On the front page of this newspaper last week appeared the picture of a little girl clutching her schoolbooks in her hand to save them from the bulldozers that were demolishing her home. A picture, as the oldjournalism cliché goes, is worth a thousand words. So I found it hard to look at this picture, and not feel shame and sorrow. And anger that the Chief Minister of Uttar Pradesh, who likes being called Bulldozer Baba, believes that what he is doing is delivering justice. It was this picture that shook the conscience of the Supreme Court, and it ruled last week that this kind of demolition of people’s homes was ‘inhuman and illegal’. The right to shelter is ‘an integral part of Article 21 of the Constitution of India’.
The Supreme Court has ruled against ‘bulldozer justice’ before, but this time it ordered the Prayagraj municipality to pay compensation of Rs 10 lakh to each of the people whose homes had been demolished. As recompense it is no more than tokenism, but the Supreme Court has at least asserted once more that justice by bulldozing people’s homes is not justice at all. This newspaper has so far been the only one to make the effort to go to Prayagraj and talk to the people who lost their homes without being given time to take out their most treasured possessions. A professor whose home was demolished while he was travelling said it broke his heart when he saw that his library of more than a thousand books had been destroyed.
