Glitz of G20 Brings in Its Trail the Suffering of Working and Destitute People

When leaders of nineteen countries and the European Union fly into India’s capital, between them they will represent most of the major economies of the world, 80 percent of the gross world product, and two-thirds of the entire world’s population.

Although it is routine for the presidentship of this commanding global forum – the Group of 20 or G20 - to pass from country to country by rotation, in India its presidency this year has been projected by a staggeringly expensive publicly funded publicity campaign as a ringing global endorsement of the statesmanship of India’s Prime Minister Narendra Modi, and of India’s rise as a vishwaguru or guru of the world.

At the time of this summit, despite a 24 percent contraction of its economy during the country’s punishing covid lockdown, the Indian economy has crossed the 3 trillion- dollar threshold, and is the fifth largest economy of the world. India is home to the third largest population of dollar billionaires in the world. The lockdown and the COVID pandemic were no deterrent to this. The number of billionaires in India increased from 102 in 2020 to 166 billionaires in 2022. The combined wealth of India’s 100 richest people (mostly men) was 54.12 lakh crore rupees. The wealth of the top 10 richest stood at 27.52 lakh crore – a 32.8 per cent rise from 2021.

But behind the blinding glitter of India’s mounting wealth is the dense darkness of India’s stubborn and desperate poverty. What India’s government would not want its powerful guests from around to recall is that of all the G20 countries, India has the lowest per capita income and the lowest ranking in the Global Hunger Index, and that indeed India is home to the largest numbers of poor and malnourished people in the world.

And that India is a staggeringly unequal country. The World Inequality Report, 2022 observed that “India is among the most unequal countries in the world, with rising poverty and an 'affluent elite’” (my emphasis)!

Unlawful and Unnecessarily Cruel Demolitions

The mascot of the preparations for the G20 summit in India is the bulldozer. With it, the Indian state is strenuously striving to expel, bury or shroud any taboo reminder of millions of India’s working poor people. We are witness to an obsessively feverish and unconscionably cruel drive to demolish hundreds of slums, informal settlements and street vending kiosks in the national capital and in cities around the country which were visited by G20 delegates.

And where demolitions are not possible, high screens, often green, are erected to obscure the slum settlements from the view of those who drove past these. And police drives are reported from around the country to drive away beggars, homeless people and street vendors.

The process that state administrations have adopted, according to innumerable accounts we heard, to demolish slum homes are both unlawful and unnecessarily cruel. In a public hearing organised by a collective Concerned Citizens in May 2023 (to which I was invited to join the jury), we heard many harrowing testimonies of the ruthlessness of the evictions. Akash Bhattacharya describes a major eviction of the Tughlaqabad slum in south Delhi. “By the time the bulldozers finished their work, an extensive area of Tughlakabad… looked like a devastated war zone.”

Housing rights activist Abdul Shakeel observes, “The Tuglakabad eviction was so brutal, that even those of us who have been working for decades with such evictions have not seen something of this magnitude. Police surrounded the basti, jammers were installed so that no one could share videos, the phones of activists were snatched, the nearby hotels and shops were shut and the entire basti was razed in two days.” Puja from Bela Estate, Delhi recalls, “We were given three hours to pack our things which was next to impossible”. Reena Sharma laments, “We had invested our life’s savings in that house we built. And they just razed it!”

This process also violated many directives of India’s higher judiciary, that require that fair notice and a relocation plan. For instance, a 2010 ruling of the Delhi High Court in a case filed by one Sudama Singh held that the right to housing was integral to the fundamental right to life under Article 21 of the Indian Constitution. The Court ordered that governments should resort to demolitions only be when a clear public purpose is established for the land, and that this should be preceded by “meaningful engagement” with those whose homes are being felled, to plan with them their relocation to a place most suited to their livelihood and social needs.

A De-facto Steep Hierarchy of Citizenship and Exclusion

If challenged, the defence of state officials for the demolition overdrive is that these are just “routine” actions against “illegal” squatters and street vendors. But this claim, that the depredations of the bulldozer are just “routine”, is disingenuous because whereas demolitions do ensue round every year, the mammoth surge of these during the months leading up to the G20 meetings and summit is manifest evidence that this was far from the normal routine of city administrations.

The claim of “illegality” of the structures that were demolished in this drive also deserves closer scrutiny. Viewed from a cold technical lens, it is undeniable that the majority of vast informal settlements that are markers of every Indian city are not lawful. But it is the state that imposes illegality on working-class residents of informal neighbourhoods, and then punishes them for this “illegality”.

It is unjust and callous to assume that residents of slums voluntarily choose to break the law in order to live in sub-human conditions, often in a single room with a plastic roof and cardboard walls, wading through reeking cesspools of waste, bereft of drainage, sanitation, potable water, schools and children’s parks. They are forced to live like this first because the countryside from where they come into the city for bare survival offers few opportunities for decent and assured work. And second, because the city to which they are forced to migrate is not planned or built in ways that allow them any opportunity to live lawfully in decent affordable homes.

Every Indian city in fact nurtures a de-facto steep hierarchy of citizenship and exclusion. The legitimate residents of the city are those who live in legal, planned homes. The others dwell in a spectrum of shades of illegitimacy and illegality. In this political and policy frame, the state owes duties only to its legitimate, law-abiding citizens; for the “illegal” residents, the state works only for duties against them – to block, demolish or at best relocate them to the city fringes.

A significant study titled “Cities of Delhi” by the Centre for Policy Research with Brown University led by Patrick Heller and Partha Mukhopadhyay, estimates astoundingly that only less than a quarter of Delhi residents live in legal, planned colonies. Those outside the legal planned city are an astonishing three-quarters of Delhi residents, people who live in slum designated areas (although no areas have been so designated since 1994), unauthorised colonies, Jhuggi Jhopri colonies, resettlement colonies and urban villages.

A city cannot run for even a day without the working poor, but no space is made for them, to provide them with work, housing and education for their children.

It is as though for the rich and middle classes the working poor are like Aladdin’s genie in the fable. The poor should appear whenever they need their services, but after they have served them, they should simply disappear. They should not make unreasonable demands for homes to live in, water, toilets, roads, health-centres, and schools for their children.

If the state instead accepted the constitutional principle of the equal right of working class people to the city, then a very different kind of city would emerge, one which plans spaces for working people to live within the city in proximity to their potential sources of livelihood, and which invests significant public funds in social housing for the less advantaged city residents, and in the infrastructure of sanitation, water, drainage, parks, schools and hospitals to serve their needs. But the reality is that the state does little for their dignified and fair inclusion in the city. Instead it displays the same contempt toward the working poor as do the rich and middle-classes.

Ashamed of a State That’s Ashamed of its Working Poor

In these many ways, the glitz and powerplay of the G20 summit of leaders from the most powerful economies of the world brings in its trail – invisible to them – a tragic burden of preventable suffering of working and destitute people. A string of homeless shelters on the banks of the Yamuna River, constructed after our intervention in the Supreme Court, have been pulled down, apparently to build a walkway for guests by the river.

Thousands dependent on casual work, alms and food charity have been expelled from the cities. Tens of thousands have been rendered homeless overnight and pushed into the outer peripheries of the national capital, sleeping under bridges or plastic, the education of their children interrupted, without work and food.

Much of India’s swagger on the stage of the world’s economy would be exposed as faux, even counterfeit, if the world’s leaders and media were reminded of how tardy India has been compared to the large majority of emerging economies of the world in ending hunger, want and illiteracy.

The official motive behind these drives is to erase every visible sign of ostensible poverty in India’s cities visited by the foreign guests, so that they see only the India of wide highways and over-bridges, of towering apartment buildings, green parks and glittering shopping malls, and of wall paintings and (in Delhi) of newly erected statues of snarling lions (admittedly, though, of disputed aesthetics).

Driving to work, I saw a tall green screen erected to hide informal settlements from public view. Posters pasted on the screen stared down upon me, of a beaming Prime Minister and the emblem of G20 perched on a lotus.

I pulled out my laptop and tapped into its keyboard this tweet, “My home city Delhi is preparing for G20 world leaders by erasing from their view the working poor, by large-scale demolitions of slums and homeless shelters, or by screens to hide slums. The working poor build and run the city. I’m ashamed of a govt that’s ashamed of its working poor”.

(The author is a human rights worker and a writer. This is an opinion piece and the views expressed are the author’s own. The Quint neither endorses nor is responsible for them.)