originally published in Indian Express on Jan 9, 2011
With its shiny metallic Legoland malls, dwarfed by the beginnings of shinier, more metallic ones finely cross-hatched with scaffoldings, Noida’s Sector 18 has the anywhere-and-nowhere feel of a vintage video-game city, oddly fitting for a middle-class consumer paradise. Dr Bhim Rao Ambedkar Park, which began to come up in its midst two years ago, appeared just as out of place as the glass-faced malls rising out of the dusty roads.
Families who lived in the widening exurb, which was beginning to feel like seismic waves of construction radiating out into infinity, watched, horrified, as a densely wooded cluster of parks — Nandan Kanan Park, Nature’s Trail, Children’s Park, Smriti Van and Navgrah Park, spanning 33.43 hectares in total — got torn down and replaced with yet another construction site. Says Nalini Rao, a bank employee who used to frequent the area for walks with her family, “It was such a beautiful park, it’s not like it was a barren bit of land which needed to be developed. I don’t think anybody needed this; it was just a monumental extravagance by someone who has power.”
This power had led to the felling of about 6,000 trees, according to a team of forest officers. The UP government also skipped a necessary environmental impact assessment crucial as the construction was taking place along the Yamuna banks, and 20 feet away from the Okhla Bird Sanctuary. The consequence: what was once a woodland floor became lined with concrete, on which stood Uttar Pradesh Chief Minister Mayawati’s signature motifs: stupa-like domes, elephant-crested pillars, a Dalit pantheon shining proudly in bronze.
A Supreme Court order in October 2009 brought construction to a halt so that the project’s environmental impact could be assessed. Meanwhile, the state government employees conducted the "other work” they were permitted: tearing up the concrete floor, and mostly sitting around from 9 to 5 every day, drinking tea prepared by Class 4 government employees at the bottom of the Uttar Pradesh Rajkiya Nirman Nigam (UPRNN) food chain, and watching as daily wagers from Sarfabad village planted bottle-palm, tamarind, ficus, champa and litchi trees (contested, as they’re not indigenous) in the newly uncovered earth.
Last month, the Supreme Court finally gave the project the nod, and asked the UP government to “consider” 75 per cent green cover on the site. Now, cranes swivel smoothly into action over the hulking dome of the Samta Moolak, where they stood frozen for more than a year. There is the muted ratatat of things being whittled down, such as an edifice with curlicued edges — evidently intended as a memorial plaque — whose ragged edges now bristle with twisted metal bars. Trucks and earth movers trundle in and out, hauling mud and chunks of concrete. Elephant-topped columns line the boundary wall, waiting to be assigned their places around nine bronze statues, draped in purple shrouds, with tell-tale lumps of topis, turbans and pointing fingers. They don’t have long to wait: according to an engineer on site, the work will take about six months to complete.
Architect Gautam Bhatia, who is quick to spot and devise witty classifications for eyesores in New and newer Delhi, is less than enthusiastic about the unveiling. ”It’s dreary stuff; there are no great surprises in store, he says. “It’s just a direct form of deification with no artistic or architectural merit at all; a proclamation in sandstone, which doesn’t go beyond mere visibility.”
But visibility, some would argue, is not negligible for a community that’s been historically shunned and kept out of sight, consigned to insalubrious winds in the east and south of villages. As visual anthropologist Kajri Jain points out in her forthcoming paper on Mayawati’s monuments, The Handbag that Exploded, this approach — which ties in with the popularly held view that Mayawati ought to focus on “real, material” benefits like schools and hospitals for the community she intends to uplift doesn’t take into account the ways in which caste injustice works so inextricably in both symbolic and material registers. Jain prefers to term what others, like Bhatia, might consider “a dreary pastiche of Buddhist, Greek and Indo-Saracenic architectural elements”, a deadly earnest, modern, historicising bid to fulfil BR Ambedkar’s dream of establishing Dalits as a political and religious community, distinct from Hindus.
As for the accusations of mass tree-killing levelled at the complex, Jain says, “It is not for me to adjudicate between trees and people, but don’t you wonder why no one asked such questions, say of Pragati Maidan or Rajghat? The largely (but not entirely) Dalit justification of the Bahujan Samaj Party (BSP)’s monuments and statuary is that they have a legitimate claim to being represented in the same forms that have hitherto been available to others, and to the same extent (think of the real estate value alone of the memorials to Gandhi and the Nehrus in Delhi),” she says in her paper.
Unlike the history that most other parties memorialise into public consciousness, though, this is a violently contested, insecure one. Jain notes that modest cement and plaster busts of Ambedkar are often beheaded, vandalised with garlands of slippers, or defaced with mud and tar. So Mayawati’s unrelenting use of stone and bronze is an index not of aggression but vulnerability.
“The media looks at it from above, from the oppressor’s perspective,” concurs Professor Vivek Kumar, a sociologist who has studied the BSP movement since its inception. “There is a need to look at it from the perspective of the sufferers of society.”
Nithari’s Jatav basti in Noida, home to about 800 people of the Schedule Caste community that Mayawati belongs to, gives you a pretty clear idea of that perspective. Behind a tangle of paint, plywood and sanitary shops catering to Noida and Greater Noida’s construction boom is a lane lined with shops dealing in scrap, waste and fresh meat. Here, Ombatti, who is in the garbage collection business, sits outside the toilet complex which doubles as home for her, her family, and her pet dog Mangi. “We think the park is a great idea,” she says, “and we want to use a part of it as a community centre. Our weddings and engagements currently take place in tents on the road, where we’re always hassled by motorists.” Ashok Kumar, a labourer, says, “This park means a lot to us. It honours our mahapurush, who fought for us.” Chimes in Charan Singh, who has a “self-business” in building supplies, “Behenji is perfect and good. She’s furthering development and building long and good historical memories for us.” Deepak Kumar, who is a young salesperson at a Levi’s store in a Noida mall, says shyly, “I get acchi feelings when I see it.”
The monuments in the Ambedkar Memorial Park are designed so the masses, like Deepak, can have acchi feelings as they behold these sweeping testimonies to Dalit assertion while passing by on buses. The average high-rise resident zipping past in his sedan might have a whole other way of seeing — and barely registering.