Seal them Off!!

The apex body of this nation, Supreme Court (SC), couldn’t have come up with a better verdict than directing the Municipal Corporation of Delhi (MCD) to continue with the sealing of illegal establishments built and operating in residential areas of Delhi. To start with, let me clarify, neither I am a current resident of Delhi nor have I spent enough time living in Delhi previously. So why am I so concerned about something happening to a class of traders and that too in a city which is not my place of residence. I will answer this question later in this write-up.

Delhi, the Indian national capital, is a beautiful city giving breathing space to both commercial and residential establishments which are in abundance. Though Delhi trails behind the financial might of trade carried out in Mumbai, it is flooded with small time traders existing profitably for decades now. As they say, “all hell broke loose” for the traders in Delhi when the SC came out with a directive to the MCD asking them to clamp down on trading establishments functioning in the residential areas of Delhi. MCD was asked to seal off the illegal establishments preventing them to continue further trade. What it meant was the saree shop that an aunty might be running profitably or a corner shop selling pirated DVD’s or the wholesale garment shop, they were all to be sealed off by the MCD.

Now, the whole point of “illegal establishments in residential areas” is an argument in itself and at this time, disputed. Majority of the traders claim and which is a fact as well that they were never stopped by the MCD before and in fact the MCD was annually collecting the tax on these properties, so the question is how does then these establishments become illegal?

As I previously said “illegal establishments” is an argument in itself and getting to the root cause of the mushrooming of these illegal establishments, rampant corruption in MCD, red tapism, demands several pages of writing. The core issue right now is, and I refer to an article written earlier by “Vir Sanghvi (Editor, Hindustan Times)”, that we just don’t care about things until it affects us. We constantly crib about residential areas clogged with vehicular traffic, no safe areas for children to roam about, less amount of parking, no clear air etc and yet we won’t raise a voice as long as we are able to let out our terraces for billboards or our basements to operate as shops/warehouse. So as it seems we will be all foul mouthed or up in arms if the neighbor’s drainage pipe is opened outside our house or if the neighbor has tried to capture a bit more area during his recent renovation but we will not come out and speak about something happening just a few blocks away from our house.

It is not just Delhi where one sees such trading establishments being operated but it is rampant across the nation. The unplanned growth of our major metropolis is a serious concern. The reason why Delhi is highlighted is that to a certain extent things have gone overboard (well, Mumbai passed this staged quite early). I mentioned it at the start of my article as to how it affects me and the point is I don’t need to be a resident of Delhi to see this nonsense happening but I can be in any part of India. No wonder, we just don’t have residential suburbs anymore but houses in the backdrop of big malls or a cluster of shops.

There are numerous households which will be affected due to the sealing as a lot of traders are going to go out of business, do we feel sympathetic towards them? Sure we do, but their fault is much bigger in the first place. They are for sure victims of the government machinery itself which initially promoted them illegally to operate fearlessly, but then to repeatedly do something wrong does not make it right.

The traders have voiced their opposition to the sealing drive and a number of protests have turned into mob violence, looting and destruction of public and private property. The police and politicians are in a fix coz these traders are the same people who were giving regular hafta or chanda (bribe) to them and now the police need to take action against them.

It was a shame to see that the police of the city was not able to prevent large gatherings of crowd and control the violence which marred the city for couple of days. It was more shameful to hear from the city’s government about their argument in favor of the traders and them admitting that it is very difficult for the police to control the violence if the sealing continues. The only thing I could think of was, “Is the police drawing a salary from the government or the traders”?

When the Supreme Court judges’ bench a few weeks back took strong exception to the Government's stand and announced, "You (Government) think that 25,000 people (traders) by putting dagger on the throat of someone (authorities) can hold entire peoples' right, life, liberty and property to ransom and the government is helpless," I felt like standing and applauding. There are a lot of lives which will be affected due to the sealing but many more if this menace of unplanned growth of metropolis is not controlled. And as the SC put it aptly, the law is above everything. The traders can’t take the city hostage to coerce the court in changing its ruling. For the time being the verdict stands, “Seal them off”.