Mumbai Fables Page 28

  Justice Gandhi rejected the extreme claims the government and the builders made for the state’s unfettered right. He sided with Desai in holding that the officers of the government held lands as trustees for the state, not for the benefit of private persons. Hence, their power to dispose of property could not be like that of an individual owner. According to him, a reading of the revenue laws and codes enacted by the legislature made clear that it was the state’s public duty and statutory obligation to realize market price when disposing of land. This implied a public auction, since it was a proven method to ascertain market price. He did not mean that the government was obliged to accept the highest bidder’s price; he allowed that the bid could be rejected for public policy reasons. The government could even offer the land for free or at concessional rates in the public interest. The executive retained discretion, but this did not free it from constitutional and statutory obligations. Taking these into consideration, the judge ruled that the government could not dispose of property without inviting public tenders.

  This was not the end of the dispute over the meaning and functions of the liberal-democratic state. A counsel representing some of the builders cited the British political theorist Harold Laski’s argument that the millions of citizens the modern state organizes cannot be expected to participate in daily deliberations.70 They can express their hopes and provide general direction, but they cannot expect a voice in the day-to-day decision making. That was possible in the direct democracy of the Athenian city-state, but not now. In the modern state, a limited number of representatives act as trustees and governors of the whole. It is up to them to glean the needs of the people and translate them into policies. In other words, representative government demanded that the determination of the public interest be left to the elected executive, whose decisions could not be second-guessed.

  The counsel for the Free Press Journal, which had been allotted a plot, made an even more forceful claim for the exemption of state’s decisions from being questioned. The state, he argued, was a distinct legal entity. It was an artificial person, a juridical personality with sovereign power. This sovereignty owed its origin to Patria Potestas—the supreme power of the father in the family over life and death. The state’s commanding force and its absolute power over property, according to him, originated in patriarchal authority. Given this origin of sovereign power, the state cannot accommmodate the idea of a trust. Even in a modern democracy with representative government, where sovereignty is dispersed and exercised through different agencies—executive, legislature, and judiciary—the concept of the state’s obligation to the people is contrary to its origin and character. Those who act for the government make their best efforts to hold resources for the benefit of the people. It is an ideal, but one that gives no right to the inhabitants as beneficiaries under a trust.

  The extreme leaps of these arguments indirectly affirmed the fact that the agents of the state had acted against its ideals. So palpable was their violation that the defense had to argue for unfettered executive power. But the judge was having none of it. He ruled that there was no constitutional provision that granted absolute power to the executive, thus permitting it to alienate property in any manner it liked. On the contrary, constitutional history made it abundantly clear that the transaction must be for the benefit of the state, whether or not its legal personality included the people. This meant that none of its limbs, no officer, could alienate it for private benefit. That would be an arbitrary or capricious act.71 This did not question the state’s right to make policy. Rejecting Desai’s argument that the Backbay reclamations were contrary to the existing laws on town planning, Justice Gandhi ruled that the executive was entitled to make that decision. But what the existing laws and statues did not permit were transactions without any effort to ascertain the market price for land. In the absence of a public auction, the government’s conduct was mala fide.

  Mala fide, but with no proof of collusion. The judgment documented that the private agreements violated the state’s constitutional and statutory obligations. It meticulously established that even though there were sixty-six bids for unreclaimed lands between 1969 and 1972, the government chose to make allotments to a small gang of builders—Dr. Maker, the Jolly group, the Mittals, Tulsiani Builders, Dalamal, Somani, and Raheja. The decision to abandon public tenders and enter into private agreements with this gang of builders was made in secret. The judge dismissed the publication of the government’s explanation in Current in 1972, holding that lands were disposed in a “secret and surreptitious manner.”72 He also ruled that the collector, the administrator in charge of making allotments, was directed to do so under the express orders of Chief Minister Naik, Revenue Minister Vartak, and Urban Development Minister Zakaria. The result of this secret and surreptitous decision making was a gross, not merely marginal, undervaluation of lands. And but for the vigilance of the secretary of urban development—meaning D’Souza—the extent of undervaluation would have been even greater. Given this finding, he directed the builders to pay a higher amount—33 percent more—for their allotments. The government’s counsel questioned the court’s right to determine the price and to judge the executive’s action mala fide. But the judge stuck to his guns, declaring that his task was to determine if there was gross undervaluation, not to fix the price. Given the executive violation of the law, its “secret and surreptitious” decision, he justified his ruling of mala fide. But Justice Gandhi backed away from finding collusion between the government officials and the builders. Mere suspicion could not substitute for proof.

  The judge may have been restrained in finding collusion, but not the media. Even before the judgment was delivered, a swirl of rumors about graft and public criticism of the project floated in the city. The court served as a venue for defending the ideals of the liberal-democratic state. It affirmed the citizen’s right to question the state, acknowledging their locus standi and establishing the principle of public-interest litigation. But the standards of law that prevented it from finding collusion served only to confirm that powerful private interests worked in secret to thwart the public good. What was seen on the surface was not real. The city was a space of conspiracy.

  The Times of India, the Free Press Journal, Blitz, and other newspapers carried regular reports, describing the reclamation as a disaster for urban planning and a colossal scam involving politicians and builders.73 The Save Bombay Committee was formed to agitate against the government’s misadventures. Forced on the defensive, the government appointed a committee to review the Backbay development. The committee recommended the continuation of reclamations, raising the share of commercial buildings, and, as a sop to critics, the creation of a pond for recreation.

  The critics were not mollified.74 The committee was seen as unrepresentative and blind to the views of citizens, most notably to fishermen, who were directly affected by the scheme but whose opinions were never solicited. The amount of reclamation was slightly reduced, but its basic thrust remained. The towers would proliferate on reclaimed lands at Nariman Point and Cuffe Parade. The north-south axis of the city would be reinforced, and the pressure on the traffic arteries would grow. The prospect of New Bombay’s emerging as a countermagnet to the Island City seemed more distant than ever. The tall towers rose up on the Backbay, representing the broken dreams of the twin city. To the critics, the government offered a sop by offering to create a pond on Nariman Point—“a little more suffering, a little more style.”

  7.5. Nariman Point towers in the 1990s. Photo by Rahul Mehrotra. Courtesy: Sharada Dwivedi and Rahul Mehrotra, Bombay: The Cities Within (Bombay: India Book House, 1995).

  REPRESSION, DISGUISE, AND DISPLACEMENT

  What went wrong? How did the dream of building a twin city sour? Correa and Patel have offered explanations—their political naïveté, a flawed implementation of the plan, the wrongheaded Backbay reclamation, the development of commercial and industrial centers in the suburbs and the north, and the lack of will t
o do what was necessary. These are reasonable explanations, but were these all? Was there something more fundamentally flawed in the planners’ dreams? Freud suggests that intentions produce dream images, but they are not immediately accessible; interpretation is required to reveal the intentions repressed, disguised, and displaced by images. What did the dream images of a rationally ordered and organic city repress and disguise?

  One clue exists in the image of the overcrowded phantom city that clings to the dream of the “city beautiful.” Again and again, planners and their supporters returned to denounce the asphalt jungle that had smothered the city on the sea. Disorganization and disorder haunted their dreamscape. Anand’s article in MARG calling for planning as dreaming ended with a series of photographs of congestion, unsanitary conditions, unplanned growth, and dirt and filth in the city with telling captions—“Two views of hell” and “If there was no ‘black hole’ of Calcutta, then here is an entrance to one in Bombay.”75 These images of dirt and dysfunction were meant to refer to the actual city. In fact, they acted as screens concealing the daily social practices and symbolic experiences of work and life in Bombay. The city’s spatial organization by capital remained hidden; class inequality and conflicts and elite-subaltern divides were kept out of view. The experience of the city as a place of encounter, difference, struggle, enjoyment, and aspiration disappeared behind the ghostly image of Bombay’s unplanned sprawl and congestion. In the clean and orderly urbanism proposed for the nation, there was no place for the heterogeneous and conflict-ridden urban life, no room for chawls as spaces of community and memory, and no provision for the rich and varied life on the streets. The dream city of clear lines and coordinated functions repressed the knowledge of the city as society; the visually rich image of the city by the sea projected the ideal of an urbanism without urbanity. Bombay was to be nothing more than an industrial metropolis, a cog in the wheel of the industrializing and urbanizing nation.

  If the nationalist fantasy of modernization found its expression in the dream image of a planned industrial metropolis, this was not surprising. Jonathan Raban writes that town planning since Patrick Geddes and Lewis Mumford has abandoned the real city and vested its hope in techniques; since love and reason had failed, a stew of science, technology, and bureaucratic administration was offered as the recipe for achieving an ideal city.76 The modernist manifestos offered a brave new world, but they were really no more than a “shrilly puritanical backlash” to the actual conditions in the city.77 Their ideal of a rationally planned city held up the lure of order and harmony in the face of the unpredictability and chance of the actual city. The dream of a new city, where spatial design was expected to shape a society of harmony and goodness, could be only a “flight into Utopia,” the “creation of a preferred reality far removed from the complexities of urban planning for an existing city.”78

  Crucial to this project was the persistent demand for delegating planning to experts. I do not mean to suggest that there was a conspiracy to circumvent democracy, but only that there was a touching faith in the power of reason, in its inherent force to cut through the webs of society, property interests, speculators, and political calculations to transform reality. Having displaced and concealed the city as a social space in order to plan Bombay as a spatial machine, the dream text of planning saw the murky and unpredictable world of politics and society as an obstacle that the force of reason could overcome. Anand’s comments on this issue are telling. Exhorting his readers to think big, to envision Bombay as one of the major cities in the “One World” of the future, he acknowledged that this may be difficult because the intelligentsia “lives in a democracy, where the vote has been given to illiterate peoples, who have so far been deprived of the knowledge of their own self interest.”79 What was required, then, was a spirited campaign by the intelligentsia to articulate and advance the interests of those who did not know them.

  Remarkably, the campaign was successful. The very manner in which CIDCO came into being is revealing. No sustained public conversation, no democratic participation, and no consultation with the peasants whose lands were to be acquired preceded the formation of a body that was to undertake the building of a new city. Instead, the publication of the letter from Correa, Mehta, and Patel through an acquaintance in the Times of India, followed by Anand’s enthusiastic endorsement in MARG, counted for the public conversation. A chance poolside conversation with a senior IAS officer substituted for democratic procedures. Access to the state proved useful in getting the plan set into motion. But then the agents of the state were entangled in a dense web of political and economic interests. If these ultimately proved to be the undoing of the dream, then the basic problem was that the compact between the state and technocratic elites had failed. Politics and society, which the planners had suppressed, returned with the rage of the repressed to sour the modernist dream of postcolonial geography.

  The wonder is not that New Bombay failed to achieve its objectives, but that its failure and the stinging judgment by Justice Gandhi on the Backbay deals have not prevented the powerful private interests to relentlessly undo the liberal state’s ideal to promote the public good. Because modernist planning aimed to achieve a more efficient and rational urban space rather than to address social desires and needs, its failure eroded the faith in the ideal of the state as an expression of general interests. Walk around Nariman Point and Cuffe Parade, and you will see the ruins of this ideal in tower after tower named after a limited group of builders. Venture into the old mill districts with its silent machines, and you will hear the sound of bulldozers demolishing chawls to make way for tall apartment towers, shopping malls, and commercial buildings. With the growing influence of the neoliberal faith in the market, builders are racing to erect towers to “rehabilate” slum dwellers—and make a tidy profit. The city is dotted with World Bank–funded projects to improve the infrastructure and forge an efficient transportation network to serve the globalizing economy. New Mumbai may be resigned to its status as a bedroom community serving contemporary Mumbai, but the elites continue to sell the dreams of newness.

  Meanwhile, the Human Development Report retails an unremittingly dismal picture for the majority of the citizens. Malnourishment, cramped and unhygienic housing, diminishing open space, and ever more crowded suburban train travel to work characterize their lives.80 Is it any wonder that the city appears as a space of conspiracy by the few behind the backs of the rest?

  1. Steel and Art Deco. Source: Times of India Annual, 1935.

  2. Doga and Suraj. Courtesy: Raj Comics.

  3. Planning violence. Courtesy: Raj Comics.

  4. Doga’s pathology. Courtesy: Raj Comics.

  5. The opening page of Khaki Aur Khaddar. Courtesy: Raj Comics.

  6. Monica forced to watch atrocities. Courtesy: Raj Comics.

  7. The comic-book panels scrambled by the chaos of violence. Courtesy: Raj Comics.

  8. Doga fights the rioters in vain. Courtesy: Raj Comics.

  9. The superhero is assailed by self-doubt. Courtesy: Raj Comics.

  10. The superhero despairs at the loss of humanism. Courtesy: Raj Comics.

  11. Luxurious 1,2&3 BHK Flats, by Meera Devidayal. Mixed media on canvas, 40 × 30 in. Courtesy: Meera Devidayal.

  12. Taxi stickers.

  13. Objects in the Mirror Are Closer than They Appear, by Meera Devidayal. Mixed media on canvas, 30 × 42 in. Courtesy: Anant Art Gallery, New Delhi.

  14. Altamount Road, by Meera Devidayal. Digital print, oil, enamel, and epoxy galvanized steel sheet, 49 × 36 in. Courtesy: Meera Devidayal.

  15. Free enterprise in Dharavi. Author’s photograph.

  16. Collectors of discarded history in Chor Bazaar. Author’s photograph.

  17. Atul Dodiya, Bombay Buccaneer. Courtesy: Atul Dodiya and Peabody Essex Museum, Salem, Massachusetts. Acc E301042.

  8

  AVENGER ON THE STREET

  A jeep careens recklessly through Bombay’s streets. It is filled wi
th ruthless goons of the notorious Panther gang. They mow down pedestrians without pausing, braking only when they find their target. The man, a witness in a case against the Panthers, is beaten senseless while onlookers watch impassively. They do not intervene, leaving the bruised and battered victim where he falls. An old man cries out in despair, “Who will help? The hearts of these people have been turned to stone.”1 This is Bombay Dying.

  Suddenly, a tall and muscular masked figure in a bodysuit appears, guns blazing. It is Doga, Bombay’s very own superhero. An adept boxer, proficient in karate and firearms, he hunts down and annihilates criminals with a gusto to match that of his quarry. He conceals his identity by wearing a dog mask. Unmasked, he is Suraj, a mild-mannered physical instructor at the Lion Gym (plate 2).

  In the popular comic-book series named for him, Doga is a ferocious and ruthless killing machine clad in a body-hugging circus suit that accentuates his imposing physique. The mask and the name Doga evoke the quality of loyalty associated with man’s best friend to proclaim the superhero’s commitment to protecting and serving the city. He respects the police but freely breaks laws and defies authority to blow criminals away. He is a loner, an angst-ridden man with memories of a violent past that propel him into sociopathic rampages against gangsters and evildoers. His motto is “Doga does not seek to solve problems, he eliminates them.”