Legal Methods

2023 –2024
Worksheet: Session 3
 Extract from “From bulldozer ‘justice’ to migrants walking home: Political organising
has ignored housing rights”, bu Sushmita Pati

If you’ve been following the news in India, there is a slim chance you’d have missed the ongoing
demolitions. The pace picked up in 2022, when the state used demolitions to deliver majoritarian
forms of “justice.” While they have taken a particular form in Uttar Pradesh, the same methods
have been deployed in Delhi, Uttarakhand, Jammu and Kashmir, and Assam. On one hand, the
charges of “illegal construction” are being directly used against Muslim minorities to further
disenfranchise them. On the other, the reckless speed of infrastructural development threatens
both urban foliage and the urban poor.

But we all know that demolitions did not begin with the Narendra Modi regime. Ever since the
imagination of modern urban planning, anything deemed unsightly or outside the neat little plans
drawn up on planners’ boards have always been subjected to demolition. From Baron
Haussmann in Paris to Jagmohan in Delhi, ruthless attempts to reproduce the city in the image
of the “plan” have always left death and destruction in their wake.

Why is it that the housing question has barely found a foothold in India? The first instances of
such demolitions in Jehangirpuri, seen as a communal move, were met with a lot of civil society
anger. But as months have passed, we do not see these demolitions abating. Residents of
Tughlaqabad in Delhi and in Sonitpur, Assam are currently battling the consequences of
demolitions. The working class facing displacement are no longer just poor Muslims. The public
anger that erupted last year seems far more subdued and dissipated as the demolitions have
gained traction. Even at the start of the pandemic lockdown when we witnessed hundreds of
thousands of migrants simply taking to the road on foot to go back to their villages, it was
horrifying, but also, at the same time, equally confounding. While American cities were spilling
over with protests around cancelling rent, the middle classes struck by job losses barely uttered a
word about the need for cancelling rent in dire times. The broader civil society, from
policymakers to activists to academics, had little to say beyond demands for rehabilitation and
welfare.

This is in no way meant to disparage the work of housing rights activists, but an
acknowledgement of the difficult space in which they work. Housing rights have never been
acknowledged as a constitutional right in India (despite an ill-fated attempt in the 1980s to draft
a bill by a coalition of different organisations under a National Campaign for Housing Rights
banner). Courts, as well, have been less than favourable in chalking out an articulation for
housing rights. As the onslaught has become more spread out and sporadic, making it hard for
people to organise, the state is also no longer the only location of power. The housing rights
question has historically been unable to translate itself into a political question in India, while the
“Right to the City”—argued for by French philosopher Henri Lefebvre in the throes of the 1968
Paris movement—has become one of those rallying cries in urban movements world over,
allowing local contexts to shape what the “rights” would be. As a result, the “Right to the City”
framework has been used to demand affordable housing, rights for undocumented workers, and
much more. Introduced into the Indian context by the UN Habitat, and organisations like
Action Aid, the “Right to the City” and, by extension, housing begin to be articulated within the
language of efficiency and accountability and, most importantly, an individuated right.

What are the historical roots of this difference? While in the US, the housing question has been
central to the civil rights movement since the 1960s, in India, the indigenous, homegrown
political movements did not quite consider housing as a political matter. While housing is at the
heart of both labour and caste in India, both labour movements and caste movements have seen
working class neighbourhoods as only the “site” but never really the “object” of their movement.

- Pati, S., “From bulldozer ‘justice’ to migrants walking home: Political organising has
ignored housing rights”, Scroll.in

1. What function do you see law performing in this piece? Is the bulldozer a symbol of
justice or order?

2. Why is housing not a legal right in India? If housing is already a human right that is
internationally recognised, why does it need to be a legal right?

3. Suppose housing were recognised as a legal right in an international convention that

India is a signatory to. What would have to be done for this to become a legal right in
India?

4. If housing is not a legal right, is the state justified in demolishing illegally built homes?
Would such demolitions fall within the ‘narrower’ or ‘wider’ meanings of justice that
Waldron describes?

5. There are specific sites in the cities that are under permanent encroachment by the urban
poor. Can these encroachments be legally defended? What sources and branches of law
could be used in such a defence? Which of the three ‘conceptions of law’ that Loughlin
talks about would such laws fall within?
6. Are social movements important for the growth of law? Why?

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