While thousands are being evicted for the 2010 Commonwealth Games in Delhi, ANIL VARGHESE looks at the lives of those uprooted, and abandoned, for the 1982 Asiad

THOUSAND DAYS to go for Delhi Commonwealth Games 2010,’ say the hoardings. The capital is counting down to its biggest event in recent times. But not everyone is sharing in the excitement. There are many in the city for whom the event marks an uncertain future, who are counting down to the day their houses will be demolished and their livelihoods destroyed. And to understand their concerns fully, one must go back to 1982, when Delhi played host to another big sporting event, the ninth Asian Games.

November 19, 1982: the day the Games started in Delhi. Jagmohan Malhotra, the controversial Lieutenant Governor of Delhi in the early 80s, reminisces: “We were barely given two years to prepare. We had only one facility, the National Stadium near India Gate and even that was awaiting renovation.” Malhotra played a pivotal role in making the Games a success. Prior to assuming the Governor’s office, he also served as the Vice Chairman of the Delhi Development Authority (DDA) during the years of the Emergency imposed by Indira Gandhi.

the Emergency could be felt on the streets as slum clusters all over the city were demolished and some 1.75 lakh families were resettled on the outskirts over the next couple of years. Each family then was supposed to be assigned a plot of land, usually 25 square yards. “These slums were encroaching on the streets. Their residents were in the grip of local MPs and MLAs, with proliferating slums enhancing their vote banks. The idea was to release these people from their control, give them some land to invest in a house for themselves,’ is how Malhotra explains the demolitions. As the city was being readied for the Games in the early 80s, he remembers Indira Gandhi commenting that work on the sites could proceed unhindered thanks to the slums being removed in 1975.

Not every one agrees with Malhotra’s version of the events. Dunu Roy, Director of the Delhi-based Hazards Centre and an authority on issues surrounding the Games, says that India had bid for the Games in 1974 and therefore the sprucing up of the city for this purpose effectively began then. Sports historian Boria Majumdar, in his forthcoming book, Olympics: The India Story, writes, “The Asian Games Federation awarded New Delhi the ninth Asian Games in 1976.” Majumdar says the groundwork for the games could possibly have been carried out earlier than 1976. Though this would only be conjecture, it’s one with some serious implications.

While that debate might remain unresolved, there are many in the city, like Surat Ram and Guru Bisamber of the Dakshinpuri Jhuggi-Jhopri Colony of south Delhi, who who paid for the Games early on. Born in Meerut district of Uttar Pradesh, Bisamber had been living in the jhuggis of Talkatora Garden for more than a decade when the DDA knocked on his doors. Bisamber, already a well-known wrestling guru then, and earning his living as a driver, has painful memories from the time when the DDA trucks dumped him and his family in their assigned plot in Dakshinpuri.

“In this area where tall grasses (bajra) stretched for miles, we found ourselves in knee-deep water. It kept raining for over a fortnight. We had to leave our kids with our relatives,” recalls Bisamber. For the first few years before the bus services connected his colony to the city, he had to cycle nearly two hours to get to work. “It was not very safe here. People from the surrounding villages used to rob us of what little we earned. New and fewer in number, we were not in a position to fight them.” It took Bisamber and his peers over a decade to have a roof over their heads. Until then they lived in tents.

Bisamber was made to part with his home but not his passion: wrestling. At Talkatora, where later an indoor stadium proudly stood as one of the venues of the Games, Bisamber used to run his own akhada (wrestling school). Earlier, he had been a student of the famous late Guru Munni Lal at his now 175-year-old akhada in Panchkuian road. Six months into his stay in Dakshinpuri, the authorities did provide a plot of land for an akhada for the colony — what was to be the only semblance of government patronage over the next three decades.

WHEN THE Games finally came, Bisamber watched from the stands as the Soviets thrashed Indian wrestlers. He was not really surprised; he knew only too well that wrestlers here spend more time wrestling with the government than with fellow wrestlers. While Malhotra sought to free the slum dwellers from the grip of the local politicians, Bisamber found himself at the mercy of just another politician. The local MLA Chaudhari Prem Singh has not lost his seat for decades. Prem Singh looked the other way, probably celebrated the Asiad coming to Delhi, while Bisamber scrounged to maintain the ring, purchase equipment and sought to provide his 50-odd boys with the ‘wrestling diet’. Yet, he’s proud of the fact that, fighting all odds, great wrestlers were born here, and several made it to the Nationals.

The Dakshinpuri akhada does not lack for the one thing that has kept it alive all these years — Bisamber’s passion for the sport. “A lot of time went into training the boys as they started pouring in, some even from outside the city, who had to be housed in the two rooms I had built inside the akhada. I had more than 90-absentee days at work and was fired,” remembers Bisamber. Then the battle just got tougher. His wife started working as domestic help to sustain the household. His sons, who hardly ever stepped onto the akhada, joined the treadmill of life, assisting their mother in her work even before they had finished school. Bisamber ran a dairy outlet for sometime, married off his daughters. Now 76 years old, with his sons having taken over the reins of the family, he continues to wrestle in and for the ring. Every evening, he is at his run-down akhada to oversee his boys train.

One of Bisamber’s protégés is Anil Kumar Jhingalia. A wrestler who took part in the Nationals in his heyday, Jhingalia now assists Bisamber in training the boys. He was four years old when his parents found themselves marooned in a flooded Dakhshinpuri in the summer of 1975. He was born in the jhuggis there, removed to make room for the stadium, an ironic twist since his family had earlier made way for another big project: the Rasthrapati Bhavan. They had been living in Malchcha Gaon, one of the 52 villages in the area razed by the British to build the then Viceroy’s House. Surat Ram, Jhingalia’s father, who retired as a gardener from the New Delhi Municipal Corporation in 2004, and his wife Maya Devi, have fond memories of his village. “When people ask us which village we are from, we still tell them ‘Malchcha Gaon’. The present Polo Ground used to be our land. The government took it away from us,” says Maya Devi.

Sandhya’s fate, relocated for the Games to far-away Sultanpuri in 1982 just days before the Games were flagged off, is worse. Sandhya, 47, now a resident of Sultanpuri P Block, used to live in a slum cluster on the edges of the present day Khel Gaon (Asian Games Village) in south Delhi. She explains. ‘The government did not want the foreigners visiting Delhi for the Games to see the mess, so we were moved from there.’

Originally from West Bengal, Sandhya’s family had been living in these slums for nearly 8 years. A fortnight before the Games, the jhuggis were demolished with no prior notice. Soon, a pregnant Sandhya, her 3-year old son and her husband found themselves in Sultanpuri, in the northern end of Delhi. They were promised a 25-square-yard plot, but 25 years later, they are yet to be assigned a plot.

‘We live in constant fear of being evicted as we have no papers for our plot’, says Sandhya. Her husband used to sell fish in Hauz Khas. Once in Sultanpuri, he began commuting the 40-odd kms to Hauz Khas. This did not last too long as the travel costs took a chunk of his earnings. Besides, people returning from work with their daily earnings were easy prey for the native villagers. While he remained unemployed, Sandhya kept the boat afloat working as a domestic help.

Unwrapping a plastic bag, she removes a scrap of paper, yellowed by the years that have passed. It has ‘5/11/1982, Hauz Khas’ scribbled on it. When the DDA comes knocking on her door, perhaps to evict them from the plot of land which does not belong to her on its papers — and demolish the house she has painstakingly pieced together over the years — this piece of paper is all she will have as proof of her eventful history.

IT’S THE year 2008, and Delhi is readying itself for another sporting extravaganza that promises to bring in tourist dollars and international prestige. And just as before, another round of demolitions and evictions are underway, news of it rarely making it even to the inside pages of local dailies. “Over the last five years, close to 350 slum clusters housing nearly 3 lakh people have been demolished in Delhi. Only about one third of these families have been resettled. The rest have been abandoned to their fates. Sure, not all evictions in the city are for the Games, but even when they are, it’s not mentioned for fear of creating a controversy,” says KV Krishnan of the Delhi Shramik Sangathan, an organisation that campaigns for land ownership rights of slum dwellers in the city.

Recently, in a startling decision, the Delhi High Court ruled that there’s no need to provide rehabilitation for evicted slum dwellers, even those who hold the necessary documents. After rights activists and NGOs pressured the Delhi government saying that those evicted are basic service providers who form the backbone of the city, an appeal was filed in the Supreme Court, which then issued a stay order saying the existing rehabilitation policy can continue for the time being.

Those evicted for the 2010 Games have now been bundled up and sent to Sawdaghevra in the west and Bawana in the north, these settlements marking the new limits of the giant city. “Even for those who have been resettled, life’s a lot tougher than before. Their livelihoods have been destroyed as they have moved far away from their workplaces, and the education of their children has been disrupted” says Krishnan.

Twenty five years later, stories like those of Bisamber, Surat Ram and Sandhya are unfolding anew. Few will survive to tell them; most will just disappear into the vast swathes of this country like so many did after the Games of 1982.

WRITER’S E-MAIL
anil@tehelka.com

http://www.tehelka.com/story_main39.asp?filename=cr190708games_governments.asp

---