Like most of the people now living in tarpaulin-covered shanties around the Shakur Basti railway station in west Delhi, Tinna Khan came from Bihar. “Around 1990,” he told me on the evening of 18 December 2015, sitting on a tattered piece of gunny sack in his tea shop. The space, in the dim light of a dangling bulb, looked out of order: dented or broken utensils strewn about; a cot in the corner, bent out of shape; a pile of biscuits and cream rolls heaped around the stove. Khan’s shop, which is also his home, was flattened during a demolition drive the previous week. On 12 December, the Indian Railways razed more than 1000 such shanties—homes to thousands—lining a three kilometre stretch of the tracks.
The Indian Railway intended to clear the safety zone—a government-defined length of space on either side of the track, in Delhi 15 metres—which almost every house in Shakur Basti violates. There were notices pasted around the area the previous day by Railway authorities, warning people about the demolition, but no one took it seriously. People living here have seen enough notices and demolitions and know that the peak of winter is an unlikely time for such a drive. Khan was still making tea when the police and the excavators reached the cluster. His shop is at the very front of Shakur Basti, so he was one of the first to notice when “four JCBs”—excavating machines—“and hundreds of policemen came with lathis.” He quickly “picked everything [I] could and went out, things related to the shop were the most important and the priority, but there wasn’t enough time—so the charpoy broke, and some utensils too.”
Others had less time, and so their losses were greater. Some lost their identity cards, some their clothes, some their savings—never more than a few hundred. A seven-month-old girl was allegedly smothered by a pile of clothes that fell on her. The demolition was even raised in the parliament, and the Congress party’sAjay Maken filed a public interest litigation in the Delhi High Court to ensure the rehabilitation of slum-dwellers. Like the residents of Shakur Basti, the court was appalled at the timing of the demolition: “What was the tearing hurry to demolish in December?” the bench asked the counsel of the Railways, and ordered the involved parties to “ensure that relief and rehabilitation are given to persons who lost their homes.”
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