Eviction & Dispossession: Keeping The Poor On Tenterhooks

“Jab kisi ka ghar tootataa hai, dil pe kya  beetati hai aapko pata hoga (You can perhaps imagine the unbearable pain a person goes through when his home is demolished),” says Sunil Yadav. Words don’t come easily to Yadav as he tries to express the pain and heartbreak he felt after being uprooted from his dwelling in a shanty Gyaspur Basti near Nizamuddin area in Delhi.

A hawker and a migrant, Yadav was among at least 460 individuals of low-income families who were forcefully evicted by the Delhi Development Authority (DDA) between June and August 2022. “They just came and ran the bulldozer over our homes. They issued us a notice at night and started demolishing the houses in the morning,” adds Yadav, who lived in the basti for around 14 years.

For a few days, Yadav stayed in a tent pitched by the road near the site only to be evicted from there as well. Since the idea of moving to a faraway shelter home, a minor consolation offered by the court, did not make sense for both his livelihood and his family, he was eventually forced to share a room on rent near Nizamuddin. His three children also bore the brunt as Yadav, now left without a home and deprived of support from fellow workers and his community, was compelled to send them back to his native place in Saharsa, Bihar.

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Yadav and other affected slum dwellers had managed to get an interim stay on the demolitions from the Delhi High Court in June last year, but in August another judge vacated that order, clearing the way for the authorities. The court did not intervene in the eviction despite the residents having proof of residence in the area for decades. It ruled that the settlement did not qualify for rehabilitation under the state policy as it was not included in the identified list of bastis released by the Delhi Urban Shelter Improvement Board.

The authorities ignored the vast number of settlements that were yet to be surveyed by limiting the requirements for due process and rehabilitation to only the ‘listed’ settlements, said Housing and Land Rights Network (HLRN), a housing advocacy group, about such cases in a recent annual report on forced evictions.

The Gyaspur eviction in the national capital offers a snippet of the lack of clarity and procedure that holders of power display when it comes to the eviction of poor and working-class citizens. It is in this context that activists and legal experts Outlook spoke to argue that the recent Haldwani eviction case presents an opportunity for the Supreme Court to settle once and for all the question of the right to shelter, address the subject of forced evictions and rehabilitation across the country, and ideally lay out a uniform policy for the states while conducting such operations.

The apex court has, for now, prevented thousands of families, most of them Muslim, from being uprooted in Haldwani, a town in Uttarakhand. The court stayed the Uttarakhand High Court’s contentious order calling for the removal of the so-called encroachments from land claimed by the Indian Railways through the use of force.

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What are termed as ‘encroachments’ often stem from the state’s failure to provide its citizens basic rights of shelter and livelihood,
experts stress.

The United Nations defines forced eviction as “the permanent or temporary removal against the will of individuals, families or communities from their homes or land, which they occupy, without the provision of, and access to, appropriate forms of legal and other protection.”

In fact, there has not been any uniformity across the country, even within states, in the way authorities have dealt with evictions, brute force and apathy being the norm. What worries activists is that despite several progressive judgments, such as the landmark Olga Tellis vs Bombay Municipal Corporation case of 1985, and observations, which mandate the rehabilitation of slum dwellers before their eviction, the courts have been inconsistent in interpreting housing as a fundamental right and intervening in such forced displacements and demolitions.

Activists argue that since the country does not have a documented or legislated right to housing, and that the law on evictions and rehabilitation is not yet settled, a lot is hinged on judicial discretion and the mercy of respective governments and states, which have differing rehabilitation policies, unreasonable eligibility cut-off dates or no meaningful schemes at all to accommodate the evicted.

“The time has come really for the Supreme Court to force the states to have a common rehabilitation plan,” says Senior Advocate Colin Gonsalves, who represented the dwellers of Haldwani. “It is shocking that you have to call the paramilitary forces to attack the poor. It is just pure, undistilled cruelty,” he adds questioning the Uttarakhand High Court order.

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Gonsalves referred to important judgments such as the Ahmedabad Municipal Corporation vs Nawab Khan case of 1997, in which the Supreme Court mandated that when people were living on public land for a long period, they should be rehabilitated with schemes run by the government for housing the poor. “Is there a shortage of law? No. Is there a lack of schemes and statutes? No. Is there a lack of judgments of the superior courts? No. It is pure dadagiri (bullying). Might is right. Take your bulldozer and crush the people,” says Gonsalves on the spate of demolitions in the country in recent times.

Labour and housing rights activist Nirmal Gorana feels it is time to introduce a law that guarantees a right to housing. “Like the Right to Food and Right to Education, we must also have a Right to Housing. Only then will the authorities be bound to implement the housing policies. Otherwise, they lie in cold storage,” he says.

According to a recent HLRN report, in the first six months of 2022, government authorities at both the central and state levels demolished over 25,800 homes, affecting over 1.24 lakh persons. In 2021, authorities demolished 36,480 homes, evicting over 2.07 lakh persons from their homes across urban and rural India. At least 158 incidents of forced evictions were recorded in 2021, the HLRN stated. These are conservative estimates as several stray evictions and demolitions go unreported or lack the magnitude to trigger outrage.

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It is well-documented that historically and socio-economically marginalised communities and groups face the brunt of evictions and demolitions, often without due process or arrangements to rehabilitate them. Evictions happen for various reasons including beautification of cities, clearing encroachments, building highways, widening roads, launching development projects or protecting the environment. “Such technicalities are used to evict people.  A lot of times, they are evicted but that land is not even used later [by the government],” says Aishwarya Ayushmaan, an activist associated with the HLRN.

Lawyers and activists fighting for evicted and displaced persons say there is decreasing legal protection to those affected. In fact, on several occasions, courts have actively directed these evictions and demolitions. Recall the Supreme Court bench which, in 2020, ordered the removal of nearly 48,000 slum dwellings around the 140-km length of railway track in New Delhi within three months. Amid much uproar, the Centre informed the court that it had put the evictions on hold till a final decision was taken.  In another instance, the Supreme Court did not provide any relief to those being evicted in Haryana’s Khori Gaon in the Aravali forest area. The top court prioritised the environment over the people even as over a lakh individuals, more than the figure in Haldwani, were affected, says Ayushmaan. If one were to be guided by the Constitution and constitutional morality, “then these kinds of evictions should necessarily be accompanied by rehabilitation,” says Bengaluru-based lawyer-activist Clifton Rozario, who has represented slum dwellers in the southern city.

Indu Prakash Singh, a housing rights defender in Delhi, however, argues that following constitutional morality in matters of evictions depends a lot on the “pressure judges can take” from the government. “It is often hard for a judge to stand up against a government,” he says, explaining the inconsistent approach of the judiciary.

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Experts also point out that authorities are prompt in executing demolition orders but often do not implement court orders aimed at providing relief and rehabilitation. In 2021, the HLRN report notes, court orders and their implementation by state authorities resulted in the eviction of over 1.06 lakh people in 11 incidents of demolition. Almost 60 percent of those evicted did not receive any resettlement, partial resettlement or compensation from the state, the report said. In many instances, the courts ignored landmark judgments like Sudama Singh vs Government of Delhi (2010) and Ajay Maken vs Union of India cases (2019) that place the onus on the state authorities to conduct a proper survey and provide rehabilitation before carrying out any demolition or eviction, said the HLRN.

Forced evictions have long been a state tactic and often interplay with class, caste, communal and political considerations. Successive governments have treated the poor and slum dwellers as disposable entities and the bastis as eyesores hindering their ambitious plans to beautify and redevelop major cities.

Seldom does one hear about demolition drives against unauthorised colonies occupied by the rich and elite. The case of Sainik Farms colony in the national capital is a classic example, says Gonsalves. “The authorities have held it to be illegal but they continue to allowe it. If they (authorities) implemented the same policies (which applied to the poor) they (the colony) would be evicted within two weeks,” says the senior lawyer.

Apart from the long-running class bias, what is remarkably different in recent years is that demolition is now also being used to teach a lesson to a community, Muslims in particular, says Roz­ario. The selective use of bulldozers on houses occupied by Muslims in Uttar Pradesh, Madhya Pradesh and Delhi’s Jahangirpuri provide merit to the widely held perception that demolition and eviction are deployed as a full-fledged punitive strategy against the minority community.

The question of partisan action has also come to the fore in Assam, another state ruled by the Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP), where the government has been relentless in its attempt to disenfranchise Bengali-speaking residents under the garb of acting against illegal Bangladeshi migrants. Lawyer Aman Wadud, who avers that the state should be held accountable and responsible to provide land to and rehabilitate those being displaced, points to the hypocrisy of the BJP government.  The BJP government has been forcefully evicting Muslim residents there. The disgraceful incident in which a government-assigned photographer was seen stomping on a man shot by police during a protest against the eviction in January 2021 comes to mind. However, the same regime allotted land pattas to more than 1 lakh indigenous people.

“Why is the government so harsh when it comes to minority communities or those whose votes don’t matter?” asks Wadud. “When the government can show magnanimity and constitutional morality towards the majority community, why can’t it do the same for the minority community? This is where the court comes in. The government cannot act in a partisan manner,” says Wadud.

Madhu Sudan, a land rights activist from Odisha, stresses on the caste angle of displacement in his home state, where some Dalit slum dwellers have moved the court for relief to prevent the demolition of their homes for the beautification and redevelopment of a major temple in Sambalpur. Cynical about the role of the judiciary in protecting the rights of the homeless, Sudan believes that the real solution lies in providing land to historically marginalised groups, especially Dalits, tribals and Muslims. “There must be a land distribution policy. Land must be nationalised,” he says.

For the estimated 15 million people still living under the threat of eviction from their habitat across the country, according to the HLRN research, this sounds like a pipe-dream.

(This appeared in the print edition as "The Lie of the Land")