Eviction in the name of development: The story of Ahmedabad's Bengali Vas

By Prasad Chacko* 

When the cities were built, they were needed; they came in hundreds of thousands from the parched rural hinterlands, fleeing grinding poverty and the indignity of caste oppression unleashed by the uncivilized and violent dominant caste landlord-moneylenders. The cities needed cheap labour, which they provided in abundance. They toiled for years trying to rebuild their broken lives, finding spaces where they could live—on the banks of lakes and ponds, in open grounds, alongside sewage canals, on riverbanks—educating their children in nearby municipal schools. They built the city; nurtured it through their labour and their services.

As the city dwellers prospered, as the gated communities flourished, they wanted the city to become 'modern' like any city in developed countries, with modern amenities. They captured most of the land for their spacious houses, and their elite institutions—educational, medical, business, and entertainment—used most of the available water and consumed the lion's share of energy. The elite built riverfronts, lakefronts, malls, and happening places along classy highways... on the land that the city kept acquiring by devouring surrounding villages, and by taking over the spaces that the 'city-makers' lived on and had their small markets and public spaces where they could take their families. This land capture would always be legal; for the law would eventually bow down to money, wealth, and power.

Chandola Lake was one such space—where, decades ago, people who came into the city started settling. A city that did not offer spaces for its makers. A city already ghettoized by caste now becoming further ghettoized by religion, where the poor had to fight each other for the meagre space that the elite left for them. Chandola had already become a ghetto of poor migrant Muslim workers who came into Ahmedabad to make a living. The city never offered them space; hence, they were offered space by land mafias. They had lived there for four to five decades, and today that ghetto—known as Bengali Vas—had over 3,000 to 4,000 houses.

Suddenly, the status of Chandola as a water body became important. The number of water bodies devoured by the city—the housing societies built on water bodies and waterways—were never a problem, as they were for the elite. Those were always legal, or made legal through policy acrobatics. But as the city grows at a fast pace, the gaze of the powerful is directed toward the 'illegal' lands occupied by the weak and vulnerable. The spaces where those who toiled to build and serve the city lived were just a temporary gesture of the dominants. They are the landlords of the city... the city government is theirs.

They were biding their time, waiting for the best optics that would give their act of cruelty legitimacy. Pahalgam suddenly provided that opportunity. Suddenly, a few scores of impoverished Bangladeshis (out of the few thousands who reside in Chandola) became the greatest threat to national security. The state launched a 'surgical strike'; the optics of this operation were very important. It had to give sadistic, voyeuristic pleasure to see the 'Bangladeshis' (read Muslims) being herded and paraded along the roads under the hot sun, and to give a sense of vicarious power by showcasing police vehicles and the home minister leading the operation, continuously making statements about how many dangerous foreigners they had captured—a pathological sense of victory in seeing the 'other' suffer, in seeing them humiliated. It does not matter that at the end of this 'operation' the state identified only 100–200 impoverished Bangladeshis who had lived there since birth, which the police likely already knew. It would not matter that the state violated and humiliated its own citizens just because they were poor and Muslim—because it was done in the name of 'national security.'

The courts, expectedly, stand by the law—the law that stands by the affluent and punishes the weak. The water body must be protected! The rest of the water bodies have disappeared and been legalized, despite the fact that the streets of Ahmedabad flood every monsoon as water gets trapped. The waterways and water bodies were devoured by the affluent dominants. Now, the poor who live around the lakes must be evicted. The lakefronts will create new real estate—the backbone of urban power. Nobody can stand in the way of 'Development.' The nation is supreme!

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*With People's Union for Civil Liberties