Between violence and desire: space, power, and identity in the making of metropolitan Delhi

Delhi, on the morning of January 30, 1995, was waking up to another winter day. In the well-todo colony of Ashok Vihar, early risers were setting off on morning walks, some accompanied by their pet dogs. As one of these residents walked into the neighbourhood ‘‘park’’, the only open area in the locality, he saw a young man, poorly clad, walking away with an empty bottle in hand. Incensed, he caught the man, called his neighbours and the police. A group of enraged house-owners and two police constables descended on the youth and, within minutes, beat him to death. The young man was 18-year-old Dilip, a visitor to Delhi, who had come to watch the Republic Day parade in the capital. He was staying with his uncle in a jhuggi (shanty house) along the railway tracks bordering Ashok Vihar. His uncle worked as a labourer in an industrial estate nearby which, like all other planned industrial zones in Delhi, had no provision for workers’ housing. The jhuggi cluster with more than 10,000 households shared three public toilets, each one with eight latrines, effectively one toilet per 2083 persons. For most residents, then, any large open space, under cover of dark, became a place to defecate. Their use of the ‘‘park’’ brought them up against the more affluent residents of the area who paid to have a wall constructed between the dirty, unsightly jhuggis and their own homes. The wall was soon breached, as much to allow the traffic of domestic workers who lived in the jhuggis but worked to clean the homes and cars of the rich, wash their clothes, and mind their children, as to offer access to the delinquent defecators. 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 and recreation, 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 wary and would have run away when challenged, and perhaps he would still be alive. 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 Amita Baviskar is a sociologist at the University of Delhi, India. Her research addresses the cultural politics of environment and development. Her publications include the book In the Belly of the River: Tribal Conflicts over Development in the NarmadaValley, OxfordUniversity Press, 1995. Journal: ISSJ Disk used ED: SVK: Pgn by: solly Article : 05501009 Pages: 10 Despatch Date: 7/1/2003