Pirate Modernity

A city of Order: the Masterplan and Media Urbanism (Page 52-106)

In 1959 a significant gathering of India’s architects took place in Delhi to discuss the future of Indian cities and urban forms and Charles Correa in this gathering criticised Corbusier’s Chandigarh project as  ‘savage’ but the patronage of Nehru to Chandigarh project created  confusions in the minds of present architects about the future of Indian cities. Ravi Sundaram discusses about the MARG’s role in planning, Hume Report of 1930, G.D. Birla Committee Report and the epidemic of 1955 to find the trajectories of the development of Masterplan of Delhi. 

The launch of Masterplan in 1962 was inaugurated with many responses from the media, Town Planning Organization and various other groups for the need of ‘urban psyche’ for the transformation of Delhi into well integrated city. This urban psyche was defined as the specific practices of living; work and community organisations and these social systems were to be nurtured through planning practices and technologies of control and management. This gave rise to the concept of zoning, social typologies and regional dispersion. The planners found the absence of urban psyche primarily in slum dwellers and it was related with health, sanitation and moral welfare. In the postcolonial arena, slums were represented as the decay of urbanism and postcolonial shame. The Birla Committee gave primary task of removing the slums from the city as the first task of future Masterplan. TPO booklet on slums and urban renewal of 1958 also talked about the ‘pre-urban’ ways of slum dwellers main cause for aggravating the problems of insanitation and congestion which is getting more intensified by the strong-solidarity of slum dwellers or brotherhood ties causing migration in the city. The moral questions were enshrined by defining these slums as the centre of “gambling-drinking-prostitution” which is connected with the negative dimensions of citizenships. So, TPO wanted to add three things in the Masterplan urban renewal, community development and healthy neighbourhood. Bharat Sevak Samaj Survey Report of 1958 revised upward official estimates of the slums and congestion was less an issue for slum dwellers. It gave a national-therapeutic model, where slum justice would prepare the residents for proper citizenship. It gave the mixture of economic analysis and moral categories. Samaj called for the removal of cattle and obnoxious trades from the city and advocated for a strict-licensing system. 

Albert Mayer in an unpublished note listed the various characteristics of a Delhi slum and wrote that the slums does not have minimum humane conditions for the living and ‘village like habits of in-migrants’ were the cause for the prevailing conditions of Delhi slums. In 1960, Hindustan Times article announcing the Masterplan in 1960 cheerfully told its readers that the planning will relieve urban Delhi of those members having rural way of life. It was a nationalistic-modernist discourse. Douglas Ensminger also suggested that Indian cities lacked urban sensibilities that had developed in the west. He talked about the absence of ‘neighbourhood consciousness’ and the presence of caste based groupings or interactions among the urban people of Delhi. Therefore, Ford India gave emphasis on urban community programmes to be carried out in conjunction with Masterplan. Self-help, participation and group action in the form of an urban Community Programme would go a long way to solving mutual problems. Ford India wanted to adopt the methods from the successes of the US because both the countries having differences in character shares the issue of “social integration”. They thought that social mixing would produce a organic community and Mayer talked about the spiritual orientation of rural people towards mohallas.

 However, Mayer’s neighbourhood model was western in its essence but he connected it with mohallah and to allude to only the ‘spiritual aspects’. In formal urban planning term, it was closer to cellular models of early regionalist/New Town designs and was close to Park’s community model developed in USA. It was seen by Planners as a western implant for democratic urban life of Delhi, but faced possible failure in the context of weak urban secular consciousness that was inadequately linked to territory. So, a pilot project was started to generate genuine civic consciousness. In 1959, first pilot community project began following a year of training and planning social workers with MA degree who would act as organizers. Six Vikas Mandals were initiated in six totally distinct areas of the city and women and lower caste people were encouraged to join this. The campaigns for sanitations, self-help, problem solving and civic actions were launched. This project had emphasis on behaviour modification, a favourite of sociological theories at that time and it played a generative role in producing a model of general welfare for the public through community action. It worked to manage and understand the city in the context of class and caste differences.

 The survey conducted by Bombay based sociologist Bopegamage noted a sharp segregation in New Delhi where one part of the city was unaware of another part of the city. This distance was disturbing the ‘social health’ of the society given the context of centuries of “caste-segregation”. This was highly dangerous for any city after seeing the US experience of race. The neighbourhood model was to be a model of non segregated urban citizenship which will define the limits of the expansion of the city. The border demarcated by this principle will define the division between urban and non urban areas. Through technocratic designs, optimum size of the city was defined and the main zone would be a model for normative urban form and social justice. So, this took three forms all of which were integral to liberal model of planning. The slum was to be tackled by a mixture of conservation of existing areas, relaxing building standards in some areas and increasing support, and removing some areas where slum dwellers with alternative forms of accommodation. These areas were not to be segregated but be made integral part of the city.

 A decade after the 1962 Delhi Masterplan, a major review was taken by Town and Country Planning Organisation and it was headed by Sayed Shafi and TPO members of the planning team for 1962 masterplan. After praising Masterplan for being the first comprehensive plan for Delhi, it damned the implementation of the project. The report revealed that not a single “flatted factory” was build to accommodate small enterprises and the segregation between industry, home and commerce has not converted into reality. The widespread presence of “non-conforming industries” and “unauthorized colonies” are showing the plan as and utopian dream of the planners. The 1973 document by same committee showed the four fold increase in land values of the city between 1958 and 1973 due to monopoly of DDA over land grants. This Masterplan created a distinction between old and new forms of city and turned old cities into despair and darkness as is the case of Sahajehanabad.

 In 1980s the city of delhi entered its own “very special delirium” and this was not novel to this city but other rapidly growing cities of that long decade went through like Mexico, Karachi, Lagos, and many others.  The turbulent expansion of the cities in the south gave a new genre to this discipline which can be best called “urban crisis” writings.  Mike Davis in his book Planet of Slums awaits a fetid, violent urbanism in the periphery of the urban centre in modern capitalism and says that there will be retreat of secular and state forms. Welfare and self help will not be provided by the state but by the religious groups.  Rem Koolhaas takes a different view and finds a self organized rhythm of urban life, markets, traffic, network innovations that render its very “dysfunctionality” productive. But the mediation of Koolhaas fails in Delhi as the city had converted into dead in 1980s. The proliferation of informality in delhi in illegal manner emerged as the definition of urban crisis in the city. The administration and governance of these areas are managed by local politicians, state employees and petty criminals. Illegal lotteries and chit funds are used to finance low cost constructions.  It also developed internal inequalities of work and gender. It emerged from smaller political and academic debates of 1970s to urban way of life at the end of the century.

 

By 1990s, a large chunk of Delhi population were living in the unauthorized and non-legal neighborhood ranging from working class settlements to elite usurpation of public spaces. Various new discourses entered into the city life like liberal environmentalists gave call for removal of polluting industries, security forces settled in large numbers after insurgencies in Delhi and Punjab, and people called for grafting of political claims by local populations known as “Political Society” in terms of Partha Chaterjee.  Middle class civic-environmental groups sought help from High Court and Supreme Court and they declared some companies as “non-conforming” and brought the purview of life in conformity or against the law. The campaign by media and other advocacy groups egged the courts to appoint special committees spread over every aspects of civic life. The Masterplan gave a model where only those individuals could live in the city that fit in the urban life styles. Among the urban bureaucracies, there was a developmental modernist wing around Jagmohan, that found some parts of the city dead and these parts developed as the grounds for crime and disease. Unauthorised colonies were flourishing in Delhi and people were settling over agricultural lands as DDA had the monopoly over land use. These unauthorised colonies were settled with rudimentary infrastructures and changed slowly through negotiations with local politicians and state employees. NCAER survey showed a rapid growth in industries in Delhi and most of them were in non-conforming areas i.e. outside the legal framework of the plan. 

Slum demolitions, resettlements and drive to clean up the cities were started by some bureaucratic elites in 1970s. However, the first demolition was done in 1967 and these slum dwellers were dumped in eastern part of the Delhi. In the period of emergency, the authority violently taken this programme to relocate them to the periphery and the tool of sterilisation was used to regularise the colonies. Through the use of police terror and force, hundreds of thousands were forcibly relocated. After thirty years, one can see the inauguration of the long processes of the shift of post-colonial Delhi away from the classic image of the capital subordinated to the political power and excess. By significantly expanding the physical forms of the city through brutal resettlement, the emergency developed new frontiers and settlements in Delhi. However, after the decision of Bombay high court and giving “right to livelihood” a fundamental right to the citizens of India stopped or slowed the pace of eviction of people from their spaces. In the post emergency period, the assassination of Indira Gandhi, anti-Sikh riot of 1984, the era of Rajiv Gandhi, terrorism and counter-terrorism initiatives created “pirate modernity” in the city. Neighborhoods, small factories, financing networks, new workplaces in homes, markets and roof spreads all over the city, particularly in Trans-Yamuna regions and parts of west and north Delhi. Every rule setup by Masterplan were violated or infringed and between 1980 and 1986 created boom in the development of hectic places.  By the time in 1990s, when court judgement came for the eviction the city turned into metropolis with its own catalog of urban crisis and conflict.

  The slow erosion of control models propounded by Masterplan and national sovereign control by globalisation increased the fluidity of the workers or the business men in and around the countries. The searches for markets were now not only regional but it was national and international. Small industries proliferated in the urban spaces and networks of sales agents between pirate factories increased. The industries were lacking proper infrastructures and Benjamin calls these industrialists “Suitcase entrepreneurs”.  These suitcase enterprises did not come from Bania background only but people from different backgrounds were active participants of this capitalistic phenomenon.  Some have mapped this phenomenon of rapid scramble for urban spaces on to a broader context of a “Splintering urbanism” in the wake of post-Fordist urban planning, where recent privatisation of urban services transforms the very nature of urban life against much of 20^th century writing had measured itself. 

 The mass disenchantment of the government of 1970s and social unrest became the daily life of the people of this country. Indira Gandhi saw 1982 game a platform to unite the country through a common network by organising national television spectacle.  This provided the first series of technological modernity and most powerful vehicle for this transition. The technological modernity was used by the state to strengthen the weaken sovereignty in virtual world. Asiad 82 is seen as the first significant media event heralding the growing gesture of politics to television. It is also said to contain the prehistory of globalisation where consumption and advertising were given a boost by media cultures emerging after mass television.

‘Liveliness’ of event created enormous pressure on the government and Doordarshan were given complete autonomy to execute the programmes successfully. The advent of VCR, colour televisions and other kits for proper broadcast of shows provided a boom in the market. The colour televisions were imported from abroad so that it will be able to meet the demands of the market during Asiad. Other means of fulfilling the demand were loosened like smuggling from other countries and assembling of television sets in urban spaces. Between 1984 and 1990, television set rose nine times in the country and production of low cost audio cassettes increased highly. This created a ‘consumption culture’ in the country. The pressures of IMF and World Bank for removing older import substitution regime radicalised this as now multi-national companies entered in the market especially in Rajiv Gandhi era. National Informatics Centre was established to connect all districts, states to provide an impetus to e-governance in the country. Video libraries and video centres emerged in every geographical area of the country and decentralisation of it provided its spread like wildfire all over the country. The speed generally associated with Mumbai entered in the life of Delhi. The use of various sound amplifiers in weddings, religious functions and so on started which increased the ambient levels of sounds in the city. From mosque to temples to car horns to jargons everywhere these low priced sound system began to be used.

 The decade witnessed different incidents like political instability, anti-Sikh pogrom, political and military conflicts in Punjab and Kashmir, military intervention in Sri Lanka and Babri Masjid demolition. Also, the preoccupation of media with political instability in country created a different set of norms. The declining acceptance of INC after the rise of media urbanism can be seen through the production of virtual space. These virtual spaces became the ground for the debates of secular forces and communal forces, parties in power and in opposition and there was no such control over this new media. Then in 90s, the government differentiated between carriage and content and content were sent to censor board for prior approval for broadcast. The local bazzars and markets were planned to be regularised in the Masterplan. Braudel finds a difference between capitalistic organization and bazaars. Capitalists were non specialised and mobile while the market was specialized and local. This non specialisation and mobility provided capitalists to increase their power and monopoly. Various groups and especially Jan Sangh and BJP which was the parties of post-partition traders call for regularisation of market. But the new topography of urbanism emerged in 1980s created a network of sales agents, linked media markets, parallel production centres and neighbourhood entirely dominated by small commerce and industries made it almost impossible to regulate. These were across the caste spectrum.

All the three media markets Lajpat Rai market, Nehru Place and Palika bazaar were post-colonial development. Now the markets were not ruled by traditional traders of Mughal times but the large number of Hindu and Sikh communities came from post-partition pakistan were part of it. The department of rehabilitation quickly set-up sixty three markets for them. These were established as temporary structures but later they converted into permanent. These markets produced, repaired and assembled every type of products in the market. The notoriety of the market created huge encroachment which can be seen in the survey of MCD’s Land and estate Department. It claimed that 95% of the market were marked by large scale unauthorised construction and encroachments. They successfully protested against any attempt to demolish the structures by civic authorities and asserted their own version of “splintering urbanism”.