What we'll lose if we destroy Delhi's Bela Estate in the name of protecting Yamuna

The most beautiful stretch of Yamuna in Delhi lies between Palla village — from where it makes its way to the city from Haryana — and Jagatpur village which is situated before Wazirabad. Agricultural fields are a conspicuously pleasant sight on both the banks in this section of the river’s flow.

The inhabitants of these villages on the banks share a living and an inter-dependent relationship with the river. And it is here that one finds not only fishermen lovingly spreading nets from their boats, but also amateur anglers exhibiting their grace and testing their patience on the banks.

It is obvious that the river sustains these people and is kept alive by them in turn. It is also important to note that there is hardly any concrete construction on the banks in this part of Yamuna while the next stretch from Wazirabad to the Okhla Barrage has seen massive construction in the form of the Metro Depot, Akshardham Temple, Millennium Bus Depot et al.

The recently held Art of Living programme was also organised on the banks of the same "developed" stretch in utter violation of various legal and environmental restrictions.

Further incidents on the banks seem to suggest that private powers backed by the might of the state pushing the agenda of "development" have got their eyes firmly set on the Yamuna. The peasants who have inhabited the banks of the Yamuna for decades have suddenly been declared as its enemies and are facing imminent displacement.

We can see some of these changes unfold with a sense of foreboding in the area known as Bela Estate, which lies tucked away just behind the great national memorials at Rajghat and Shantivan.

DDA dilemma

It is here that the DDA has been bringing brute force and exerting continuous pressure in trying to make hundreds of families give up their home, land and livelihood.

More than 800 families live in the Bela Estate area, out of which around 300 families are those of farmers. The rest of the families either work as agricultural labourers on the fields of others or are engaged in other kinds of jobs and wage labour.

Since the second half of September this year, DDA officials have been constantly threatening to throw people out of this land. The habitants have experienced the devastation and terror brought upon them by the power of busloads of police personnel and more than a dozen JCBs, which not only razed down their homes, but also completely destroyed the standing crop, ravaged the cultivated fields and dug such huge pits in the ground as to make it unfit to put up habitable structures or for cultivation.

People were not shown any clear orders in this regard. Some newspapers reported that it was the NGT that had disallowed farmers to cultivate crops and vegetables using the water of Yamuna on the basis of the claim that pollutants present in the river enter into the food chain and present a health hazard to those consuming them.

However, we need to listen to the pain and anger of the people who have some pertinent questions to ask in response to this alleged argument. If this is the case, then why did the DDA bulldoze their flower cultivation? Why can’t they be provided resources and training for organic farming? Is the destruction of their lives and livelihoods the only solution to this proclaimed problem?

Some 70 children from the area study in a nearby government school of Delhi. When the DDA was pulling down their homes, these students were in the midst of writing their first terminal exams at school. We can only imagine the amount of strength students would have gathered to study and write exams under such circumstances. When teachers at school queried their students about the reason behind their obvious worry, they confided in them.

The students asked, “When the government is running a campaign against dengue and chikungunya then why is it pushing us into the arms of grave risk by forcing us to live with mosquitoes under open sky? Why does the very government which publicises ‘Beti Padhao Beti Bachao’ as its call to the people chose to put our education and future in dark?”

The girls further asked, “How are our families supposed to teach girls and save girls?”

Colonial Indian government?

These students found some of their questions resonating in their history textbooks. They could relate to the painful histories of people under the colonial regime when the British imperial government brought in the western concept of land ownership. Their book suggested that it was during the colonial era that all forest area was declared as "government land" and adivasis were denied the right to enter into their own jungles for cultivation, animal grazing or collecting firewood.

They could now understand with a heartbreaking clarity the tragedy in History when English rulers used colonially fabricated laws to establish their ownership rights in land and employed their regal courts to criminalise lakhs of adivasis for practicing their customary rights.

These children have been brought to face the parallel between the colonial government of 19th-20th centuries and the post-colonial government of the 21st century. They have tasted the bitter reality of the so-called welfare state and its public administration.

These people celebrated Dussehra and Diwali in a climate of uncertainty and anxiety. Some families somehow managed to erect some kind of kuchcha and ramshackle dwellings again before Diwali, but they were in a constant state of fear all this while. The fact that they could be forcefully evicted any moment has been hanging over their heads like the Damocles sword. It is also a crisis of livelihood for them as they are primarily dependent on agriculture though some of them do keep and rear cattle and goats too.

Though the administration has brought the people to such a state of destitution, they have not given up hope and are ready to fight state repression.

A letter on the website of DDA provides some clue to the immediate cause of state action this time. It seems a complaint submitted in the PMO office has been used to undertake the current drive of eviction but the basis of the complaint is not clear. Meanwhile, DDA officials continue to visit the area and threaten people about the next round of eviction drive. People think that government’s interest in this piece of land has grown manifold in the last two-three years since this part doesn’t get flooded by Yamuna waters anymore.

Their fears are strengthened by the fact that such eviction drives are being carried out along other stretches of the Yamuna as well. They feel that the government and big corporates are eyeing this land as another natural and public resource to be outsourced and as a source of huge private profits.

NGT's nod to DDA's abuse

It is also very probable that the Art of Living program (which could neither be stopped from happening despite the NGT’s orders nor could the authorities manage to collect the imposed fine from the organisers) has encouraged various religious organisations to cultivate dreams of virtually occupying if not in fact owning such prime land.

It is obvious that peasants and others living on and off the land would have to be removed to make way for such organisations. In the light of the emerging gaushalas on the banks of the Yamuna and the increased political activism of the associated organisations, it is not difficult to anticipate the direction in which changes will be pushed.

Peasants have questioned the DDA’s abuse of power in pulling down their homes and destroying their flower cultivation, when the NGT itself, whose orders are projected as a ruse, doesn’t exercise any authority to do so. Moreover, farming certainly doesn’t cause any pollution.

Thus they find the whole NGT argument problematic and feel that it has been used as a red herring to manipulate and dilute the sympathies of other people and project a false situation. The ancestral families of these farmers settled here almost 100 years back, cleared the wild growth with their hard work and made the land cultivable. Some of their documents are dated from 1920s and 30s which show that they have been paying rent to the rightful authorities since British times.

Peasants complaint that in spite of the fact that they have been living here for decades, authorities never transferred land ownership rights to them and thus they could never become legally recognised owners of the land. They have paid rent to the DDA as per the court’s orders till as late as 2008. Under these circumstances, it is difficult for them to swallow the accusation of being illegal occupants on the land.

A Delhi Peasant Cooperative Society was formed after Independence in 1949. Peasants continued paying the rent through DIT (Delhi Improvement Trust). DIT was converted into DDA (Delhi Development Authority) in 1955. DDA says that it had cancelled the lease of Bela Estate in 1968, but the truth is that the peasants continued to pay the rent. When DDA tried to prove these people as illegal occupants, magistrate SN Kapoor gave a judgment in Tis Hazari Court (1991) saying that DDA couldn’t evict people because they were settled beyond the limits of 300m from the Yamuna and that they couldn’t be called illegal residents/occupants.

Rather, it is the DDA which is violating all laws of rehabilitation and resettlement and acting illegally in abusing its authority and violating people’s rights. First, the DDA played a foul game in its own court in INA as a result of which these people lost the legal battle. People feel that they again lost the case in Tis Hazari due to a lack of good legal representation. Both the orders have brought down the morale of the people as they were not informed about the hearings and proceedings of the case and felt cheated as a result.

They realise with a sense of acute irony that while the DDA has a public prosecutor fighting the case on its behalf who is paid with the tax money to which their labour and earnings contribute too, they have to cut down their basic expenditures to be able to afford contesting in the court of law.

It is no secret that the toiling masses of this country find the long and expensive proceedings of the courts as harassing as the injustice which brings them to the court in the first place. People said that the DDA had intentionally sent individual notices to each family and took advantage of the fact that it would be difficult for them to collect money and hire lawyers for filing a case in the High Court.

In the given circumstances it becomes even more difficult for people to build a collective fight.

The DDA claims that it has already given compensatory money and houses to peasants but residents of the area challenge the DDA to provide documentary proof in support of such a claim. Moreover, people ask who decides the definition of a decent compensation for loss of home and livelihood. The DDA gave 12 or 18 square yard plots to some jhuggi-jhopdi dwellers of the area in a far-off place like Bawana almost a decade back.

Considering the fact that a family needs this much space to build a bathroom for itself, they cannot help wondering how a democratically elected government views and treats its citizens.

Can farmers ruin agriculture?

Peasants say that farming is the only thing they have ever done and displacement will ruin their lives for good. They fail to understand why the NGT order has asked them to switch over from vegetable to flower cultivation without taking into account the fact that the two have different science, require different kinds of inputs, and need separate mandis and markets.

It is quite possible that the "environmental" orders of the "urban" governments have no understanding of the science of farming. Despite the fact that farming is no longer economically viable/profitable for them, farmers continue to cultivate their fields because they don’t have any other means of livelihood. Even in "normal" times, they find it difficult to run their households when the crop is standing in the fields and waiting to be harvested. It is during such a time that the DDA decides to bulldoze their crops and crush their confidence.

People of the area share the observation that previous governments had also been destroying their crops and homes once in a while but would at least let them live on. They feel that things have changed for the worse in last one-and-a-half to two years.

They can feel that now the DDA wants them to vacate the land at any cost and it has found in the NGT a gullible partner in its nefarious designs. The massive program organised by the Art of Living further exemplified the potentiality of this piece of land for profit-making-cum-religious ventures.

It is ironic that the NGT order says that farming can be allowed after the cleaning of the Yamuna. This statement raises more questions than it answers. Who will be responsible for re-establishing the displaced farmers and others in the same area? What will be the means of their living and livelihood during this time? When farmers are not responsible for polluting the Yamuna then why are they being made to pay the biggest cost of its alleged cleaning?

The Indian state can obviously afford to ignore the experiences of Singur and Nandigram because it has police and other repressive apparatus at its disposal. Recently the Assam government tried to displace people living in the Kaziranga (reserved forest) for generations using police force, in violation of all rehabilitation laws and at the cost of people’s lives. They had been living there since when Kaziranga hadn’t even been turned into a sanctuary.

All over the country, people are getting evicted by force, their homes are being razed down, their crops are bulldozed and lands are made uncultivable in order to make way for corporate loot and plunder of the commons. These machinations are indeed part of a global trend wherein the inflicting of any amount of violence and injustice upon common people is being justified and made to appear normal in the name of "development" and "nationalism". We remain deaf to these cries unless they start narrowing upon our own backyard. As long as the monster of "development" dispossesses forest dwellers in far-off areas, the rotten stench of its violence doesn’t seem to bother us.

The expropriation of fisherwomen from their land, livelihood and cultural heritage doesn’t feel cruel enough. But today if it’s the matter of farmers’ lands and livelihood in our own cities then tomorrow profit-mongers are sure to eye our schools, grounds, roads and other public spaces. We might not feel it today, but our city is surely being sold away piece by piece to those who have only one god – profit.

It is tragic that in this glorious era of Right to Information (RTI), "Sabka Saath Sabka Vikas" and e-governance, people are not even informed why and under which order/law they are being displaced and what evidences they must produce in order to prove their claims.

Meanwhile, they get to know from the newspapers that the central and the state governments are planning to modify and develop the Yamuna and its banks for promoting tourism and transportation-cartage, and also for running water boats between Wazirabad and Agra et al.

Yamuna at risk

Rumours are afloat about private companies being given tenders for beautification of the ghats/banks of the Yamuna. The ministry of urban development has instructed Delhi government and the three municipal corporations of the city to ensure smooth implementation of the Land Pooling Policy, 2013.

The policy aims to notify 89 villages of Delhi as urban areas and 95 villages as urban development areas and thus make it even easier for the government to acquire land in this still rural and comparatively green part of the capital.

This rings alarm bells for the villagers in the city. Simultaneously, the Delhi government is organising a maha-aarti at the banks of the Yamuna from tax payers’ money. It is difficult to predict the nature and extent of adverse consequences of such an event on the river and environment but we certainly need to question the relationship with the river of that class which is going to reap the material gains of such an event. Is it a productive or a parasitic relationship? Delhi has seen how expansion of temples, gaushalas et al on the banks of the Yamuna has happened at the cost of the city’s farmers, ponds and fishermen.

We need to remind ourselves that big corporations and religious institutions, supported by political parties and funded by capitalists, have a monopolistic relationship with nature. Rivers are kept alive by the famers and the fisherwomen. They need protection from the designs of religious institutions, state-centric programmes and the tourism industry.

Although we Indians like to believe that India is an emerging superpower, the "great" Indian government seems incapable of answering even such basic questions as "How can the farmers continue cultivation in the area where they have lived for more than a century?"

Though it doesn’t obviously have sufficient means to provide them any inputs (free seeds), training and guidance, it does have bulldozers and the police to send after them in order to destroy what little they have made of their lives. Do the people of the area and fellow citizens have a right to know who will be given this land, what purpose it will be used for and who it will benefit ultimately?

True to the poet’s words, "In the dark times, there will also be singing of the dark times", students of the school are visiting the area in order to understand the problems of their classmates and stand in solidarity with them and their families. They are educating themselves beyond their textbooks and the state’s agenda.

It is to be seen whether the system rises up to their cause or provides another challenge to their budding dreams of a just and equal world.

The Art of Living's response:

1) The Art of Living has flouted no legal or environmental restriction in organising their prestigious event in Delhi, the World Culture Festival. In fact we were extra vigilant about it. All the required permissions had been obtained one year prior to the event after which we started with the preparations of the event.

2) The amount mentioned by the NGT is a compensation deposit and has not been termed as a 'fine' as the NGT has yet to pass its verdict on the case.

3) It is careless to say that the NGT could not stop the event from happening. In fact, The Art of Living waited for NGT's order to go ahead with the event. Two days before the event on March 9, the NGT gave the permission for The Art of Living to go ahead with the World Culture Festival as planned. You may check the NGT records for the same.

More importantly, the NGT questioned the very intention of the petitioners for moving the tribunal against holding the event at the very last minute.

4) It is gross misinformation to report that the compensation amount was not deposited. Please clarify to your readers that The Art of Living has duly deposited the amount as laid down by the tribunal.

5) The picture used with the article of the WCF grounds is an unfair usage. This is a picture taken immediately after the event. It is only fair to represent facts by using the current picture. It makes us wonder why such deliberate misrepresentation. Please find attached pictures of the event site that is green and flourishing and quite the contrary to what has been sadly depicted by you.

We would like to reiterate that The Art of Living has always abided by the law and will continue to do so.