Duration: 00:41:56; Aspect Ratio: 1.778:1; Hue: 67.118; Saturation: 0.153; Lightness: 0.243; Volume: 0.077; Cuts per Minute: 0.191
Summary: Panel Description:
From residents of the New Delhi to researchers on New Delhi, no matter where they start looking at the city, have inevitably found themselves, at one point or another willingly or unwillingly, at the doorstep of the city’s courthouses. In the past two decades, the Courts have emerged as a part not just of structural and urban change in the city, but of its everyday life, governance, politics and imagination. These four papers are located in this juridical emergence. Each taking on a different aspect of the court’s attempted (un)making of the city, they look at Public Interest Litigations and the court’s dramatic interventions in the cityscape on issues of unauthorized construction, at the deliberations over the fate of Delhi’s river Yamuna, at processes of urban planning as well associational life and movements of resistance to the court’s directives by city residents. Together, they represent an examination of millennial Delhi and its urban formations looking particularly at the arguably central role of law and the juridical. They do so in order both to raise a larger question of the role of law in the Indian city while remaining rooted in the particularities of the contexts and mechanisms of a legal urbanism as it has played out in the Capital.
Panel Coordinator: Gautam Bhan
Chair/Discussant: Dalia Wahdan, Assistant Professor of Anthropology
Foundation for Liberal and Management Education (FLAME)
Title: Yeh Court Is Sheher Par Raj Karti Thi: ‘Public Interest Litigation’ in Delhi
Panelist: Anuj Bhuwania, Doctoral Candidate, Department of Anthropology, Columbia University
Abstract:If the Indian city is becoming bourgeois at last, as Partha Chatterjee has put it, one key agent of this transformation has been the appellate court, especially the role it has assumed under the jurisdiction of ‘Public Interest Litigation’ (PIL). Nowhere in India has this phenomenon been as spectacular as Delhi. Right from the inception of PIL in the early 1980s, but especially with its massive intensification in the last decade, the two appellate courts in Delhi have made their presence felt in the everyday life of the city. Dramatic PIL-based interventions have included the closure of ‘hazardous industries’, the forced move to CNG for public transport, the demolition of scores of bastis and the sealing of commercial properties under newly invoked land use laws, each of which affected lakhs of people. PIL emerged as a media event par excellence with provocative pronouncements from the Bench invoking the image of urban collapse and projecting itself as the only agent that could ignore ‘populist pressures’. This paper will foreground the changing material practices of adjudication introduced by PIL, that enabled the city’s media and the ‘Residents Welfare Associations’(RWAs) to emerge as its ideal typical public.
To this end, the paper will concentrate on a mammoth PIL case, Kalyan Sanstha vs Union of India, which, for about two years between 2006 and 2008, subsumed all other cases against encroachment on public land and unauthorized colonies in Delhi. Literally hundreds of miscellaneous applications were attached to this case in the Delhi High Court. Large-scale slum demolitions resulted and the whole city became a site for the court's corrective intervention. This was a radically new kind of PIL, one no longer restricted to a single part of the city based on specific allegations by the petitioner. Rather, here the court practically took over the reins of urban governance, instituting its own appointees to oversee – and indeed dictate to – the municipal authorities. I will use the case of Kalyan Sanstha to discuss how PIL enables the courts, the media and civil society organizations to cross-mediate and transform the city.
Title:Delhi’s Yamuna
Panelist:Awadhendra Sharan, Sarai-CSDS, New Delhi
Abstract:This paper focuses on the multiple dimensions of the relationship between the city of Delhi and the river Yamuna, as mediated by the Supreme Court and Delhi High Court.
Delhi’s Yamuna is seriously polluted through organic and inorganic matter that are beyond its assimilative capacity - the ability of natural waters to absorb, dilute and disperse wastes – a concept first developed at the end of the 19thc as part of an ensemble of strategies about calculating risk. Indeed, it may even be classified as dead in the 22 km. that it traverses through the city, measured through standards of BOD levels etc. Its ‘state’, has implications for communities and livelihood practices both in the city and beyond it. And the imaginations of its future ‘states’ have implications for just what may be built/ occupied alongside it.
Pollution and death, and regeneration, not surprisingly, have invited different modes of thinking about the river and the city, marked by the intersection of two different conceptual fields, the science of pollution and theories of urban planning. At its most obvious, the Courts have addressed the issue of Yamuna’s pollution through the practice of relocation of slums, grounded in urban planning conceptions that began in the early years of 20thc. with the idea of separation of incompatible practices but which increasingly seek to banish ‘illegality’. On the other hand, Courts have intervened to regulate its pollution through the principle of ‘precaution’ and through engagement with ‘standards’. The first of these moves, we suggest, have invited considerable critical commentary; the latter, however, still needs far more elaboration. Even more, the intersection of these two modalities of reasoning, invite us to reflect on law and the city through a more complex set of arguments than those on offer in the literature either on ‘bourgeois environmentalism’ (Amita Baviskar) or on ‘public interest litigation’ (S. P. Sathe, 2002) or on the ‘appropriate domains’ of law and judiciary in dealing with urban and environmental issues (Subhankar Dam and Vivek Tewary, 2005). My paper is an attempt at developing one such argument.
Title:Residual Publics and Improper Citizens: Reflections on Urban Planning in the Juridical City
Panelist:Gautam Bhan, Indian Institute for Human Settlements, New Delhi, and Doctoral Candidate, Department of City and Regional Planning, University of California-Berkeley
Abstract:Indian cities have never looked at like their Master Plans. Yet often, discussions of urban informality and the “Unintended City,” to use Jai Sen’s evocative term, have remained at that: the inevitability of the “failure” of planning and its undoing by the informal/illegal. Informality has been seen as the limit of planning, and never as an inevitable part of it. This paper argues that it is not just that cities escape their plans, but how they do so in order to accommodate certain kinds of deviations from the plan at the expense of others that must the focus of sustained investigation within planning theory. Only then can we ask the next question: why are particular deviations from the plan permitted or even encouraged at moment one but condemned at moment two? In other words: if planning is not technical but a political process, how do prevailing urban politics influence both urban planning as well as the urbanization and the formation of our cities themselves? What does that imply for planning in the Indian city, and, arguably, in cities with entrenched spatial and economic inequality in general?
In early 2004, an estimated 35,000 households – colloquially called ‘Pushta’— on the banks of Delhi’s river Yamuna were destroyed in what was the first in a series of evictions. Between 2003-2007, an estimated 45,000 households were evicted in the city of Delhi, with less than 25% receiving any resettlement or compensation. These evictions were not initiated by the city’s planning agency, its municipal bodies or by either the city or central government. Each was the result of a verdict in an innovative judicial mechanism created, ironically, to protect the poor: the Public Interest Litigation (PIL). How has the eviction of nearly half a million urban residents and national citizens been recast, justified and legally endorsed in the name of “public interest”? How has this translation been made possible juridically and politically? What do repeated evictions tell us contemporary urban politics and the citizenship of the poor in particular? This paper seeks to answer these questions by looking at original writ petitions filed by a range of actors in the Delhi High Court and the Supreme Court of India that led to the eviction of poor informal settlements. It analyses the dictum and texts to see the logics by which the judges translated and interpreted “public interest” to accommodate the eviction of the city’s poor. It also looks closely at the Court’s vision, interpretation and use of the “Plan” and “Planning.” It offers initial hypotheses as to how these decisions and evictions both inform and are deeply influenced by contemporary political, economic and aesthetic transformations in Delhi. It then suggests that locating the processes of urban planning within these transformations is a necessary first step for any engagement between the governance and formation of Indian cities.
Title:Residual Publics and Improper Citizens: Reflections on Urban Planning in the Juridical City
Panelist:Gautam Bhan, Indian Institute for Human Settlements, New Delhi, and Doctoral
Candidate, Department of City and Regional Planning, University of California-Berkeley
Abstract:Indian cities have never looked at like their Master Plans. Yet often, discussions of urban informality and the "Unintended City," to use Jai Sen's evocative term, have remained at that: the inevitability of the "failure" of planning and its undoing by the informal/illegal. Informality has been seen as the limit of planning, and never as an inevitable part of it. This paper argues that it is not just that cities escape their plans, but how they do so in order to accommodate certain kinds of deviations from the plan at the expense of others that must the focus of sustained investigation within planning theory. Only then can we ask the next question: why are particular deviations from the plan permitted or even encouraged at moment one but condemned at moment two? In other words: if planning is not technical but a political process, how do prevailing urban politics influence both urban planning as well as the urbanization and the formation of our cities themselves? What does that imply for planning in the Indian city, and, arguably, in cities with entrenched spatial and economic inequality in general?
In early 2004, an estimated 35,000 households – colloquially called 'Pushta'— on the banks of Delhi's river Yamuna were destroyed in what was the first in a series of evictions. Between 2003-2007, an estimated 45,000 households were evicted in the city of Delhi, with less than 25% receiving any resettlement or compensation. These evictions were not initiated by the city's planning agency, its municipal bodies or by either the city or central government. Each was the result of a verdict in an innovative judicial mechanism created, ironically, to protect the poor: the Public Interest Litigation (PIL). How has the eviction of nearly half a million urban residents and national citizens been recast, justified and legally endorsed in the name of "public interest"? How has this translation been made possible juridically and politically? What do repeated evictions tell us contemporary urban politics and the citizenship of the poor in particular? This paper seeks to answer these questions by looking at original writ petitions filed by a range of actors in the Delhi High Court and the Supreme Court of India that led to the eviction of poor informal settlements. It analyses the dictum and texts to see the logics by which the judges translated and interpreted "public interest" to accommodate the eviction of the city's poor. It also looks closely at the Court's vision, interpretation and use of the "Plan" and "Planning." It offers initial hypotheses as to how these decisions and evictions both inform and are deeply influenced by contemporary political, economic and aesthetic transformations in Delhi. It then suggests that locating the processes of urban planning within these transformations is a necessary first step for any engagement between the governance and formation of Indian cities.
CNG
Delhi
High Court
India
Kalyan Sanstha
PIL
Pushta
Residents' Welfare Association
Supreme Court
Yamuna
authorities
autorickshaw
basti
bastis
city
compressed natural gas
demolition
economic inequality
encroachment
eviction
governance
hazardous
illegal
industry
inequity
informal
juridical
master plans
municipal
poverty
public interest
public interest litigation
public land
settlement
slum
spatial
unauthorised colonies
'unintended city'
urban planning
Title: Yeh Court Is Sheher Par Raj Karti Thi: 'Public Interest Litigation' in Delhi
Panelist: Anuj Bhuwania, Doctoral Candidate, Department of Anthropology, Columbia University
Abstract:If the Indian city is becoming bourgeois at last, as Partha Chatterjee has put it, one key agent of this transformation has been the appellate court, especially the role it has assumed under the jurisdiction of 'Public Interest Litigation' (PIL). Nowhere in India has this phenomenon been as spectacular as Delhi. Right from the inception of PIL in the early 1980s, but especially with its massive intensification in the last decade, the two appellate courts in Delhi have made their presence felt in the everyday life of the city. Dramatic PIL-based interventions have included the closure of 'hazardous industries', the forced move to CNG for public transport, the demolition of scores of bastis and the sealing of commercial properties under newly invoked land use laws, each of which affected lakhs of people. PIL emerged as a media event par excellence with provocative pronouncements from the Bench invoking the image of urban collapse and projecting itself as the only agent that could ignore 'populist pressures'. This paper will foreground the changing material practices of adjudication introduced by PIL, that enabled the city's media and the 'Residents Welfare Associations'(RWAs) to emerge as its ideal typical public.
To this end, the paper will concentrate on a mammoth PIL case, Kalyan Sanstha vs Union of India, which, for about two years between 2006 and 2008, subsumed all other cases against encroachment on public land and unauthorized colonies in Delhi. Literally hundreds of miscellaneous applications were attached to this case in the Delhi High Court. Large-scale slum demolitions resulted and the whole city became a site for the court's corrective intervention. This was a radically new kind of PIL, one no longer restricted to a single part of the city based on specific allegations by the petitioner. Rather, here the court practically took over the reins of urban governance, instituting its own appointees to oversee – and indeed dictate to – the municipal authorities. I will use the case of Kalyan Sanstha to discuss how PIL enables the courts, the media and civil society organizations to cross-mediate and transform the city.
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