People's Democracy

NEWSPAPERS are full of regrets over the exit of Jagmohan from the urban development ministry. Reading the papers of the last few days, it appears as if an honest crusader has been hounded out, punished for taking on the high and the mighty, for daring to dream, for honestly doing his job, and so on. He is a radical, said one newspaper. Another said, "Planners and architects ring alarm bells for city’s heritage." Jagmohan contributed to his own image building with "If you ask the mafia, they’ll be celebrating my exit." Newspapers promptly put this self-advertisement on their front pages.

To go by newspaper reports on the matter, it would seem that only the builder mafia, the rich and powerful owners of palatial houses built on encroached land (the fabled Sainik Farms that nobody dare touch), and businessmen with huge illegal constructions and extensions had something to complain of with regard to Jagmohan. In short, he is the man who took on powerful forces that others wouldn’t dare to, and has paid for it!

The fact is that the man received no punishment, as the media will have us believe. He has merely been shifted to another ministry --- to wreak havoc elsewhere. He is firmly entrenched in his party and his mentor organisation. Not many days ago, he was seen in the company of Advani and Vajpayee, paying his annual gurudakshina and obeisance to the RSS chief Sudarshan.

Jagmohan began his political career as the demolisher of people’s lives. During the Emergency, he was the right hand man of Sanjay Gandhi and his bulldozer became as famous as the ‘trains running on time’ and the jails crowded with the Emergency regime’s opponents. As vice chairman of the Delhi Development Authority (DDA) in those days, he was the father of the ideology that planning and urban development mean wholesale expulsion, even elimination, of people and their dwellings from the city. Gharibi Hatao, the pin-up slogan of the Congress in those days, became Gharib Hatao during the Emergency. Jagmohan gave voice to this idea and literally rode roughshod over the poor of Delhi so as to "beautify" the city.

The idea of beautification and planning as synonymous with pushing the working class out of the city, till it actually became fashionable and more convenient for the elite to move out for reasons of space, environment, and individual land ownership-based housing, is not new in history. All over Europe and America, it has been part of the process of urbanisation based on capitalist industrialisation during the industrial revolution and the subsequent, fashionably called "post-industrial" phase. In that sense, what is happening in Mumbai, Delhi and other big cities is a repeat history of capitalism in the context of India, in more barbaric forms. The co-existence of capitalist industrialisation with agricultural backwardness in India, the accelerated pace of this process in some pockets in the midst of policies that have created unemployment, have meant rise in migration and concentration in cities like Mumbai and Delhi that have made the elite of these cities very uncomfortable. The sheer sight of slums and working people imply for them a ‘festering boil’ that must be demolished. Jagmohan has done just that.

It is essentially the poor of Delhi who suffered at his hands, something the bourgeois media would rather not see. The Sainik Farms received verbal threats now and then, but survive to date despite having broken every norm and law conceivable. As its residents like to put it, "we do not depend on the state or municipal structure, so just leave us alone." They constitute an independent sovereign republic with all facilities in a city where the basic amenities are denied to those whose roof over their heads has been bulldozed into flat earth. The so-called builder mafia gets away by paying bribes; their happiness consists in the fact that they may now have to pay less of it. Jagmohan’s record with the poor is more straightforward and simple --- no deals here, because the poor cannot afford them.

Delhiites remember the Emergency through the memories of Jagmohan’s bulldozers. Once, in outright fascist fashion, without reference to the plight of the citizens, under the orders of Sanjay Gandhi who had no constitutional authority, he personally came with his bulldozers and armed police to raze to the ground the huge Muslim locality at Turkman Gate. People who had been living there for decades, some over a hundred years, found their lives destroyed in a day. Their houses had to face bulldozers, and those resisting were brutally gunned down by the armed police. The incident has been one of the blackest chapters in the history of the Emergency, and has set a precedent for bulldozers without notice. This incident had earned him, as many would remember, the title of the "Butcher of Turkman Gate."

Similar demolitions of the poor’s dwellings have continued since then. But a reiteration of the beautification and "heritage preservation" plan, just another name for demolishing the poor’s life, became an environmentalist cult after Jagmohan took over the urban development ministry. During this tenure, thousands of jhuggis have been demolished. People were forced to sit with the scorching summer sun over their heads in the midst of their ruined lives, for fear that moving away would mean losing their right to compensation. They could not even put plastic sheets over their heads as that could be called ‘reconstruction.’ Lakhs lost their livelihood and menial jobs as a result of dislocation and lack of a staying place; those shunted to alternative sites found no water, electricity or transport facilities. Thousands of children could no longer go to school. They faced untold miseries, as Jagmohan also presided over the closure of small factories in residential areas. Lakhs lost their sources of income with this ‘pro-environment’ decision as well. Delhi virtually became hell for the poor under Jagmohan. One also remembers his firm resolve to do away with the Yamuna Pushta jhuggis where lakhs of the poor and the deprived live, so as to turn the entire area into an "Indraprastha Park," the heritage of "Ancient India." Needless to say, this area has a very large concentration of poor Muslims and Dalits. Many of them periodically face the charge of being ‘infiltrators’ and ‘criminals’ labeled by communal elements in the administration, police and media aligned to the Sangh Parivar.

It is also forgotten that Jagmohan was the chief architect of the J&K policy the RSS espouses. It was he who, during his governorship, brought the state to the point where we see it today. During his bloodstained stint, he presided over and contributed to a worsening of relations between the Kashmiri Muslims and Pandits, made the mass migration of Kashmiri Pandits inevitabile by declaring that the state was unable to provide them protection, and played with the idea, now accepted by the RSS, of trifurcating Kashmir along religious lines. His first stint as governor coincided with the undermining of the democratically elected government and the installation of stooges. And during his second stint he succeeded in alienating the Kashmiris to a point of difficult, if not impossible, return.

Not surprisingly, he was rewarded with a prominent position in the BJP-RSS team of ministers. His has been an illustrative example of a bureaucrat with fascist sympathies and service to the sectarian causes during his civil service. And that naturally flowed into the domain of a political career, when he became a visible face of the RSS-BJP combine in power.

Why is it important to look into the nature of the radicalism (sic!) he represents? Because it is a face of the ‘reforms’ and ‘solutions’ that combine globalisation with sectarian and fascistic authoritarianism, in the same way the worst right-wing alternatives combine them.