Fact: I had a 98 percentile score on the analytical portion of the GRE.

But apart from handwaving about it being fuzzy logic, and apart from pretending that the argument is solely whether the tsunami is the same as the Maharashtra Govt, would you care to explain exactly why the comparison is invalid?

After all, to take just one slice of this, the tsunami did happen to destroy many hutments in Chennai and down the coasts that were as illegal, if you like, as those in Bombay. Yet we all rushed to help those people too. Why? Why did we not just sit back and say, “Hey they were on illegal land and the tsunami did a fine job?”

(It’s no use pointing to tsunami-caused deaths either, because in Chennai, the “illegal” hutments were destroyed with minimal loss of life).

So please, go ahead, tell me. Why is the comparison wrong?

Dilip,

To me, the cruelty of the Tsunami lay in its suddenness. And yes, the loss of life it caused. You bring up Chennai, but if all that the Tsunami had done was destroy a few hutments in Chennai, reactions across the world would have been significantly different.

This demolition of houses in Maharashtra was a lot of things, but it surely wasn’t something sudden that happened out of the blue and caught families unaware and destroyed all their property. In short, it was no Tsunami.

I have mixed feelings about the destruction of encroachments - legally, it was the right thing to do, but morally, I am not so sure. We had our house burgled once when I was young, and my mother’s anguish when we returned to find our house empty is still fresh in my mind. I guess these people are going through the same thing, magnified several fold.

That said, I think it is disingenuous to compare this with the Tsunami. If the Tsunami parallel was so obvious, why you think there is no national outrage? It may sound harsh, but when you build houses on public property, you are gonna lose them sometime. And everyone is aware of it, at least subconsciously.

PS : 98% is impressive The GRE mention was just a light-hearted dig.

Karthik,

When news of the wave that overwhelmed Marina beach and the hutments there spread across Chennai, friends of mine in the Rotary got together immediately and took relief material out. They didn’t know till much later about the huge extent of the damage (i.e. beyond Chennai). As far as they could see for several hours that day, all that the tsunami had indeed done was destroy a few hutments in Chennai. Yet their reactions were based on their humanitarian feelings. They didn’t stop to think, as we seem to do in Bombay, hey, these hutments are illegal, good the are gone.

You may not think the demolitions were a surprise, but most of the residents did indeed think so. They had been assured that they would be allowed to stay, they had proof of being “legal” (i.e. pre-1995, a concept I have problems with anyway, but still), they were given no notice. They woke up one morning to find bulldozers flattening their homes. Sounds to me every bit as sudden as the tsunami.

This “legal” bit, in any case, makes no sense to me. In what way can we arbitarily decide that people who come in before 1995 are “legal” and those who come in afterwards are not?

The whole point of my writings on this subjects, as also Sainath’s is exactly what you ask: why is there no national outrage? My explanation: it’s the poor who are being affected. We think they are the hindrance to our “development”, they are ugly, they breed too much, they are dirty, they pay no taxes — pretty much all of which is untrue, but that’s for another day. So it’s OK to pull down their homes. Why is it that not one middle-class block of flats has been brought down that I know of, even though pretty much every one of those is built flouting FSI and other building regulations, is built paying bribes, is paid for using illegal money? Would there be a national outrage if that happened? You tell me.

Of course people know that if they live on “public property” they will face action. That’s hardly the point. But two things are the point. One, these people are an integral part of the economy. This city generates jobs all the time, a process we all see as desirable. People come into the city to fill those jobs, because they are there and because there is no comparable generation of jobs in their rural homes. But to go with those jobs, there is no comparable generation of affordable rental housing (plenty of people have written about this). So where are these people to stay? After all, all of us want our hair-cutters, our cobblers, our bus conductors, our maids, our dishwashers, our couriers, our sweepers, even our policemen. Where do you think all these people live? What would our economy turn into if we got rid of them as we are doing? (Yes, the true irony is that many of the cops who accompanied demolition squads themselves live in slums).

Two, what about resettling them? I have no objection to demolishing slums if their residents are assured of alternative housing. Where is that assurance?

> PS : 98% is impressive The GRE mention was just
> a light-hearted dig.

Thanks. I know it was light-hearted, but even so: you might be better off not assuming that those you disagree with are automatically dopes… Allow me some more trumpet blowing: Verbal 97%, Quantitative 99%.

This has got long enough that I may adapt it into a post on my own blog, if that’s OK.

As far as they could see for several hours that day, all that the tsunami had indeed done was destroy a few hutments in Chennai. Yet their reactions were based on their humanitarian feelings. They didn’t stop to think, as we seem to do in Bombay, hey, these hutments are illegal, good the are gone.”

“My explanation: it’s the poor who are being affected. We think they are the hindrance to our “development”, they are ugly, they breed too much, they are dirty, they pay no taxes - pretty much all of which is untrue, but that’s for another day. So it’s OK to pull down their homes.”

Don’t you see the contradiction here? Why are these same humanitarians (by your own admission) not too concerned about what is happening in Bombay? Is it that all the good people have decided to converge on Chennai? Or maybe unbeknownst to me, there is a strange Jekyll and Hyde thing going on in India, where people oscillate between intense love for the poor when there is a giant wave and hatred otherwise.

Perhaps, the truth is the obvious thing : that most people - even diehard Vonnegut fans like me - realize that this is not a battle between the rich (aka Maharashtra Government) and the poor. It would be very convenient to paint it thus, but unfortunately it is not all black and white.

While I can appreciate your anguish about people being uprooted from their homes, I am also pragmatic enough to realize that in the end something drastic had to be done in this situation. The ideal thing would have been to prevent encroachments, but that didn’t happen, so this had to. Sooner or later. If everyone that decided to encroach on someone elses property is entitled to it because they are poor then there will be no concept of private property anymore. What will prevail will be anarchy. Being poor does not entitle anyone to own what is someone else’s. Would you react the same way if someone had built a multi-storey office building at the same place on encroached land?

About the effect on the city’s economy - it is more resilient that you think. At the risk of sounding callous, I will say this : People will struggle a bit, but in the end things will work out for them. That is the beauty of a market-driven system. The middle class that you seem to loathe will end up paying a bit more to their barbers to take care of the commute, and learn to wait a little longer in the morning before their maids arrive. A painful transition, but one that will have positive consequences in the end. Here’s wishing for the best.

And here’s my response, also up on my blog.

Don’t you see the contradiction here?Actually, no. What’s happening, as I see it, is this: with the tsunami, people react as they do because they think: “that could have been me.” (I hesitate to use “there but for the grace of god go I” because that phrase has caused some literal-minded people some heartache in these pages in the past). With the slum dwellers, people react as they do because they think: “those guys deserve what’s coming to them, they are on illegal land, they are filthy and messy, they are all Bangladeshis and a threat to national security.” Etc. (Don’t laugh, I spent half an hour on the phone with a very articulate, very well-known Bombay personality this morning listening to exactly these phrases).

Of course something drastic had to be done. But I wonder why it wasn’t one of these other drastic things. One, get rid of the Rent Control Act that has essentially killed the rental housing market in Bombay. Two, build alternative cheap rental housing for the people who need it. Three, stimulate job creation and opportunity in the rural areas. There may be more.

Why is it that the only drastic thing that ever happens is the tearing down of the homes of the urban poor?

I have no loathing for the middle-class, and I don’t see how it furthers your arguments to make out that I do. But I do think we in the middle-class in India don’t fully understand what’s going on with slums and our urban condition. That’s why we choose the easy option: destroy slums. Too bad it is also the futile option.