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The next morning the penny dropped. When Dutt Saab said he would allow the bulldozers only over his dead body, he really meant it. He lay down in its path and soon there was high drama in progress. Naturally, the municipal authorities were frazzled by that action, word went up to the municipal commissioner, then the collector, eventually the chief minister and perhaps even the prime minister. Soon there was a crowd of officials, big and small, begging Sunil Dutt to vacate the bulldozer’s path but he did hot relent. He continued to lie on the road through the beating sun, sitting up only to sip water, eating nothing until the authorities called off the bulldozing for the day.
“You try this again tomorrow, I will be here again,” he warned them. ”I will not allow the poor to be bulldozed out of their homes.”
The action earned Dutt Saab much criticism – that he was standing in way of much needed development, that he was benefitting only a few to the detriment of the larger population of commuters, even that he was merely safeguarding his vote bank. But Dutt Saab was unfazed. He took all the criticism in his stride, insisted that people whose houses were being demolished had to be rehabilitated first and only then the railway terminus could come up.
It did – after the government had taken the measures demanded by Sunil Dutt. It may be noted that much of the houses in the slums were illegal constructions, if not the entire slums and the government was well within its rights to demolish them.
But Dutt Saab’s argument was that it was government’s failure to begin with – the failure to provide the poor with adequate housing – that had compelled them to encroach upon the railway land, so now the government could not wash its hands off and simply abdicate its responsibility to the poor.
Now Sunil Dutt was no politician. He was a film star, a friend of the Nehru-Gandhi family and member of parliament only because of that friendship with Rajiv Gandhi. But his instincts towards the poor were the right ones and he reacted against his own government, in the manner that opposition politicians of the 1960s and 1970s would – something those in the current century have failed to live up to.
Even when the Delhi municipal authorities were bulldozing the homes of poor Muslims and Hindus in Jahangirpuri some weeks ago, only one politician showed the courage to stand before those monstrous machines and stop the razing. I am greatly disappointed that in Uttar Pradesh, the newly elected legislators were conspicuous by their absence when the home of a Muslim activist was being razed on extra-Constitutional grounds.
If that home was illegal, there should have been resort to the courts but the silence of the judiciary in matters of human rights in this country these days has been greatly disappointing. Bulldozers cannot be allowed to crush our democracy in the arbitrary manner being resorted to by the BJP-ruled states and if politicians and judges will not speak up for the people, the people themselves must.
It is a frightening prospect but when the state pushes people to the wall, we could be soon faced with a revolution in the manner of the French and Russian revolutions which were, after all, reactions to the complete disregard by the respective rulers of the poor and the deprived.
After all, the Khodynka tragedy of Russia during the last Tsar’s coronation wherein people were crushed in a stampede – after which he attended a ball – and the Paris street tragedy wherein children were crushed under the carriage wheels of a French aristocrat with no remorse expressed by the king, were the triggers for those revolutions.
Those tragedies were accidents that enraged the people in the face of indifferent rulers. We are faced with deliberate crushing by those ruling in the name of democracy in a manner worse than the French or Russian kings. They were self-absorbed but not deliberately cruel as here today. There is always a price to pay for people’s anguish can never be bottled up for too long. Unless another Sunil Dutt can lie down on the ground and stop the bulldozers from razing people to the ground, the tragic outcome of such deliberate cruelty is inevitable.
The only question is when.
( The writer is Consulting Editor, National Herald, Mumbai. Views are personal)
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