The Persecuted Intruders of Capital’s Road Republic

A cute hatchback car for the daughter, a muscular SUV for the son, a couple of swanky sedans for Mr and Mrs, an imposing Merc for the whole family, the list can go on. But one rickshaw for one puller (or his family) in the country’s capital is no cakewalk, cannot exceed that and even for this ‘favour ’of one rickshaw, applications for licensing are invited for only two months a year! Even a cap on their final number was to be put at 99,000 before Supreme Court refused to allow capping on their number in August 2010, (court has not done anything for relaxing cap on individual licensing). But the court order, for whatever little it means, does not change the ground rules of the roadmap for governance and the texture of urban imagination. Sounds like another paradox in everyday life of India, banal and boring? But before we return to more layers of the lives of rickshawpullers in Delhi: did we need the latest UNESCO report to know this? You may say it with a smug yawn that it’s obvious – the fait accompli.

The boring stuff is that UNESCO’s recent report on Indian urban policies, as summed up by Miloon Kothari, former UN special rapporteur, says : “there is inequality, ghettoisation, apartheid and segregation across the cities in India, where new projects (gated communities, high rise apartments, malls, coffee chain outlets , entertainment complexes) have created a clear demarcation between ‘rich’ and ‘poor’ areas, slums are sprawling, with little access to essential civic amenities, especially water, electricity and sanitation.” So what? Didn’t someone say ‘the executive of the modern state is nothing but a committee for managing the common affairs of the bourgeoisie (the capitalists, the entrepreneurial class or people with property)’? And the eyewash of ‘welfare state’.

Yes, the divide is sharpening and the scale is getting massive – according to the census 2011, one-third of Indians, close to 377 million (of 1.2 billion) now live in urban areas. And to there is the array of urban development programmes, Jawaharlal Nehru National Urban Renewable Mission (JNNURM) and of course, 12^th Five Year Plan (2012-17). I can think of another report, the mobile reports moving on the roads of Delhi.

On the roads of the capital of the country many such mobile reports are pulling the cycle rickshaw, moving slowly and digesting abuse, sleeping on the streets of the city but supporting at least five more reports back home somewhere. A cycle rickshaw is not just a modest and idyllic means of transport – it is an economy in itself, it is subsistence – it is hope and despair rolled into one. Observing cycle rickshaw pullers in Delhi is a humbling experience in humanity- dehumanization, meaning – absurdity, state- statelessness, poetry- prose and sentimentality – heartlessness, that only the consumerist anomie and narcissistic hubris of the times can ignore. The test case for urban governance in Delhi (about 93% of Delhi’s territory is officially urban area and 7% is rural) need not go beyond what fills up about seven lakh for the ten million plus city.

For me, after walking through city streets and talking to a number of cycle rickshaw pullers over the years, some of the incidents and conversations linger in my memory. Let me just tell you about one, and then we can move to other signposts – policies, statistics, the façade of urban activism. These stand as signposts of how the urban space of the capital has treated the marginalised and ‘close the nose cleansing’ hypocrisy of the bourgeois socialists (the paradox of capitalist socialists).

The acceptance and melancholic defiance: For him the state does not exist, pre –state Hobbesian state of nature exists – short, brutish, solitary, poor and nasty.

Umesh, 53 (he guessed, he doesn’t remember his age) sends money to support a family of seven in his village in UP (money order economy) – thrashed, penalized and rickshaw seized gets drunk, hums Jahaan ko Thukra ke Pee Liya, goes back to the road divider to sleep. His ‘crime’?

He was lying bruised, resigned to another round of thrashing, blood oozing from his furrowed face, from somewhere below his right eye at a cineplex in North Delhi. He was late by a minute or two in moving his rickshaw out of the way of a car driven by a young woman whose desperation to get away from the parking space certainly had the sympathy of people there, and of course the constable. She egged the people on, the crowd and constable followed Madam- thrashed the rickshaw puller in what was a three minute blitz. Clearing the commotion, when I was there, he was lying but trying to get on his feet. He managed, went to a nearby paan shop but not for first aid the way we know it. He had kept his bottle of tharra (cheap desi liquor) there. He emptied it down his throat within seconds as he ignored the taunt from paanwala – “Pitt-te hi pee liya”.

Walking with a swagger that bordered on defiance he fell to the ground again.  As I stood there the need to take him for a medical attention made me put him on another rickshaw. Here he narrated the thrashing as a non- event accepting the banality of it. On being asked he identified himself as Umesh and fumbled before he said his age was 53. His earnings here support a family of seven in his village in Gorakhpur district of UP.  He had been sleeping on the road divider for years, and vehicles smoke saved him from mosquitoes.  But then something that followed was unexpectedly lyrical in expressing his melancholic defiance, alcohol spurring him to hum poignantly:

‘ Thukra raha tha mujhko badi der se Jahaan,                 

Aaj Main Saare Jahaan Ko Thukra Ke Pee Gaya,

 Apne Dil ki Bewashi Par Taras Kha Ke Pee Gaya,

Aaj Main Saare Jahaan Ko Thukra Ke Pee Gaya!’

He reluctantly received the medical attention and went to the road divider to sleep – thrashed, without a shelter, looking for a mosquito free spot.

In Jahangirpuri, Gopalpur bastis, statements are more prosaic, life the same.

When Delhi decided to look bold, beautiful and move fast, the wrinkles had to be ironed out and pygmies of the road had to be hidden, or worse, thrown out. Some roads in Delhi, including roads in a large part of Lutyen’s Delhi are no entry zones for humble rickshaws. Some parts like the lanes of the walled city cannot do without a rickshaw. Not because of some fondness for idyllic life. It’s just that nothing else fits in the claustrophobic maze of human- animal mobility here.

Whatever part of Delhi you’re in, Municipal Corporation of Delhi (MCD) views rickshaws as illegitimate urban kids, congesting the roads and spoiling the party for get, set, go cars. Delhi Traffic police has more crude and lucrative ways to deal with them, though MCD does not miss the venal pie either.

Jahangirpuri and Gopalpur are two of the few settlements in Delhi where rickshaw pullers spend their static time, not moving, not arguing for fare, not waiting for any passenger.  Almost none of them own a rickshaw. They only pull them. In his blue plastic jhuggi in Jahangirpuri, Hamid, 27, from Midnapore district of West Bengal, says that a majority of rickshaw pullers themselves hire rickshaws on rent at the rate of Rs.40-60 per day (depending on the condition of the rickshaw). They hire it from thekeddars (rickshaw contractors, an off-shoot of Delhi’s road business) who own a fleet of 150 to 200 rickshaws. How these contractors get registration numbers for so many rickshaws is anybody’s guess. On being asked why they don’t buy their own rickshaw (a new one costs about Rs. 8000), Hamid and his friends, who also pull rickshaws say that the price of a new one is too much (the legitimate kids of Delhi’s roads have music systems in their cars costing several times that). And they quickly tell that even if they get a new one, they would be paying fines to MCD daily for bizarre reasons and their rickshaws would get seized regularly. So thekeddars are their ‘saviours’ from MCD’s whims and arbitrary vigilantism of Traffic Police. How do thekeddars manage to protect their fleet of rickshaws? It’s a no brainer.

Manoj, 29 from Katihar district of Bihar adds that only a few own as well as pull their rickshaw – a rarity. Owner-pullers are the ones who spend nights on the rickshaw because in the absence of a secure shelter the chances of it getting stolen are very high. While the state does not exist for them, the Hobbesian ‘state of nature’ certainly does – all against all, one against all and all against one.

Fines and seizure – discouraging individual owners and aiming for decongestion:

Kailash, 40, lives in his jhuggi in Gopalpur. He has been a rickshaw puller for 13 years. He sees a pattern in the seizures. He daily observes rickshaws being penalized (several times more than what a car is subjected to for the same offence) and seized for reasons other than what meets the eye. Release after seizure is tedious and takes almost a week. There is an unstated policy of making it difficult for rickshaw pullers to own a rickshaw. He says nobody in the city, except rickshaw pullers, want individual ownership of rickshaws. Their rickshaws are captives of thekeddars – “Maalik to log car ke ho sakte hai. Rickshaw ke maalik bhi car wale hi hai!”

Hamid, Manoj, Kailash, their friends and relatives, with all other rickshaw pullers are about seven lakh in the capital city, and support at least five of their families – in Delhi or their native place. And how does their day go? They say they survive on cheap glucose biscuits (small packets of Parle G, Tiger etc) use public toilets and even use open spaces for answering nature’s call. A few of them have managed to put their children in MCD schools too – the same MCD.

Interestingly, a large number of rickshaw pullers were once weavers, skilled craftsmen, blacksmiths and some were dhobis too.

Close the nose cleansing bourgeois socialists:

They are all over the city. Smooth talking activists, pretending to reach out to rickshaw pullers with all the bleeding heart large heartedness of patronizing benevolence. They make occasional visits to rickshaw pullers’ ghettos. Poverty tourism has added a new breed of capitalist activists in the country who pretend to do a cleansing job without getting to the essence of the mess, the dirt, the squalor (the close the nose cleansing brigade). They want to address a society, without addressing its basic contradictions. Rickshaw pullers in Delhi, at least the large number to whom I have spoken, have seen through the façade and are fed up of these ‘NGO sirs and madams’ (that is what they call them). They say that they look at them like animals in a zoo and have a similar tourist curiosity about us.  Madan, 42, a richshaw puller in West Delhi is more terse in his assessment – “they have just wasted our time, they had their cinema in our jhuggis and got stuff for their bhasanbaazi.”

They do not attend dharans, or massive agitations, and they do not look for legislative wizards to conquer their suffering. Shielding themselves from a lathi here, a challan there and tolerating abuse everywhere they move in the city like persecuted intruders of our Road Republic. Not quite the ‘constitutional morality’ of a Constitutional Republic.

Image Source [http://www.flickr.com/photos/ganeshdhamodkar/5758826210/sizes/l/in/photostream/]