Once upon a time, for Kolkattans, South City meant an undergraduate college space for students of the city to get admitted to and get a bachelor’s degree from. A few years back the equation changed: from academia it moved onto mean real estate – and real estate with elan. The overt connotations were thus – elite, extremely affluent, probably NRIs or people who hold/held sufficiently high positions in the corporate world, filmstars, and so on. If you had a flat there, you were one of Kolkata’s elite. The other covert set of implications were thus: you had servants who would work for you but neither sleep at your place nor shit in your toilet – there were separate servant’s rooms and a separate elevator for the subalterns. One could afford to maintain one’s high caste (financial caste i.e.) without having to touch the untouchable. Recently, while walking into the premises of the 36 storey towers, I saw a string of flex banners, tied against a wall of the fort, saying “South City Residents will not allow any illegal construction by South City.”
I was amused.
Because SC already had a long (and buried) history of illegality: and I knew it from one of the horse’s mouth. Almost the entire land on which the thousands of flats stand and stands a huge shopping mall where crores pass hands, has been forcibly occupied – with minimum or no compensation to the original inhabitants, the ‘natives’ as it were. It had been a small and successful Tata-like venture. Till now cases are pending and one insane character still refusing to give up his plot despite his life being put at stake. Result = some deplorable slums destroying the pristine beauty of the elite space. Reminds one of colonial time when we had separate colonies and spaces for the white and the natives; when the only lucky natives who could entre the sacred domain of the whites were the scavengers and sweepers. And now, the only subaltern who can walk into the SC premises and take the posh elevator to the 36th floor, and pee in a toilet in there, are the domestic helps. Neo-colonialism?
Coming to the part about illegal construction by South City; perhaps the move was made by some guilt-ridden soul/s residing in the towers. But here was a conceptual problem; the person/s were against illegal constructions. And as far as legality and courtrooms stand, one can well be sure that NK Realtors (the group that built it) had all its papers in line, knowing that papers are papers and can be made against payment, and well, NK does have some little money to get original papers made. And what’s more, we can almost be sure that the slum dwellers never had any ‘papers’ for that matter. Perhaps the question is not of legality but of ethicality; the question might be, even if we had the right papers, could we afford to simply select-all and delete people who had been living there for decades, without providing an alternative? Legality connect us with labyrinthine juridico-political processes, ethics is a matter of belief. And one feels that the question of justice gets trapped between them – and justice does not belong to the domain of the court, only. Justice is an ontological concept too, living and thriving within the ethical, growing in the day-to-day. Is it just to hire contractors at lower than market rates, and then have not adequate safety measures and when several labourers die on site, simply bury them there – while their families keep on waiting for them in far away villages in Bihar and Orissa? The land, let us assume, managed to generate all its ‘original’ papers, and that almost everything is legal now – but was the process just? Fair? Ethical? Should these aspects cease to matter in toto to us?
No comments:
Post a Comment