The recent jhuggi demolitions in Delhi are built on a castle of distorted truths and factual overreach

ON THE MORNING OF JUNE 16, a vacation bench in the Delhi High Court sat down to hear the plea of jhuggi-dwellers from Wazipur, a north Delhi municipality, facing an imminent demolition of their homes, trailing alongside bustling railway tracks. Already on June 2, around a hundred homes had been razed to dust, just two weeks after a notice pasted by the Railway Administration, Northern Railways, had warned of bulldozing homes within a week. But the residents, most of them migrant wage workers and domestic helpers, had not gotten any effective hearing, and were left overnight shelterless in Delhi’s sweltering heat. There was another issue. 

While the notice stated that the jhuggis had to be removed due to difficulty in spotting the railway traffic signal by train pilots owing to blockade by upper floors of some jhuggis, when the bulldozers came, they razed down entire buildings. There was almost no rhyme or rhythm to which homes were targeted, or why.

Three days after the demolition, came a second notice, a replica of the previous one, warning of further demolitions. Before Justice Tejas Karia in the High Court, one defining question was whether a stay could be imposed - on paper, there seemed to be violations with the Draft Protocol for removal of Jhuggis and JJ Bastis in Delhi, notified in 2016, which had outlined a clear sequence of procedural compliances before any bulldozer touched a house. Justice Karia issued notice, but there was no stay.

That day, around 200 police personnel had marched into the jhuggi area in Ashok Vihar - different patches of jhuggis around the region would be demolished in huge drives, slowly and slowly, until on June 25, heavy bulldozer machinery reached the homes beside the railway tracks too. 

In the recent spate of demolitions of jhuggis and migrant worker settlements in Delhi, a pattern of arbitrary reasoning emerges. In the past two weeks, homes in the Bhomiheen camp in Kalkaji, and the old Tamil settlement of Madrasi camp in south-east Delhi have been razed to dust, only a portion of the residents getting any rehabilitation support. In Okhla’s Muslim populated Batla house, fear of imminent demolitions looms large, as the High Court sits over its decision in a reserved order in a batch of petitions. Courts have, so far, failed to grant any substantial relief, or in Madrasi camp’s case, played an explicit role in fortifying its ill fate.

The Leaflet looked closely at claims raised by the Delhi government for demolition of two specific settlements - Wazirpur (settlements in the Chander Shekhar Azad Colony), and Madrasi camp in Jangpura. While the Wazirpur demolitions were allegedly in the interest of railway safety, Madrasi camp was accused of causing monsoon floods in the Jangpura and Nizamuddin region and blocking the Barapulla canal.

“Most anti-encroachment actions are being carried out in compliance with court orders,” Delhi chief minister Rekha Gupta claimed on June 8, also noting that Madrasi camp’s court-ordered removal was critical, “otherwise, 2023-like floods would be seen again in Delhi.”

However, independent studies, one by a team of scientific experts, that were on record with the High Court noted that Madrasi camp had only a “minimal”, if any role at all, in choking the canal. Instead, the main reason seemed to be leftover debris from the construction of a new bridge, abandoned by the Public Works Department and the Delhi Development Authority, and lack of desilting exercises. 

In the hearings, the High Court refused to engage with this line of reasoning, orally observing in fact that it would not question the State’s version of reality. As with Wazirpur, in Madrasi camp too, a disproportionate move, based on an arbitrary reasoning with full nod by the High Court, had led to expedited demolitions. A pattern emerges of vaguely framed justifications giving way to a systemic narrative to clear out the city of its poor, on whose back urban life and landscape in the capital is being built.