Look at our front page picture. Three generations – a grandmother, a mother and her children – fixated at the horror unfolding, staring into nothingness, their life in debris all around them. A bulldozer followed written orders because a lower court judge decided that these 50 odd homes were not worthy of any relief from the demolition of their homes, while 150 other homes, facing demolition on the same grounds, were saved by a High Court intervention.
The argument today is not whether these hutments should be demolished. The people of Vasco want the migrants out to clear the space for clean beaches. The builders too have an eye on these spaces for major construction spaces. And ministers are with the builders. There is no debate on whether illegalities should be removed and these hutments which are on sand dunes need to go. But isn’t there a level playing field which should be offered even when illegal structures have to be demolished, or at the very least, a field which is less unfair? Taking nothing away from the state’s rights to demolish and clean illegal hutments, we ask how often have they exercised the same rights when there are five star hotels built in CRZ areas or on sand dunes or when temporary shacks turn into concrete structures or when high end night clubs build wooden floors and huge structures, which are for all practical purposes, permanent? We ask, if the government exercises the same rights when it takes back a night club property in North Goa, on grounds of CRZ and other violations and hands over the same property to another high end night club owned by a film stars family. Do these rights come into play only when those whose homes will be demolished are no longer necessary for the ruling party to come back to power?
Let us ask this. How different are the ground realties in Baina different from the ones at Moti Dongor, a large festering slum with past cases of abject criminalisation and violence. Inspite of court orders for the demolition of Moti Dongor (a slum hillock, whose voters have never allowed Margao MLA Digambar Kamat to fall), demolitions have not actually been carried out. One of the reasons for not going ahead with demolitions in Moti Dongor, was that the monsoons had just set in and humanity had to prevail over legality. So are the monsoons different in Baina? Is the fury any less? And why does the administration think that alternative arrangements have to be made only when those whose homes are getting demolished ask for them. But when they are not even told that their homes for the past 30 years will be broken the next day, why would they ask for alternate arrangements?
The demolitions of 50 hutments were done in a planned hurry and on the same day when a petition to restore their water and electricity connections were being heard. The cruel irony hit home when the court set a date in July to hear the plea for restoration by which time the bulldozers had destroyed all the homes that pleaded for water and electricity.
The state administration was clearly desperate to carry out the exercise before the courts could intervene. We have two very simple points. Why couldn’t they wait till the monsoons were over or done it before the rains set in? Why weren’t the people given some notice? And purely on humanitarian grounds, alternative temporary shelters should have been erected.
If Lalit Modi, accused of money laundering and Foreign Exchange violations was given travel papers to visit Portugal to attend to his ailing wife, on ‘humanitarian grounds’ by a BJP ruled centre, 50 poor families with children can be given a group shelter to tide over the monsoons, in a BJP ruled state.
Clearly, even death has better timing.
