Knock ?em out

Neighbouring every middle-class residential area in Delhi lies a sizeable colony that forms the service infrastructure. And this is the sector the authorities target during every demolition drive.

The broad streets and neat houses of south Delhi’s Safdarjung Enclave give way close by to a hodge-podge of buildings of assorted shapes and sizes. Cows congregate outside a Ram temple, looking wistfully at flower-sellers selling marigold necklaces. Little shops selling everything from tikki to brooms spill halfway across the narrow street. This is Krishna Nagar — lately in infamy for being 100 per cent illegal. Every building here reportedly violates some law or bylaw.

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And yet, I doubt that too many people in the neighbourhood would want it bulldozed to the ground. Not Krishna Nagar residents, surely, for who would want his or her home razed. Not many Safdarjung Enclave residents either, I suspect — we who live here gain much from our proximity to this ‘illegal’ neighbourhood.

For starters, my maid comes from there. My maid is among the most important women in my life. If you always wash your own dishes and make your own rotis, feel free to cast the first slur, or else hold your tongue. Apart from the maid, the grocery shop that home-delivers is there. So is the vegetable shop, and the fruit seller, and the pani-puriwallah, and the street-corner mechanic, and the chemist, and the photocopy guy, and the plumber shop, and the electrician, and the carpenter, and the tailor who does alterations… There’s an entire universe of services out there. All of it catering to Safdarjung Enclave, an area whose residents include ministers, MLAs and even the occasional British Lord in passage.

A feature of this city is the regularity with which a ‘posh’ neighbourhood alternates with a relatively downmarket one. Next to Chittaranjan Park and Greater Kailash II you have Govindpuri. Next to GK I and East of Kailash there’s Garhi village. Across from Defence Colony there’s Kotla. Nizamuddin is surrounded by slums. And so on.

In each of these neighbourhoods the workers — maids, drivers, cleaners — typically come from the poorer colony alongside. The people who live in these areas (and often, work for us) are often the people we encounter in reports as statistics: those mind-boggling figures about the millions of illegal residents or unemployed.

It seems Delhi’s population will exceed 20 million in the next 10 years. I’ve also read that 40 per cent of India’s billion plus people will live in cities and towns by 2020. And that the number of jobless in India was 44.5 million in 2001. It is currently over 50 million by even conservative estimates. The higher estimates put the figure at over 100 million. Only 5 per cent of people in this country have jobs in the organised sector. The remaining 95 per cent include farmers, labourers, petty businessmen and shopkeepers and all those other people we encounter in our daily lives — the vegetable and fruit-seller, the small-time plumber, the electrician, the watchman, the dhobi, the maid, the driver, the car-cleaner…

The laws of this ‘socialist democracy’ do nothing for them. When the MCD or the NDMC decides to bully someone, it usually picks the chap trying to make an honest living by selling samosas or chaat on the roadside. The truck with the sarkari bullies swoops down on these ‘encroachers’ and makes off with the handcart that is the source of his livelihood. A bribe and a few visits to the ‘babus’, and some bowing and scraping, ensure its return.

It seems to me most unfair that a country that fails to provide either employment or social security to the vast majority of its population should have laws that allow its corrupt and bloated bureaucracy to extort those who manage to employ themselves. These people work hard and provide useful services — in sum, they are of more help to citizens than the crooks at MCD. If the court does indeed close down that miserable organisation, it will not be mourned. As to the question of law: laws ought to be followed, but first, the laws must be in consonance with reason. And second, laws shouldn’t result in injustice. All these years, laws have been selectively used as instruments of extortion by the ‘inspector raj’, rather than followed in spirit.

Morality, of course, is mainly an affliction of the middle-classes. A close look at the lifestyles of the powerful shows the absence of morals in many cases. We’ve heard recently of a former Intelligence Bureau officer’s allegation that a chief minister of a north Indian state has close links with the ISI. Certain ministers are also believed to be involved in criminal activities including drug smuggling. Several ministers in insurgency-affected states have close links with militants. And, of course, we’ve seen MPs on TV, taking money to raise questions in Parliament.

Instead of going after the samosa-seller by the roadside, the law ought to go after these big crooks first. The country would be better served by such action.