaswa, Shahbad and Ghazipur are the largest. It has periodically announced plans of providing more land where existing dairies can relocate.7 But the allocations are far smaller than what is required, so unauthorised dairies continue to flourish in the heart of the city, in violation of Delhi’s Master Plan and many municipal laws and regulations, and cows continue to walk the streets of the capital. Matters would have continued thus but for a public interest writ petition filed before the Delhi High Court by Common Cause, an NGO started by the late H.D. Shourie, a noted citizens’ rights activist.8 Describing itself as ‘an organisation for ventilating the common problems of the people’, Common Cause’s members, like those of other such organisations in Delhi, are uniformly upper-class—retired bureaucrats, army officers and industrialists whose posh south Delhi addresses attest to their privileged status. The NGO has a history of litigating on urban issues. In the past, it has tried to secure far-reaching judicial orders against unauthorised residential colonies in Delhi. In July 2001, Common Cause petitioned the High Court to end ‘the menace of stray cattle’ after newspapers reported people being gored by cattle. According to the petition, Stray cattle squat on roads and throw traffic out of gear, which leads to accidents. The cattle also pose a health hazard since cows and 7 ‘Dairy Colony Proposed in North Delhi’, http://timesofindia.indiatimes. com/articleshow/832997.cms. Accessed on 6 March 2007. 8 Common Cause has an official website http://www.commoncauseindia.org/ default.asp.

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stray dogs surround garbage dumps in colonies and make it nauseating for residents living nearby. The cattle often excrete on the roads which causes filth and stench all around. Such excreta is a breeding ground for microbes which could spread various diseases. Also, it is an extremely abhorrent sight. Stray cows eat garbage from rubbish heaps due to which they fall sick and their milk was unfit for human consumption.

In response, the High Court issued orders to the Delhi Government, MCD and the New Delhi Municipal Committee to file Action Taken Reports (ATRs). However, there was little Action to Report. The municipal authorities pleaded that they did not have the staff or other resources to comply with the court’s orders to get the cows off the roads. The case lurched from hearing to hearing but nothing much happened till February 2005 when the news media reported that two people had been gored to death by a stray bull in east Delhi. Taking suo motu notice of the incident, the court once again asked the municipal authorities and the police about their plans to rid the city of ‘the cattle menace’.9 In August 2005, the judges came up with a novel scheme of involving citizens in the cattle-catching effort by rewarding them with `2,000 for every animal caught.10 This ‘catch-for-cash’ scheme excited great attention and much speculation about how it would be implemented. The judicial order said that the scheme would first be tried out in affluent south Delhi. However, municipal officials protested, saying that crafty citizens would drive cattle from other parts of the city into south Delhi to claim the reward. To pre-empt that, the MCD said that only bona fide south Delhi citizens carrying certificates issued by the Residents’ Welfare Associations of their neighbourhood would be eligible to get the reward. Despite the expectation that the cash prize would bring in crowds of cattle lassoed by

‘High Court Questions Police, MCD on Cattle Menace’, http://www. hinduonnet.com/2005/02/10/stories/2005021010160400.htm. Accessed on 6 March 2007. 10 ‘Court Orders Cash for Catching Stray Cattle’, http://www.thehindu. com/2005/08/05/stories/2005080509120100.htm. Accessed on 6 March 2007.  9

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cowboy-citizens, the MCD reported after two weeks that a total of seven cows had been caught under the scheme.11

Photo: Author

So ‘the menace of stray cattle’ has continued to dog Delhi’s streets. Common Cause tried to diversify its campaign by including stray dogs and rhesus monkeys in its list of stigmatised species, animals unwelcome in urban environs.12 Across India, other cities have also witnessed public-spirited citizens banding together to banish cows.13 Bangalore 11 ‘Seven Stray Cattle Caught under Reward Scheme, Court Told’, http:// www.hindu.com/2005/08/19/stories/2005081909510400.htm. Accessed on 6 March 2007. 12 Curiously, pigs haven’t attracted their ire, even though they pose a serious threat to safety, especially in poorer neighbourhoods, where they have been known to bite and even kill young children. ‘Pig Kills Boy’, http://www.hinduonnet. com/2006/11/29/stories/2006112921340100.htm. Accessed on 12 March 2007. 13 See http://www.petitiononline.com/straycow for the full litany of city cowrelated complaints. Some petitioners suggest that a patented cattle identification device, a chip called Rumitag, be inserted into the stomach of each stray cow so that a hand-held scanner passed over the belly of the beast can extract all the

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has been the front-runner in these campaigns against strays, to the extent of clubbing street dogs to death (Karlekar 2008), 14 but Ahmedabad, Chandigarh and Mysore have not been far behind. All the campaigns cite concerns about traffic disruption, hygiene and the safety of citizens as the chief reasons why cows should be banned from urban public spaces.15

Bourgeois environmentalists I call these initiatives instances of ‘bourgeois environmentalism’, a term that needs explaining. Environmentalism in India has for long been described as an ‘environmentalism of the poor’ (Guha and MartinezAlier 1998). Drawing upon iconic examples of environmental movements such as Chipko and Narmada Bachao Andolan, scholars and activists concur that Indian mobilisation around the use and abuse of nature is intrinsically linked to issues of material distributive justice. Struggles over nature are perceived as combining shades of both ‘green’ ecological concerns and ‘red’ class politics, unlike the post-materialist concerns driving environmentalism in the North. Ramachandra Guha has subsequently revised this characterisation to discuss another group of environmentalists that are at odds with the dominant current of ‘the environmentalism of the poor’: ‘wildlife fanatics’ and ‘green missionaries’ who propagate an agenda of authoritarian conservation by creating protected wilderness areas that exclude forest-dependent local people (Guha 2006). Wildlife conservationists, many of them from former aristocratic families whose hunting was directly responsible for the decimation of animals and birds across India, embody a information about the animal. Such information, maintained in a centralised data base, would help to identify and fine the owner of individual animals. Other petitioners endorse the use of a pneumatic blowpipe to tranquilise cattle and carry them away to shelters. Accessed on 6 March 2007. 14 The brutality of these campaigns has been vigorously challenged by urban animal rights organisations, usually groups of dog-lovers, which mostly draw their members from the same social stratum that produces bourgeois environmentalists. Thus, the ‘public interest’ orientation of the elite takes a variety of forms, including those that run counter to each other. 15 In suburbs of Mumbai near the Sanjay Gandhi National Park, troublesome urban animals include the leopard (Landy 2017).

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form of elite environmentalism that runs counter to the political and social values that drive ‘the environmentalism of the poor’. By conceiving of conservation mainly in terms of creating protected parks and sanctuaries, wildlife conservationists fail to recognise how their own resource-intensive affluent lifestyles destroy and degrade wildlife habitats worldwide. Such habitat destruction and pollution are the chief causes of the loss of biodiversity that they purport to save. This double-think is the defining feature of bourgeois environmentalism. If bourgeois environmentalism doesn’t show many signs of being concerned about ecological sustainability, is it environmentalism at all? Its practitioners certainly see themselves as environmentalists and this is a self-image that we must take seriously. For them, environmentalism is a mode of expressing and addressing their anxieties about themselves in relation to their habitat—physical surroundings, both proximate and distant, and other species.16 Concerns about health and hazard, beauty and order, pervade this mode and have precedence over issues of life and livelihood that are central to ‘the environmentalism of the poor’. The sensibility that underlies these judgements is expressed in the language of modernity, of civic consciousness and public health, even of certain ideas of beauty related to the management of public space and interests, an order of aesthetics from which the ideals of public health and hygiene cannot be separated. It is the language of modern governments, both colonial and postcolonial, and for that reason, it is the language… of modern nationalists as well (Chakrabarty 2002: 66). 16 It should be noted that such environmentalism does not endorse a catholic love for all species but discriminates between them on the basis of perceived qualities (Govindrajan 2018). In the urban context, mosquitoes, rats and cows are bad and should be removed, but pet dogs and ornamental trees are good and should be encouraged. The good/bad species list differs between social groups: many city-dwellers scatter grain to feed birds, including pigeons and crows. The list has also changed over time: Mahesh Rangarajan (1998) provides a historical account of how bounties were offered in British India to kill tigers and leopards that were then regarded as vermin. The subsequent endowment of value to species such as lions, whales and polar bears—‘charismatic megafauna’—has been crucial to the success of conservation campaigns (Davis 1995).

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The place of nature in the city is thus a matter to be ordered and regulated. For instance, the Delhi Master Plan’s categorisation of land use includes ‘green areas’ but these areas are not allowed to take the form of wilderness. The natural and naturalised vegetation of Delhi is to be found on the Ridge, the last spur of the Aravalli mountain range that, together with the Yamuna river, forms the parentheses enclosing the old Delhi of Shahjahanabad and the New Delhi built by the British. That part of the Ridge that has not been swallowed up by encroachments has been gradually cleared of its undergrowth and converted into parks by the Delhi Forest Department (Kalpavriksh 1991). The parks allow citizens to use green areas for recreation in a way that the rough ‘jungle’ of the Ridge does not. Green lawns, tidy flower-beds and neatly-pruned trees are a form of ‘nature’s government’ (Drayton 2000) that meet with the approval of bourgeois environmentalists. This ‘improved’ nature—garden, not jungle—is deemed superior to and is promoted over the unkempt, inchoate luxuriance of creepers and bushes through which scurry partridges, snakes and mongoose.17 Bourgeois environmentalists would frown on Esmeralda, the fabulous city of water described by Italo Calvino in his book Invisible Cities (1972), where canals and streets span and intersect each other, such that ‘the ways that open to each passerby are never two, but many’. Esmeralda’s inhabitants include 17 But it should be noted that Delhi’s parks don’t quite fit the principle exemplified in Frederick Law Olmsted’s design of New York’s Central Park that a park should be an instrument of governing conduct (Joyce 2003: 220–222). If Central Park was the site for working-class persons to learn from the upper classes how to disport themselves without being drunk and disorderly, Delhi’s parks offer lessons not in socially sanctioned recreation, but a refuge for illicit romance. In the garden surrounding Safdar Jung’s tomb, for instance, at sundown, when the park closes for the night, one can stand by the gates and see streams of courting couples emerging from the bushes, smoothing their hair and clothes, their departure mirrored overhead by parallel streams of large fruit-eating bats emerging from their tree roosts to forage. To me, this is one more example of the unruliness of Delhi, and how governmental intentions founder on the rocks of the everyday exigencies of lovers looking for privacy and park-keepers looking for additional income (see Chapter 7).

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…cats, thieves and illicit lovers [who] move along higher, discontinuous ways, dropping from a rooftop to a balcony, following gutterings with acrobats’ steps. Below, the rats run in the darkness of sewers, one behind the other’s tail…. A map of Esmeralda should include, marked in different coloured inks, all these routes, solid and liquid, evident and hidden. It is more difficult to fix on the map the routes of the swallows, who cut the air over the roofs, dropping long invisible parabolas with their still wings, darting to gulp a mosquito, spiralling upward, grazing a pinnacle, dominating from every point of their airy paths all the points of the city (Calvino 1972: 88–89).

Esmeralda’s fanciful map, like the urban geography traced by Michel de Certeau’s city-walkers, would find no favour with bourgeois environmentalists who prefer to be lakeer ke fakeer (literally, ‘seekers after the line’, or sticklers for the letter of the law) and unswervingly follow formal rules and regulations, clear lines laid out in black and white. For them, cats, rats and illicit lovers are unwelcome transgressors to be (respectively) caught, killed or confined at home. If bourgeois environmentalists are concerned with the ordering of nature in the city (and in the countryside), they pursue this concern through a strategy that further distinguishes their activism from ‘the environmentalism of the poor’. Citizens’ campaigns to control cows (and rickshaws, as we shall see) have been routed through the courts, rather than addressed to the municipal authorities charged with the responsibility of managing urban life. Impatient with bureaucratic procedures and the politics of compromise and accommodation, and unwilling to engage in mass mobilisation of the sort that social movements strive for, bourgeois environmentalists prefer to use their privileged access to the media and courts to achieve their ends. Their desires for an ordered environment are reflected and taken up by an activist judiciary, keen to step into the breach left by the executive and legislative branches of the state, especially a regulatory apparatus that is susceptible to political pressure and corruption.18 18 The emergence of this affinity between bourgeois environmentalists and higher-level judiciary has been discussed at greater length in Chapter 3.

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It should also be noted that the prominent role of bourgeois environmentalists in the pursuit of urban order in Delhi is rather different from the state-centric process described in the literature on urban governmentality (Joyce 2003).19 Instead of the postcolonial government monopolising the creation of ‘rationalised schemes, programmes, techniques and devices which seek to shape conduct so as to achieve certain ends’ (Rose 1999: 3), we see citizens at work, often at odds with the state administration. Their initiatives recognise that the state falls far short of its modernist ideals and that its authority is severely undermined by the actions of its own agents. It is the sovereign power exercised by the courts, at once arbitrary and extreme, that wins accolades from bourgeois environmentalists. Bourgeois environmentalists are also able to bypass the regular channels of government and approach the Supreme Court and High Court as the first, and not the last, resort because of how they frame the issues that concern them. Keeping cows (and rickshaws) off the streets is a matter of ‘public interest’, a framing that the higher judiciary endorses. In fact, as I shall go on to show, these concerns do not reflect the priorities of all street-users but mainly those of that section of Delhi’s population that uses personal vehicles, especially cars. Yet, their interests get normalised and universalised as those of the ‘public’, while the concerns and priorities of pedestrians and rickshaw riders and pullers (and cows and their owners), and all those who make money off them, are left by the wayside.20 This, then, is another defining feature of bourgeois environmentalists: that they claim to speak for the entire city, and even the nation (see Deshpande 1997; Baviskar and Ray 2011). As the section on cars in this chapter shows, this claim is based upon a fundamental misrecognition of the relationship between class and citizenship, consumption 19 Even though Foucault’s famous 1978 essay on governmentality (Foucault 1991) is meant to be a move away from state-centric theories to focus on the cultivation of self-government, much of the scholarship that he has inspired concentrates squarely on state practices. 20 Chapter 3 traced the same argument in the case of the closure of ‘polluting and non-conforming’ industries, showing how the concerns of workers about work, health and safety were superseded by bourgeois environmentalists who projected air and water pollution as transcendental issues of ‘public interest’.

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and civic concern. This misrecognition is reflected in the doublethink that is at work in the starkly opposed attitudes of bourgeois environmentalists to cows and rickshaws on the one hand, and to cars on the other. Who are these bourgeois environmentalists when they’re not filing cases in court and how may we recognise them? It’s hard to generalise about a group that is heterogeneous and encompasses a range of attributes in terms of income and consumption, education and occupation, and property ownership. To complicate matters further, bourgeois environmentalism is also a more generalised sensibility that exceeds identification with an empirically-grounded class formation, and can be found in a diffused form even among those it may otherwise marginalise—the cycle-rickshaw puller, the Blueline bus driver, the dairy owner may all, at different times, decry the lawlessness of Delhi’s streets and demand that the state act swiftly and peremptorily. However, in the context of this chapter, I use the term to capture what in Hindi are referred to as padhe-likhe log (educated folk), a group instantly recognised by its dress, deportment, and language. These are white-collar professionals and businessmen, usually educated in private English-medium schools, usually upper-caste. Besides being owners of cultural capital, they are likely to own their own homes and automobiles over the course of their lives.21 Since the onset of liberalisation in the 1990s, this section has been educated into an awareness of its own power and entitlement by the English-language media, which have played up the idea of the newspaper-reading and talk-show-watching citizen as the guardian of the public interest.

Cycle-rickshaws Among the undesirable objects that bourgeois environmentalists sought to banish from the streets were cycle-rickshaws.22 In May–June 2006, the Delhi High Court ordered that, within three months, all 21 For an early review of the literature on Indian environmentalism and the middle class, see Mawdsley (2004). 22 This section draws heavily upon the research and activism of Lokayan and Manushi, two NGOs that have led the campaign in support of cycle-rickshaws

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cycle-rickshaws be removed from Chandni Chowk, the most important avenue in the Walled City of Shahjahanabad and the oldest commercial hub of the city. The Court said that rickshaw pulling was against human dignity and resulted in the exploitation of poor rickshaw pullers by powerful and influential ‘mafias’, and that the unregulated plying of rickshaws caused congestion and inconvenience to the city’s commuters. It directed that all ‘arterial roads in the MCD (Municipal Corporation of Delhi) area should be strictly prohibited for the plying of cycle rickshaws’ and ordered the MCD to take strict legal action against violators (Sethi 2006).23 Ironically, this order caused much consternation among the very people who had petitioned the courts to regulate rickshaws—traders in Chandni Chowk. They had wanted only a reduction in rickshaw numbers but were instead handed a total ban. The Hindu quoted A.R. Javed, a resident: We welcome introduction of CNG (compressed natural gas) buses in our area as it will not only improve environment but also make commuting easier for people. However, cycle-rickshaw is also an eco-friendly mode of transport and convenient for residents of the Walled City area, particularly for old people, women and children. CNG buses on main road are fine, but in the lanes and by-lanes we need rickshaws.24

As rickshaw advocates point out, the cycle-rickshaw is the only nonpolluting mode of public transport in Chandni Chowk. It should therefore be championed by city planners and environmentalists. Instead, it is condemned as the cause of traffic congestion and accidents, not only in the Walled City but all over the capital wherever rickshaws ply. It is true though, that the number of rickshaws in Delhi in the capital. See http://www.indiatogether.org/manushi/rickshaw/ for a comprehensive critique of the political economy of cycle-rickshaws in the city. 23 Also see ‘Cycle Rickshaws: Victims of Car Mania’, http://www.cseindia. org/campaign/apc/pdf/smog-2006-oct-3-rickshaw.pdf. Accessed on 11 March 2007. 24 ‘Chandni Chowk Residents Upset over Ban on Cycle Rickshaws’, http:// www.hindu.com/2006/06/04/stories/2006060412970300.htm. Accessed on 11 March 2007.

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has grown exponentially. Until the 1980s, rickshaws were restricted to the Walled City and the east Delhi suburb of Shahdara and were estimated to be about 20,000. In the 1990s, they entered other municipal zones such as Civil Lines and the Delhi University campus where they rapidly became the preferred mode of short-distance travel for students. According to the then Traffic Police Commissioner Maxwell Pereira (2002), the number of licensed and unlicensed rickshaws in 2002 was anywhere between 200,000 to 500,000. The vagueness of that estimate tells us just how little knowledge and control the top traffic officials have about this mode of transport. In 2007, there were estimated to be 600,000 rickshaws in Delhi, serviced by about 20,000 mechanics, and backed by thousands of others who own, assemble or manufacture the machines. According to Madhu Kishwar (2001), if one includes the family members dependent on the earnings of rickshaw-related work, a total of about five to six million people live off the cycle-rickshaw economy in the city.25 If rickshaws were banned in the ‘public interest’ of bringing order to Delhi’s streets, it would deprive a substantial section of the city’s working class of its basic source of livelihood. It is these numbers that bourgeois environmentalists regard with unease. Pedalling a rickshaw is the quickest employment opportunity available to male migrants into Delhi. It requires fewer resources and skills than other occupations: no financial, educational or social capital, just the strength of one’s body and basic survival skills. People from rural areas who come to Delhi in the hope of making it in the city can relatively easily hire a rickshaw for about `40 a day, and earn enough to make ends meet and perhaps even save some money. The work is hard and the conditions brutal: there is no respite if one is ill or if the weather is bad. The prospects of economic improvement and upward mobility are slim. Yet, such is the need for remunerative work, and 25 It is unclear how this figure has been computed. Since many rickshaw-pullers are young men who have migrated to Delhi without their families, one presumes that Kishwar is referring to the total number of dependents in urban and rural areas and has assumed that each rickshaw-puller sends money back to support a family of five members. Even with these maximalist assumptions, the figure is likely to be closer to four million, which is still a substantial figure.

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such are the difficulties in entering other modes of employment, that thousands of migrants (and many long-time residents too) take up the cycle-rickshaw. As they doggedly keep their place on the roads, often jumping lights because that’s the only way they can get a head-start against the motor vehicles that crowd and overtake them, rickshaws are a conspicuous irritant for car-drivers.26 The men who pull them are marked by their Bihari and eastern Uttar Pradesh accents and quickly identified as migrants. Regulating rickshaws in the name of curbing urban congestion is also tinged with anxiety about the influx of migrants into the city and fears about the collapse of civic infrastructure under their weight. There are supposed to be only 99,000 licensed rickshaws in Delhi. However, the actual number at the time of writing exceeded 600,000. Despite the court’s order and the recommendation of the courtappointed committee that rickshaws be banned on arterial roads, rickshaws were all over the city, even sneaking into the exclusive area of Lutyens’s Delhi (like the dairies). Part of Delhi’s informal economy, what allows them to flourish is ‘a tightly structured, highly formalised economy of corruption’ (Barua 2007). Since no new rickshaw licences are now issued, the majority of rickshaws are unlicensed and unauthorised, which makes them liable to be confiscated and destroyed, unless the owner can negotiate with municipal officials and pay them to leave the rickshaws alone. These transaction costs are much too high to bear for those who own only one rickshaw,27 so only those who own several can survive in the business. By making regular, fixed payments to the municipal authorities, rickshaw owners can ensure that their vehicles are untouched. In fact, unlicensed rickshaws are often ‘password-protected’, with a code-word embossed or painted on the back of the rickshaw to identify it as one whose owner has paid his dues to the MCD officials. The fact that they do not have lights makes them difficult to spot in the dark. According to the Cycle Rickshaw By-laws of 1960, framed under the Delhi Municipal Corporation Act of 1957, a person can only own one cycle-rickshaw and must pull it himself (widows and the handicapped can own up to five and can hire them out). In practice, most owners have between 10 to 50 rickshaws. At every level, cycle-rickshaws are caught in a web of illegality woven by the municipality. This is vividly described in Kishwar (2001). 26

27

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Photo: Author

If rickshaws disappear from Delhi’s streets, they will take with them the primary source of earning for hundreds of thousands of workers and their families (and a significant part of the illicit earnings of municipal and police officials). They will also be missed by those who use them. This group spans the city’s social and economic divides. Members of households that own one vehicle often use cycle-rickshaws for short trips. There is usually a gendered pattern to this usage in that the car, scooter or motorcycle is generally driven by the adult male member of the household, leaving women and children to ride rickshaws more than men. Other reasons also help explain why rickshaws fill a gap in urban transport needs. As streets have been broadened to cope with the increase in vehicular traffic, pavements have narrowed, often disappearing under encroaching shops, vendors and parking slots, all of which make walking more difficult and hazardous. Potential pedestrians and cyclists now take rickshaws instead. For people who find walking difficult and for those carrying heavy bags, cycle-rickshaws are a convenient alternative. Despite its obvious utility—economic, social and environmental, the cycle-rickshaw is seen as an embarrassment in a world-class city

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in the making. It does not fit into the modernist vision of judges, the bourgeoisie, the Delhi government, even though its proliferation attests to its eminent functionality. People from ‘all walks of life’ use cycle-rickshaws and yet upper-class ones look down on this mode of transport. The court may wish to ban the rickshaws and the Chandni Chowk traders may want their numbers regulated, but what municipal officials wish is to keep rickshaws on the streets in a perpetual state of illegality. It is this legal limbo that renders rickshaws vulnerable and fetches handsome earnings for municipal officials and the police.28 This deep-seated interest converges with the livelihood needs of poor migrants and has so far neutralised the court’s dictum on rickshaws. Despite the September 2006 deadline, Chandni Chowk still has its rickshaws, as does the rest of Delhi.29

Cars Imagine the following scenario: One fine morning, the Delhi government suddenly declares that no more than 50,000 cars and scooters will be allowed in the entire territory of our capital city, without ensuring an effective public transport system to make up for private vehicles…. People need to have special government permits to own a car or scooter. Also no family can get a licence for more than one vehicle. Imagine further, that the government enacts a law stipulating that the person who is issued such a permit to own a car, a scooter, a bus or a truck has to drive that vehicle himself. If he allows someone else to drive it, the vehicle is liable to be forcibly seized by the Municipal Corporation and sold as junk, after being hammered to pulp…. That even if there is clear evidence that the seizure was mala fide and that the municipal or traffic police inspector had confiscated several duly licensed vehicles simply to extract bribes, the owners of seized cars still have to pay a minimum fine of `40,000 each, or 10 to 20 per cent of the cost of their cars to get their respective vehicles released…. 28 For a similar scenario regarding street hawkers in Mumbai, see Anjaria (2006). 29 Chapter 1 discusses how this situation has been changed by the introduction of electric-rickshaws.

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Most educated and informed citizens would dismiss the above scenario as an impossibility. They would argue that such economic tyranny does not prevail even under outright dictatorial and fascist regimes, let alone in a democracy like India. And yet the situation I have just described does not represent any futuristic nightmare. It is the daily life experience of lakhs of citizens in our capital city—a situation legitimised by none other than the Supreme Court of India. The reason no one has taken any note of it is that the victims are one of the poorest and marginalised groups of our society—the pullers and owners of cycle-rickshaws in Delhi (Kishwar 2001).

Madhu Kishwar’s simple yet powerful evocation of the double standards at work on Delhi’s streets shows how cycle-rickshaws and cars are treated in radically different ways in the city. Cars are the big blind spot in the mirrors of bourgeois environmentalists. Resources for the Future and the Delhi government’s 2018 Economic Survey reported that the number of motor vehicles on Delhi’s roads grew almost tenfold over 20 years, increasing from about 1.5 million in 1997 to an estimated 10.1 million in 2017, of which seven million were twowheelers.30 According to the Centre for Science and Environment, these cars and (motorised) two-wheelers occupy more than 75 per cent of road space in Delhi, but meet only 20 per cent of travel demand (in contrast, buses occupy less than five per cent of road space but meet 60 per cent of travel demand), yet there are no efforts to check the

30 http://www.planetark.org/dailynewsstory.cfm/newsid/39598/story.htm. Accessed on 12 March 2007. https://auto.economictimes.indiatimes.com/news/ industry/number-of-vehicles-on-delhi-roads-over-1-crore-with-more-than-70lakh-two-wheelers-economic-survey/68128444. Accessed on 22 May 2019. Also see Mishra (2000) for more statistical data and analysis about the problem of private cars. For an evaluation of different kinds of transport needs, from the point of view of safety and affordability, see Mohan and Tiwari (1999). It should be noted that two-wheelers—motorcycles and scooters—have not attracted enough analytical attention, even though their numbers have increased exponentially in Delhi and across India. Two-wheelers are also sociologically significant because their acquisition often signifies entry into middle-class status.

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phenomenal growth in the number of cars.31 To be sure, there are now heftier fines for traffic violations to encourage people to drive better, but there are no initiatives to restrict the numbers of motor vehicles on the road, unlike the case for cows and cycle-rickshaws. Cars cause congestion and they pollute: the switch to unleaded fuel notwithstanding, petrol- and diesel-run motor vehicles still contribute nitrogen and sulphur dioxide to the air, and the steep increase in the number of private vehicles has already begun to negate the gains from the switch to CNG for public buses and three-wheeler auto-rickshaws that occurred in 2000. Vehicle emissions are by far the biggest source of air pollution in Delhi around the year. Cars pollute and they cause accidents and kill far more frequently than cows or cycle-rickshaws.32 Yet no one petitions the Court to ban or even regulate the number of cars in Delhi (the city with the greatest density and absolute numbers of private vehicle ownership in India).33 On the contrary, car-financing has made it easier to own a car. Advertisements on television and in the print media drive home the message that a car is something a scooter-owner should aspire to, 31 ‘Choc-a-Bloc: Parking Measures to Leverage Change’, http://www.cseindia. org/campaign/apc/pdf/parking_mono.pdf. Accessed on 1 July 2009. This report makes a compelling case against the expansion of parking spaces for personal vehicles. Also see http://www.cseindia.org/campaign/apc/press_ 20061114.htm. Accessed on 12 March 2007. The Centre for Science and Environment almost single-handedly ran a powerful campaign titled ‘Slow Murder’ (see CSE 1996) to highlight the issue of air pollution from motor vehicles. It also approached the Supreme Court on the issue, resulting in the setting up of the Bhure Lal Committee that recommended the phasing out of all diesel public transport vehicles in the city. This order threw a wrench in the wheels of Delhi’s buses, taxis and auto-rickshaws, as owners were forced to change over to CNGfuelled vehicles. However, private cars passed unscathed. The fact that public transport was thrown out of gear (and the number of buses on the road actually declined even as the city’s population increased) provided yet another compelling reason for people to find private solutions to commuting problems (Véron 2006). 32 On the question of how law in the US apportions responsibility for accidents between cars (i.e., their safety features and other design elements), their drivers, and the ‘bystander’ on the road, see Jain (2004). 33 In January and April 2016, the Delhi Government ran a two-week long programme to reduce air pollution by halving the number of cars driven on the roads. This ‘odd-even scheme’ (dubbed thus because only cars with licence-plate numbers ending in an even digit would be allowed to ply on even dates of the

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Photo: Author

month, and similarly for odd numbers and dates) was widely welcomed for reducing traffic congestion. However, it did little to reduce pollution, barely affecting the incidence of dangerous 2.5 micron-sized suspended particles in the air. The scheme was abandoned after the National Green Tribunal asked the government to impose the odd-even rule on two-wheelers as well, a move that would have affected a much bigger section of the city’s population. Without adequate public transport to fill the gap, regulating private vehicles is unpopular and unviable.

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for the sake of his school-going son’s self-respect among his peers or for his wife’s comfort, and post-liberalisation personal loans promise to make the dream a reality ‘in equalised monthly instalments’. Urban congestion took a turn for the worse after ‘the people’s car’ Maruti 800 hit the streets in 1983 and the wider availability of easyto-buy options intensified traffic problems manifold. But the private automobile is the ultimate fetish of mobility and freedom. Sudhir Rajan refers to the ‘enigma of automobility’: that on the one hand, cars are taken as symbols of modernity—‘the pleasures of the open road, speed, power, and personal control’ combined with ‘the functionality of covering distance, managing time, and maintaining certain forms of individuation’. Yet on the other hand, they produce a range of risks and dangers which require intrusive governance: The vast enterprise of privatised transportation generates serious risks to human health and social welfare from accidents, pollution, and the wasteful consumption of energy and resources—risks that even individual drivers ordinarily face in the form of congestion, mishaps on highways, and the increasing costs of owning and maintaining vehicles… [This is the enigma of automobility, that] cars serve to create privatised spaces for individual drivers, but driving propagates socially shared effects that could quite conceivably undermine the individualist credo of personal vehicle use (Rajan 1996: 7–8, cited in Paterson 2007: 218).

Thus, even if it spends most of its time in gridlock and traffic jams, the private car or motorbike does not seem to lose its aura. Unlike on the issues of cows and cycle-rickshaws, on the subject of motor vehicles state practices are much more unequivocal. Cars are necessary and desirable.34 Those who have the wherewithal to own, drive and ride them are, by definition, respectable citizens by virtue of The Indian automobile industry is the fourth largest in the world. Postliberalisation, its performance has played a major role in shaping the overall size and growth of the Indian economy. Hence, despite the environmental and social costs of automobiles (including the climate change-related effects of fossil fuel dependence), no government has tried to rein in the auto industry. 34

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their demonstrated property-owning power. The city government has taken numerous steps to smooth the passage of the owners/riders/ drivers of motor vehicles: 42 flyovers were built across major intersections in time for the Commonwealth Games in 2010 and more continue to be built for ‘signal-free’ passage.35 Flyovers allow cars (and other motorised vehicles) to zoom ahead but are useless for bicyclists and rickshaws, and they force bus commuters to walk long distances to change buses. Apart from building flyovers, the government has also constructed some elevated walkways or subways at some points of heavy pedestrian movement. However, these are too few and far-between to be of much help to most pedestrians in the city. Deterred by median and side barriers when they attempt to cross the

Photo: Author

See Anand (2006) for a similar account of making Mumbai world-class through improving and augmenting roads. 35

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road anyhow, people have to brave several lanes of on-rushing traffic, at serious risk of losing their lives. Easing the passage of cars has been accompanied by measures to ease their rest. The burgeoning problem of parking is being addressed by building multi-level parking lots and by converting pavements into parking spaces. If the roads are crowded, build more roads. This simple supply-side solution has overwhelmingly prevailed over the more sustainable strategy of regulating private vehicles and investing in mass transit systems.36 A poorly-designed Bus Rapid Transit corridor in south The Delhi Metro, the flagship mass transit project of the government, is a conspicuous yet curiously insubstantial counter to this statement. In 2007–8, the Metro contributed only four per cent of the total vehicular trips made by Delhi commuters (as compared to 41 per cent of all trips being made by bus), a share that, in 2019, seems to have risen but I could not find data about this. In the period that the Metro network has expanded, the proportion of total trips made by personal vehicles has increased, and not decreased. However, despite its limited contribution to addressing Delhi’s transport challenge, the Metro has had an enormous impact on the city’s sense of itself, particularly along its routes and, more generally, as an icon of progress and efficiency. Since this chapter confines itself to the street, the underground and overhead tracks of the Metro are outside its purview. However, it should be noted that, while the Metro may eventually emerge as an alternative to using one’s personal vehicle and bring about a reduction in road congestion, its symbolic importance seems to be far more significant than its effect on traffic. As a mode of transport that seems to annihilate class distinctions by admitting everyone to the same elevated experience of being whisked through the city in air-conditioned comfort, the Metro holds out the promise of a more inclusive bourgeois mode of belonging in the city. While this promise is only realised by a small section of the working class (the Metro is considerably more expensive than the bus), it retains a powerful charge. The overwhelming approval of the middle classes for the Metro derives from their enthusiasm for a mode of travel that conjures up a ‘world-class’ experience, as well as from their sense that, within its heavily surveilled premises, the Metro is educating the humbler citizens of Delhi—the burqa-clad woman from the Walled City; the working-class youth with gelled hair and mobile-phone ear-buds; the dark, skinny children from the resettlement colony dressed in their best for an outing to India Gate—into proper bourgeois conduct, thereby improving their lives and opening up the horizons of their minds. At such moments, one sees the 36

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Delhi ran into rough weather when irate car owners protested against being made to wait for buses to pass, and the English-language newspaper The Times of India spearheaded a campaign to dismantle it. The road-space available to motor vehicles in Delhi has been expanded by widening roads (eating into footpaths) and allowing motor vehicles into the parallel lanes that were originally designed for bicycles (for instance, the Ring Road along Raj Ghat). But even that has not proved to be enough.37 So we have the Barapula flyover from Yamuna bank, cutting close to the historic 16th century Humayun’s Tomb area and overshadowing the Barapula bridge built in 1621 by Emperor Jahangir’s chief eunuch, Mir Banu Agha. Work on the 225-km-long ‘super ring road’ around the city’s periphery is under way. All these schemes are meant to address the chief concern of the car-commuter. A journalist writing a business column approvingly reported on all these changes by defining the problem thus: ‘If you’re a Delhi-ite, and there’s a considerable distance between your home and your workplace, you’ll know your day’s work isn’t done when office closes. Driving back home, you’ll have to contend with the most exasperatingly democratic of roads where buses and cycles jostle for space’ (Singh 2005).

Conclusion Kaun jaye Zauq ab Dilli ki galiyan chhod ke Who would wish to leave the lanes of Delhi now and live elsewhere? Zauq (1789–1854)

hegemonic ideal of an inclusive public being actively negotiated in the public sphere (also see Sadana 2010). 37 According to the CSE, ‘During 1995–2006, while the road length in the city has increased by about 20 per cent, cars/jeeps have increased by 131 per cent and two-wheelers by 76 per cent’ (‘Choc-a-Bloc: Parking Measures to Leverage Change’, http://www.cseindia.org/campaign/apc/pdf/parking_mono.pdf. Accessed on 1 July 2009).

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Dilli jo ek shahr tha aalam mein intikhaab/ rahte thei muntakhib hi jahan rozgaar ke/ usko falak ne loot kar weeraan kar diya/ Hum rehne wale hain usi ujre dayar ke There was a city, famed throughout the world/ Where dwelt the chosen spirits of the age/ Delhi its name, fairest among the fair/ Fate looted it and laid it desolate/ And to that ravaged city I belong. Mir Taqi Mir (1723–1810)38 The phrase ‘exasperatingly democratic’ road space sums up the frustration of the car-rider. Delhi just has too many buses and cycles; they must make way to create exclusive avenues for cars and other private motor vehicles. Less well-to-do citizens and their modes of locomotion—walking, cycling and buses should be banished from the street. If the republic of the streets is perceived to be a problem, the public sphere of judicial space where grievances are supposed to be heard and resolved—the space of sunvai (hearing) has already been shrunk by the courts. The voices and perspectives of cattleowners or cycle-rickshaw owners or pullers were excluded from the courts that decided upon their future. In this chapter, I’ve tried to argue for the resilience of ‘the republic of the streets’, its survival in spite of efforts by the courts and bourgeois environmentalists to suppress its unruliness. The embodied public sphere that is the city street reasserts itself, foiling bourgeois attempts to impose urban order by excluding cows and rickshaws. Bourgeois efforts have been undone as much by their own hubris as by their failure to deal with two issues: one, the corrupt collaborations between cow-owners, rickshaw-owners and municipal officials, and two, their misrecognition of their own complicity in creating urban congestion by driving private vehicles. These complex interdependencies have averted imminent collision between different social sections and enabled ‘the republic of the streets’ to survive. That said, I am not sanguine about the survival of this public sphere. It is contingent upon 38 Quoted in Jacob (2001). I am grateful to Shahid Amin for correcting these quotations.

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the continuation of complex equations between state and elected officials and those who pay them off, the courts’ fluctuating levels of interest, and the degree of mobilisation by bourgeois environmentalists and, last but not the least, the power of those who benefit from the liberalisation project to secure their vision. Like Delhi’s streets, this path too is an adventure into the unknown.

Illustration: Orijit Sen

6

The River

In early September 2010, the citizens of Delhi were witness to an unprecedented sight in the centre of the city. Erased from view was the unremarkable green-brown plain dotted with fields, trees and huts where the river Yamuna usually flows in a small and sluggish stream. Instead, a shimmering sheet of water stretched out wide, obliterating the land, and lapping at the bottom of the old iron railway bridge. The 100-year-old reticulated bridge, a sturdy yet strangely graceful monument to colonial engineering, suddenly appeared vulnerable as strong currents swept water dangerously close, causing trains and road traffic across the bridge to be cancelled. Close to the bridge were the submerged homes of poor squatters. A few thousand residents had been evacuated and housed in tents where they stayed for the next two weeks until the river ebbed. For many of them, temporary displacement was an annual event to which they were inured, an inescapable accompaniment to the experience of living by the river, eking out a slender livelihood from growing vegetables and melons on the riverbed. The sudden rise in the Yamuna had been caused by unremitting monsoon rains in the catchment of the river in the lower foothills of the Himalaya. Although the annual rainy season always brings about a swell in the river, the ceaseless downpour of September 2010 had

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raised water levels to such a height that the protection offered by embankments and dams seemed suddenly shaky. With the river threatening to spill over the levees and reclaim its floodplain, the upstream state of Haryana had been forced to release large quantities to safeguard its barrages and embankments. In Haryana, a section of the Tajewala Barrage had been washed away and more than 125 villages in Yamuna Nagar and Panipat districts had flooded as a result. This inundation across a huge expanse of farmland had dissipated some of the violent energy of the river in spate, an inadvertent boon that saved the downstream city of Delhi. Delhi had experienced floods before. In 1995, 15,000 poor families in low-lying areas next to the river were rendered homeless when the river approached the danger mark, but the rest of the city was untouched. In 1978, the worst floods in living memory, a million people were affected as the river reached its highest recorded level, submerging 70,000 hectares of land in the city. The raging floodwaters breached river embankments so that well-to-do north Delhi neighbourhoods such as Model Town were under 15–20 feet of water for almost a week, with extensive damage to homes and property. People recall how they stayed up all night sandbagging their homes in a vain effort to stem the floodwaters; how unexpectedly swiftly the water rose; how boats plied in city streets instead of cars and buses; how the army ferried supplies to stranded families on rooftops, rushing a pregnant woman to hospital in a motorboat just in time to deliver a baby; how the water left the walls sodden and stinking for many months after. With the passage of time, the memory of panic, disruption and anxiety had faded. The events of 1978 were now tinged only with the recollection of excitement and adventure. In comparison, the effects of the 2010 flood were minor and shortlived. Streets in low-lying areas stayed waterlogged for a week; people and vehicles had to wade through a foot or more of muddy water. For 10 days, the sewage and storm water drains flowing from the city into the river were shut to pre-empt a further rise in the river’s level, and residents in areas close to the river had to cope with smelly sewage backflow and toilets that would not flush. But soon the river returned to its former shrunken state, sewage once more flowed into it unabated,

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and the crisis of the floods passed. Once more, the city had weathered another monsoon, another imminent flood.

Visibility and place: Popular perceptions What was then unprecedented about the 2010 floods was not the fact of their occurrence, but their visibility to the city at large. Previous floods had come and gone, but the only people who were aware of them were those directly affected—a tiny minority in a city of 14 million people—and the government agencies responsible for dealing with them: the Flood Control and Irrigation Department, the Delhi Jal Board (the city’s water supply, sewage and sanitation authority), and the Municipal Corporation’s Slum Wing (for managing squatter settlements). In the case of the 2010 floods, however, dozens of television news channels stationed their outdoor broadcasting vans to film the river, reporting minute-by-minute on the rising water, its proximity to the danger mark, the state of the railway bridge and the consequent dislocation of traffic, the plight of displaced squatters; and interviewing government officials and residents in floodthreatened neighbourhoods. In September 2010, when the Yamuna in Delhi was flowing two metres above its danger mark of 204.83 metres, the river had finally become newsworthy. The dramatised relaying of this event to the public eye was not only a result of the inherently spectacular character of the river in spate. It was also partly an offshoot of the growth of news media in search of new material to televise during its round-the-clock broadcasts. Since the onset of economic liberalisation in the 1990s that opened up television channels to private companies, the demand for reportage and features had risen. Imminent disasters and crises helped fill the constant demand for news, and television, along with older forms of print capitalism, has over these years helped produce not only the floods-as-news but also an urban public concerned by threats to parts of their city. Aiding the task of the news media in making the floods visible was a new, and notable, development on the right bank of the river: the Yamuna highway. Completed in the summer of 2010, the concrete

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pillars of this gigantic four-lane road march parallel to the riverbed from Jamna Bazaar to ITO, offering a high vantage point from which to observe a river that had hitherto been hidden from view. The outdoor broadcasting vans with their overhead satellite dishes and smartly dressed correspondents reporting live from location joined curious onlookers crowding the edge of the highway, gazing out at the spreadsheet of water below them. Without the highway, the eloquence of the liquid expanse, the imperilled iron bridge, the treetops sticking out like miniature bushes from the water, would be invisible. Without the highway, there would be nowhere to stand and nothing to see. Without the highway, for most residents of Delhi, the river would cease to be.1 In the story of the Yamuna’s shifting visibility in the social and ecological imagination of Delhi, the highway is an irony. Built to ease road traffic congestion along the city’s north-south artery, its construction was sped up for the Commonwealth Games held in October 2010 (one of the main venues for sports events, the Indraprastha Stadium, lies at its southern foot). The highway rides atop the river’s western embankment, cutting through an unfamiliar landscape. There is the riverbed to one side and, on the other, the rear view of a power station and the public gardens where rest the remains of India’s political greats—Mahatma Gandhi, Jawaharlal Nehru, Lal Bahadur Shastri, Indira Gandhi and Rajiv Gandhi. There are no recognisable landmarks, no street-side vendors and shops, no passing pedestrians. There is only a broad stretch of concrete, speeding cars and big blue signboards announcing exits and destinations. The highway, especially in the darkness of night, is a disorienting place. In fact, at first glance, it would seem to not be a place at all. Marc Augé uses the term ‘non-place’ to describe ‘a space which cannot 1 George Berkeley (1710): ‘A Treatise Concerning the Principles of Human Knowledge’ (proposition 45) argued that ‘the objects of sense exist only when they are perceived’ http://philosophy.eserver.org/berkeley.html. Accessed on 20 June 2011. This comment on perception and the production of nature is not to deny the substantive materiality of the river or, what the chapter argues for, the fact that nature exceeds social categories and framings. I am grateful to Vinay Gidwani for helping clarify this point.

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be defined as relational, historical, or concerned with identity’ (2008: 63). Highway routes, along with airports and hotel chains, are part of a fleeting, transient and ephemeral world that people increasingly inhabit, spaces of ‘circulation, consumption and communication’ (ibid.: viii), where the link between individuals and their surroundings is established primarily ‘through the mediation of words’, even prescriptive ‘instructions for use’ (ibid.: 76–77). Augé contrasts non-places with ‘anthropological places’ that create ‘organically social’ relations (ibid.), locating them at opposite ends of the spectrum of sociality and socialisation in terms of identity and history. Augé also points out that it is precisely their anonymity and streamlined ease of negotiation that makes non-places the sites where desires and aspirations are increasingly located in a world ‘surrendered to solitary individuality’ (2008: 63). This would certainly be true of projects like the highway, which concretely embody the desires shared by the Delhi government and many of its citizens to make the city ‘world-class’, visually aligned with a modernist Western aesthetic and physically engineered to move people as swiftly as possible by minimising the friction of having to engage with their surroundings (Mumford 1963). Richard Sennett calls this ‘the neutralised city’ (1990: xii) where spaces are carefully orchestrated to remove the threat of social contact, especially between different kinds of people. So the fact that the highway brought into view the river, however fleetingly, for the citizens of Delhi was an irony. In the ‘world-class’ city, the Yamuna is an anomaly, an embarrassment even. Next to the highway to super-modernity, it is an especially awkward presence. Urban eyes struggle to make sense of it: is it nature or culture? Both these socially produced categories come with recognisable markers. If urban nature has come to be identified with manicured parks, the Yamuna is a wilderness of shifting sandbanks, grasses, crops and water. Nor is it explicable in terms of rural nature: it is neither forest nor intensively cultivated farmland. For Delhi residents, the riverbed does not fit within popular notions of nature; only when it is in spate does the river seem to assert its biophysical power. And even then, the network of barrages and embankments usually succeeds in domesticating the river, rendering it into a human-made artefact, controlled and managed.

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The Yamuna in Delhi makes little cultural sense either. In a country where rivers are an intrinsic part of sacred geography, especially for the dominant Hindu majority, the Yamuna is curiously profane. To be sure, she has a place in the pantheon of river deities as the sister of Yama, the god of death and righteousness (Haberman 2006). The figures of Yamuna and Ganga flank temple entrances all over the country (Stietencron 2010). She is invoked along with Ganga in Vedic verses chanted during ritual baths. Her stepped ghats besides the temples of Delhi’s Jamna Bazaar are the site of Hindu funerary rites and other purificatory ceremonies.2 But the religious-cultural cosmos of the Yamuna is circumscribed to the Jamna Bazaar spot. Along the rest of her 22-km-long flow through the city, the river is neither revered nor regarded as important to the cultural life of citizens. It may then be said that, for the citizens of Delhi, the river Yamuna is a non-place. If history, identity, and social relations are the hallmarks of an ‘anthropological place’, the Yamuna is perceived as being devoid of all these. In fact, the Yamuna is a non-place twice over since it also lacks the aspirational qualities that Augé attributes to places of super-modernity. The non-place that is the highway snakes past the non-place that is the river, their twinned flows signifying the contradiction that lies at the heart of Delhi: the highway is a concrete manifestation of the city’s futuristic vision, its world-class ambition brought into being; the river is a watery nothingness.

Microcosms of nature-culture Yet, the non-place that is the river in the city has accommodated small cultural worlds built around nature,3 microcosms that quietly continue 2 The Sanskrit term for a place of pilgrimage, tirtha, originally meant ‘ford’ or ‘crossing place’ and sacred riverbank sites like the Ganga at Banaras represent spiritual fording, the soul’s journey from the obstacles of this world to the next (Eck 1982). This metaphysical aspect of a river underlies the Hindu practice of using ghats or the steps built onto a riverbank leading down to the water, as sites to cremate the dead. 3 On the mutual constitution of place and nature on the Amazon river, see Raffles (1999).

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around the year even as the rest of Delhi is unaware or indifferent to their presence. The ghats at Jamna Bazaar descend to the river on broad flagstones and the Yamuna licks at their feet, coaxing a red boat into the water. When the boat is midstream, a man flings a sweeping shower of grainy pellets around him. From nowhere come thousands of birds, circling and swooping in ever-tightening circles, plucking the pellets from the water and soaring away. The air is dense with the flutter of white wings beating at the autumn light, a dizzy wheeling that goes on and on until the food disappears. The birds go to roost and the moment ebbs away. The birds are Black-headed Gulls. As he moors the boat, the man informs me that they come from Siberia. In the four months of winter, every morning and evening, he feeds them on behalf of his uncle, a well-to-do businessman in Shahdara, a suburb in east Delhi. ‘Forty kilos in the morning, sixty kilos in the evening. Three thousand rupees a day, it costs Mamaji.’ Why does he do it? ‘Bahut door se aate hain ye panchhi. Hamare mehmaan hain’ (They come from very far away, these birds. They are our guests). For the businessman from Shahdara, the birds from Siberia are visitors to whom hospitality

Photo: Author

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is due, and the river provides a place for fulfilling the religious obligation to feed itinerants as well as the charitable duty of caring for lesser creatures.4 For people from the Walled City near Jamna Bazaar, the Yamuna offers a respite from urban congestion, from a life constantly crowded with people, sounds and things. I asked Satya Narayan, a middle-aged man who told me that he worked in a hotel, why he came down to the ghats. ‘Yahaan bahut khula-khula hai. Tasalli milti hai’ (It’s wide open and spacious here. One gets reassured). We pay 10 rupees to a boatman to ferry us to the island that lies midstream. As we walk up, we unsettle the Black Kites that are warming themselves in the sunny sand. The large brown birds rise and hover, then snuggle back into bed. In an odd way, it is reassuring to know that there are gulls and kites going about their business even as the city seethes all around them. For those searching for momentary peace, the river provides restful calm—a chance to catch one’s breath and gather one’s thoughts—in an urban place where open space is scarce. In October, the islands and western margins of the riverbank are covered with sprawling fields of vegetables that supply inexpensive and fresh food to the city. The silt of the Yamuna is fertile: cauliflowers and cabbages grow vigorously, with beds of marigold and roses behind them. In the summer, there are cucumbers and melons. Lines of migrant workers from eastern Uttar Pradesh bend and straighten, planting baingan and mirchi (brinjal and chillies). Water gushes from a bore-well. ‘Bilkul meetha pani hai’ (The water is absolutely sweet), declares a farmer. The groundwater recharged by the Yamuna may be sweet, but studies indicate that the vegetables it irrigates are likely to be contaminated with faecal bacteria and heavy metals such as lead and cadmium.5 Untreated industrial effluents and domestic sewage that 4 The two gaushalas (cow shelters) close to the river, with their infirm and injured cattle, offer a similar opportunity to the devout. 5 See the 2003 study ‘Heavy Metal Contamination of Vegetables in Delhi’ http:// old.cseindia.org/programme/health/pdf/conf2006/toxins2_aggarwal2.pdf. Accessed on 25 June 2011. Other studies on Yamuna water pollution in Delhi and critical appraisals of the efforts to clean the river can be found online at the Centre for

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discharge into the river in Delhi and upstream mean that, once the monsoon-rain flow subsides, the river reverts to its undiluted state: still and stinking, foam-flecked and laden with the flotsam of the plastics packaging revolution. The water is black with filth. On the auspicious full-moon day of Kartik Purnima in October, I watch with awe as worshippers bathe in what looks like raw sewage. The guruji (respected teacher) at the Bhishma Vyayamshala (gymnasium and wrestling school) on the ghats tells me phlegmatically that he takes a dip in the river twice a day. ‘There’s a difference between the eye and the mind,’ he says. ‘The eye sees only the surface. The mind perceives true meaning.’ There are enough people bathing on the ghats to support guruji’s assertion that faith allows the mind to conquer over matter. But not

Photo: Author

Science and Environment website http://www.cseindia.org/taxonomy/term/5050. Accessed on 25 June 2011. For an ongoing commentary on the Yamuna’s condition, with biographical musings and photographs, see Ravi Agarwal’s blog, http:// haveyouseentheriver.blogspot.com. Accessed on 25 June 2011.

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all the devout are willing to do so any longer. A little upstream of Jamna Bazaar lies Nigambodh Ghat, the main riverside cremation site in Delhi, a site steeped in Hindu mythology and, now, sewage. Apparently, many mourners, whose mind’s eye could not resolve the paradox of divinity and disgust, protested that Jamna-ji was too filthy to bathe in. The Delhi government, which in the late 1990s was led by the Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP), came to their aid, installing an exclusive pipeline from the distant river Ganga to supply gangajal (holy water) for purificatory rites. As Anupam Mishra, a cultural historian of water, observed, ‘Ulti ganga beh rahi hai.’6 It is indeed an upsidedown world when, instead of cleaning the river, the government prefers the short-cut stratagem of bringing in water from another river.7

Pollution, illegality and cleansing the riverbanks The annual rhythms of the Yamuna harmonised with the ebb and flow of farmers and labourers, the Hindu ritual calendar and charitable and funerary practices, and the desire of some city dwellers for an open space. The banks also provided a space where dhobis (washermen) from the Walled City could spread laundered clothes to dry in the sun. The riverbank functioned as an urban common, with unwritten but nonetheless tangible norms about access and use, with areas being informally demarcated by function. Among these public functions, defecation ranked high. For large sections of the urban poor who lived on or close to the riverbed, and who did not have access to sanitation, the wilderness of the riverbed was a vast open-air toilet where the occasional shrubs and rocky outcrops provided privacy. Early morning and late evening, under cover of dark, groups of women with veiled faces picked their way through little piles of waste to the more remote 6 This Hindi aphorism is particularly apt on this occasion. Literally, it means that ‘the Ganga is flowing backwards’, or a state that violates the natural order of things. 7 The same sleight of hand has happened in the city of Ahmedabad, Gujarat, where the shrivelled-up Sabarmati river now brims with water brought by damming the Narmada river.

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spots. Later in the day, men repaired to the wasteland, armed with plastic bottles of water to wash themselves after they were done. To those who lived there, these widely practised, agreed-upon uses were by no means an infringement of the commons, though that is how they were perceived by well-to-do citizens who had access to toilets in their homes. Like rural commons—pastures, forests and streams— the riverbed too was a resource on which the poor depended more than those who owned private lands. Unlike the rural commons, the poor did not gather fuel, fodder or berries here; instead, their chief usufruct was space for the conduct of a basic biological function, a space that is notably scarce in the city. However, defecation contributed to the sense of the riverbed as a literal wasteland, derelict and defiled. It evoked disgust, intersecting with the wider popular perception of the place as an abused, uncared-for non-place. The association in the popular imagination of the riverbed with poor people and their polluting practices was to play an important role in destroying perhaps the biggest and most vibrant cultural world on the riverfront. Ironically, this once-flourishing community was,

Photo: Author

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in some ways, also a product of the wider popular perception of the floodplain as a non-place. That is, the settlement of the poor on the riverfront in the 1980s and 1990s, and their subsequent eviction in the 2000s, were both processes that derived from the marginality of this space. Their opposing tendencies indicate a historic shift in popular perceptions of how a non-place should be treated. As I shall go on to discuss, the subsequent phase of ‘reclamation’ of the riverbed in the 2000s inaugurated the current moment of creating value via commodification, incorporating a non-place into the spaces of capitalist consumption. The year 1977 marked the end of a two-year period of political Emergency when the government of Prime Minister Indira Gandhi had suspended civil liberties and undertaken ‘welfare’ programmes including forced slum clearance in Delhi (Tarlo 2002).8 An estimated 700,000 poor people had been evicted from their homes, their protests brutally suppressed, and taken to distant ‘resettlement colonies’ (see Chapter 2). Soon after, work began on facilities for the 1982 Asian Games, bringing an estimated one million labourers to Delhi. For the Asiad ‘82, a segment of the Yamuna’s floodplain was diverted to build the Players’ Building, a hostel for athletes which could not be completed in time, and the Indraprastha stadium, which soon fell into disuse. Thousands of workers who were involved in the construction of these buildings came to settle in the surrounding area, an open plain along the western embankment (pushta). During the 1980s and l990s, the encouragement of Congress politicians and the studied indifference of the bureaucracy led to expanding swathes of settlement on the strips of land on both sides of the river. By 2004, almost 350,000 poor 8 In her book Unsettling Memories (2002), anthropologist Emma Tarlo persuasively argued that during the Emergency, the state’s desire to discipline poor people’s lives in urban spaces extended to an invasion of their bodies as well. Tarlo showed that the project of urban beautification via slum evictions was linked to the project of population control via forced sterilisation. Displaced slumdwellers were more likely to get resettlement plots on the edge of the city if they got themselves sterilised or if they could prove that they had ‘motivated’ someone to get a vasectomy or tubectomy. Tarlo found that several files in the DDA archives related to the allotment of individual housing plots included certificates of sterilisation to strengthen the claimant’s case.

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squatters lived along the Yamuna in Delhi. There were a few farmers among them, but the majority were workers—vendors, porters, rickshaw-pullers, masons, mechanics, artisans, factory workers, domestic help, security guards—who had built homes in the only centrally located place that afforded them a space close to their means of livelihood. Over the course of more than two decades, they populated the land along the embankments, strengthening their shanty houses with brick, cement and even concrete, securing public water taps and electricity, starting schools and health clinics with the help of NGOs and the state government. Concealed from public view, the low-lying land of the Yamuna Pushta had been transformed into a dense settlement of Delhi’s under-class—a squalid, illegal, but nonetheless vibrant cultural world. In 2004, defecation along the Yamuna by these settlers became the grounds for the demolition of their homes. The Delhi High Court ordered that the Yamuna Pushta bastis be removed because they were responsible for polluting the river and because they were encroaching on the riverbed. Both these charges were based on the selective use of facts. In 2000, court orders had already closed down thousands of small industrial firms across the city on the grounds of water pollution (see Chapter 3). However, even with the flow of industrial effluents reduced to 218 million litres a day (mld), the river continued to be polluted by the unchecked discharge of domestic sewage, receiving an estimated 1789 mld of untreated wastewater as it passed through the city (CPCB 2004; also see CSE 2007). In a city that produced 3267 mld of sewage—more sewage than all the Class II cities in India put together—more than half of all sewage went untreated. Notably, this wastewater was generated by only half of Delhi’s 14 million population—those who live in ‘planned colonies, regularised colonies, resettlement colonies and urban villages’ (CPCB 2004: 1). The other seven million who lived in illegal and unauthorised settlements like the Yamuna Pushta did not have access to drains and sewerage.9 So, by 9 In 2004, Hazards Centre, an organisation researching urban issues from the viewpoint of working-class citizens, attempted to calculate the total quantum of liquid waste generated by areas equipped with sewage lines as well as those

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ordering the eviction of Pushta-dwellers on the grounds of polluting the Yamuna, the judiciary placed the burden of excrement produced by Delhi’s well-to-do sections on the working-class people of the bastis along the river.10 The accusation of encroachment also involved deploying double standards to shift blame. While it was indeed true that the Yamuna Pushta settlers were squatting on land that was legally owned by the DDA (on the west bank) and the Uttar Pradesh Flood and Irrigation Department (on the east bank), far larger tracts of these two agencies’ lands along the river had been taken over by the government and handed over to private bodies in blatant violation of the Master Plan for Delhi which designated these lands as an ecological zone. Besides two power plants and disused sports facilities built in the 1980s, the Yamuna waterfront by the early 2000s was arrayed with an Information Technology Park, a sprawling Metro train depot,11 and the gigantic Akshardham Temple complex which was retrospectively legalised by the Supreme Court over the protests of the land-owning agency (see Srivastava 2009). On the drawing board was the 2010 Commonwealth Games Village with high-rise luxury apartments. A shopping mall, housing for Delhi Metro workers, and a bus depot were also waiting to be built. However, none of these projects were criticised for being located on the riverbed in direct contravention of the area’s land-use without. According to their report, 3296 million litres of wastewater are released into the Yamuna in Delhi every day. Their analysis estimated that the Yamuna Pushta bastis contributed only 2.96 mld (or less than 0.1 per cent) to the total waste flowing into the river. Yet, the Pushta settlements were targeted for eviction while no action was taken against the pucca neighbourhoods that generated the bulk of domestic sewage. 10 The regularity with which judicial attempts to address pollution in the Yamuna have targeted the wrong offenders while ignoring systemic problems and letting state officials off the hook, condoning failure despite more than `1356 crore being spent on the Yamuna Action Plan, indicates the anti-poor prejudice driving the recent judicial activism (see Ramanathan 2006). 11 The Metro depot uses groundwater pumped from the river-bed and discharges waste, including chemicals used in train maintenance, directly into the river (Bharucha 2006).

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designation. In fact, the courts permitted all of them to go ahead. Only the settlements of poor workers were targeted for demolition.

Photo: Author

Displacement and the poor The consequences of the 2004 court order were devastating. Sanjay Amar Colony was one of a series of working-class settlements that ranged along the Yamuna Pushta, the embankment along the western side of the river. The basti was no fly-by-night agglomeration of ramshackle huts. Over the course of more than 20 years, hundreds of brick and cement dwellings came to line the streets. Of the Pushta’s population of 350,000, an estimated 150,000 were displaced over the course of one week in June, with the rest to follow. When the bulldozers left, the Pushta resembled a bombed-out site. Homeless families camped out under the ferocious summer sun, wondering where to go, warily avoiding the police posted in the area to pre-empt any protest. Hundreds of people sifted through the rubble, trying to salvage their belongings.

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Mohammad Faim broke down and cried. ‘Nineteen years in this city’, said the white-haired native of Siwan, Bihar, ‘and I have to return empty-handed. How will I show my face in my village?’ Until a few weeks ago, Faim was known to everyone in his neighbourhood as ‘Prem Hotelwala’, the owner of a successful dhaba (inexpensive restaurant) in Sanjay Amar Colony. The dhaba was patronised by rickshaw pullers, small vendors and artisans, who lived in the basti and plied their trades and wares nearby in the bustling heart of the Walled City. It also supported Faim’s family of five until that summer when Prem Hotel and its customers’ homes were razed to the ground. In the ensuing fire, Faim lost everything but a few stainless-steel plates and plastic jars. ‘At my age, what am I to do? Where will I go?’ he asked. The Yamuna Pushta demolitions were part of a citywide campaign of clearing squatter settlements that, between the years 2000 and 2004, displaced an estimated 800,000 people from the Capital. Although sterilisation was not an ‘incentive’ this time around, in some ways the 2004 demolition outstripped the dark days of the Emergency. For one, far fewer people were resettled. In theory, the Delhi government had a policy of offering land compensation to those who could offer proof of residence. Those who could demonstrate that they settled in the city before 1990 were eligible to receive, upon payment of `7000, a plot of 18 sq metres in a resettlement colony on the outskirts of the city. Those who settled between 1990 and 1998 were eligible to receive a plot of 12.5 sq metres. However, resettlement colonies such as Bhalaswa and Holambi Kalan to which the displaced were sent were little more than wastelands, with no amenities, 20–30 km from people’s place of work (Menon-Sen and Bhan 2008). Yet, despite the difficulties of relocating to such inhospitable places—losing employment, withdrawing children from school—people still grabbed at the chance to secure a legitimate home in the city. Unfortunately, many who qualified to receive resettlement plots did not get them. Only 16 per cent of those displaced from Yamuna Pushta were given plots. The rest found their names missing from municipal lists. Thrusting forward his documents—ration card, voter identity card, government token issued in 1990—Ram Kumar Sah expressed the anger and despair of most Pushta residents, ‘The whole week I’ve been queuing outside this office and that, hoping some official will listen to me. But

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it’s hopeless. I’ve lived here for 25 years. I pushed my thela (cart) for miles, bringing bricks and mud to make this place liveable. I built my house with my own hands. All that hard work, and I get nothing at all? The government should just strangle us. At least that’s quick.’ Those who could not muster even these documents—a majority of residents—stood no chance of receiving any housing land. They were simply rendered homeless. Some scattered to the city’s periphery, living on rent in squatter settlements on the margins of Delhi state, forced to again live precariously in the interstices of the law and the urban economy.

Photo: Author

The shift in popular perceptions and political equations from tolerating and even encouraging settlement in the 1980s and early 1990s to the brute removal of squatters in the 2000s reflected a new hardening of attitudes towards the city’s working class. It indicated an antipathy towards ‘informal’ livelihoods and spaces on the part of an urban elite that had become disproportionately empowered by the liberalisation policies adopted in the 1990s, and that had the backing

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of the higher judiciary. This bourgeois environmentalism ignored the structural imperatives behind squatting on public lands to adopt a more hard-line position against slum-dwellers. A High Court judge remarked that resettling an encroacher on public land was akin to rewarding a pickpocket (see Ramanathan 2006: 3195). But while the encroachers on Yamuna Pushta were deemed criminals in the eyes of the law, they saw themselves as being forced into that role. As Ramadevi pointed out, ‘I sell vegetables, barely making enough to feed my four children. But I save every paisa so that they can go to school and make something of their lives. I can’t afford to pay a high rent for a place to stay. Nor can I spend 20–30 rupees on travel every day. That’s why I live here – gareeb aadmi aur kahan jayega? (Where else would a poor person go?)’ The economics of everyday life in the city, making ends meet on meagre wages, dictate that people live close to their workplace. But this need goes unmet in Delhi’s real estate market that offers scant legal housing for poor workers. During 1994–2004, the DDA planned to build 1.62 million dwelling units but built only 560,000, none of them within the economic reach of the poor.12 It was no surprise then that more than 23 per cent of Delhi’s population lived in bastis like Yamuna Pushta. Standing by the rubble of his demolished home, Abdul Barik gestured to the squalor around him, ‘You think we want to live like this? We are also human. We also want to live decently, without fear of being harassed and uprooted. But there is no other option.’ Under the circumstances, encroachment was not a choice but a compulsion for poor workers, their hope of securing a foothold in the urban economy. However, in the court’s determination to clean the river by clearing its banks of poor squatters, the underlying political economy of housing in the city was ignored, as was the complicity of the state in enabling settlement on the riverfront in the first place. In 2008, the Delhi government announced that it had built 60,000 flats for the urban poor, a claim that was later found to be completely false. An enquiry found that, by 2009, only 7,635 of these flats had been built and another 5,227 were under construction. See ‘Lokayukta ticks off Sheila for false claim over flats for poor’, The Hindu, 19 July 2011. http://www.thehindu.com/todays-paper/ tp-national/tp-newdelhi/article2249115.ece. Accessed on 19 July 2011. 12

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The court’s selective targeting of poor squatters while letting more powerful polluters and encroachers off the hook reflects the partial, and even distorted, environmental vision of Delhi’s well-to-do citizens. A characteristic feature of bourgeois environmentalism is its hostility to the poor in the pursuit of a ‘clean and green’ environment, where the very presence of the poor is equated with pollution. ‘Cleaning’ the Yamuna thus did not take the form of installing sewage treatment facilities but entailed the removal of working-class squatters from the riverbank. As Asher Ghertner points out, an aesthetic vision has been central to the liberalisation-era quest of making Delhi a ‘world-class’ city: ‘According to this aesthetic mode of governing, …widespread in Delhi today, if a development project looks ‘‘world-class,’’ then it is most often declared planned; if a settlement looks polluting, it is sanctioned as unplanned and illegal’ (Ghertner 2011: 280). This helps explain the differential treatment accorded to slums on the one hand and to luxury high-rises and stadiums on the other. Though the eviction of squatters cleared the riverbed, it did nothing to address the actual acute problem of water pollution. Meanwhile, projects that

Photo: Author

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reflected the world-class aspirations of the city’s elite were retrospectively legalised. In 2004, the court-ordered demolitions were aggressively implemented. Once cleared of the bastis, the Yamuna bank was to have been ‘beautified’ with gardens, promenades and parking lots stretching down from the historic Red Fort to the river. The 2004 demolitions on the west bank of the river were followed by equally harsh evictions from the east bank in the summer of 2006. That June, the homes of more than 50,000 squatters were razed to the ground. In what had, by then, become a familiar tragedy, most of those who lost their homes received no compensation. A small fraction was temporarily housed in shelters in Saavda Ghevra, 40 km away, and effectively lost their means of livelihood for the next year (see Baviskar 2012). By the end of 2006, the riverbank had been cleared of all those citizens whom the court deemed to be ‘non-people’—those who failed to legally own private property and whose consequent dependence on the commons rendered them invisible as rights-bearing citizens. Denied access to housing and basic services by the government, and then condemned for this very lack, the eviction of working-class settlers and the destruction of their community reflected the consolidation of anti-poor hostility among the judiciary, bourgeois environmentalists and state officials. In retrospect, it became evident that the hostile manoeuvres of demolition and displacement were a necessary precondition for the transformation of the riverfront as a place of value. The removal of non-people was essential for the reinvention of a non-place.

The making of a place: Commodification and the creation of value By 2007, selectively cleared of its encroachments, the Yamuna riverfront appeared to be terra nullius, an uninhabited place outside the realm of value, inviting investment.13 If the High Court order evicting 13 The move of ignoring or exterminating original residents and then claiming their land as one’s territory is, of course, a familiar story in the history of colonialism (see Carter 1987; Wilmsen 1989). However, it continues in attenuated

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poor squatters seemed to indicate some concern for the polluted state of the river, no such environmental concern was evident when it came to permitting the construction of capital-intensive projects on the river-bed. In July 2009, a Bench of the Supreme Court of India, headed by the Chief Justice, approved the construction of luxury highrise apartments close to the river Yamuna in east Delhi as part of a complex to house athletes and officials during the Commonwealth Games 2010. The 100-acre Games Village had been the centre of controversy since its inception, with an environmentalist NGO Yamuna Jiye Abhiyan (Keep Yamuna Alive Campaign) petitioning the High Court in 2007 to stop construction since permanent structures on the floodplain would adversely affect its ecological functioning as an area crucial for groundwater recharge and accommodating excess flows during the monsoons.14 Construction was also challenged by farmers from Patparganj, Mandavali and Shakarpur villages in east Delhi who participated in a year-long sit-in satyagraha at the proposed site of the Games Village to protest against the takeover of their land, first for the Akshardham temple and then the Games Village. Baljit Singh, general secretary of the Delhi Peasants’ Multipurpose Cooperative Society, showed documents dating back to 1949, granting co-op members the right to cultivate on the river-bed. ‘The sarkar talks about creating biodiversity parks, but we have been maintaining biodiversity for almost sixty years’, he said. ‘Just let us be.’ However, the judges did not find any merit in the environmental arguments of the Abhiyan and the farmers. After reviewing the conflicting reports submitted by the Ministry of Environment and Forests, the National Environmental Engineering Research Institute, and examining the city Master Plan prepared by the DDA, the body responsible for planning and regulating land use in the capital, the Delhi High Court had set up a committee to monitor the forms into the present, through time-tested tactics such as criminalising the poor for survival practices that are a product of state-imposed restrictions. 14 Writ petition www.elaw.org/system/files/Petition+-+final+version.doc). Accessed on 23 July 2011. For other documents related to Yamuna pollution and construction on the riverbed, see Yamuna Jiye Abhiyan, http://www.yamunaji yeabhiyaan.blogspot.com. Accessed on 23 July 2011.

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environmental impacts of the Commonwealth Games Village. However, it refused to halt construction, even though the Abhiyan argued that if construction continued, the project would be a fait accompli and any subsequent order against it would be meaningless. In response, the DDA, as the agency in charge of the project, appealed against the High Court order in the Supreme Court, claiming that an environmental oversight committee would hamper work on a project of national importance which had to be completed on a tight schedule. The Supreme Court concurred with their view and, dismissing the environmental committee appointed by the High Court, allowed construction to forge ahead without hindrance. However, and most significantly, the Supreme Court did not justify its decision on grounds that the urgency or importance of the project superseded environmental concerns. The judgement stated categorically that all the arguments about the ecological value of the location were baseless: the place was not a river-bed or a floodplain. This authoritative pronouncement by the Supreme Court, an imprimatur for converting the riverfront to real estate, has sealed the fate of the Yamuna. No longer a non-place, it has become a frontier for get-rich-quick schemes (see Tsing 2005), for speculation in a land market that has seen spiralling prices in the booming post-liberalised urban economy. Along with speculation have come the sweetheart deals, with state officials colluding with private developers to profit from the transfer of public lands. As discussed earlier in this volume, the subsidy to builders included bailing out Emaar MGF, the Dubaibased real estate developer contracted to build the Games Village. The DDA allotted 27 acres of land at no charge to the company to build 1,168 luxury flats to house athletes and officials. It was agreed that, after the Games, the firm would sell two-thirds of the flats while DDA would sell the remainder. After the financial downturn of 2009, Emaar MGF pleaded that it could not execute the project in time because of a cash crunch. DDA responded by giving it an interest-free loan of USD 100 million (`500 crore), to be repaid in the form of additional flats.15 15

See Chapter 4.

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Among similar subsidies given to private developers, the case of the Akshardham Temple complex stands out. Built on 90 acres of the floodplain, the sprawling site also includes a lake, extensive gardens with a musical fountain, an IMAX theatre, a food court, and a Centre for Applied Research in Social Harmony. Commentators have characterised the complex as a religious theme-park, a form of ‘Disneydivinity’ (Srivastava 2009). Construction of the temple began illegally in April 2000, despite protests from farmers who were evicted from the land, and from the Uttar Pradesh Flood and Irrigation Department which petitioned the Court arguing that 30 acres of land belonged to them but had been illicitly claimed and disposed of by the DDA. However, the Supreme Court ruled in favour of the temple, pointing out that most of it had already been built—an argument that was likely to have been influenced by the power of the organisation building it. The Swaminarayan sect is not only well-endowed but well-connected; the BJP-led National Democratic Alliance was ruling at the Centre at that time and Home Minister Lal Krishna Advani was a personal friend of the sect’s leader. Projects such as the Akshardham temple and the Commonwealth Games Village—the term ‘village’ suggests a pastoral community, a lowrise settlement harmonising with its setting, when what has been built consists of multi-storeyed luxury apartments with a captive power plant—illustrate how the new development has been actively fostered by the government with large subsidies being given to corporate organisations, not only through land being transferred at nominal rates but through interest-free loans and buy-back guarantees. Other capital-intensive projects have rapidly flowed in their wake. With the Akshardham temple acting as an anchoring point on the eastern bank and a network of flyovers and widened roads being built to accommodate the enhanced traffic parallel to the eastern riverfront, other concrete developments have followed suit. The Delhi Metro Rail Corporation has located its Yamuna Bank station and extensive train depot within 300 metres of the river; Parsvnath Builders has constructed a shopping mall adjacent to the Games Village; and the remaining land along the river is earmarked for similar projects. The reinvention of the riverfront is proceeding apace. As one travels along the overhead Metro line from central to east Delhi, crossing the

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Yamuna on the new metro bridge, one can look down on the patchwork of farms rapidly being replaced by grand buildings. In most citizens’ eyes, the transformation is a welcome one: finally, the neglected suburb of east Delhi, home to low-rise tenements and middle-class neighbourhoods, has a skyline to be proud of. And if this skyline swallows up the non-place that was the river, that is just as it should be, for in its place there is now a landscape of value, where the worth of a place can be measured in money and in the recognisable form of architectural excess.

Ecology, commodity aesthetics and the flow of value What, then, remains of the Yamuna as an ecological entity that lies outside the circuit of commodity value?16 Has the imagination of urban Delhi been completely colonised by a vision of the riverfront as a ‘world-class’ space? Has the river been comprehensively transformed into real estate? As this chapter shows, the line between water and land not only changes with the seasons—becoming especially blurred during the three monsoon months when the river swells to accommodate 70 per cent of its annual flow—but has also altered over the years as successive embankments have gradually hemmed in the river and ‘reclaimed’ land from its bed. Until the 1970s, the floodplain was regarded as wasteland, given over to seasonal cultivation by farmers’ cooperatives who leased land from the Flood and Irrigation Department. The very fact of land ownership by that agency indicated that the primary purpose of this strip was related to the management of water in the city. Small-scale farming on the rich silt deposited by the river was not seen as inimical to the task of regulating water flows. The incremental construction of embankments in a piecemeal fashion to protect settlements along the river from occasional flooding eventually created a network of parallel lines that effectively restricted the river’s channel and allowed accelerated build-up on the banks. 16 For an instructive discussion of the contrast between the ‘commons’ and ‘commodities’, see Bakker (2007) and Linebaugh (2009).

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The major spate of construction along the river’s west bank before the Asian Games of 1982 was accompanied by the spread of squatter settlements housing the city’s working class that, with the encouragement of the government, kept expanding over the next two decades. Their subsequent eviction on the charge of pollution cleared the way for the construction of capital-intensive projects of urban infrastructure and elite consumption. These projects gave material shape to then Chief Minister Sheila Dikshit’s vision of riverfront development that mimics other ‘world-class’ cities. Dikshit frequently mooted the idea of channelising the river in a manner resembling the Thames in London and the Seine in Paris, with the river fitting into the cityscape as a site of recreation and leisure, with cultural performances and other modes of public consumption. This seemingly benign project of creating the riverfront as a public space, one that may forge a relationship between the river and the residents of Delhi, elides key issues, social and ecological. One, this space will not really be open to the ‘public’ for the direction of its redistribution already shows that it favours corporate capital and private and elite public modes of consumption. Not only will these new spaces exclude most residents of the city but, in fact, have already done so—the land made available for the new developments has been taken from farmers and by evicting hundreds of thousands of poor slum-dwellers who had previously occupied that land. It must also be borne in mind that the Yamuna is not the Thames or the Seine. Its distinctive rhythms are harmonised to the Indian subcontinent’s seasons. With the bulk of its flow concentrated in the monsoons, the Yamuna is liable to breach its embankments if deprived of its present fertile expanse. While the floods in Mumbai and New Orleans in 2005 are recent examples of the hazards of building in a river’s floodplain (Kelman 2003), the residents of north Delhi and the Pushta have also experienced the risks of a swiftly rising river. The vast stretches of riverbed revealed in the summer months may lure developers, but the line between land and water is swiftly dissolved once the rains come. With climate change, the flows of the Yamuna promise to become even more unpredictable as the Himalayan glaciers that feed the river recede and as episodes of rainfall condense into

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more frequent ‘extreme events’. Despite upstream abstractions, the likelihood of floods is higher than ever. The spatial and temporal flow of the Yamuna through Delhi shows the fluctuating fortunes of urban ecology as a concern in the cultural politics of the city. In 2009, the ecological value of the floodplain was comprehensively dismissed by the Supreme Court’s declaration that the area along the river was neither a river-bed nor a floodplain and could be incorporated into a regime of commodity value as real estate. However, the floods of 2010 challenged that assertion, reminding the city of the presence of a river in its midst, an ecological entity that could not be fully controlled and that demanded its natural due.17 In this chapter, I have tried to show that the contestations over the Yamuna are not merely another inevitable instance of the enclosure of the commons, a historical accompaniment to the onward march of capitalism (Thompson 1977), or of ‘accumulation by dispossession’ in an age of ‘new imperialism’ (Harvey 2003). Though they do fit within the wider pattern of accumulation going on in contemporary India, the processes that have rendered the riverfront a place of commodified value are also anchored in a longer-standing set of aesthetic values associated with modernity (Glover 2008). These values made the riverfront a non-place inhabited by non-people, illegible as either nature or culture. Among the many intersecting ways of making nature recognisable as a place of value—spectacular scenery, charismatic mega-fauna, religious significance, national prestige— commodification is only one (see Cederlöf and Sivaramakrishnan 2005; Davis 1995). It is the conjuncture with the period of liberalisation that has enabled the emergence of commodity aesthetics as the dominant form of imparting value to the river, allowing the Yamuna to be seen and imagined as a desirable place. However, the floods assert 17 The ecological value of the floodplain was again at issue in March 2016 when the DDA allowed the spiritual guru Sri Sri Ravi Shankar’s Art of Living Foundation to hold a three day World Culture Festival on the floodplain. Following widespread protest and a petition filed by Yamuna Jiye Abhiyan, the National Green Tribunal appointed a committee that reported significant damage to riverine ecology and then imposed a fine of `5 crores on Art of Living, which the Foundation continues to dispute.

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a contrary doctrine, reiterating the force of ecological limits, and emphasising that the floodplain of the Yamuna continues to be a place that defies commodification and thus defines the limits of capital. As Mike Davis (1999) reminds us, nature is not a stable backdrop against which humans can orchestrate their affairs. That natural processes have their own dynamism and integrity must be borne in mind lest world-class ambitions founder on the fluvial bed of the Yamuna.

Illustration: Orijit Sen

7

The Ridge

The cultural politics of ‘socio-nature’ Since their inception, the social sciences and humanities have tried to understand the relationship between nature and society. In this chapter, I follow one thread of a complex skein of theories, starting with Raymond Williams’s seminal essay ‘Ideas of Nature’ (1980). Williams argued that Nature was a cultural artefact. Not only was the natural world physically transformed by human actions, our very perception of it was shaped by socially produced ideas and sentiments. Referring to this material and imaginative work, Williams wrote: ‘We have mixed our labour with the earth, our forces with its forces too deeply to be able to separate each other out’ (ibid.: 83). His classic work The Country and the City shows how an urbanising society, with its ‘historically varied experience’ of the Industrial Revolution, came to change its view of rural life and the countryside, a shift reflected in the literature of the period (1973: 2). Williams’s work precedes a more recent surge of writing in political ecology that tries to transcend dualistic conceptions of nature-society relations by tracking how nature is socially constructed and culturally produced in the past and present (Cronon 1996; Peet and Watts 1996; Castree and Braun 2001). One strand of this research explores cities and how their apparently artefactual character is in fact based

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on material and discursive transformations of nature (Cronon 1991; Gandy 2002; Heynen et al. 2006). This literature is also influenced by Bruno Latour’s Actor-Network Theory (1987, 1993), the notion that complex networks of human and non-human ‘actants’ combine in hybrid forms that defy the nature-culture divide. While Latour’s work pushes the boundaries of how ‘socio-nature’ may be conceived, it tends to ignore the power relations that permeate such networks. As Williams says, ‘If we say only that we have mixed our labour with the earth, our forces with its forces, we are stopping short of the truth that we have done this unequally’ (1980: 84). Understanding the processes of ‘socio-nature’ demands keeping in mind social inequality as well as natural variability. Location matters: the cultural geography of class, caste, nation and gender and the materiality of biophysical processes in specific places are equally consequential. Studying environmental conflict and collective action requires relating human actors and their habitus to habitats that alter and exert power. This chapter approaches the contentions around Delhi’s green spaces from this analytical perspective.

Mangarbani: Sacred grove and developers’ dream Nothing prepares you for the first view of Mangarbani. There’s the Gurgaon-Faridabad toll road, your standard highway on Delhi’s outskirts, rolling through a landscape where dusty scrub vegetation is being rapidly replaced by dustier high-rise construction sites. There’s an eyesore called the Gurgaon Faridabad Combined Solid Waste Management facility, acres of open garbage through which forage scrawny cows and flapping crows. Beside the kachcha (unpaved) road along the dump’s broken boundary wall, there are deep, jagged-edged craters, relicts from the stone quarrying that used to happen here until 15 years ago. The land is rocky and open, dotted about with trees and shrubs, one of those ennui-inducing views where your mind begins to wander to more interesting things like the grocery shopping list or reminding yourself to call the plumber when you get home.

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In the middle of this nowhere, Pradip Krishen, author of Trees of Delhi (2006) who I am accompanying, stops the car. We walk for about 10 minutes, winding our way past rocks hugged by stunted plants, between trees twisted by hot dry winds. It is 8 o’clock on a morning in late March and it already feels like summer. And then, suddenly, we arrive at the lip of a cliff. The ground drops away and so does my jaw. Spread out below us is a deep wooded valley, densely yet delicately green, the expanse of its tree canopy broken only by the whitewashed domed tower of a small shrine in the distance. Besides the shrine, the only other sign of human presence is a boundary pillar on the far end of the valley. That’s it; the rest is undisturbed forest. The only sound is the plaintive call of peafowl, the only movement is their ponderous glide from one tree to another. Now and then, the silence is punctuated by the racket of parakeets arrowing across the sky. A gust of breeze briefly ruffles the grass by the outcrop of rocks below our feet. Everything else is still. We could be 200 kilometres away in the middle of Sariska National Park except that we are not. We’re in Delhi NCR (National Capital Region), 20 minutes away from the wall-to-wall carpeting of tarmac-glassconcrete-stone, 20 minutes from traffic jams, crowds, noise, dust and smoke. Yet it feels like we have landed on a different planet.

Photo: Pradip Krishen

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What’s so special about Mangarbani? It’s not as if Delhi lacks large green spaces. Besides numerous parks and gardens, there is the densely-wooded expanse of the Ridge, the northern-most spur of the Aravalli range which stretches all the way to Rajasthan. However, from the ecological point of view, the Ridge is deeply compromised. A lot of it has been spruced up for human use, the undergrowth cleared and exotic species planted. Among these imports, the most pernicious has been vilayati keekar (Prosopis juliflora) which has established itself by suppressing indigenous plant species and the life forms they support.1 Because it is hardy and propagates easily, P. juliflora has been a favourite of forest departments looking for a quick-fix for greening India since colonial times. So, in most large green areas in Delhi and its environs today, P. juliflora is an invasive alien species, dominating over native flora, to the detriment of local biodiversity. Mangarbani has managed to remain remarkably free of the vilayati keekar curse. Even more miraculous, it has undergone virtually no human interference or exploitation for several hundred years. The surrounding villages have protected the grove as sacred to the memory of Gudariya Baba, a hermit whose shrine stands at the base of the valley. They believe that anyone who cuts wood or grazes their animals in this 100-hectare forest invites the Baba’s wrath and retribution. So Mangarbani stands out in the Delhi region for being an unspoiled old growth forest of a kind unique to the Aravalli range, a startling vision of what these ancient hills would look like if they were protected from biotic pressure. And what a vision it is! The top of the valley and its steep sides are thickly covered with dhau, a medium-sized tree with delicate leaves that go from pale green to purple brown through the seasons. Such a 1 Gold and Gujar (2002) have analysed how villagers in Rajasthan differently value vilayati (foreign or imported) keekar—P. juliflora (mesquite) is a native of Mexico—and desi (native or indigenous) keekar (Acacia nilotica), is also called babool. P. juliflora’s thorns and inedible leaves keep browsing animals away, making it useless for pastoralists seeking fodder, whereas Acacia nilotica yields fodder as well as an edible gum. Gold and Gujar argue that desi and vilayati—native and foreign—are binary categories that organise perceptions of modernity in rural India, especially with respect to agrarian environments and species.

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profusion of dhau is typical of the climax vegetation of some tropical dry deciduous forests. According to Krishen, whose book brought Mangarbani to the notice of a wider public, the tree used to be found all over the Ridge but is now in danger of disappearing in Delhi. Two other trees found in such forests that have vanished from the Ridge— kala siris and salai with its fragrant resin—survive only in Mangarbani in the Delhi region. The valley includes some dry and sandy patches where plants are typical of arid regions: trees like kareel—the kair of the famous Rajasthani vegetable dish kair-sangri—and roheda with its flamboyant orange flowers, can be found. The moist valley floor is shadowed by tall kaim—the original kadamba of Krishna’s Vrindavan— and kanju with its seeds encased in translucent papery discs.2 Along with these are the more common trees of the Ridge: ronjh, bistendu, hingot and doodhi. In this season, doodhi ki bel is laden with sweet-smelling creamy flowers; its perfume escorts us down to Gudariya Baba’s shrine.3 On the path to the shrine is a nasty surprise. There is a temple, a large building with a courtyard and pond, which is being expanded to double its size. The land has already been cleared of its vegetation. The temple is the site of an annual fair and other religious events and the crowds that descended on it most recently have left behind smelly heaps of dirty Styrofoam plates. Although the temple’s growing precincts pose a problem in this pristine area, there is an even bigger issue at stake, one that threatens the very existence of Mangarbani. 2 Vrindavan, also known as Braj, is an area in present-day Mathura district, Uttar Pradesh, sacred to the Hindu deity Krishna. In legend, Vrindavan was an ancient forest on the banks of the river Yamuna where the young Krishna lived, grazed cows, sported with village maids and fought demons. It became a place of pilgrimage for Hindus of the Vaishnava sects from the 17th century onwards and several temples were built here. The forest was gradually destroyed over the last two centuries. The kadamba tree is associated with Krishna’s life in Vrindavan: in an episode made famous in songs and paintings, Krishna stole the clothes of bathing gopis (girl cowherds) and hid them in a kadamba tree. 3 The scientific name of dhau is Anogeissus pendula. Kala siris is Albizia odoratissima and salai is Boswellia serrata. Kareel is Capparis decidua; roheda is Tecomella undulata; kaim is Mitragyna parvifolia; and kanju is Holoptelea integrifolia. Ronjh is Acacia leucophloea; bistendu is Diospyros cordifolia; hingot is Balanites roxburghi and doodhi is Wrightia tinctoria. Doodhi ki bel is Vallaris solanacea. For a complete list of the flora of Mangarbani, see Shahabuddin et al. (2013).

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Photo: Author

Mangarbani (‘bani’ means ‘little forest’) and its surrounding land used to be the shamilat deh (commons) of Mangar, Bandhwari and Baliawas villages. These settlements are dominated by the Gujjar caste, with about 3,000 landowning households. Since pre-colonial times, the malikan deh (proprietary body of a village) which consisted of all landowning households represented through village panchayats (local councils), controlled these forests, grazing lands and ponds. In revenue records, the commons were classified as ghair mumkin pahaad (uncultivable hills) and therefore exempt from agricultural tax. Landless households in the village belonging to the Scheduled Castes had rights to collect firewood and fodder from these commons only at the pleasure of their upper-caste landowning patrons, as did agricultural tenants. In the late 1970s, the governments of Haryana and Uttar Pradesh states and the Union Territory of Delhi began carving out plots of the land in the commons to give to landless Scheduled Caste households for cultivation. This was ostensibly a relatively painless programme of ‘land reforms’ since it did not expropriate any existing landowner of their cultivable land, only allocating a portion of their shared ‘uncultivable’ commons. However, the landowners were not

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willing to allow even this limited curtailment of their rights and managed to successfully block it.4 Fearing that the government would try again to wrest control of their commons, landowning villagers across Haryana state mobilised politically to get the Punjab Village Common Lands Regulation Act of 1961 amended. From being collectively owned by the village panchayat, the commons were partitioned such that individual owners of agricultural land received titles to common lands in proportion to the size of their private holdings. The land divisions remained notional until 1986 when individual claims were demarcated on the ground. This privatisation of the commons facilitated their commodification. Several villagers sold their titles to real estate developers and speculators who have fenced and walled in their plots, preparatory to clearing and building on them. This activity is so far confined to the area surrounding Mangarbani but may soon encroach into the forest if the real estate lobby in the Haryana government has its way. Many individual titles have been sold and re-sold to a ‘powerful business-politico-bureaucratic-police nexus with ostensibly no interest in agricultural activities’.5 The actors who collaborate in this nexus include influential local men who persuade their fellow villagers to sell their land. Some of them have set up small offices along the main road advertising their business as property brokers.6 They get financially backing and enforcement muscle from local politicians who bribe and intimidate lower-level officials to legitimise and expedite transactions. Bigger real estate firms either buy land through these brokers or appoint them as their agents on the ground, getting capital from 4 See Chakravarty-Kaul (1996) for a finely-observed account of a similar conflict over the commons in north-west Delhi. Her analysis includes a detailed examination of the case law on disputes around rights to the commons from the colonial period onwards. 5 This term was used by Ashok Khemka, former Director General of Consolidation of Land Holdings in Haryana, an IAS (Indian Administrative Service) officer turned whistle-blower, who was soon transferred out of this post. See http://www.thehindu.com/news/how-village-common-property-along-theAravallis-is-grabbed/article4394445.ece, accessed on 9 June 2013. 6 For a detailed account of this process, see Levien (2018).

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investors who include not only people seeking homes and offices for their own use, but also speculators looking to gain from the rise in property prices. For owners of unaccounted wealth, real estate—with its large gap between the declared and actual value of property and its undocumented cash transactions—is a convenient way to invest black money. Corrupt politicians and bureaucrats are an essential part of this real estate economy. They help developers negotiate the regulatory hurdles required to secure building permissions, in return for a share in the profits. The glue of kinship holds this tight-knit network together. Several leading politicians have immediate relatives in the real estate business. It is this political economy of land transformation, extending from the village to the state’s topmost leaders, that led in 2011 to the Draft Development Plan 2031 for Mangar which zoned the area for commercial and residential use, a designation that would be a death sentence for Mangarbani. From 1991, developers started using the Consolidation Act, a law meant to redress the fragmentation of agricultural fields and village commons, to accumulate land holdings in violation of the Land Ceiling Act. Since the holdings are benami (under fictitious or other names), it is difficult to track and prosecute the actual owners. With the help of political leaders, corrupt revenue department officials, land brokers and complicit villagers, Mangarbani was on the verge of going the same way as the rest of the Aravalli landscape—denuded, buried under concrete, an ancient forest gone forever. One would think that it required a sea change in values for villagers who have protected Mangarbani for centuries to now be willing to see it destroyed. But this change did not happen overnight. Quartzite quarrying in the Aravalli hills in Delhi, Haryana and Rajasthan accelerated in the 1980s when Delhi underwent a construction boom before the Asian Games in 1982. Miners struck deeper and wider over the next two decades as the NCR witnessed unprecedented growth. Some quarries were on private lands, but most were on village commons and panchayat leaders were quick to seize the chance to make money, even though farmers reported that the blasting and removal of rocks was affecting groundwater. In places, the landscape was visibly altered with entire hills gouged out over the course of months. It was only in 2002

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that, acting on a public interest petition, the Supreme Court of India ordered a ban on mining in the entire Aravalli range. However, by that time, farming and livestock rearing in this semi-arid terrain were already dwindling as remunerative livelihoods. Once the money from mining stopped, villagers were left high and dry and altogether willing to consider other options for their land. The Mangarbani forest, however, remained intact over the last three decades even as the surrounding landscape and people’s relationships to land changed rapidly. What tipped the scales against the collective protection of Mangarbani as a sacred grove was the tide of real estate development sweeping in from Gurgaon and Faridabad. These two ‘satellite towns’, planned as magnets to reduce congestion in Delhi and unencumbered by the Urban Land Ceiling Act that prohibited private firms from undertaking large-scale projects in the capital city, offered rich pickings to real estate developers. Selling to developers made many landowners cash-rich beyond their imagination. Farming was a subsistence activity at best, so these villagers were only too willing to give it up. Land in the area around Mangarbani remained low-value until about six years ago when the road connecting Gurgaon and Faridabad was upgraded in anticipation of the eventual merging of the boundaries of these two expanding cities. The villagers in this area who sold their lands, including their claim to the Mangarbani forest, were only doing what most of Haryana’s villagers had already done or were waiting to do.7

This is not to suggest that there has been no farmers’ opposition to land acquisition for real estate development in Haryana. In 2008, a mahapanchayat (super-panchayat of several villages) declared that it would not allow the government to acquire 25,000 acres of land from 22 villages in Jhajjar district and 18 villages in Gurgaon district for a Special Economic Zone to be set up by Reliance Industries, India’s biggest private company. See http://articles.times ofindia.indiatimes.com/2008-05-12/chandigarh/27778469_1_sez-policy-sezissue-pelpa. Accessed on 9 June 2013. However, such instances of resistance in Haryana and neighbouring Uttar Pradesh are primarily tactics for negotiating better terms, not stopping land transactions. Landowners are not unwilling to sell; they just don’t want to get a pittance from the government which then hands over the land to a private company which makes a killing from the rise in its value. Michael Levien’s research on land acquisition in Rajasthan (Levien 2012, 2013) 7

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But what of the religious significance of Mangarbani? How could Gudariya Baba’s prohibition be defied? When asked about this, some villagers reiterated their commitment to him. ‘Baba ne kahaa ki yahaan koi lakdi nahin kaatega, pashu nahin charayega. Hum barson se unke kahe ko maante aa rahen hain’ (Baba said that no one will cut wood or graze animals here. We have been abiding by his words for ages), said Jairam Harsana of Mangar village. He also described what happened to those who violated the Baba’s injunction: livestock dying, wooden beams in houses bursting into flame. But by selling his title to the forest he is at a remove from these acts of retribution since he will not be the one actually cutting the trees. He has regrets, though, about selling the sacred grove. In 2011, he signed a petition along with other elderly villagers asking the government to protect the forest. When asked how that would affect the rights of those who had purchased the titles to Mangarbani’s land intending to develop it, he expressed his helplessness, ‘It was 30 years ago. We didn’t know. It was only on paper. No one knew who owned which piece of land. We didn’t think it would come to this.’ If there is regret in some quarters about losing the forest, other villagers seem to be taking Gudariya Baba’s legacy in a different direction altogether. As mentioned above, near the Baba’s simple whitewashed shrine is a newly built temple, painted stand-out saffron and all set to expand its precincts, adding space as well as deities to the Shiva-led pantheon currently installed for worship. With the temple attracting more devotees and visitors, Mangarbani’s spiritual centre seems to be shifting away from Gudariya Baba to the standard Hindu multi-god, multi-purpose buffet, bringing in a commercial element which was earlier absent from the forest. The temple is both a salve to the conscience that rues selling out the Baba—‘Hum is dharmik sthal ko sudhaar rahein hain’ (We are improving this religious place) and a sign that the Baba’s spirit may soon be superseded by the all-toofamiliar process of temple-led land grab.8 shows that land prices rose eight to 12 times after such a transfer, an escalation that the original landowners did not benefit from. 8 Temples sprout up almost overnight on city pavements, in the crevices of peepal (Ficus religiosa) trees, as kiosks set into walls, on abandoned plots of land, in squatter settlements as a bid to stake claim to land which a state soft on ‘hurting

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Perhaps villagers would have had a clearer consensus about protecting Mangarbani if the forest had remained a common. If individual titles had not been allotted to landowners, it would have been harder to sell the undivided land. But this is speculation. What is evident is that although the village no longer functions as a collective body in deciding the fate of the forest, another collective entity has stepped in to save Mangarbani. A group of environmentalists, most of them upper-middle-class residents of Gurgaon with an interest in water conservation, 9 started a campaign by publicising Mangarbani’s eco-logical richness and calling upon the government to fulfil its environmental mandate. The campaigners pointed out that changing land use in Mangarbani would violate a 1996 Supreme Court order that densely wooded areas, regardless of ownership, be legally notified as forests and protected accordingly. They demanded that the Draft Development Plan of Mangar which zones the area for residential and commercial use be scrapped. The campaign received sustained media coverage and, in January 2013, succeeded in getting the National Green Tribunal (NGT) to order the Haryana government to stop all non-forest activities in the forests around Mangar village.10 In May 2014, it received a further religious sentiments’ is reluctant to act against. From a small icon, to tiled and cemented surrounds, to concrete canopies and domes is usually a series of quick steps, as is the emergence of a thriving spiritual economy of patrons, priests, vendors of ritual offerings and worshippers. However recent their vintage, temples tend to announce themselves as ‘pracheen’ (ancient) from the get go. 9 Boosters style Gurgaon as the ‘Millennium City’ (Oldenburg 2018), a destination for corporate offices and high-end residential projects with names like Belvedere Towers and Malibu Towne, but first among the basic infrastructural amenities absent in the city is water. Over-exploitation has depleted the aquifer; groundwater is brackish. The more Gurgaon’s affluent population grows, the worse its water problems (Soni 2000). Environmentalists have so far not been successful in either regulating groundwater extraction in Gurgaon or instituting rainwater harvesting on a significant scale. For an account of unregulated urbanisation and the creation of landscapes of inequality on Delhi’s periphery, see Soni (2000) and Chatterji (2013). 10 http://www.downtoearth.org.in/content/green-tribunal-orders-halt-allnon-forest-activities-aravallis-faridabad. Accessed on 9 June 2013.

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boost when the National Capital Region Planning Board decided that Mangarbani and a 500 metre-wide ring around it would be earmarked as a ‘no-construction zone’.11 After delaying for almost two years, the Haryana Forest Department finally demarcated 677 acres in Mangarbani and 1200 acres of the buffer zone in February 2016.12 The move should deter construction and water-intensive land use in an area which is the watershed of a seasonal stream that runs through Mangarbani, recharging groundwater and feeding nearby Dhauj lake, important functions in a region where water resources are severely depleted. Water conservation is only one of the ecological benefits of the area around Mangarbani. Most of the buffer zone has scattered and stunted trees that are indigenous to the Aravalli hills. Although the invasive P. juliflora has spread here, native species such as dhau, ronjh, the flame-flowered palash and blazing yellow-blossomed amaltas still predominate.13 Conservationists argue that restoring the forest will recreate a habitat for indigenous fauna such as nilgai and jackals. Mangarbani could be integrated into a continuous biodiversity corridor in the Aravalli hills stretching from Asola Wildlife Sanctuary in Delhi to Kot in Rajasthan. The campaign demands that the Haryana government not only comply with the Supreme Court and NGT’s orders but also take steps to protect the larger landscape. However, given the state government’s complicity in dubious land deals, it is unlikely to sort out and settle tangled property rights or make villagers partners in future conservation. Despite the official demarcation of the forest, there are periodic reports of fully grown trees being cut in the area.14 Only continued pressure from conservationists, working

11 http://www.thehindu.com/todays-paper/tp-national/tp-newdelhi/notourism-activity-construction-in-mangar-bani/article6014393.ece. Accessed on 23 May 2014. 12 http://www.thehindu.com/news/cities/Delhi/haryana-demarcates-mangarbani-forest-area/article8196063.ece. Accessed on 5 June 2017. 13 Palash is Butea monosperma; amaltas is Cassia fistula. 14 http://timesofindia.indiatimes.com/city/gurgaon/Mangar-Bani-loses-300trees-in-3-months/articleshow/55989198.cms. Accessed on 5 June 2017.

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through the courts and media, might compel the government to protect Mangarbani. Although Mangarbani is in some ways a special case—a sacred grove on the periphery of a modern metropolis—it highlights the processes through which urban India acquires or loses green spaces, the political economy of land ownership and use. It also delineates the social transformations that reconfigure the cultural meanings that inhere in green spaces. The Mangarbani forest came out of obscurity in the last decade because it featured in the handbook of a naturalist (Krishen 2006), who also guided walks in the area. The weekend visitors it attracted were wilderness lovers, affluent residents of Delhi and Gurgaon, many of whom became home-owners thanks to real estate development facilitated by the ‘political-bureaucratic nexus’ that took over village lands. Now that this process threatens Mangarbani, in an ironic twist, some beneficiaries of land commodification have become ‘environmentalists’, ranging themselves against the ‘builder mafia’ from whom they bought their luxury apartments and bungalows, seeking to protect a green space that is not only perceived to be ecologically valuable but also an enhancement of their quality of life. From a mutually advantageous relationship with builders, sections of the elite have shifted their allegiance to a new axis, aligning with the older generation of Mangar villagers. Thus, even as the corporate identity and power of the village is broken down into individual fragments that hasten the commodification of land, another collective group constitutes itself as the guardian of the forest. The environmentalists do not replace the villagers, nor are they in conflict with all of them. In fact, by talking to villagers about the biodiversity of the forest, reminding them that it is their protection that has sustained this grove over the centuries, the environmentalists hope to revive a collective sentiment that will enable them to fight together for the future of Mangarbani. Even as the Baba’s spiritual hold on the villagers seems to be eroding, environmentalists have stepped in with ecological arguments about respecting all life forms, the inter-connectedness of trees, soil, water and air, living in harmony with nature, arguments that at times resemble a secular religion.

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The Delhi Ridge The sensibility that underlies the environmentalists’ efforts—their appreciation of Mangarbani as an original ecological place worthy of protection—is both modern and recent. Although many of the cities that flourished at the site of present-day Delhi over the last two millennia had established systems to harness water and source timber and fuel from the hinterland, and had also designated land use based on topography and soil, they did not set aside any area for its ecological importance. Delhi’s two major natural features—the river Yamuna and the hilly Ridge—went virtually ignored until the 1970s, even though they together defined the catchment that watered the wells and ponds crucial for the city’s existence.15 The idea that these landscapes are valuable and worthy of special attention emerged only when Delhi’s expansion had decimated them or severely damaged their ecological integrity. Ironically, as is often the case, the champions of these beleaguered urban ecologies emerged from the very middle classes that were the beneficiaries of urban growth.16 That is, the changing Ridge and the burgeoning middle classes evolved together, each giving shape to the other. ‘The Ridge’ is the colonial term for the area locally known as pahaadi (hilly land), a series of undulations that begin close to the river in north Delhi and stretch to the south-west, increasingly distant from the river. Images from the 19th century depict the Ridge as an open, unpopulated wilderness, with barely a tree in sight. Perhaps this was a matter of perspective: British and Indian eyes would have passed over the thorny scrub forest as a wasteland because it lacked useful or imposing trees. The Ridge may also have been laid bare over the years as trees were cut to provide city-dwellers with fuel, the land grazed by livestock.17 However, its barren contours were to turn green in the next century (Mann and Sehrawat 2009). See Chapter 6. See Raymond Williams (1972). 17 According to forester R.N. Parker, this is likely to have occurred after the 1857 Mutiny because, at that time, the vegetation was thick enough for ‘the attacking [British] force [to] advance concealed in the brushwood stretching up 15 16

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When New Delhi, the imperial capital was being built (1911–31) at the foot of what is now known as the Central Ridge, the Viceroy, Lord Hardinge, initiated plans for extensive afforestation, imagining a dense evergreen curtain behind a ‘splendid ... Government House’ placed at the top of Raisina hill, ‘commanding the most lovely views over the city of Delhi and over the whole plain, ... dominating the whole of the country round, while the slope down to the plain would be covered with terraces and fountains like a miniature Versailles.’18 To create this arboreal backdrop for the principal seat of imperial government, Hardinge drew upon the expertise of P.H. Clutterbuck, a forester from the United Provinces, who suggested several indigenous trees from the drier parts of the Himalayan foothills. His advice was endorsed by W.M. Hailey who inspected the early experimental plantings in 1916: ‘I would not extend the plantation of exotics. They should only come after we have established indigenous trees.’19 Planting proceeded slowly and on a small scale, limited by wartime budget constraints. The results were not satisfactory. Trees died off as soon as watering was stopped; few species could withstand the rigours of the Ridge, its thin soils and exposure to extreme summer and winter temperatures. Over the next 20 years, the government struggled with this uphill task. Though some native trees such as ronjh, palash and siris managed to survive,20 it was vilayati keekar (Prosopis juliflora) that proved to be the most tenacious. As the Annual Report for Government Gardens 1935–36 noted, ‘Prosopis juliflora, one of the hardiest of drought resisting trees, forms the main base of useful, evergreen vegetation; and trees raised from seed a few years ago are now well developed and gradually extending in to fresh ground.’21 to within musket shot of the walls (of the Mughal city of Shahjahanabad)’ (1920: 25). It is also reported that Firoz Shah Tughlaq, Sultan of Delhi from 1351 to 1388, planted trees on the northern Ridge, using the area for hunting. 18 Letter from Hardinge to Edwin Lutyens, 19 August 1912, quoted in Krishen (2006: 37). 19 Letter from Hailey, Secretary, Notified Area Committee, 13 January 1916. Hailey went on to become the Chief Commissioner of Delhi (1918–24). 20 The scientific name of siris is Albizia lebbek. 21 Punctuation added.

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This exotic had a strong champion in William Mustoe, Director of Horticulture, who is reported to have personally tucked individual seedlings into the ground.22 Mustoe’s diligence and P. juliflora’s persistence left a lasting legacy. The ‘useful evergreen’ tree became an invasive species, crowding out the natives. P. juliflora now rules the Ridge, as it does across much of the subcontinent’s drylands. Although the Ridge was designated as Reserve Forest by the colonial government in 1933,23 its legal status did not offer watertight protection. When land was needed for other purposes, portions of the wooded Ridge were made available. As the Delhi Improvement Trust expanded the city to the west to accommodate the ‘Depressed Castes’ from the congested Walled City and those displaced by the construction of New Delhi (Hosagrahar 2005; Legg 2007), the central section of the Ridge around Jhandewalan was cleared and levelled, widening the gap between the Northern and Southern parts. Independence and the Partition of India in 1947 brought half a million Hindu and Sikh refugees to the city and many of them were resettled by clearing the Central and Southern part of the Ridge. The Southern Ridge was further eaten into to establish the sprawling campus of the Jawaharlal Nehru University and other institutional and residential areas in the 1950s. At around the same time, a section of the wooded parts along the hilly spine of the Central Ridge was transferred to the army which later illegally expanded its territory; another chunk was grabbed in the 1980s by the ashram of Asaram Bapu, a popular sant (holy man).24 Numerous other encroachments over the last

22 George (1958). For a more detailed account of the afforestation of the Ridge, see Baviskar (2016), especially chapters 1 and 3. 23 It had been fenced off from grazing earlier, in the late 1910s. 24 The establishment of the ashram was challenged in a 1985 public interest petition but, in 1996, the Supreme Court allowed it to be regularised, despite opposition from forest officials. However, the recent fall from grace of Asaram Bapu, now facing trial for raping a minor at his Jodhpur ashram, may mean that action will finally be taken to close the ashram. See http://www.sunday-guardian. com/news/probe-likely-into-land-encroachment-complaint-against-asaram-bapu. Accessed on 25 May 2014.

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three decades have nibbled away at the Ridge until its death by a thousand cuts seems imminent.25 Not only did the forested area of the Ridge shrink because of land diversion and encroachment, from the 1980s the character of the forest also began to change. Until then, the wooded Ridge was regarded as a wilderness and duly ignored. It was not trespassed upon except by poor women and men who collected wood from the area for cooking and heating, cajoling or bribing the occasional chaukidar to look the other way. In 1978, however, the Central Ridge was the scene of a gruesome crime, filed in popular memory as the Billa-Ranga case.26 Geeta and Sanjay Chopra, the teenage daughter and son of a naval officer, were abducted when they hitched a ride on the Ridge Road. The car was driven into the woods; Geeta Chopra was raped; she and her brother were murdered. The incident shook middle-class newspaper-reading Delhi: Geeta and Sanjay could have been their children. As the hunt for the culprits began, the Ridge came into focus as a place of danger, the locus of criminal activities. Efforts to bring law and order to the Ridge took a physical form: from being an overlooked, overgrown space, the unruly Ridge was to be disciplined. On the Northern Ridge, the domestication of wilderness took the form of clearing the dense under-storey of shrubs and creepers such as bansa, heens, gondni, jangli karaunda, bilangada and kankera and replacing it with grass.27 Ornamental plants and shrubs were planted in neat beds. Gravelled walking paths were cut through the forest. A small pond was spanned by a bridge, reeds planted along its banks, and benches placed so that visitors could enjoy the pretty scene. A badminton court was created in a depression near the Flagstaff Tower built by the British in 1828. The ruins of Pir Ghaib, a 14th century 25 For details of the area of the Ridge and its current land status, see http:// www.delhi.gov.in/wps/wcm/connect/doit_forest/Forest/Home/Forests+of+Delhi/ Recorded+Forest. Accessed on 14 December 2013. Also see Kothari (1988). 26 Billa and Ranga were the two men who were eventually convicted of the crime. 27 Bansa is Adathoda vasica; heens is Capparis sepiaria; gondni is Grewia tenax; jangli karaunda is Carissa spinarum; bilangada is Flacourtia indica and kankera is Maytenus senegalensis.

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Tughlaq hunting lodge, and Chauburja, a mausoleum from the same period, were spruced up. The Ridge was now accessible and inviting to middle-class citizens.28 Once manicured, sections of the Ridge were enthusiastically incorporated into the social geography of residents of well-to-do neighbourhoods in its vicinity. Morning walks—the quintessential quotidian practice of urban Indians with sedentary lifestyles—bring cars to the gates of the Ridge, from which middle-aged men (and some women) alight, all wearing the sports shoes that declare their commitment to their fitness regime. They stride briskly along the paths, swinging their arms, breathing deeply to fill their lungs with the clean morning air. Some stop to stretch, a few jog. Groups do yoga and laughter therapy. Others carry packets of grain which they scatter at designated spots to feed flocks of parakeets and pigeons. Still others buy bananas to feed the Rhesus Macaques that infest the Ridge, their numbers proliferating thanks to Hindus who revere them as a swaroop (incarnate form) of the god Hanuman. After their vigorous exercise, many morning walkers head for the fruit vendors outside, to drink coconut water and eat papaya and other nutritious fruit. Then they get back into their cars and drive home to bathe and start the work day. While the crowds of morning walkers attest to the success of the project of taming the Ridge and incorporating it into the ordered realm of urban rhythms, a different facet of this accessibility becomes apparent later in the day. By late morning, well after the fitness enthusiasts have departed, the rows of parked cars outside the gates are replaced by motorcycles. Walking up the now-deserted paths, one only encounters hopeful families of macaques looking for handouts. But on the lawns, under shady trees and behind sheltering shrubs, there is a discreet but nonetheless palpable buzz of activity. Each semi-concealed spot that offers some privacy harbours a pair of young lovers looking for solitude. In a city where young women are subject The process of ‘beautifying’ the Ridge in the 1970–80s was less pronounced in the Central Ridge (where a large section had already been carved out as the Buddha Jayanti Park in 1960s) and the Southern Ridge (which was not yet surrounded by the upper-middle-class residential neighbourhoods that came up in the late 1980s). 28

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to family surveillance, and escaping the censorious public eye is difficult for romancing couples, the gardens of the Ridge offer refuge. As Radhika Chandiramani writes: ‘There’s safety in the park. The park sets limits.29 They hold hands, press palms together, play with each other’s fingers.... Privacy lurks in public spaces; pleasure lies in the palm of a hand’ (2001: 197–98).30 Paradoxically, the public park, where visibility is coupled with anonymity, allows a retreat from the public into a realm of privacy for partners of various sexual persuasions. Rendering the Ridge safer for citizens by converting the forest into a wooded park created a space that enables romantic and sexual practices that would otherwise have been stifled; it allows the youth to express themselves as lovers, desiring and desired subjects who can more fully participate in the increasingly influential discourse of romantic love and courtship. The domestication of the Ridge thus not only created new bourgeois forms of recreation and caring for the self, but also enabled romantic and sexual practices in public spaces, pushing against the limits of what is considered culturally tolerable and gradually widening them. Making the Ridge safer for ordinary and elite citizens had another unintended effect. Some of those who came to the park for morning walks were drawn to the area that was still wilderness. Sanjeev Khanna31 remembers when his dog darted into the undergrowth, chasing a Grey Francolin or some exciting scent. ‘When I followed 29 Here, Chandiramani is referring to young women who, while willing to engage romantically with their partners, want to be able to control what they do. Sexual coercion, including rape, by one’s companion is less likely when there are other people around and where a chaukidar or itinerant vendor is a shout away. The ‘wild’ part of the Ridge would not be safe (or comfortable) in this respect. 30 The discussion of contestations over public spaces focuses mainly on the tensions between bourgeois notions of spatial order and public conduct and their defiance by the poor (see Kaviraj 1997) and, to a lesser extent, on how this patriarchal spatial order marginalises women (see Ranade 2007). The use of public parks by young men and women seeking privacy and the social disapproval that they face, which can even take the form of humiliating remarks and physical harassment by Hindu nationalist ‘moral police’ vigilante groups, suggests that age-based discrimination is as much a part of the conflict over parks as are class and gender-based orientations. 31 Name changed.

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him, pushing through the bushes, I found myself alone. It was gorgeous. Really wild. Other people wouldn’t go into this part of the Ridge, but I loved it.’ Khanna was a teenager in the late 1970s when he literally stumbled into a fascination for the wilderness of the Ridge. Later, he met a few other school and college students who were interested in bird-watching and began to go on nature rambles with them, learning about the flora and fauna of the Ridge and coming to understand the ecological importance of the forest. In 1979, on reading that a section of the Central Ridge had been demarcated for constructing schools, the students organised a protest rally in which they were joined by the residents of Rajendra Nagar, the neighbourhood next to the proposed clearance. A year later, the students formed Kalpavriksh, an ‘environmental action group’ that campaigned against the diversion of the forest to other land use and the conversion of wilderness into parks.32 Over the next two decades, Kalpavriksh continued to monitor the Ridge’s biodiversity by conducting annual bird counts and mapping the vegetation. Hoping to ignite the same spark of appreciation of the wilderness in others, members guided school and college students on ‘nature walks’.33 The group published a booklet about the Ridge and its threatened status (Kalpavriksh 1991). It petitioned the LieutenantGovernor of Delhi and other officials to prevent the destruction of the Ridge. These efforts, supported by directions from the Supreme Court, led to the constitution of a Ridge Management Board in 1995, which included government officials and NGO representatives (Sinha 2014). Even as Kalpavriksh went on to study and campaign about a range of emerging conflicts between ecology and economic development, 32 Kalpavriksh has gone on to become a well-known research and advocacy NGO, working on issues of ecological sustainability and social equity. It was a pioneer in developing a broad-based critique of large dams, and has worked extensively to promote community-based natural resource management. See http://www.kalpavriksh.org/index.php/about-us.html. Accessed on 26 December 2013. 33 For a survey of Kalpavriksh’s engagement with the Ridge by one of the organisation’s founder-members, narrated as a nature walk, see Kothari (1988). For an analysis of how activities such as hiking foster a ‘love for nature’ among students in Indonesia, see Tsing (2005).

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travelling further afield into rural India, the organisation’s early involvement with the Ridge remained a defining moment in its biography, when Khanna and others realised that it was the wilderness that they loved, not parks. How this sensibility set them apart from other upper-middle-class people, and how it evolved into a critique of industrial capitalism and its consumerist culture, leading to a stand against ‘destructive development’ in rural India, is a complex story.34 But central to it is the sensual experience of the Ridge in the early morning, its tangled wildness a contrast to the ordered, populated park. Since the 1980s, the Ridge has faced new threats and recruited new champions. Kalpavriksh has shifted base from Delhi to Pune, but other organisations and alliances, formal as well as impromptu, have taken up the cause, primarily focusing on preventing further construction on the Southern Ridge, an area now surrounded by affluent neighbourhoods, where residents have become concerned about dwindling greenery and aquifers.35 One such campaign highlights the unintended ironies of the situation. During the lead-up to the Commonwealth Games in 2010, the Delhi government planned to expand the sports facilities in Siri Fort that it had constructed for the Asian Games in 1982 by clearing an adjacent section of the Ridge. They encountered vehement opposition, including a public interest petition filed in court, from residents of nearby Siri Fort Village, a low-key yet luxurious haven in a prestigious location, inhabited by members of the elite. As the residents denounced the Delhi government for its callous destruction of greenery, they chose to forget that the spacious bungalows in 34 The history of the wilderness movement in India has been sketched by Ramachandra Guha (1989) and Mahesh Rangarajan. Their analysis has focused on the ideological strands of the movement which range from the socially conservative, demanding ‘inviolate areas’ for mega-fauna, to the more human rights-oriented ‘community-based management’. However, a social history that examines the class background of ‘wilderness lovers’ and relates it to their ways of being in the world and ‘structures of feeling’ remains to be done (Bourdieu 1984). For a preliminary analysis, see Mawdsley (2004) and Chapter 5 in this volume. 35 See Ghertner (2011) for a discussion of one such controversy near Vasant Kunj, where the DDA violated its own Master Plan to allow the construction of shopping malls and a luxury hotel on a remaining section of the Ridge, a move that was retrospectively legalised by the court.

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which they lived had been built less than 20 years ago by exactly the same process: clearing the Ridge (see Chapter 4). Siri Fort Village was carved out of the Southern Ridge to house visiting athletes and sports officials during Asiad’82. After the games were over, the houses were sold at subsidised prices to senior bureaucrats, their cronies and relatives. Beneficiaries of that process now reinvented themselves as saviours of the city’s green areas.

Conclusion As Mangarbani and the Delhi Ridge change and are threatened with change, they bring into being new allegiances and alliances.36 These green spaces and the urban publics who cohere around them have shaped and transformed each other. Reconfigured relations in the ecological and social landscape have had uneven effects. The

Photo: Author 36 Walker (2007) provides a richly detailed account of this process in the San Francisco Bay Area of California.

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domestication of the wilderness of the Northern Ridge for recreational use has squeezed out the native flora and fauna—jackals, hares and monitor lizards have now disappeared. Poor people who collect firewood and grass find it much harder to do so; vigilant middle-class walkers and patrolling chaukidars are quick to pounce on them. The Ridge is now closed off as an urban common that provisions people who live by the sweat of their brow; they have been replaced by those who sweat in order to keep their bodies fit. Yet the concerns of the labouring classes have not figured in the debate on urban conservation. In other parts of the city, the conflict over urban nature has been even more violent. As I described in Chapter 2, in January 1995, residents of the affluent neighbourhood of Ashok Vihar beat a young man to death for defecating in the area that they regarded as their ‘park’. The opposition between different views of urban nature and its commons could not be starker. Dilip was from an adjoining jhuggi basti where the lack of toilets forced people to use any open space, under cover of dark, as a place to shit. The kothi-owners tried to foil them by building a wall between the basti and their own homes, but the wall was soon broken to allow the daily traffic of domestic workers, those who lived in the jhuggis but worked in the mansions of the rich. Soon after, when people from the jhuggis gathered to protest against Dilip’s murder, the police opened fire and killed four more people. These seemingly senseless deaths were the tragic outcome of a simmering feud over a piece of land that, to one set of residents, was their park, a place of gracious greenery that complemented their opulent homes, and that, to another set of residents, was their toilet. The social geography of urban nature in Delhi is a deeply riven, shifting landscape. As the villagers of Mangarbani showed by their alacrity to sell their share of a sacred forest, green spaces can become taken for granted and traded for more tangible gains. Yet other social groups have intervened to evoke a sense of loss and a renewed appreciation of the forest, leading to a new determination to save it from developers. The domesticated sections of the Delhi Ridge now accommodate morning walkers and trysting couples, members of the middleaged middle classes as well as their subversive offspring. And, at the

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same time, for a handful of people, the park opened up a path into the wilderness as an aesthetically and ecologically superior form of urban nature. While these are unexpected twists produced by the coming together of disparate elements and contingencies, there are expected patterns and continuities as well. More than 60 years after Independence, Viceroy Lord Hardinge’s urban forests command the higher ground close to the centres of power; the Versailles-style gardens that he envisaged grace affluent parts of the city. Greenery is a good index of a neighbourhood’s prestige and wealth, its lack a sign of social exclusion and impoverishment (Nagendra 2016). Most poor, working class areas of Delhi are massed boxes of brick and cement broken only by narrow streets. There are no trees to sit under, no grass on which to run or play or take a nap in the winter sun. The government’s proud slogan of a ‘clean and green’ city fades away once one leaves elite and middle-class areas. When green is confined to the solitary tree that has survived in a wasteland or a densely-packed settlement, or the tulsi plant growing in a recycled tin, urban nature is conspicuous by its absence. As Matthew Gandy observes, ‘The production of urban nature is a simultaneous process of social and bio-physical change in which new kinds of spaces are created and destroyed’ (Gandy 2006: 63). To do justice to this process, we need analyses that ‘place greater emphasis on the malleable, indeterminate and historically specific dimensions to the urban experience’ (ibid.: 64). Malleable yet persistent, indeterminate yet structured, green spaces in Delhi—parks, wilderness, wasteland—are deeply streaked by social character, by ways of knowing and valuing nature that reflect the city’s sharp hierarchies and shifting alliances.

Conclusion and Coda

Illustration: Orijit Sen

8

City limits and beyond

The city: Two views Anuj Gupta, 45, senior manager with a corporate firm in Gurgaon, a suburb of Delhi, stood at the window of his luxury apartment in Malibu Towne, looking out at the scene beyond the concertina wire-topped compound walls. ‘This used to be all green,’ he said. ‘Fields of wheat and yellow mustard in winter. That’s why we moved here. Because of the fresh air and peace. But now it’s a mess.’ Pointing to the glass and steel skyscrapers that punctuate the distance, he continued, It’s all built up. I drive out of the gate of the colony and I’m stuck in traffic for hours. There’s no order, no discipline. The air is so bad that my son keeps falling sick. Of course, we have air purifiers installed at home and his school bus is air-conditioned but he wheezes at night and then I feel so helpless. What has this world come to?

Turning back, as a maid served us glasses of lemonade, he gestured at the cool, marble-floored room, This apartment too. You’d think this is great but we have no water. We pay a fortune for private tankers to fill our reservoir and we buy filtered water for drinking and cooking from another supplier. We’re supposed to have 24-hour electricity but the power supply

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is so bad that our generators work overtime. The maintenance charges are through the roof. The only thing I can say is that at least it’s safe. Once you go out of the colony gates, it’s another story. But inside we’re all right. The security guards check everyone who comes in. We have CC-TV (closed-circuit television) everywhere. Our RWA (Residents’ Welfare Association) issues ID cards to all the maids and drivers after police verification. It’s OK here, safetywise. We don’t go out much, only to work, school. On the weekends, we see friends and go shopping. The malls here are good, at least there’s that: the best branded stores, lots of good restaurants, movie halls. But the rest of it is rubbish. All these people. So much congestion. The government does nothing at all. In fact, it only encourages them. We pay taxes but who listens to us? Slums come up overnight on any vacant plot of land. These people, their children shit out on the street. No civic sense. Who knows what diseases they’re spreading? Anything can happen. You hear about theft and murder all the time. It’s a mess, I tell you.

Two kilometres away from Anuj Gupta’s apartment, Sarita Devi, 32, sits outside her rough-brick room chopping onions and potatoes, every now and then swatting at the mosquitoes that swarm up from the open drain that runs alongside. Even at dusk, the thin-walled shed in which she lives with her husband and three children is stifling. They have a water-cooler but when the power cuts out—which it does frequently— there’s no respite from the heat. The cooler and a television set are Sarita’s prized possessions, purchased from her earnings as a domestic worker cleaning homes and washing dishes in the Malibu Towne apartments. She earns a steady wage, all the more essential because her husband Manoj doesn’t have a regular job. He worked in a factory but they fired him when he missed a few days. What to do, he had to go back to the village to help his brother. Then he thought he’d start his own business and sell vegetables, but that didn’t work out. Then he became a helper to a mason on a construction site and got good money but, for the last two years, there’s no demand there. Now he drives a cycle-rickshaw but that doesn’t bring in much. If I didn’t work, how would we feed ourselves? Everything keeps getting more and more expensive.

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Sarita tilts her head towards the tiny room behind her, a tidy space in which pots and pans gleam on a shelf beside wall calendars showing Hindu deities above a bed—the sole item of furniture—pushed up against the wall: And this jhuggi: we bought it and built it up with our own hands but they keep saying that our basti is illegal and we’ll be evicted. We’ve been here for 20 years; how can they remove us? The pradhan (headman) says he’ll look after us, but you can’t trust anyone these days. They’re only looking after their own interest. If we had to leave this place, where would we go? Where would I work? As it is, life is hard; I queue up at 5.30 every morning to fill up pots of water; every day there’s a fight at the tap. The toilets are so filthy it turns my stomach. In the monsoon last year, the drains overflowed and sewage entered my jhuggi. My youngest daughter had diarrhoea for two months; we spent three thousand rupees on getting her treated. But I say, all right, at least we’re not starving; at least we have a roof over our heads. This is the fate of poor people. What can we do? But if they take away even this, what’s left for us? I can’t sleep at night I’m so worried.

Though only two kilometres separate them, Anuj Gupta and Sarita Devi seem to inhabit different worlds. The contrast is most vivid in the physical spaces in which they live. Gupta’s living room alone is six times as large as Sarita’s shack. His apartment has running hot and cold water, three bathrooms, five air-conditioners. The apartment block sits amidst lush lawns and frangipani trees, a swimming pool and children’s play area with swings, see-saws and a jungle gym. Sarita’s home is squashed between other shacks, each a tangle of tin sheets and rough masonry, along a potholed lane bisected by a drain where young children squat to relieve themselves and pigs snuffle around in the wet muck. Dogs root through heaps of waste, dirty plastic bags and decaying organic matter. There’s nowhere to play so kids crowd the street, dodging between passing rickshaws and motorbikes. At each end of the lane there is a public tap that supplies water for two hours in the morning and evening; it’s usually at low pressure and the number of waiting people high. There is one mobile toilet with 10 cubicles for the entire lane of more than 200 households: by

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common consent only women use it; men defecate in a scrubby wasteland nearby. Despite these obvious differences, Gupta and Sarita’s observations about the places in which they live also contain some telling parallels. Take water and electricity, for instance. Both complain about shortages and unreliability. However, Gupta is able to buy his way out of the problem whereas Sarita must make do with the little that comes her way. Both are concerned about their children’s well-being and the burden of disease to which they are exposed. However, while Gupta junior has access to the best health care, Sarita’s child almost died because of a preventable gastrointestinal infection caused by drinking contaminated water. Both worry about safety. Gupta frets about burglaries and violent crime, anarchy on the streets, and ensures that his college-going daughter is chauffeured everywhere she goes. Sarita spends the second half of her working day wondering if her eightyear-old daughter came home from school all right and whether her neighbour is keeping an eye on her as she promised to. Along with this, however, is an ever-looming anxiety that Gupta will never have to face: Sarita’s fear about losing her home. More than the precariousness of her husband’s earnings, it is the threat of eviction that constitutes the core of Sarita’s worries: that this modest yet precious home will be razed by bulldozers, its contents scattered, her family’s life shattered. Gupta’s and Sarita’s lives criss-cross in other ways. For one, Sarita cleans his apartment, wiping down its marble floors with rose-scented detergent, dusting the knick-knacks on its shelves, washing dishes. For another, when Gupta’s chauffeur impatiently honks at a rickshaw to move out of his way on the street outside, he could be honking at Sarita’s husband, Manoj. And of course, the jhuggi basti that so disgusts Gupta happens to be Sarita’s home.

What is the environment? How do we interpret these sometimes conflicting, sometimes converging, narratives in terms of environmentalism? For most people in cities in the South, the popular understanding of ‘environment’—one that cuts across social classes—centres on its meaning as habitat. That

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is, the surrounding landscape within which one lives—its physical characteristics, social relations, as well as the ideas and sentiments associated with it—represents the sum total of one’s environment. The concerns that emerge from this environment may vary: for Gupta, spatial order and physical safety matter most, whereas Sarita’s priorities are security of shelter, job opportunities for her husband, and her children’s health. Their different subject positions mean that their environment evokes in them divergent ‘structures of feelings’ (Williams 1961): pride, disgust, fear, comfort, hope. Yet both share the notion of ‘environment’ as related to amenities and infrastructure—water, electricity, housing, sanitation, roads—that constitute the essentials of a decent life in the city. Several of these are understood to be public goods and a shortfall in their provisioning is felt keenly as a breach of the contract between state and citizens. The language of claiming these ‘environmental’ amenities therefore uses the vocabulary of civic rights. This all-encompassing notion of ‘environment’ as habitat—a tangible place imbued with intangible yet powerful relationships, governed by the state—is narrowed down within the field of urban studies. Here, the ‘environment’ is defined in terms of the characteristics of physical space, especially land use—density of built-up areas, quality of housing, extent of green cover, but also infrastructure in the form of transport and sanitation. Within this literature then, one comes across an explicit discussion of ‘environmental problems’: air pollution from factories and motor vehicles, water pollution from untreated sewage and industrial effluents, the shrinking of green areas and the congestion of the built environment. Historically, urban studies took a wide-angle view aimed at understanding (and engineering) an ideal relationship between environment and society, including within its sweep the moral as well as material well-being of city dwellers, as shaped by their physical setting. The work of scholars and planners such as Patrick Geddes, Lewis Mumford and Jane Jacobs exemplifies this perspective (Tyrwhitt 1947; Mumford 1961; Jacobs 1961). However, ‘environmental issues’ in contemporary urban studies are usually studied in isolation and the socio-economic processes in which they are embedded are treated as a given. And when changes in urban land use and political economy are the focus of analysis, ecological aspects are mentioned only in passing, if at all (see, for instance, Desai 2012).

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Public perception largely regards polluted air and water as externalities, unfortunate by-products of the wealth-generating processes that make cities engines of economic growth, to which municipal authorities turn a blind eye because of the powerful players involved or because they are pressed with providing more ‘basic needs’ such as water, roads and waste disposal. This is the case with almost all cities and towns in India where industrial manufacturing is a major part of the economy (Varghese et al. 2015). Only when urban elites distance themselves from dirty production processes—for instance, when the economic base of a city shifts from industrial manufacturing to services—do they mobilise against particular environmental ills, especially those that affect their ‘quality of life.’1Besides air and water pollution, green areas and, increasingly, wetlands are also the focus of analysis and action but, notably, ecological arguments are mobilised in a manner that brackets them off from a wider consideration of environmental flows (see Chapter 7). Gupta, for example, is active in a campaign to protect a patch of wilderness on the edge of Gurgaon that is threatened by real estate developers. The campaign highlights the ecological importance of the area as a refuge for biodiversity and as catchment for groundwater. However, the campaigners don’t recognise or address the fact that they themselves are largely responsible for what they define as Gurgaon’s environmental problems. They were the first to buy and occupy the luxury apartments that were built on farmers’ fields and village commons. Their water-intensive lifestyle plunged aquifers into the dark zone. Buildings and roads that cater to them created heat islands that cry out for relief. Protecting the last remnant of Gurgaon’s greenery then is a token, a talisman that denotes the desire for a landscape that includes urban forests as well as shopping malls, never mind the contradictions. Thus, it is a select social group that explicitly invokes ecological arguments and mobilises them to pursue interests that they deem to 1 In the late 1990s and early 2000s, public interest litigation against pollution led the Delhi High Court to order the closure of older manufacturing industries in the metropolis. This was not, however, an instance of environmental concerns overriding economic ones. The extensive lands vacated by mills were profitably repurposed as higher-value real estate for building offices, shopping and entertainment malls and luxury residences (see Chapter 3).

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be ‘environmental’. In practice, environmentalism as an ideology centred on ecological protection for the benefit of present and future human generations, nonhuman species and planetary biophysical processes, is a resource available primarily to those who have the cultural capital to leverage it. This cultural capital is not immobile or impregnable. In some cases, it has been eroded by sections of the rural under-class through their struggles to secure rights to land, forests, water, fisheries, and other resources. Their claims have succeeded when they have highlighted how ecologically sustainable their practices are and how their cause aligns with social justice. Such social movements, classified in the literature as the ‘environmentalism of the poor’, have curbed the power of dominant institutions that frame and prosecute environmental agendas by deploying the language of scientific rationality and economic efficiency to dispossess vulnerable populations (Guha and Martinez-Alier 1997). Yet, in the urban context, it has been far harder to challenge the cultural capital of these institutions and the elite social groups associated with them. While the dominant framing of urban ‘environmental issues’ as pertaining to noxious externalities has sometimes been successfully used by poor people to oppose specific projects—the location of a solid waste incinerator near Black and Hispanic neighbourhoods in south-central Los Angeles, for example—it has rarely been questioned or replaced by another that represents poor people’s priorities (Bullard 1990; Di Chiro 1995). Demanding that ‘environmental justice’ in the city encompass a wider set of claims is simply too much of a stretch for people weighed down by daily privations, inhabiting precarious positions. Those who share Sarita’s social location are scarcely able to articulate their rights to water and sanitation—or, for that matter, secure shelter and jobs—in the vocabulary of environmentalism.2 And they are rarely able to use an ecological frame to mount a critique of the resource-intensive lifestyles of the residents of Malibu Towne. The only exception to this rule is the recent attempt by waste-pickers who collect and recycle paper, plastic and other scrap, to demand a place in the city because of the environmental services they provide. I shall discuss their case later in this chapter. 2

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Why is this? There are two aspects to this puzzle. First, ecology is often hard to see in the city. The concentration of concrete and tarmac, brick and glass, seems to squeeze it out of existence. The built environment overwhelmingly appears to be an artefact of human manufacture, of materials transformed by technology. For minds socialised to separate ‘nature’ from ‘culture’—a long-standing intellectual distinction made across the world—it seems evident that there is not a lot of ecology in the city, except in the attenuated form of gardens and birds and insects.3 Unlike rural landscapes where nature is palpably visible in the form of soil and water, plants and animals, and is valued as a productive resource, the urban environment fails to yield such recognisable indices to which productive value may be ascribed. In rural areas, social movements have been able to fuse the vocabulary of citizenship and environmentalism to fight for productive resources and livelihoods as embodied in and deriving from nature. In urban areas, productive resources—factories, firms, financial and intellectual capital—seem unrelated to nature. Visible only in isolated units (and not as the underlying foundation of economic and social well-being) and valued primarily in terms of consumption, urban ecology becomes a concern mainly for elites who can afford to pursue such ‘minor’ and ‘non-essential’ causes. The second reason why the urban poor have not been able to wield environmentalism as a discursive resource to secure their interests is to do with legitimacy. Environmental debates are almost always framed in terms of public interest. That is, an environmental good is held to be universally beneficial, transcending the interests of particular sections of society. Poor people’s quest to secure the environmental resources that matter most to them—shelter and sanitation, for instance—are viewed by the state and its reference publics as particularistic interests, of concern primarily to the affected group. This is especially so when these interests come up against those of more Thus, a recent book on Bengaluru titled Nature in the City (Nagendra 2016) focuses only on trees, public parks and private gardens, without considering the larger set of biophysical processes and material transformations that urban ‘nature’ encompasses. In this book, as in common-sense understanding, ‘nature’ is automatically equated with green spaces. 3

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powerful groups who claim to represent the wider social good. In the last 15 years in Delhi, public interest litigation by environmentalists and RWAs like that of Gupta’s colony has brought about the eviction of settlements such as the one that Sarita inhabits, on the grounds that they were an ‘environmental nuisance’ or were polluting the river Yamuna. The courts came down on the side of ‘clean and green Delhi’, dismissing pleas that their orders would deprive vulnerable groups of basic shelter and subsistence. Instead, they castigated slum-dwellers for occupying land illegally, a crime born out of compulsion in a city that provides little affordable, legal housing near places of work for its under-class. At the same time, portraying the poor who lived along the riverbanks as environmental villains in the Yamuna case was a spectacular miscarriage of justice since the untreated waste released into the river came from better-off neighbourhoods that were connected to the sewage system. Evicting squatter settlements along the embankments didn’t solve the pollution problem. Instead, it allowed land in central Delhi to be made available for redevelopment

Photo: Author

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(Chapter 6). A similar pattern of public interest environmental activism adversely and unfairly affecting the poor prevailed in the case of Delhi’s drive to deal with air pollution caused by motor vehicles (Véron 2006). In contrast to these drastic measures, the same courts have condoned environmental violations by powerful corporate organisations and by the government, on the grounds that these projects involved a lot of money or were ‘prestigious’. Thus, a clutch of shopping malls and luxury hotels on a tract of forest in south Delhi, and a grand temple complex and luxury apartments on the Yamuna floodplain in east Delhi, were retrospectively legalised. Asher Ghertner (2015) argues that, along with the financial capital at stake, what moved the judges was the notion of environment-as-aesthetics: glittering shopping malls and opulent luxury hotels look good, they enhance the appearance of a ‘world-class city’, so they are to be preferred over forests and floodplains. Court decisions reflect the hierarchy in how public/private interests around the environment come to be organised in the public mind: first come ‘economic growth’ and ‘national prestige’ as represented by corporate capital (state and private), while clean air and water or green areas languish far below. And at the bottom, stigmatised by their lack of cultural capital, flounder the urban poor. The notion that ‘what’s good for General Motors is good for America’ continues to dominate perceptions of public interest across the world. Economic growth is the hegemonic ideology of national development and ecological issues are relegated as second-order concerns. The state promotes capital-intensive projects that generate short-term revenues, licit and illicit, for state actors, and ‘infrastructure’ for further economic growth. This is believed to be synonymous with the ‘public good’. When the state has taken note of environmental damage by powerful actors—as was the case in March 2016 when the politically well-connected Art of Living Foundation organised a giant event on the floodplain of the river Yamuna in Delhi—it first makes minatory noises and then soft pedals on punitive action.4 These modes Analyses of environmental administration and litigation show a clear and consistent record of corporate firms being let off the hook for environmental 4

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of thinking also regard the urban poor as illegitimate or, at best, irrelevant actors in environmental matters. By the rules of this game, capitalism usually trumps ecology, and equity is a particularly low value card. So, in an unequal city, elite notions of environmental good prevail as the public interest, and elite projects override ecological concerns. And the pursuit of apparently universally desired goals by the state and public-minded citizens grievously hurts the most vulnerable residents. How could the rural poor occasionally overcome a similar hegemonic stranglehold? As noted above, it requires considerable cultural capital to be able to insert oneself into an elite conversation bristling with class bias. Even when activist organisations working with the poor muster legal arguments and the facts to support them, they find themselves handicapped. However, in all cases where the rural poor have been successful in asserting their rights to resources, they have done so by mobilising a counter-narrative about the superiority of their conservationist ethics and practices, often performing the role of the ‘virtuous peasant’ or ‘ecologically noble savage’ (Baviskar 1995).5 Organisations of the urban poor find it very difficult to marshal similar moral claims that marry ecology with justice. For there they are: slumdwellers, living in squalor and condemned for it. When their claims to their habitat are unsupported by law or long usage (compared to their rural counterparts) and they cannot demonstrate a conservationist ethic, how do they assert their ecological virtue? Among their numbers, only waste-pickers and recyclers are now trying to repackage their public image as upholders of urban ecology and it remains to be seen whether they will be able to use environmentalism as a lever to prise open the door to the status and security so long denied to them (CERAG et al. 2009). For the rest of the poor, the notion that the crimes. Compounding the state-industry nexus is the fact that those crimes could not have been committed without the complicity of the state. This willingness to turn a blind eye to corporate crimes and, when forced to take cognisance, to condone rather than condemn, pervades the political economy of environmental law (Narain et al. 2014). Also see Sethi (2016). 5 This is also the case with the 2006 Scheduled Tribes and Other Traditional Forest Dwellers (Recognition of Forest Rights) Act, achieved after sustained political mobilisation.

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public interest might include their rights to space, shelter, jobs, and civic amenities, remains not only out of reach but out of the realm of possibility.

Order in the city The responsibility for creating and managing cities so that all citizens have access to a healthy environment rests mainly with the government. Political survival requires that the state secure legitimacy for its rule by supervising stable conditions for capital accumulation. Historically, the state’s push to regulate urban environments has been prompted by the desire to shape model citizens who would be willing subjects in this project of rule (Joyce 2003). The threat of a restive urban under-class seizing power has been around for centuries, but was realised most dramatically during the French revolution in 1789, leading to a drastic rethinking of how city spaces were used and organised. Baron Haussmann’s demolition of dense neighbourhoods and the insertion of wide boulevards through Paris in 1853–69 was aimed at making the city ‘more governable, prosperous, healthy, and architecturally imposing’ but, above all, ‘safe against popular insurrections’ (Scott 1998: 59, 61). The logic of urban planning was to simultaneously create spatial and social order. In colonial India, this imperative was at work in the redesign of Delhi (Gupta 1981) and Lucknow (Oldenburg 1984) after widespread revolt against British rule in 1857. When the British built their imperial capital of New Delhi, spatial segregation between white and native populations, as well as a strict code assigning housing on the basis of rank and status, was the norm (Legg 2007). The strategy of regulating physical spaces for social control, whether in the form of explicit policies of apartheid or the unspoken yet all-pervasive rules of class and ethnicity that govern gated communities and the like, continues to prevail into contemporary times (Caldeira 1992; Fischer et al. 2014). Along with the imperative of social control, there were other, more liberal, ideas of social welfare at work in the imposition of spatial order. The notion that urban spaces should be designed for the physical, social, and moral improvement of all citizens, especially the most

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deprived, lay behind the first experiments in town planning initiated by Victorian philanthropists in Britain (Macqueen 2011). Social engineering via spatial fixes was attempted on a larger scale when Ebenezer Howard’s Garden City model was adopted in Britain and the United States, and was subsequently imported to the colonies, influencing the layout of Lahore, New Delhi, Quezon City, Canberra, and parts of Sao Paulo (Howard 1902; Glover 2013). Concerns about public health were central to these plans. Since the early 19th century, the threat of contagious disease epidemics had led to increasing attention to the quality of urban water, air, and waste disposal, as well as to monitoring hygiene in places of public dining and homes. Soliciting the cooperation of citizens was crucial for this enterprise. It was continuously reiterated that cities could be clean and healthy only if their citizens were. Civic compliance was sought through laws penalising the ‘nuisance’ of littering, urinating, and spitting in public. Thus, the two organising principles of environmental regulation were hazard and nuisance. From its inception, then, urban environmental management has been governed by anxieties around health, hazard and social order (Chakrabarty 2002, also see Kaviraj 1997). It has privileged an aesthetic that values capital-intensive buildings and manicured green areas (Chapter 7). These concerns and sensibilities have precedence over issues of life and livelihood that are central to ‘the environmentalism of the poor’. Since angry and resentful poorer sections may constitute a threat to political order, an array of disciplining techniques in the work economy, social welfare system and public spaces is deployed to keep them on the defensive and to defuse collective mobilisation (Chatterjee 2004). Thus a 1988 cholera and gastroenteritis epidemic that killed more than 150 people in east Delhi slums led to improved municipal supply of water and, eventually, sewerage (Hazarika 1988), but larger questions about city-wide distributive justice in access to water and sanitation went unaddressed. So did the issue of vulnerability to disease aggravated by the poverty of people who had been evicted from their homes in central Delhi and forcibly settled on flood-prone land on the edge of the city. This continues to be the case even today. A brief phase of populist welfare policies in the early 1990s gave way

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to two decades of economic liberalisation policies that have worsened inequalities in Indian cities and have created a harsher, more intolerant climate for poor people’s livelihood security (Saajha Manch 2001).6 For the government, resource politics in the city is about regulating spaces and managing social order such that economic growth and accumulation can continue without disruption from below. In this context, it is bourgeois environmentalists with their quality of life concerns who decide what constitutes an environmental issue.

Conclusion To sum up, environmentalist action in Delhi—and in most other cities in the global South—is guided neither by the principle of ecological sustainability nor social justice. The dominant form of action has been driven by the ideology of bourgeois environmentalism which has had perverse effects on air and water quality, and has penalised the poor while ignoring the culpability of other classes and their ‘luxury emissions’ and discharges. In some instances, ecological values have been pursued, as in campaigns to protect wetlands and areas of wilderness, but in a manner hostile to the poor communities who rely on these areas for shelter and subsistence. Only in exceptional cases do we find urban environmental action aimed at securing ecological sustainability as well as social justice. Remarkably, this is being done by one of the most deprived and discriminated against social groups in urban India: those who gather and sort solid waste for recycling (Doron and Jeffrey 2018).

6 It is too early to gauge whether the Aam Aadmi Party government in Delhi, elected to power in 2015 with overwhelming support from poorer sections of society, has changed living and working conditions for its supporters. Reports suggest that they have improved access to water, electricity and sanitation. They also seem to have replaced the previous government’s policy of evicting squatters with that of in situ upgradation. However, when evictions and workplace closures are ordered by the Supreme Court, or when the land in question is owned by an agency outside its control, the Delhi government has had its hands tied, its populist politics held in check by the larger political economy of the Indian state.

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Traditionally, particular Scheduled Castes have performed the work of going door-to-door to collect domestic garbage and recyclables (Gill 2010). Now their efforts are supplemented by migrants from Bengal, most of whom are Muslim. Many of these young men spend the day knee-deep in the filth of neighbourhood waste dumps, rummaging through the mess for scraps of thrown-away plastic, paper and metal. By end of day, they neatly stow away the retrieved material in large sacks which they wheel away on bicycle carts. At home, the women sort through heaps of scraps, painstakingly separating each kind so as to get a better price from the wholesale scrap merchant (see Gidwani 2013). Stigmatised by what they do and by who they are—poor Dalits and Muslims—they make unlikely heroes. Yet this make-over is what Delhi’s Chintan, an NGO, and Pune’s Kagad Kach Patra Kashtakari Panchayat, a trade union of waste-pickers and scrap-dealers, have attempted as they strive to secure recognition, safety, and fair deals for their members. They point out that waste-workers serve the public good by cleaning up the city. They recycle things that would otherwise land up on the bursting-at-the seams landfills and tottering garbage mountains that every city creates. And each recycled item means one less new object produced, saving resources and preventing emissions. Once it is recognised that waste-workers are ecological warriors, even climate change crusaders, fighting for their rights is not only socially just but environmentally good. Those who gather and process urban waste bring into the environmental frame a notion that has been missing so far: urban metabolism or ecology as the sum of stocks and flows of materials and energy, which includes those embodied in the built environment as well (Demaria and Schindler 2015). If urban environmentalism were to be based on such a metabolic matrix, the fact of the city as ‘nature’s metropolis’ would overcome assumptions about the nature/culture divide (Cronon 1991). It would also transcend the apparently selfevident distinction between the rural and the urban by focusing on the flows that mutually bind them, often in grossly unequal ways (Swyngedouw 2004). By showing the presence of ‘natural resources’ in productive practices in the city, and by revealing the glaring inequalities in the ownership and distribution of wealth derived from

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Photo: Author

nature, such an analysis would allow ecology to be made accountable to equity . I refer here to the notion of urban metabolism as a metaphor for understanding environmental politics, and not as a model for computing quantified or monetised flows. Such quantification often creates false equivalences between incommensurable entities, severs

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them from the social relations in which they are embedded, and suggests that they can be exchanged or, worse, bought and sold. Mapping urban metabolism is best approached not as a matter of getting precise socio-spatial coordinates, but as an attempt at drawing a freehand sketch that is accurate enough to navigate by. Such a sketch would enable Sarita and her fellow basti-dwellers to show how light their ecological footprint is compared to Gupta’s resource-guzzling lifestyle. They could highlight how elite privileges have been facilitated by preferential treatment from the state. They too could claim environmentalism as an ideological resource, just as it has been used by some of their rural counterparts to challenge forestry, mining, and dam projects. At the same time, the systematic misrecognition of public interest would stand revealed for what it is: the pursuit of interests and ideas that serve powerful private players. To be truly disruptive, however, such an ecological framing would have to be supplemented by a wider definition of ‘environmental resources’. For instance, space is an environmental good that may also generate livelihoods—the space of the street enables not only walking and sociality but also vending goods and selling services (Chapter 5; also see de Certeau 1984). The social value of streets can’t be approximated by a computation of ground rent, but neither can it be subsumed within a mapping of material and energy flows. Such a calculus would have to be incorporated within a cultural matrix of what counts, where the concerns of the poorest citizens, those who lack access to private spaces and resources and rely all the more on urban commons, would have priority. That, then, is the challenge posed by dominant notions of the city: what exactly qualifies a resource or a problem to be classified as ‘environmental’? If it is its ecological component: where does ecology begin and end and what does it encompass? If it is about ‘natural resources’ like land and water, how do we discern them in the highly mediated forms in which they appear? Is a municipality’s crackdown on street vendors an environmental issue? Is a basti’s bid to get piped drinking water an environmental campaign? These questions about definitions are important because they allow and disallow not only what can be talked about but who can do the talking.

9

Climate change, uncertainty and the city

The summer of 2019 was the hottest in Delhi’s living memory. On 10 June, the temperature touched an unprecedented 48o Celsius, the highest ever recorded for this month. Day after relentless day, the loo—scorching dry winds from the south-west—swept the city. A dull dusty haze shrouded the sky. People, animals and birds sheltered as best they could: in air conditioned lairs, under the shadow of buildings and the shade of trees. Rickshaw drivers moistened gamchhas draped around their necks, seeking the meagre relief offered by slowly evaporating water. Passers-by stopped at charitable piaos to gratefully gulp down tepid water and refill their bottles. Evenings brought little respite as concrete buildings and paved roads released the heat they had absorbed during the day. Sleepers sweltered in their beds, tossing and turning even below fast-whirring fans, only to rise to another sullen morning. Like the rest of north-west India, Delhi has always been renowned for its gruelling summers, but this one felt like no other. Charting the spikes in temperature in recent years, most notably 2014 and 2016, many residents of Delhi were quick to pounce on climate change as

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the reason for this onslaught. And it is indeed true that globally the frequency and intensity of heatwaves have risen due to climate change. However, what is happening in Delhi is part of a much more complex set of place-based processes, with some surprising twists and turns. In this coda, I reflect on how the specificities of Delhi’s socio-nature may shape its future. Climate scientists agree that global warming raises the overall likelihood of extreme temperatures and rainfall events, of droughts and downpours, storms and surging seas. Yet what global warming does to local weather depends a great deal on the particular features of a place. At the height of Delhi’s 2019 heatwave, a report from World Weather Attribution, an initiative to understand the causes behind extreme weather events, pointed to two factors that made the Delhi region rather distinctive (van Oldenborgh et al. 2019). One, the aerosol of dust, unburnt hydrocarbons and other pollutants that stays suspended over the city for almost nine months of the year blocked sunlight and prevented temperatures from rising. Two, the well-watered gardens and greenery of the capital meant that ‘more of the heat is used to evaporate water and less to warm the air’ (ibid.). Ironically, air pollution (and irrigation) actually helped to mitigate the effects of global warming, making Delhi ‘an urban cool island’ compared to the surrounding countryside. The authors of this study also point out that if air quality improves in the future, maximum temperatures may well increase. They note that minimum temperatures have in fact already risen, so Delhi sleeps through hotter nights. And, while evaporating water reduces heat, it also increases humidity, making summers more stickily uncomfortable and helping mosquitoes to breed. The depletion of subsurface water, the drying up of rivers and ponds, and the decline in rainfall all indicate that current levels of irrigation can’t be sustained into the future.1 Delhi’s verdant gardens and avenues abound in trees imported 1 Reduced rainfall and delayed onset of the monsoons may now be the new normal. Tellingly, the India Meteorological Department is considering lowering its definition of ‘normal rainfall’ by two per cent and changing the expected date of onset (Koshy 2019).

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from other, moister, regions and, while they help create cooler microclimates where they grow, they also need a lot of water to flourish (Krishen 2006: 36). So, what helps to dampen the hammer-blow of a heatwave may in fact worsen human health or deplete another environmental element. These unexpected outcomes underline just how complex the relationship between climate change, weather and lived environments is. Instead of bringing it closer, every little step in learning about how weather works seems to push the horizon of knowledge farther out. Even seemingly localised events such as low wind speeds and descending air that favour the formation of smog over Delhi in winter are touched by far-flung planetary currents circulating in the atmosphere and oceans. How these inconceivably large forces alight upon particular places is not clear and may even be impossible to know. Yet, the evidence so far does point in one direction: the amplification of uncertainty. A subcontinent ruled by already erratic monsoon winds now faces a future where even perennial rivers fed by Himalayan snow-melt have wildly fluctuating flows (Amrith 2018): the Ganga goes from a trickle to a raging torrent to a shrunken stream within days and miles because of dams and barrages built to abstract water but also because of flash floods triggered by cloudbursts such as the 2013 disaster in Uttarakhand. Most of peninsular India is uninsulated: its deep deltaic aquifers depleted and many of its wetlands and water bodies built over. When more variable weather encounters less resilient environments, the swings of meteorological fortunes oscillate into fatal tragedies. Chennai’s disastrous arc from floods in 2015 to drought in 2019 is one such instance of acute and opposite crises. The prim term ‘extreme events’ fails to capture the catastrophic quality of climate change-induced disasters for those who experience them (see Ghosh 2016). That number is guaranteed to grow in coming years. The loss of lives, property and livelihoods from cyclones and floods that have so far been occasional, localised blips on the radar of public affairs will now radiate outwards to engulf larger areas and populations. Actuarial science, or the system of determining the probability and price of uncertain events, is being plunged into confusion (Powers 2018).

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Climate-related extreme events are not the only cause of dislocation. Less dramatic yet equally inexorable changes in seasons and warming seas have affected fundamental life processes. The flowering of plants, the spawning of fish and the emergence of insects no longer follow a familiar calendar. Biological clocks are off by weeks and months; the synchrony between plants and their pollinators, or predator and prey lifecycles, is breaking down. The range of a number of Indian species—the altitude where apples grow, the depth where mackerel are found—is shifting (Adve 2014), leading to a corresponding change in the lives and livelihoods of those who depend on them. Most farmers, fishers and keepers of livestock already have their backs to the wall; how will they adjust and adapt to yet another increment of confounding change? How will they feed themselves and the cities who have come to take the fruits of their labour for granted? Indian metros have long relied upon their power to requisition resources from distant catchments. Delhi gets drinking water from the Tehri dam on the Bhagirathi river more than 300 kilometres away. Its bright lights and cool interiors are powered by coal from Jharkhand, gas and diesel from West Asia, hydropower from the Himalaya. Food pours in from all over India and around the globe: pulses from Mozambique, palm oil from Malaysia, rice from Myanmar and sugar from Brazil. When this dense grid of dependency suddenly snaps and switches off due to climate instability, how will the city cope? Writing about the mountains and rivers of solid and liquid waste that increasingly make up India’s landscape, Doron and Jeffrey (2018: 10) invoke the idea of a ‘binding crisis’, one that unites all classes of citizens and prompts them to respond to the disaster in their midst. Climate change is, without doubt, the ultimate binding crisis for it affects us all, across geographies of social distance and difference. Yet it has not precipitated the urgent, painstaking preparations that such a sea change demands. The Delhi government took eight years to submit its State Climate Change Action Plan to the Centre in January 2019. Even six months later, the document was not in the public domain. Citizens do not know what future scenarios their government envisages, nor how it proposes to face them. A superb example of bland bureaucratese suggests that the Action Plan may be no more than a

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paper tiger: ‘ “Now that the plan has been finalised, the next challenge would be that of implementation. Then there would issues of availability of finance and technology,’’ said a senior official, who didn’t wish to be named’ (Thakur 2019). Put plainly, even though climate change is already upon us, the government has its head buried in the sands of the Yamuna floodplain. Climate change is a binding crisis but most people in a position to act behave like bystanders. Social psychologists Darley and Latané (1968) described the ‘bystander effect’ as the diffusion of responsibility that reinforces mutual denial of a situation’s severity (see Powers 2018). The larger the group, the less likely that anyone will act. A crowd watches a young woman being beaten by a man; no one steps in to intervene. Each person assumes that someone else might act, if things get worse. No one moves and the woman dies before their eyes. Project this scenario to city-scale and you get the picture. We are watching an ecological catastrophe unfold and thinking that someone else will do something if it gets really bad. And while we wait, entire ecosystems unravel around us. If we cannot look to the government to set in place strategies to mitigate and adapt to the effects of climate change, what might we expect? Delhi’s experience with another binding crisis—air pollution—offers an object lesson. Sustained media coverage during the worst periods in winter and fresh public interest litigation led to the revival of the Environmental Pollution (Prevention and Control) Authority for the National Capital Region (EPCA), first constituted in 1998. Despite being vested with far-reaching powers, the Authority has been reluctant to act (Dutta 2018). Its boldest move has been to temporarily suspend construction and industrial activity in the capital for a few days in October-November when air pollution is at its worst. Since the Delhi Pollution Control Committee doesn’t have the capacity to enforce the ban across the city, compliance is more a pious hope than effective practice. While the Authority has pressed for higher diesel emission standards, it has done nothing to check the growth of automobiles in Delhi. Its members include the Director-General of the Society of Indian Automobile Manufacturers, which suggests

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a conflict of interest that the Authority has shown no signs of resolving. EPCA has produced informative reports and detailed plans but Delhi’s air is dirtier than ever. Similarly, in the case of climate change, we should anticipate compromised authority, unwilling to act decisively against powerful propertied classes whose profits and comforts derive from a fossil fuel-based economy. Compounding the problem is the fitfulness of public attention. Concern about climate change and air pollution suffers from seasonal amnesia. When a heatwave ends or when air quality infinitesimally improves from ‘Hazardous’ to ‘Severe’, their underlying causes cease to make news headlines. Long-term measures that are likely to be difficult and unpopular—restoring built-over wetlands or restricting private motor vehicles and diesel generators, for instance—are shelved. The key task of strengthening the capacity of regulatory institutions and re-orienting their focus is put aside. The urgency of a fundamental reworking of urban architecture and landscape planning is forgotten. Apparently more pressing issues prevail and environmental action is once again postponed to the next Diwali. Where are bourgeois environmentalists when air pollution peaks? What do they do when Delhi is hit by a heatwave? Well, they travel in air-conditioned cars from air-conditioned homes to air-conditioned offices, restaurants and shops. They compare brands of masks and air purifiers. They complain on social media about farmers burning stubble in Punjab and how the ban on firecrackers is being flouted. When it gets too much, they retreat to the hills in time-honoured colonial fashion. Meanwhile, the exhaust from their vehicles and appliances makes the air hotter and dirtier for everyone else. The vacuum created by state inaction is filled by private solutions that further damage the commons. Elites respond to air pollution by selective blaming and studied indifference to the plight of less privileged citizens whose situation they worsen. In the context of Indian cities, then, the concept of a binding crisis comes with a major caveat: common troubles are not shared; instead of coming together, people compete to find ways to escape. Ecology and equity are sacrificed to private ends.

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The growing debate on ‘Climate Justice’ that frames global warming as a political and ethical issue has largely been conducted at the international and national scales. If telescoped onto cities, the contours of this discussion will closely conform to an enduring social landscape of inequality and incivility. For cities and the countryside, there can be no climate justice without ecological justice.

Glossary

babu  office worker, clerk baingan  brinjal bandh  shutdown, a form of collective protest that involves closing down shops, public transport and places of work basti  settlement, a low-rise working-class neighbourhood benami  under a fictitious name or in the name of someone other than the real owner bhaiyya  brother bidaai  concluding wedding ritual where a bride leaves her parental home for her marital one chaiwala teashop man charpai  string-bed with wooden legs chaukidar  security guard chulha  cooking hearth dalao  garbage dump desi  native or indigenous desi timatar indigenous, non-hybrid tomatoes dhaba  inexpensive restaurant dharna  sit-in protest dhobi  washerman doodhwala  milkman gali  lane gamchha  thin cotton scarf ganda naala large open sewage drain gangajal  water from the sacred river Ganga, used in Hindu purification rituals gau-raksha  cow protection gaushala  cow shelter

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ghair mumkin uncultivable hills, a land revenue  pahaad classification category ghat  steps on a riverbank leading down to the water gobar  cow-dung gobar ki khaad cow manure gopi  girl cow-herd in Krishna mythology guruji  respected teacher gutkha  chewing tobacco hafta  weekly bribe jalebi  crisp fried syrup-filled squiggles of flour Jamna-paar  across the river, east Delhi jhuggi  shack, a rough shelter built from temporary materials jugaad  the process of creating innovative solutions with limited resources juloos  procession kachcha  unpaved (road), also raw, flimsy kameti-wale  municipal squads that fine vendors and confiscate their goods karmchari  service staff kothi  mansion lakeer ke fakeer literally, ‘seekers after the line’, those who strictly follow the letter of the law langar  community kitchen serving free food to all, usually attached to a Sikh gurudwara lathi  stick or baton, usually made of bamboo loo hot summer winds that sweep through North India maidan  field maali  gardener malikan deh proprietary body of a village mirchi  chillies nyaya yuddha battle for justice paan  betel leaf folded around areca nut and other ingredients, chewed as a stimulant and digestive padhe-likhe  formally educated padhe-likhe log educated folk panchayat  village council piao  public drinking water stand

Glossary  221

pracheen  ancient pradhan  headman prasad  Hindu ritual offering that has been blessed by the deity and distributed to devotees pushta  embankment roti  unleavened bread sabziwala  vegetable seller sant  holy man sarkari  government (adj.) satsang  Hindu or Sikh devotional gathering satyagraha  non-violent protest shamilat deh commons sunvai  hearing swaroop  incarnate form thela  hand-pushed cart thelawala  vendor with cart tirtha  Hindu place of pilgrimage tulsi  sacred basil vilayati  foreign or imported

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About the Author

After studying Economics and Sociology at the University of Delhi, Amita Baviskar received her PhD in Development Sociology from Cornell University. She is currently Professor of Sociology, Institute of Economic Growth, Delhi. Her research focuses on the cultural politics of environment and development in rural and urban India. She has taught at the University of Delhi and has been a visiting scholar at several universities including Stanford, Cornell, Yale, SciencesPo, University of California at Berkeley and the University of Cape Town. A recipient of the 2010 Infosys Prize for Social Sciences, she was also awarded the 2005 Malcolm Adiseshiah Award for Distinguished Contributions to Development Studies, and the 2008 VKRV Rao Prize for Social Science Research. Her writings explore the themes of resource rights, popular resistance and discourses of environmentalism.

Index

Aam Aadmi Party, 208 Actor-Network Theory, 170 agricultural land, 37, 39, 174–176, 179 Air Pollution Act of 1981, 59 air pollution and cars, 58 and judicial activism, 18, 57, 60–68 closure of industries, 39, 45, 63, 68 Delhi Government two week programme in 2006 to reduce, 133 environmental initiatives taken to curb, 77 litigation filed by M.C. Mehta in Supreme Court of India, 57 narrative of, 57 Airports Authority of India, 86 Aiyar, Mani Shankar, 86, 91 Akshardham temple, 161, 163 apartheid of imagination, 35 Aravalli hills, 122, 172, 180 ban on mining by Supreme Court in 2002, 177 Art of Living Foundation, 204 Asian Games of 1982 (Asiad’82), 42, 86, 92, 98, 99, 101, 152, 165, 189 Association of Small-scale Industries, 68 automobile industry of India, global scenario of, 134 Bangalore toxic liquor deaths, 83 Barapula flyover, 137 Bawana Industrial Area, 67 Beijing Olympics (2008), 88 Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP), 49, 98, 150

Bhopal industrial disaster, 83 Bhure Lal Committee, 132 binding crisis, 215 bourgeois, 35 see also elite environmentalism, 4, 35, 36, 46, 76–78, 110, 111, 120, 121, 125, 158, 159 environmentalists, 53, 77, 80, 111, 113, 125, 217 Bus Rapid Transit corridor in south Delhi, 137 bystander effect, 216 cars, 4, 9, 11, 23, 58, 130–138, 217 Central Empowered Commission, 95 Central Pollution Control Board (CPCB), 69 digital display of pollution levels, 56 Centre for Science and Environment (NGO), 131 Chintan (NGO), 209 Chipko movement, 58, 120 climate change, 218 climate-related extreme events, 215 Common Cause (NGO), 117–119 common effluent treatment plants (CETPs), 60 Commonwealth Games 2010, Delhi, 83–107, 135, 189 and global financial crisis of 2008, 98 Commonwealth Games Village complex, Delhi, 86, 91, 94, 98, 161, 163

240  Uncivil City Comptroller and Auditor General of India, report on Commonwealth Games 2010, 93 Confederation of Indian Industry, 88, 100 cows, 114–119 cycle-rickshaws, 22, 125–130 Dalit, 29, 38, 115, 174, 184, 209 See also Scheduled Caste Das, Veena, 84 de Certeau, Michel, 113, 123 Delhi Development Authority (DDA), 37 See also planning and economic liberalisation, 43 and urban planning, 37–40, 87, 115 construction of housing, 47, 70, 92, 152, 158, 162 violation of rules, 42, 43, 68, 71, 162–163, 166, 189 Delhi Forest Department, 122 Delhi High Court See also judicial activism order to remove cycle-rickshaws from Chandhi Chowk in 2006, 126 order for removal of jhuggi squatter settlements on public lands, 35 petition to end stray cattle menace by Common Cause in 2001, 118 removal of Yamuna Pushta bastis, 153 setting up of committee to monitor Commonwealth Games village environmental impacts, 162 Delhi Improvement Trust, 39 Delhi Jal Board, 143 Delhi Janwadi Adhikar Manch (DJAM – Delhi Socialist Rights Forum), 63 Delhi Land and Finance (DLF), 40 Delhi Manufacturers’ Association, 66 Delhi Metro, 6, 12, 86, 94, 136–137, 163

Delhi Municipal Corporation Act of 1957, 128 Delhi NCR (National Capital Region), 171 Delhi Peasants’ Multipurpose Cooperative Society, 161 Delhi Pollution Control Committee (DPCC), 60, 69 Delhi Ridge, 7–8, 15, 122, 172–173, 182–191 Delhi State Industrial Development Corporation (DSIDC), 65, 67 Dikshit, Sheila, 88, 165 displacement, 4, 51, 101, 110, 152, 155–160, 184, 191 ecologically noble savage, 205 ecological sustainability, 208 economic activities, 44 growth, 204 economic liberalisation, 4, 43, 58, 62, 81, 83, 97, 101, 110, 112, 143, 208 empowered urban elite, 111 Election Commission, 84 elite, 4, 6, 21, 81, 95, 98, 110-112, 120n, 157, 165, 181, 190, 201, 205, 211 See also upper-class Emaar MGF, 91, 100 Emergency (1975–77), imposed by Indira Gandhi’s government, 42 encroachment on public land, 11, 44, 47–48, 59, 68, 71, 122, 153, 154, 158, 184 environment definition of, 199 in rural India, struggle over, 34 public perception about, 200 environmental administration, 204 improvement, 36 nuisance, 203 environmental hazard, transformation of public perceptions about, 74

Index  241

environmentalism as ideology centred on ecological protection, 201 of poor, 201 environmental issues, in contemporary urban studies, 199 Environmental Pollution (Prevention and Control) Authority for the National Capital Region (EPCA), 216 extreme events, 214 floods, 97, 142–143, 165–166, 214 Ford Foundation, 37 fossil fuel-based economy, 217 Fraser, Nancy, 111 Gandhi, Indira, 144 Gandhi, Rajiv, 144 Gandhi, Sanjay, 41 Gandy, Matthew, 192 Ganga river, 150 gaushalas (cow shelters), 148 Geddes, Patrick, 39, 199 Geertz, Clifford, 105 Ghertner, Asher, 159, 204 Gidwani, Vinay, 144 global financial crisis of 2008, 91 global warming, 213 governmentality, 74–75, 122, 124 Guha, Ramachandra, 120, 189 Gurgaon, 43, 179 heatwave during Delhi summer in 2019, 213 industrial emissions, 69 encroachment on public land, 11, 44, 47–48, 59, 68, 71, 122, 153, 154, 158, 184 estates, 37, 45, 70 units, 35, 44, 45, 46, 57, 61, 64, 66, 70 workers, 71–72, 76, 78–80

industrialisation, 36, 70 Industrial Revolution, 100, 169 informal economy, 25, 28, 40–41, 58, 70–71, 128, 157 Jagmohan, 41, 42, 67, 68, 101 Jawaharlal Nehru University, 184 jhuggi basti (settlements), 5, 34, 48, 53, 155, 191, 197, 211 See also squatters, slum-dwellers judicial activism, 4, 18, 23, 35, 57, 60–68, 80–81, 153–154, 158, 161–162 Kalpavriksh (NGO), 188 Krishen, Pradip, 171, 173 land tenure, 34 land-use zones, 44 luxury emissions, 208 Mangarbani forest, 170–182, 191 Manushi (NGO), 125 Master Plan, 8, 37, 45, 59 See also planning categorisation of land use, 122 converge with ongoing process of capitalist restructuring and real-estate development, 46 disciplinary aspects of, 39 envisaged urban landscape in ideal of Nehruvian socialism, 37 identification of polluting industries in 1990, 69 mushrooming of unplanned Delhi, 41 middle class, division into different factions, 112 migrants, 43, 49–50, 58, 80, 94n, 127–128, 130, 209 Ministry of Environment and Forests, 161 Ministry of Urban Development, 66, 67

242  Uncivil City Municipal Corporation of Delhi (MCD), 60, 116, 126 drive against stray cattle, 117 Narmada Bachao Andolan movement, 58, 120 National Environmental Engineering Research Institute, 60, 161 National Green Tribunal (NGT), 133 order to stop non-forest activities in Mangar village, 179 natural resources, 209 natural variability, 170 nature-society relations, 169 Nehru, Jawaharlal, 144 Nehruvian socialism, 37 non-conforming industry, 61, 65–71 non-governmental organisations (NGOs), 51, 95, 97, 117–119, 125, 131, 161, 188, 209 nyaya yuddha (battle for justice), 67 odd-even scheme, 132 planning, 10, 33, 36, 43, 113 See also DDA, Master Plan political ecology, 169 patrons, 44, 48 polluting industry, definition of, 69–70 pollution and perception of public, 77 property brokers, 44 public good, 204 public interest, 202 environmental activism, 111, 204 Public Interest Litigation, 35, 72, 81 Public-Private Partnership (PPP), 91 public sphere, 82, 109, 111 Punjab Village Common Lands Regulation Act of 1961, 175 recyclers, 205 refugees (Hindu and Sikh), settlement during Independence, 37

Save Yamuna Campaign, 68, 73, 97, 102, 132, 161 Scheduled Caste, 174, 209 See also Dalit Sennett, Richard, 145 Shahjahanabad (the walled city), xii, 6, 38–39, 122, 126, 183 Shourie, H.D., 117 Singh, Kuldip (Green Judge), 72 Siri Fort Village, 42, 190 slum-dwellers, 52 See also jhuggi basti, squatters social inequality, 170 justice, 73, 201, 208 social movements, in rural areas, 202 socio-nature, 170 spatial configuration, 35 segregation, 35, 39, 77, 206 spectacular events in city, analysis of, 105 sports mega-events in cities, political and economic analysis of, 103 squatter(s), 18, 21, 25, 35, 44, 47–49, 83 See also jhuggi basti, slumdwellers settlements on public lands, 18, 35, 47, 59, 70–71, 153, 156 State Climate Change Action Plan of Delhi Government, 215 state surveillance, 36 Supreme Court, 49 See also judicial activism closure of polluting and nonconforming industry in Delhi, 34, 39, 45, 57–68 Kuldip Singh ( Judge) speedy justice on complex cases, 73 order to compensate factory owners and employees, 46 Tajewala Barrage, Haryana, 142 Tarlo, Emma, 42

Index  243

trees, 1, 8, 34, 122, 170–178, 180–184, 202, 213 See also Delhi Ridge Tughlaq, Firoz Shah, 183 upper-class, 20, 35–36, 56, 73, 76, 117, 125, 130, 179 See also elite urban design, 39 See also planning urban ecology, 202, 205 urban environmental issues, 201 urban governmentality, 84, 124 Urban Land Ceiling Act, 177 urban metabolism, 209, 210 urban order, 113 urban studies, 199 urban village, 6, 38, 115, 153 Uttar Pradesh Flood and Irrigation Department, 163 waste-pickers, 208–209 water pollution in Delhi, 71 white-collar professionals, 35 Williams, Raymond, 30, 104, 169–170, 182, 199

work discipline, 37 workers construction, 40, 42, 94, 101, 152 identity of, 50–51 industrial, 71–72, 76, 78–80 Yamuna Jiye Abhiyan (Keep Yamuna Alive Campaign), 68, 73, 97, 102, 132, 161 Yamuna river and Hindu culture, 146 as ecological entity, 164–166 cleaning of, 155 commodification and creation of value, 160–164 displacement of poor residents after 2004 court order, 160 floodplain, 8, 20, 59, 96–98, 101–103, 142, 152, 161, 204–205 floods, 97, 117, 142–143, 166 pollution, 60, 155