Trilokpuri riots: Delhi's East End
The east end of Delhi is a nether land. Just beyond the main roads and blocks of multistoried buildings, all pretence of urbanity gets lost in a rabbit warren of narrow by-lanes and passages. Thin slivers of roads, heaving with carts, clogged sewers and cows, end in mysterious gullies of makeshift hutments.Dark, dank and often dangerous, the gullies have no names-just numbers, that don't tally. People scramble to survive, more often than not, on a short fuse of anger and abuse. Here festivals never end, weddings go on till the wee hours, Shiva-adoring kanwariyas cheer the loudest, Ram Leela stunts set trees on fire. Edgier, louder and more visceral, like most areas bordering Delhi, this too is a breeding ground for some of Delhi's worst headlines.
On Diwali night, Trilokpuri was gearing up for fun. A 30-year-old man near gully number 34 kicked a dog viciously, for no reason. Within seconds a small crowd gathered ("Why did you kick the dog like that?") and soon a stormy verbal to-and-fro ensued. The man, drunk enough to be disorderly but not enough not to sense danger, called the police from his mobile phone. As the crowd thinned, he went home. His evening had just started: he picked up a fight first with his wife, thrashing her black and blue. Then he demanded money from his father, hurling invectives when the old man refused to part with any. It ended in a disaster, as things often do in Trilokpuri: the man took his own life. But it could have ended a lot worse, with him wounding and killing many others.
They are neighbours from hell. Within hours of his death, stones and broken glass were flying through the air. There was war, right there, in nearby gully 32, between his neighbours, Hindus and Muslims this time around-the communal violence that has paralysed the area for the last three days. Thirty years ago, in November 1984, in gully 30 and 32 of Trilokpuri, 350 Sikhs were mercilessly slaughtered by a mob. In May last year, in nearby Gandhi Nagar, just 15 minutes away, five-year-old girl "Gudiya" was raped and left to die in a dingy basement room, by yet another resident of the area.
There is something in the air of the shadowlands of Delhi that erupts as horrific violence from time to time. Here there are neighbours from all across the country: migrant contract workers from Bihar, UP, Bengal, Tamil Nadu, Punjab. Most of them are daily wage earners, earning a precarious living, without security, working in abominable conditions, with little hopes of moving up in life, and thrown together with assorted gangs of criminals. As the spectacular consumption and wealth of big-city Delhi pass them by, they band together in the anonymity of their poverty and indulge in recklessness on the edge of the capital.
It's almost history playing out over time and space. It is interesting to reread historian Gareth Stedman Jones' 1971 classic-Outcast London: Study in the Relationship Between Classes in Victorian Society. London in the first half of the 19thcentury was a puzzle: it was the cultural, financial, and political center of the world. At the same time, it was home to 'casual labourers' living in extreme poverty. English thinkers devoted a good deal of their time to decipher this paradox of wealth and poverty: from Thomas Malthus to Charles Dickens to George Bernard Shaw. And, as Stedman Jones points out, the inflammable underbelly was not a result of moral or educational deficit but simply stagnant economic opportunities for the poor in the urban set up.
Trilokpuri may pick itself up for now, for fear of life or law, but our streets will continue to be a ticking time bomb unless "good times" really come for those who need it the most.