Cong gets street-smart, plans protest rally

“Come rain or shine, we will be there, on the streets, in large numbers,” Bhujbal today told The Indian Express.

The heavy monsoon rains, which they plan to battle with black umbrellas, might actually end up providing them an apt backdrop. For both the BRCC and Bhujbal are protesting the Maharashtra government’s decision to demolish slums in the suburbs thus depriving hundreds of poor people of shelter during the last spell of heavy rains in the city.

The Shiv Sena-Bharatiya Janata Party government, already under pressure from the failing slum redevelopment scheme it set up soon after it came to power, demolished houses last month some of them pucca homes on a 100-acre plot in the western suburbs of the city. Now it has sent out notices to another set of slum dwellers in Kalyan in Thane district claiming that they are occupying “forest land” and must vacate or face demolition.

Bhujbal’s case is that the slum redevelopment scheme is failing because builders do not want to take on the cost of the residents of these areas going to courts, with their investments tied up uselessly for years. So they have hit upon the novel scheme of offering vacated land to the builders.“They maintain that these slum dwellers are all Bangladeshis. You mean to say that nearly 50,000 Maharashtrians, Yadavs, Mishras, Bengalis, Biharis, South Indians and Indian Muslims who have been living there prior to 1995, have overnight come to constitute such a large, concentrated colony of Bangladeshis’? This is being done only to circumvent their commitment to provide houses to people who have been living there before 1995,” said an outraged Bhujbal.

“What we wish to state is this: if you want them to vacate, provide them with alternative accommodation. And if you can’t provide them the promised houses, at least do not render them homeless, and that too in the rains!” Meanwhile the Maharashtra Pradesh Youth Congress today had its own morcha, rather dampened by the rains. They were protesting a different cause: the alleged use of police by the State Government to “repress” political activists. With his leg in a cast, Anees Ahmed, its president and MLA, was the star attraction. His bones had been broken in a police lathi charge last month. The rains, however, interfered with his supporters’ plan to carry him into the Maharashtra Legislature, whose monsoon session opened this morning, on a stretcher. The anticipated shock value somehow diminished considerably as Ahmed hobbled over to the morcha site.