“It took a fire”: The Long-Standing Negligence of Bahujan Migrants’ Issues in Delhi’s Tughlakabad

A massive fire broke out on May 26 in a slum in Tughlakabad in Delhi, destroying almost 1500 shanties. Badal*, who lives there with his wife, daughter, and son-in-law, was sleeping when he found out. The family rushed out to save their lives, while everything they owned burnt in the fire. Badal, who belongs to a Scheduled Caste, migrated to Delhi around 20 years ago with his family. Back in his village in the Burdhman district of West Bengal, he worked in the fields and caught fish for a living. He says,

“I had four brothers and my parents had died when we were young. We had no prospects there. I had to get my daughter married and earn a decent living, and everyone told us we will be able to do that if we came to Delhi. When we came here we only got work as waste-pickers- in this job we are ill-treated both by police and by other people. We have to continue doing our job in fear”.

According to him, most of the people living in the shanties are migrants from West Bengal and UP, and most are Hindu SCs and Muslims. Barsha*, who belongs to the same caste, and works as a domestic worker, was a daily-wage labourer with no steady income back home in Kolkata. It was through people from her area who had already migrated to Delhi, that her family reached Tughlukabad, where contractors employed her husband as a waste-picker and rented out a shanty to them. Chitra*, a domestic worker who also belongs to a Scheduled Caste, migrated to Delhi from Nadia almost 15 years ago, when her youngest child was just five months old. “I used to go to work in the kothis with my daughter in my arms. When she grew a little older, I bought a sewing machine and started tailoring clothes at home as well”, she said.

Ever since the lockdown began, Badal, Barsha, and Chitra’s families, like most other families in the area, have been robbed of their income. Contractors have not only refused pay to the waste-pickers but also continue to extract rent from them. The women who work as domestic workers in upper class kothis and housing societies have been denied their pay as well. “When we went to ask for money, they refused to give us our wages and asked us to make do”, Badal said. Throughout this entire period, he says, not a single government representative has attempted to provide any help or relief. “I have lived here for so many years, I have a voter card, an aadhar card, a pan card. In so many months we have just received 5 kgs of rice and 5 kgs of atta from somewhere. Aren’t we voters? Shouldn’t the government think about us?”, he says. In fact, not far from their homes is where the BJP MP Ramesh Bhaduri resides, who according to Barsha, has seen their condition and failed to do anything to better it. When the lockdown was announced suddenly, Barsha spent her last bit of money to buy extra groceries to keep in her home, and Chitra was barely managing to sustain her family with some money sent to her by her father.

It was all of this that the fire burnt besides their homes- every document that Badal had created over the last 20 years, whatever remained of the 5 kgs of rice and atta his family had received, the groceries that Barsha had bought, her husband’s medicines, and the money sent to Chitra by her father. While the cause for the fire had not been ascertained, many reported seeing, in the beginning, fires in three distinct places at the same time, suggesting that it had been lit by someone with malicious intent. On June 3, another fire broke out in the slum, burning another 200 shanties. According to Badal, there had been similar fires twice before- one around seven to eight years ago, and one fourteen years ago, but this is the first time anyone has attempted to intervene. Saleem Khan, of Little India Foundation, one of the many organizations attempting to provide relief in the absence of government action, described what they had been able to provide- food, fans, mosquito repellents, temporary shelter, and so on. But any permanent interventions in this area are difficult.

The slum is located in an empty plot of government land, allegedly seized by a member of the BJP Party, known around the area as ‘Karamveer chacha’. It was on this land that he built a number of tiny shanties, renting them out directly or through contractors, at varying rents. As a result, the sources alleged, that any interventions by civil society members or media persons is blocked in order to avoid attracting attention to the illegally seized land, and any complaints regarding the lack of amenities (such as running water) or the condition of the slum are faced by threats of extreme violence. After the fire, organizations which attempted to install water tanks, or rebuild the shanties, were turned away. In the heavy rains following the day of the fire, residents of the area remained roofless for two nights and had to resort to taking shelter underneath a bridge. “There are two people who profit from this- the contractor and the landlord, and if anyone from outside rebuilds our home, both of them will stop getting rent”, says Chitra. According to Badal, while a few Congress party workers had been inquiring about their needs and attempted to help, they did not receive any help from AAP or BJP since the fire. “The SDO also kept telling us that they can send us back home for free in Shramik trains- but what about the documents that we have lost? Shouldn’t they have offered to take care of that before suggesting that we go back?”, he said.

“In some ways, maybe it was a good thing there was a fire. This is the first time in years anyone has paid attention to our needs. No one came to us before, not even during lockdown”, Badal said. In what kind of a morally corrupt society can the marginalized be thankful for a disaster such as this, in hopes that it will ensure their fundamental rights? Who will be held accountable for the consistent negligence and denial of their dignity?

The caste-Hindu families living in kothis and housing societies who can somehow afford to employ domestic workers but not to pay them their wages during the lockdown, the contractors who continue to extract rent even as they deny pay, the elected representative Bhaduri, a Brahmin who has allegedly not only given his tacit support to the illegal seizing of property by one of his party workers but also failed to address the needs of the residents of his constituency, the Prime Minister who has implemented a lockdown that has constantly victimised the vulnerable, the Indian Government which in all these years has not felt the need to create a sanitation and waste-management system that does not rely on the exploitation of Dalits- these are the many levels at which a system built for the benefit of Savarnas functions. “There is so much free land in the world- instead of allowing a few people to seize it, why can’t the government give some of it to the poor?”, says Chitra, pointing to the fact that the events in Tughlukabad and the developments in the country during this pandemic are not simply an accident or an ill-thought-out policy decision, but are representative of this system, where the Indian government has consistently allowed caste-Hindus to take that which is not theirs and turned its back on the Bahujan they leech off of.

Note: First names of sources have been changed, and the specific castes they belong to have not been revealed in order to protect their anonymity. 

Damayanti Saha is a freelance writer based in Kolkata. For any feedback please email [email protected]