Before January 2004 the banks of the river Yamuna (the Yamuna Pushta), on which the city of Delhi is built, was home to over a hundred and fifty thousand people. By May 2004 it was reduced to a heap of rubble bearing an uncanny resemblance to a bombed out war zone. No, the Pushta residents are not part of the ‘axis of evil’ as defined by Messers George Bush and Company! Instead they are the city’s poor who had built shanties on the river’s neglected banks because this was the most affordable form of shelter available in the city.
Many households had been there for well over a quarter of a century. Many belonged to peasants who have cultivated the dry riverbed for fifty years. Many provided the workforce for the Old City, now home to Asia’s largest wholesale market. But within a span of about three months, Delhi’s biggest squatter settlement had been razed to the ground. The current process of slum demolitions, of which the Pushta is a part, started in the late 1990s. In the past five years or so over four hundred thousand slum dwellers have been evicted from their homes in the centre city areas and ‘relocated’, if at all, to the outskirts of the city.
Such evictions are demonstrative of the inherent instability of the city’s slum settlements, no matter how old, how solidified or how big. This instability, we argue, is created by the kinds of questions raised on slum housing by city elites. In recent years, the central focus has been the illegality of slum settlements which are often built on peripheral vacant land. Unlike the equally illegal housing of the city’s rich, exemplified by the sprawling estates or farm houses that ring the city, unofficial slum housing is never ignored, but subject to constant censure. Further, while the issue of affordable, legal housing for the poor is seldom ventured; many questions persist on the aesthetic quality of slum settlements, on the morality of those who live in it and what it means that a modern city should have slums at all. Slums are taken to be a sign that ‘enough’ progress and development has not taken place and slum dwellers themselves come to be identified as a sign of persistent underdevelopment that must be removed to make way for a more ‘adequate’ urban space. In what follows, we would like to trace how this historical attitude has intersected with the city’s new economy to fuel one of the largest displacements of poor people in the city’s history.