Footnote: This edition of article 2, focused on the Bellilious Park eviction, in West Bengal, India, complements the July 2004 edition of its sister publication, Human Rights SOLIDARITY, published by the Asian Human Rights Commission, ‘Life at rubbish dump after Bellilious Park eviction’.
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About 700 families living in a place called Bellilious Park, in greater Kolkota, India were forcibly ejected by a rapid action force engaged by the Howrah Municipal Corporation on 2 February 2003. The eviction–but one of many by the authorities in West Bengal during recent years–was briefly reported upon by the local media and then forgotten. The victims, however, can ill-afford to forget: they have since been left to live in absolute squalor; for some, the only escape has been death.
Although initially there was some expectation that the municipality would take steps to rehouse the persons, these hopes were washed away with the coming monsoon, and the evictees have been left to fend for themselves on the fringes of the municipal rubbish dump and other atrocious locations. Residents at the rubbish dump site report having frequently seen amputated human body parts, internal organs and dead babies from hospitals, which are dug out by pigs and dogs, and brought into the settlement. Such are the conditions in which these people have been forced to live, thanks to the role played by India’s legal system.
The predecessors of the park occupants were brought to the park in the first part of the last century; they have lived there since without disruption, building small houses and collecting a few possessions, while cleaning the streets, drains and toilets of the surrounding neighbourhoods. They are Dalits, known in the past as ‘untouchables’, the lowest stratum of India’s caste structure.
Attempts to get legal redress have failed. The law concludes that as the land on which these families had dwelt is under a trust, they have no title to it. The fact that the municipality settled the ancestors of the residents there, in order to keep them apart from caste groups, nearly a century ago is of no legal significance. The law allowed the municipality to evict the occupants, on behalf of the trust, without redress. It allowed for massive force to be used to demolish the houses and to ransack the few possessions, such as radios, televisions, furniture and clothes, which the residents had accumulated. The consequences for these families were of no significance for the law. The fact that the park was occupied with the consent of the municipality, also employer of the evicted residents, is likewise of no relevance to the law. No moral obligations are attached to the decision to evict where the law is concerned. On 7 May 2004, a fundamental rights petition moved in the Supreme Court by Kishan Balmiki, a permanent employee of the municipality and victim of the eviction, together with Manabadikar Suraksha Mancha, a local human rights organisation, was rejected.
The eviction was one of many carried out in West Bengal in recent years where no restitution or rehabilitation was offered to the victims. In each case, the courts have been made a willing instrument of state or municipal authorities intent upon removing thousands of persons, with excessive force, and without regards to the consequences.
It is the nature of the existence of the Dalits and other marginalised groups in India and elsewhere in Asia to not have legal titles to anything. They lack title over even the smallest plots of land on which they may be allowed to live until the concerned authorities find some alternative use for it. So what is the meaning of legal title for these persons? Is caste still the principal basis upon which Indian citizens obtain title to land and material objects? Have the years of rhetoric emanating from Indian leaders from Mahatma Gandhi to Swami Vivakananda amounted to nothing other than volumes of sentimental statements?
What about the boasts by government representatives in international forums on human rights that public interest litigation is a great achievement of Indian jurisprudence? No doubt there have been some successes; however, how far have these gone to really challenge and affect change to the principles underlying the country’s nocuous social structure? The Bellilious Park case, and others like it taking place all over India, attests to a society where neither democracy nor human rights have had manifest influence on the distribution of resources.
The test of genuine social change in any society lies in the extent to which change occurs in its system of entitlements. Where a society incorporates the dispossessed into this system, they cease to be dispossessed. In particular, this ought to be done where groups have historically suffered outrageous maltreatment at the hands of others, out of recognition that such historical wrongs deserve redress.
The long period of residence by the people in Bellilious Park should have entitled them to some rights over the land upon which they lived. This at least would have obliged the municipality to seek alternative arrangements for them were it determined to press ahead with the eviction. In particular, the court should have taken into account the fact that the population belongs to a specially scheduled caste under the Constitution of India, and taken into account the fact that they had no other place available to reside. Nothing is so basic to dispossessed people as the place where they live: virtually the only place where they are protected from discrimination. History has made them exceptions, and the law should not ignore history. But, the law as it stands now does ignore history, and applies abstract principles, blind to reality.
The founding fathers of the Constitution of India claimed that they sought to achieve social justice. The early independence movement stressed that independence would be meaningless if social justice was not at the heart of self-rule. However, social justice soon became irrelevant to the new rulers. In fact, the upper castes and traditional elite ruled in a manner no different to their colonial predecessors. The law did not change to accommodate principles of social justice. The rule of the powerful over the weak remained as naked as when the Law of Manu ruled supreme, centuries earlier. The caste system under the Law of Manu stands unrivalled as the most supremely oppressive and brutal system of social control ever devised. It lives on today in events such as that at Bellilious Park on 2 February 2003.
On a few occasions in recent history legal scholars have sought to challenge Indian legal theory and gain greater space for social justice. However, in recent decades these have fallen into dramatic decline; hardly any now exist. Indian intellectuals instead take pride in their country’s possession of nuclear arms. A new type of nationalism has gained hold among the Indian intellectual elite. The animal-like treatment of vast numbers of citizens is no longer a concern for them. The law and morality have become so completely divorced that social justice has become a non-issue. Meanwhile, the country claims to adhere to several international treaties on human rights, including the International Covenant on Civil and Political Rights (ICCPR) and International Covenant on Economic, Social and Cultural Rights (ICESCR), while utterly disdaining their provisions.
It is time for a new movement to rise and attack the deep malfunctions in Indian jurisprudence undermining its ability to act for social justice. The Bellilious Park case needs to be canvassed throughout India and globally as an example of the complete failure of the law to act with any semblance of fairness towards the historically dispossessed peoples of India. Common article 2 of the ICCPR and ICESCR requires that all violations of rights should have effective remedies. India as a signatory to both covenants has undertaken to provide for legislative, judicial, administrative and other machinery for the realisation of the rights enshrined in these documents. The rights of the occupants of Bellilious Park under both covenants have been violated wholesale, yet they have been offered no remedies in law. The government of India, as state party to the two international treaties, must be held to account for this failure, both by its own people and by the international community.
