Cars carrying tourists and pilgrims queue up on the carriageway of Sudarshan Setu — India's longest cable-stayed sea link connecting Okha town of Devbhumi Dwarka district with Beyt Dwarka island, 3 km off Okha coast. Among the tourists are Darshan Doltani (38), a utensil trader from Keshod town in Junagadh. “I had come here around four years ago and rode ferries to go to Beyt Dwarka and back. I had seen videos of this bridge after (Prime Minister) Narendra Modi inaugurated it. It looks like a wonderful structure,” he says. With the bridge now functional, tourists and pilgrims have the option of driving their vehicles straight to Beyt Dwarka island instead of relying solely on ferry boat service, which was the only mode of transport till around two months ago. “Ferry boat operators used to pack passengers like herds of goats and sheep. There was a lot of concern about the safety of passengers. Thanks to this bridge, now one can drive one’s own vehicle to Beyt Dwarka,” Doltani adds. The PM had inaugurated the 4.77 km-long bridge, constructed at a cost of Rs 978 crore, on February 25. Devbhumi Dwarka district is part of the Jamnagar Lok Sabha constituency, from where BJP has fielded sitting MP Poonam Maadam. The Congress candidate from here is J P Maraviya. Thanks to its Dwarkadhishji Mukhya Mandir, a temple of Lord Krishna, Beyt Dwarka is a major hub of religious tourism. In October 2022, bulldozers had torn into several illegal structures, including 30-odd religious ones, in a drive taken up by the Okha municipality and the state government at Paaj in Beyt Dwarka, to free "encroached government land" on the island to build the bridge. Hitesh Haripara, owner of a diamond polishing unit in Botad town, who was on his way to Beyt Dwarka with his family for the first time, justified the demolition drive. "While people may have lost their homes, the fact is that (the houses) could have looked ugly in that place," says Haripara, claiming to be a BJP supporter. However, Doltani says that the government should be "sensitive" while relocating people to make way for big-ticket projects. “Fishermen had suffered due to the demolition drive. demolitions should be the last recourse and affected people should be properly rehabilitated.” At Beyt Dwarka, some of those who lost their houses and shops in the demolition drive are struggling to overcome the shock even today. “My general store was demolished one-and-a-half year ago and have not found another means of livelihood since then. They are not allowing me to set up a shop near the Sudarshan Setu landing point,” says Hasina Jagatiya (30) – who comes from a family of fishermen – while sitting outside a house surrounded by rubble at Paaj, from where the towers of the bridge are visible. Paaj is where the eastern end of the bridge lands on Beyt Dwarka. “While others left the area, we stayed put as we had nowhere else to go,” Hasina says. During the demolition drive, power supply to Hasina's house was disconnected. “Nobody came to even see how we are living, with our homes gone, our power connection gone,” she says. Hasina is not alone. Owners of around 170 ferry boats are also coping with the loss of their livelihood. A few yards away from Hasina's house, the backyard of Hema Sattar Jadeja’s (50) house, where she used to tie her goats, is now a pile of debris – the built-up part having been razed in the demolition drive. Till two months ago, Hema’s sons Yassin and Irfan ferried tourists from Okha town to Beyt Dwarka. “We had bought the boats for Rs 5 lakh each but sold them for around Rs 50,000, as there is no one to ride them now,” says Hema. Yassin and Irfan would take around 150 people on their boats one-way, and earn up to Rs 3,000 a day during festivals. "Their boats would ferry passengers once every three days. But after the bridge opened, they would not get passengers even once a week," she adds. Her mother-in-law Halima Suma Jadeja (70) says, “The bridge is nice, but where do the Muslims go, where does he do business?” Hema adds, “We vote every time but they don’t let us stay. We vote based on what the head of the house says. We vote for Modi most of the times.” These days, in Paaj, which is barely 100 m from the Krishna temple, one can spot only women and children, as the men have “gone out” to find means to earn. A government official in Devbhumi Dwarka says that while some affected by the demolition could be finding it tough to come to terms with the loss of their houses and shops built on government land, most of the affected families – majority of them fishermen from minority communities – have got on with their lives. “Most of them had either houses or plots of land on Haji Kirmani Road in Beyt Dwarka. But people had encroached coasts as houses right near the landing points of boats offered them convenience of ease. But that posed a security risk as Beyt Dwarka is near the Pakistan coast,” he adds. On Thursday, while addressing a rally in Jamnagar, Modi noted how the bridge had become a tourist attraction. “Earlier, there would be a problem going to Beyt Dwarka. one would have to wait. Today, Sudarsahn Setu has become a nazranu (gift)”.
