A cause is all you need to squat at Jantar Mantar

NEW DELHI, June 30: All it takes is a banner, a table, a megaphone and four people to occupy prime property at Jantar Mantar. The banner sho...

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NEW DELHI, June 30: All it takes is a banner, a table, a megaphone and four people to occupy prime property at Jantar Mantar. The banner should scream Anishchit kaleen dharna or indefinite protest, a megaphone on which you can scream the same for those who fail to see, a table to stand on and four people to join your cause.

This is enough to live at Jantar Mantar – steal power with impunity, have the NDMC provide water and a toilet. In fact there are protesters who get up in the morning, bathe in the open, shave and head for their office. One such person, Gajendra Singh goes to Nehru Place to work. His wife and children stay behind.

Singh’s neighbours say that he is not among the displaced. He did not have a house on rent so he moved in here with them. But you need to profess a cause. The banner outside his tent says: stop police brutality on jhuggi dwellers. In fact the police have deployed armed Central Industrial Security Force (CISF) jawans to protect these protesters. The jawans too live in a makeshift tent.

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Compared to the large number of people who were sitting in this upcoming slum at Jantar Mantar on Sunday, the place looked rather empty today. There were mainly women, children and the aged. “The men folk have gone for work,” the CISF jawan explained.

The architects of Delhi designed fountains adjacent to Jantar Mantar. Once the fountains worked and were illuminmated by colourful lights. Today naked children were dancing in the rain in and around the dried fountains. The Buddhist monks from the hills find Delhi very hot and humid. So they have pedestal fans installed. A red wire runs from the overhead wire, along the tree to the fans. This afternoon they were reading scriptures and discussing spirituality.

Others have more earthly problems. A group wants Uttarakhand, another set wants to be rehabilitated in trans-Yamuna. A CISF official said that in the evenings the place is more crowded. “Most of the men are out working now,” he said. But why has the CISF been deployed here. “To ensure that they don’t fight among themselves or damage property,” he adds.

Almost every “well to do” squatter has a pedestal fan, some have even two and one family even had a television. The New Delhi Municipal Council (NDMC) today decided to evict all the people from Jantar Mantar “very soon.” S.S. Rao, chief of NDMC’s enforcement wing today told Express Newsline that probably the coming Sunday, the squatters would be evicted and packed off. As for their demand for getting an alternate place for demonstrating, Rao said that these people were all unauthorised squatters and therefore would not be entitled to government land.

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“Those who are entitled to land will get it but others will just be taken away from Jantar Mantar in trucks and left,” he said. The NDMC today blamed the police for not cooperating with them. “Dadwal (Joint Commissioner Yudbir Singh Dadwal) promised us force but withdrew it at the last minute saying the Parliament session was on and they needed all the force they had.

Otherwise by now we would have cleared this place,” Rao added. Yesterday a senior police officer had, however, claimed that they were willing to provide the force but the NDMC lacked the will to act. While police and NDMC trade charges, the unauthorised residents of Jantar Mantar live on.