The World of the Games: Warring Illusions

A ‘world class city’ is coming up in India today, in the capital, where Delhi
used to be. It will last from the 1st of October to the 15th of October, after
which it will vanish as ephemerally as it will appear. It is as yet too early to
say if Delhi, the city that resolutely refused to become ‘world class’, will
reappear, or what else may appear in place of both Delhi and the ‘world
class city’. But this much is certain: the ‘world’ in this city will no longer be
the same.

During the period when the ‘world class city’ replaces Delhi, there will be
only one ‘class’ that will occupy the space of the city – or rather two: the
small but infinitely more powerful one of the ruling elite; and the much larger
one of the middle class – multi-layered and heterogeneous in so many ways,
but tragically homogenized by the blinkers of patriotism and paradoxically,
also by the hunger to be part of a mythical ‘world class’. The tiny but all-
powerful ruling elite of course need this larger set of subjects to remain in
power – and need for them to remain blinkered, if not blinded by their
hunger. But most importantly, they need them to yearn for the ‘world class
city’, even if the illusoriness of that city is patently clear to everyone. And so
various urban policies to bring about this illusion have been initiated, with
the grateful approval of large sections of this middle classes. There are of
course the usual dissenters – jholawala intellectuals, human rights activists
and their sensationalist friends in the media – all of who are parts of this
class – but firstly they constitute a minority, and secondly, they constitute
just a minor bump in the path of the speeding juggernaut of administrative
fiats by which the city is being ‘cleansed’.

First in these is the removal of the unsightly poor from the city – those
intractably persistent markers of ‘underdevelopment’. The innumerable poor,
destitute and diseased denizens of the city that used to be Delhi will have
been packed away – some right out of the city, stuffed into outgoing trains
and buses at gunpoint by an enthusiastic police force; some herded into
parks converted into concentration camps, walled up behind aesthetically
designed ‘scene cutters’ that will prevent the visiting ‘world’ from ever
knowing they are there; some will be packed away into the various jhuggi-
jhopdi colonies (also known as JJ Colonies – transformed into civility by the
power of the acronym) that begrime the suburban landscapes of the city;
and the remainder will no doubt be swiftly stuffed into jails and prisons
through the mechanisms of various unpleasant charges available in the IPC.
Alongside this ‘cleansing’, there have been associated activities, like the
removal of cycle-rickshaws – those ubiquitously embarrassing reminders of
our ‘backwardness’ – from across the city, and their replacement by sleek,
colourfully designed, electric-powered ‘e-rickshaws’; or the complete ban on
hawkers and vendors on the streets of Delhi. We will no longer have migrant,
illiterate, uncivilised peasants-turned-rickshaw-pullers to haggle with in
almost extortionist ways, when we take a rickshaw, but rather, well-dressed,
well-spoken and trained ‘e-rickshaw-wallahs’, whose rates are fixed (and
probably inflexibly extortionist themselves – but we will have no say in that
anymore). We will no longer see pani-wallahs, chai-wallahs, bhel-puri-
wallahs, kulcha-chhole-wallahs, momo-vendors, vegetable and fruit vendors,
and all the rest of that pot-pourri of itinerant goods and services that
constituted the irreplaceable background to street-life in Delhi. In their place
we will have only empty, but freshly painted and tarmaced, roads and
boulevards, marked by the occasional licensed kiosk that will sell only the
well-packaged, branded and licensed products of our eager and waiting
industries. The colossal unemployment this will cause, and its effect on the
economy, are yet to be measured; but there is no doubt that it will be
enormous. Add to this the sheer inconvenience of this removal, and the
concomitant additional expenditure to the millions who have come to depend
on this sector, and we will have a glimmer of the invisible costs that this
monumental prestidigitation that is being undertaken in the name of the
Games, will eventually entail.

The simulacrum of being ‘developed’ that we hope to achieve doesn’t end

with these. The government is also going in for mass replacement of the
regular buses of the public transport system with spanking new air-
conditioned buses that charge prohibitive fares (but then the poor who
needed lower fares aren’t around to use them anymore, so how does that
matter?). Stray dogs, cattle and other unsightly bestial signs of being ‘third
world’ are being removed with a speed and alacrity only matched by that of
the disappearance of enormous sums of money. This selective ‘upgradation’,
‘development’ and ‘beautification’ of specifically targeted areas – sites of the
city close to or part of the CWG – on a ‘war-footing’ is, in one sense, the
exact equivalent of the grandiose cloth-palaces that are erected for the
typical Delhi wedding – and the minister who made that unfortunate
comparison in the first place was, in this sense, speaking truer than perhaps
he himself could have desired. But the ‘world’ that will come visiting will not
know – or so we hope, keeping our fingers and toes (and possibly even other
less visible appendages) crossed that buses will not catch fire, bridges will
not collapse, roofs will not cave in, stadia and apartments will not implode,
rooms will not be invaded by snakes and dogs, roads will not develop
potholes – in short, that the whole blessed shamiana (sham-iana, scam-iana,
whatever) that we have put up as our version of the ‘world class city’, will
hold, just for two weeks, it will hold…. After that, who cares if roofs fall, or
floors cave in, or bridges collapse, or how many die or are injured in that
process – at least the ‘world’ will not be watching.

Even before all these policies were put in place, the government had
‘encouraged’ the various Delhi University colleges to close their hostels for
three months before the Games, ostensibly in order to overhaul them
completely, and render them habitable by ‘international’ standards.
Absolutely no compensatory mechanism or procedure was set in place to
help the aggrieved students; they were simply left to fend for themselves.
This peremptory eviction of students from the hostels was apparently to
accommodate various kinds of guests who will arrive for the Games – but
mainly the 800-odd ‘volunteers’ for the Games from different parts of the
country. It is not clear why these ‘volunteers’ from outside were so
desperately needed that several hundred students had to be rendered
without accommodation; could it be that there is a severe shortage of
‘volunteers’ in this recalcitrant city? Or is it that, in the guise of bringing in
volunteers, various political constituencies will be satisfied with a free trip to
Delhi and to the Games? In any case, Rs. 70,000 crores have been spent so
far, and several hundreds of those crores on refurbishing hostels that will
become exorbitantly expensive to run, after the Games (and therefore
available only to students who could well afford not to live in them in any
case); but evidently the government found it – what? cheaper? more
efficient? or just another way to spread the largesse of the Games funds? –
to commandeer the student hostels than to board and lodge these ‘official’
visitors in hotels.

The ‘war-footing’ though, on which all this was undertaken, is not simply a
metaphor. Shock has turned to mind-numbing awe as the government has
revealed its intentions to pin this mirage of a ‘world class city’ to deadly
reality, at least for two weeks, through sheer force of arms. An astounding
100,000 police and paramilitary personnel, complete with riot-gear, snipers
and bomb squads, have been deployed, ostensibly to ensure that this fragile
‘world class city’ is not ripped apart by ‘terrorists’. There is apparently also a
proposal to impose Section 144 of the IPC (which prohibits the assembly of
five or more persons) across the city for the duration of the Games. The
government has also used Section 118 of the Motor Vehicles Act to declare a
dedicated CWG lane on Delhi roads; entering this lane without authorization
will lead to instant impounding of the vehicle and a fine of no less than Rs.
2000. The police have already started enforcing these with ruthless
efficiency. The message is clear: the police are here in such large numbers
not just to counter possible ‘terrorism’ – the word that is fast becoming a law
in its own right, an emblem under which anything can be justified and
legitimated. No, the police are here in such large numbers to ensure that the
recalcitrant denizens of Delhi behave themselves – or rather, that they do
not behave like themselves but – for just two weeks – like citizens of a ‘world
class city’. The civilizing of the Delhi-ite is being undertaken on a ‘war-
footing’, quite literally here – and the irony is that the illusion of the ‘world
class city’ is preventing the Delhi-ite from even knowing that he or she is
being warred upon.

Let us pause for a moment and reflect on the context of these

developments. If they had been undertaken in China, or North Korea, or even
Singapore, we would not have hesitated to decry them as the violations of
the democratic rights of their peoples, as the excesses of authoritarian
regimes and police states. These are actions perfectly in tune with such
regimes, expected of them. Nobody expects that an event of this scale would
be conducted in any other way by say, a Hu Jintao, a Kim Jong Il, a Robert
Mugabe or a Muammar Qaddafi. What we have here though, is the presence
of the actions apparently minus the singly identifiable actor, the dictator
whom we can point to and decry: who do we hold responsible for this magic
act, this illusionist’s trick that will make Delhi disappear for two weeks and
produce a ‘world class city’ in its place? Suresh Kalmadi? Sheila Dixit? The
Group of Ministers that was finally appointed to oversee the Games, when
both the gargantuan corruption and the absolute failure to deliver on time
became too patently apparent to ignore? P. Chidambaram? Manmohan
Singh? Sonia Gandhi? Where does the proverbial buck stop (the actual buck
stopped long ago, tucked away with its billions of brethren in the vaults of
Swiss and other overseas banks by now – but that is another story)?

For some days now, the national anthem has been ‘let’s not dwell on this
now, let’s come together and make the Games happen, it’s the country’s
pride at stake; we’ll deal with the culprits later’. The fact of the matter is
that, after the Games, another set of games will begin, the second act of the
Great Illusion will commence. The second Great Illusion that will be
perpetrated will be the disappearance of the first one. Even if the Great
Shamiana of the Games does not hold up – with more collapsing bridges and
roofs – even if every last shred of the Great Illusion is exposed for what it is,
there is no doubt that the Second Great Illusion is already being prepared, to
make the first one disappear. This is easier, much easier, to do when it isn’t
entirely clear who the perpetrator of the first illusion was: the principle is
that if there was no illusionist, then there was no illusion – it was all just an
illusion about an illusion. It’s a little more difficult when it is clear that there
were several illusionists: but since it is going to be up to the illusionists
themselves to identify the actual illusionists and take action against them,
this poses no real problem. We can safely say that whatever action will be
taken will be purely illusory – that is, if they are unsuccessful in convincing
us that there was no illusionist at all, which they will no doubt pull every trick
in the book to do.

This metaphor of the illusion has been stretched enough; like all metaphors,
it has the dangerous potential to become an illusion itself. To return then to
ground reality, let me spell out some propositions by way of my
understanding of this. First, we didn’t need a dictatorship or an authoritarian
regime to have these gross violations of democratic rights happen under our
very noses: they happened precisely because we live in a purported
‘democracy’. But this ‘democracy’, which is in reality nothing more than a
sort of extended oligarchy, ensures that the benefits of its democratic
principles remain confined to the ruling elite, and to some extent, and in a
much more diluted form, to the Great Indian Middle Class. The elite use the
powers vested in them by this ‘democratic’ system to garner and accumulate
wealth, not just for themselves but for their partners in the broad alliance
that gives the impression of ‘democracy’. This mutual support system is
what will ensure that the guilty in the Games scam-iana will never be
brought to book. If there is an outcry against the likes of Kalmadi, there is a
deeper class sense that will persuade Us to let it be, fostered by our ever-
faithful media: because, deeply ingrained in the unconscious of this class is
the awareness that the likes of Kalmadi are only continuing to do what we do
routinely, except more blatantly, and on a much greater scale. When
Kalmadi is finally let off the hook, as no doubt he will be, there will be some
mutterings and some rantings, but the matter will be quickly forgotten. That
is what he is banking on, and that is what the essence of our ‘democracy’ is.
In this ‘democracy’, our elected representatives and their appointed officers
tell us that it is in our interests that our democratic rights are being violated,
and we paradoxically accept it because we believe that our representatives,
being products of the democratic system, represent democracy itself. Even
when it is patently clear that they do not, we cannot conceive of their being
anything but democratic, because to acknowledge that would be to
acknowledge the systemic failure of this ‘democracy’. It would be to
acknowledge that we are victims of the same system that we routinely
participate in, that is used to routinely victimize the millions below us – Us,
the Great Indian Middle Class – a process of victimization that at once
defines Us and that we thrive on, indeed are dependent on. The half-hearted
outcry against the deportation of the toiling masses from the ‘world class
city’ and specifically from its extensions in Gurgaon, arose because of this
very dependency: how can we be at liberty to participate in the illusion of the
‘world class city’ if we are tied down with the myriad domestic chores that
our domestics perform for us?

But this is the price we are being told to pay for participation in the ‘world
class city’ – and we are willing to pay it because, on the one hand, of course,
we get to be, for two weeks, citizens of a ‘developed world’, and on the
other, it is nothing compared to the violence perpetrated – in our name and
by us – on the rest of the populace of the country. Farmers dying by the
hundreds of thousands because of the depredations of agricultural
corporations that we own, or work in, or get dividend-profits from, will be
cynically portrayed as ‘suicides-for-money’; tribals battling the established
nexus between the government and big mining corporations, that is
rendering them destitute in the millions in the process of capturing their
lands, will be cynically portrayed as Maoist terrorists, and systematically
crushed; tax-sops to the tune of several lakhs of crores will be proudly
proffered to dollar billionaire industrial giants, but loan-waivers of a few
thousand crores to peasants across the country will be bitterly resented;
workers agitating against appalling working conditions and demanding no
more than marginal increase in wages are berated for their greed and
thrashed by an ever-willing police; the victims of the Bhopal gas tragedy
continue to remain beggars for our democratic favours, long after our
‘democratic’ system, with our silent collusion, allowed the villains of the
piece to go practically scot-free – and so on.

Predatory capitalism, parasite capitalism, crony capitalism – call it what you

will, it is thriving in our very real world, because that world is not the ‘world
class’ world that we would like to imagine it as, but a deeply feudal,
profoundly colonized, underdeveloped-in-every-sense world of caste-, class-,
ethnic-, religious and gender-violence. The Great Indian Middle Class sits on
the skin of this world – predatory, parasite, crony – like a hallucinating bug,
insulated from the actuality of this world by its hallucinations, protected from
its violences – however fragilely – by the chains of ‘democracy’ that bind this
world and hold it tightly in place. The Delhi we know may or may not
reappear, after the Games; but that world – destitute, deprived, steeped in
poverty and violence, and warred upon by the Indian state in a multitude of
ways – that world, it seems, is doomed to remain invisible.

PK Vijayan

Asst. Prof., Dept. of English, Hindu College, Delhi University.

Bio-note:

PK Vijayan teaches English Literature at Hindu College, Delhi University. His

research is in the area of gender and nationalism. He is currently examining
the intersectionalities of class, caste, religion and gender as these emerge in
the Sachar Committee Report. He may be contacted at
pk.vijayan@gmail.com