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THE sleaze accompanying the preparations for the impending Commonwealth Games (CWG) is now fully out in the open. Every day we are subjected to new, unfortunately predictable, stories of corruption, time and cost overruns, inadequate preparation, faulty design and implementation, concerns about player safety and security – the list is endless. More disturbingly, no agency involved is blameless, or can claim ignorance. Little surprise that repeated assertions about the proverbial Indian ability to somehow pull everything together at the last moment have few takers. Rarely has an event so thoroughly shattered public confidence in our leadership.

Nevertheless, these stories, even as they feed into our prurient fascination with the murky world of the power-weilders, have so far failed to engender the much needed discussion about the nature of our democracy, and what it is being transformed into. The corruption and the inefficiency that we are experiencing is more than an entrepreneurial reflection of the ability of the powerful – contactors, officials and politicians – to extract undue rent from the public exchequer. It is systemic, with ‘planned’ delays enabling those in-charge to blackmail authorities to approve contracts and expenditures, sidestep regulatory approvals, dilute demands for concurrent accountability – all because what is at stake is ‘national pride’.

In all the brouhaha about transforming Delhi into a ‘world class city’, we seem to have forgotten urban sociologist Robert Park’s insightful comments. ‘The city,’ he wrote, ‘is man’s most consistent, and on the whole, his most successful attempt to remake the world he lives in more after his heart’s desire. If the city is the world which man created, it is also the world in which he is henceforth condemmed to live.’ Similarly, David Harvey, in a brilliant essay, ‘The Right to the City’ [in Swapan Banerjee-Guha (ed.) Transformative Cities in the New Global Order, Sage, 2010] reminds us that, ‘The question of the right to the city cannot be divorced from the question of what kind of people we want to be, what kinds of social relations we seek, what relations to nature we cherish, what style of life we desire, what aesthetic values we hold.’ ‘The right to change the city,’ he argues, ‘is far more than the right of individual access to the resources a city embodies. It is, in essence, a collective rather than an individual right.’ Starkly stated, it reflects the exercise of power.

So, just who is exercising power over the processes of urbanization? Who are we redesigning the city for? And who are not just being excluded from, but being denied, their basic right to participate in the shaping of their habitat.

Of late, a section of the media, pressured no doubt by the actions of a few activists and civic organizations like the Hazards Centre and the Sahja Manch, have belatedly drawn attention to the plight of 400,000 odd workers toiling to deliver us a world-class city. Yet, despite numerous admonishments by the Delhi High Court, only a minuscule proportion of these workers have so far been registered, entitling them (in theory) to a range of civic services. A vast majority remain unrecognized.

Worse, any expectation that they might have entertained about settling down in the new city that they are helping build remains a chimera. Come October, and the games, they face unceremonious expulsion. And not just them. It appears that under the new security guidelines likely to soon come into operation, thousands of our informal sector service providers, particularly in areas of proximity to the games venues, will be forced to suspend operations so that we can present an orderly and sanitized face to the world. Alongside beggars and stray cattle, they are to be forced underground.

None of this is, in a sense, new. During the now forgotten Emergency years, thousands of citizens were forcibly relocated from their slum and dilapidated settlements in the heart of the city to the peripheries to enable beautification and planned development. Some decades later, this time with assistance from the courts, environmental concerns resulted in a reworking of the city’s master plan and zoning regulations to expel ‘polluting units’, dramatically curtailing livelihoods. The CWG only provides yet another opportunity to force through another makeover.

For those concerned about democracy, this should become an occasion for debate. The kind of city we envision, and aspire to make, is a direct reflection of the kind of people we are becoming. The fear is that in our unreflexive drive towards becoming ‘world class’, we may well be permanently alienating a vast majority of our underclass. Driven out from their rural habitats, and unwelcome in the city, they will soon be left with little but their despair and rage. And that, to a regime never tired of extolling the aam aadmi and inclusive growth, should be a matter of concern.

Harsh Sethi