maraa

Bangalore, often heralded as the Garden City, and recently as the IT city, has been in the news for all the wrong reasons. One of which has been the brutal punching of its women for wearing jeans, and now, for mowing down whatever’s left of its ‘gardens’. Of course, when something is destroyed, something must come in its place, and what we are now being faced with is a unique Indianized version of a Shanghai-Singapore like city.

First, lets get the facts. The State, under the BJP party, calls the shots on infrastructural growth in the city. All decisions rest with the CM, after ‘consent’ from the folks at Vidhana Soudha (the state parliament) . The implementing agency for this is the Bangalore Metro Rail Corporation Limited (BMRCL), who asks no questions, but is doing the job on hand. Then there are about give or take, 1000 people who don’t think it’s a good idea to cut trees for trains.  These people are orgnanized under the loose umbrella of a people’s collective, calling themselves Hasiru Usiru (loosely translated as Greenery-Life/Breath).

The whole controversy started (starting points are always contestable!) when the thriving Chinmaya Mission Hospital (CMH) Road, in Indiranagar came under the Metro treatment. All trees were chopped down, and construction started without much fuss. Immediately, the CMH Road Trader’s Association filed a case in court asking for the construction to be stopped. The case goes on, while the construction at CMH Road continues at full swing.  Subsequently, civil society for the first time, saw the Metro physically. Until now, it had only been romantic imaginations of a sky train, sweeping away all of our miserable traffic issues. A few historic roads later (like Avenue Road) being threatened, the issue has really taken off, when the BMRCL demolished about 500 feet of the West Gate of Lalbagh, one of the oldest green parks in Bangalore, and by doing so, declared that a Metro station will come inside Lalbagh. The suddenness of this move, really glavanized the protestors, and since then, tensions have only mounted.

Continuing the story since then, the BMRCL has succeeded in cutting most of the eucalyptus trees on the West Gate of Lalbagh, and work is going ahead at full speed. Hasiru Usiru has publicly said that there is a Stay Order by the Court and all construction on Lalbagh is illegal. This has had no effect, and ironically, the State has provided police protection to the tree cutting at Lalbagh, driving away the protestors! Further, the BMRCL having now conquered Lalbagh, has now shifted focus to the beautiful Nanda Talkies Road, and Lakshman Rao Park. A Right To Information application was filed by Hasiru Usiru, and it was learnt that about 323 trees will be cut on Nanda Talkies Road, when the BMRCL said only tree pruning was planned. Again, this has led to massive and regular protests by Hasiru Usiru with much needed support from local residents.

Finally, all these protests, and sufficient media coverage culminated in BMRCL recognizing the ‘nuisance’ posed by the protests. Mr. Shivsailam, chief of BMRCL, Jayanagar MLA, Mr. Vijayakumar, and Prof BK Chandrashekhar were kind enough to grant the audience an hour of interaction on the 32nd cross at Nanda Talkies Road, Jayanagar. Mr. Shivsailam, said many things, but mainly, said that BMRCL was only an implementing agency, not a decision making agency. He advised the group to take their issues up with the State and not with BMRCL. Mr. Vijaykumar, in a candid interview with TV9, said that the protestors had no attachment with the trees, since they were all ‘outsiders’ and ‘Tamilians’ who had come from Austin Town and Cox Town, and were not from Jayanagar, so he thought the entire exercise was irrelevant. Prof B K Chandrashekhar said that protest was not an ‘appropriate’ means of dissent, and objections must be given in writing, and democracy will take its due course.

At present, members of Hasiru Usiru, along with Environment Support Group are regrouping and reformulating strategies desperately in order to save the trees. The current debates have centered around alternative alignments for the Metro, possibilities of it going underground (to which Shivsailam has said it will mean more trees being cut), or not having the Metro at all, or having better bus systems in place to beat traffic woes. All of this has not met with mass consent. The net result is that only a handful or civil society organizations, Maraa included, have supported the campaign, and local residents, and common public’s imagination has not really been captured.

This campaign has been heavy on facts (technicalities of Metro, number of trees, review of other models in the world) etc but low on true mass participation. If the trees are to be saved, all future calculations must take into account the fact that democracy has to be deepened if the battle is to be fought well. Facts can be thrown back and forth, and yet the “truth” will always remain relative, subjective. What is needed is a mass mobilization of public opinion, and forcing the State to recognize the legitimacy of public opinion. Otherwise, it will go down the annals of history, as yet another campaign, yet another exercise in futility.

Zooming out a bit, so to speak, it is unwise to see this campaign as merely being about the trees or about Lalbagh/Nanda Road/Lakshman Rao Park. This battle is one which is directly about what I will call the “new nationalist” project, wherein successive governments, irrespective of ideology or manifestos, will passionately and righteously believe in their notions of progress, technology and rationalist development. Each government tries to imagine and indulge in every changing notions of nation building, consistent with ever changing mantras of development and progress.  These notions will continously be in opposition and conflict with other imaginations of peoples like hawkers, slum dwellers, residents and senior citizens etc. The resulting victorius notions will define and shape all future imaginations of the city, directly implicating physical realities be it choice and mode of insfrastructural growth, or privatization of water, or attacks against women.

Ultimately, it is up to us, inhabitants of the city, to quickly legitimize ourselves, talk to our “neighbours”, express our opinions, make ourselves heard, both internally and to the State. We must have imaginations of Bengaluru that are strong enough to withstand the onslaught of the new “development” process or we must be resigned to forever accept the status of  the unfortunate wayside victim, a sad unnoticed and unwritten footnote of urban history.