Ex-bureaucrat Harsh Mander responds to Justice BR Gavai calling homeless people parasites seeking freebies
Text of the open letter by Harsh Mander to Supreme Court Justice BR Gavai in response to the latter's description of homeless people as “parasites” seeking “freebies” in a hearing on 12 February:
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It is with respect but utmost dismay I feel compelled to respond to your remarks while hearing the civil writ petitions pertaining to provision of adequate shelter facilities to homeless persons, on 12 February 2025.
And since this concerns the lives (and possible deaths) of masses of our most destitute and dispossessed citizens in cities and towns across the country, I feel persuaded to place this letter in the public domain.
My letter relates to your observations to the counsels, “Sorry to say, but by not making these people part of mainstream society, are we not creating a class of parasites? Because of freebies, when elections are declared...people are not willing to work. They are getting free rations without doing any work! Would it not be better to make them part of mainstream society so that they can contribute to nation?” (as reported by the legal news portal Live Law).
In this letter, I will respond particularly to two words in your comments. One of these is “parasites”. The other is “freebies”.
I write because India’s Supreme Court is the highest forum to which citizens of India may turn, in their last resort for justice and the defence of their constitutional rights. For citizens who suffer comprehensive daily violations of even their right to life with dignity under Article 21 of the constitution, the Supreme Court can literally make the difference between life and death. And few in the cities we live suffer more brutal daily violations of their right to life than our homeless fellow-citizens.
I write this letter in many capacities. To start with, I am a petitioner in the case hearing which you made these remarks. I was for 12 years Special Commissioner of the Supreme Court for the landmark Writ Petition 196 of 2001 PUCL versus the Union of India (popularly known as the right to food case), and with Commissioner NC Saxena raised the question of shelters for homeless people. I am a citizen of this country. And most importantly, for over two decades now, since I returned from Madhya Pradesh to live in Delhi, I have worked closely with homeless women, men and children in Delhi and many cities in the country. I have come to know them closely, and think of them as my sisters, brothers and children.
Firstly, who are homeless people? Far from being parasites, they are the city’s most destitute and dispossessed *working* people. Unprotected by the state, by any labour law, or any union, they crowd on numerous street corners each morning – be it winter, summer or the monsoons – in what we call “labour chowks”. Here they offer their labour to anyone on any terms that he offers, in ways that disquietingly echo the slave markets of history. They are picked up for very hard labour on dirt wages, and some report being taken into distant farms and literally chained and forced to work. It is they who push heavy loads, clean our streets, build our homes and offices and cater in our marriage parties. Parasites certainly they are not.
Homeless men are often permanently separated from their kin and communities by family and psychological breakdowns, and by a settled sense of despair that their lives can never improve. Homeless women almost without exception have been driven to the streets because of unrelenting ferocious domestic violence. Benefit of any places of safety to which they can retreat with their children, the streets alone becomes their homes. Single homeless children escape cruelty, abuse and incest within their families, often from alcoholic fathers and step-fathers. Children on the streets with mothers are mostly born out of the unceasing rape of single women on the streets. Parasites, sir, certainly they are not.
I turn now to the charge that what we seek in our petitions to the court are “freebies” for the homeless. It was familiar but melancholic reports of able-bodied homeless people dying in the winter cold of 2010-11 that spurred Dr Saxena and I, as Commissioners of the Supreme Court in the PUCL case, to turn to the Supreme Court seeking to defend their right to live. In a series of rulings that are now acknowledged as groundbreaking globally, Justice Dalveer Bhandari and Justice Dipak Gupta observed on January 2012, “Nothing is more important for the State than to preserve and protect the lives of the most vulnerable, weak, poor and helpless people. The homeless people are constantly exposed to the risk of life while living on the pavements and the streets and the threat to life is particularly imminent in the severe and biting cold winter, especially in northern India (my italics)”. They ruled that “The State must discharge its core obligation to comply with Article 21 of the Constitution by providing night shelters for the vulnerable and homeless people”.
This order of significant moral and constitutional significance resulted in more than 2000 shelters coming up rapidly around the country. This was many times less than were ordered by the Supreme Court, but we hoped the first step to a highly belated national response to secure a life with dignity for homeless people.
However, what transpired was that in most of the country, the shelters were nothing more than tin and makeshift structures without elementary conditions of sanitation and dignity. I was reminded constantly of the “poor-houses” of Victorian England, in which living bodies were stuffed at night and ejected in the day, only to prevent the scandal of their deaths in the English winter.
Surely democratic India could do better. For years after the orders of the Supreme Court, first as a Commissioner in the PUCL case, and then as a petitioner in the case that is being heard before you, we tried to plead that a bare shelter is far from enough to secure a life with dignity of homeless people. We need many more shelters, they need to conform to standards of human dignity, homeless people must get election cards and ration cards, women need places of safety and working women’s hostels, men and women need opportunities for decent work, affordable nutritious food is essential, and since our studies reveal that homeless people are excluded from all health services, can each homeless shelter be developed as a sub-health centre with community health workers.
These then, Sir, are the “freebies” that we have been seeking from India’s highest court for years, first as Commissioners in the PUCL case, and then after that case closed in the present case. Our efforts all these years, sadly, have met with little outcome. Notices are periodically sent out to state governments, they crowd the courtroom with glowing accounts on the ground about all that their governments have accomplished for the homeless, but these are in most cases very far from the facts. Our studies reveal that there are five to ten times higher chances for homeless people to die than those who are housed, and that summer and the monsoons are even more lethal than the winters. We have discovered, in collaboration with the University College of London, that single homeless men on the banks of the Yamuna in Delhi have some of the highest levels of untreated TB that the University College of London has encountered anywhere in the world.
Matters plummeted even further when in February and March of 2023, the Delhi government demolished nine homeless shelters in Sarai Kale Khan and Yamuna Pushta. These are shelters built to comply with the orders of the Supreme Court in the PUCL matter. They were razed a decade later even without notice to the homeless residents in the middle of the night, mercilessly rendering the sleeping homeless men doubly homeless. The shelters were demolished to build a riverfront bamboo garden for the G20 summit delegates, presumably mimicking the Hong Kong waterfront promenade. We rushed to the Supreme Court, managed to secure a stay on further demolitions, but the Delhi government still got more shelters vacated. Far from even seeking the “freebies” that I listed earlier, our petition has now been reduced to a losing struggle to protect the few shelters that still stand in Delhi.
May I reiterate in conclusion that our homeless sisters, brothers and children are very far from being “parasites”. They are our most persecuted working compatriots – dispossessed and destitute people expelled by a state and society that does not care. It is impossible to live, work and travel in any Indian city without seeing homeless people every day. And yet we do not have a national program to assure shelter, food, work, social protection and safety to our homeless city residents. Our collective indifference is nourished and normalised by millennia of caste and gender persecution. The cruel abandonment of any responsibility of the state and the larger citizenry toward homeless people in our cities and towns is for me a most powerful symbol of our extraordinary cultural capacity to look at intense suffering and injustice, and then simply look away.
True justice, sir, I am convinced, is always tempered with public compassion. For this reason, we have repeatedly turned to you, the highest arbiters for justice in our republic, to defend the right to a life with dignity of homeless people. I still cling to the hope that at last - 78 years after freedom - India’s highest court would recognise, with humility and responsibility, the equal humanity, the equal dignity, the equal worth, and the equal rights of every child, woman and man still forced to sleep each night under the smoggy sky on rough treacherous streets.
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