Close to five high-rises surround a patch of land that was at the center of violent clashes after a “demolition drive” on May 15. This was once the village of Fatehpur Jharsa, which its inhabitants claim has a history going back more than a 100 years.
There’s no semblance of a rural settlement here today, though. The village that was once home to over 250 families is now all dust and rubble. All you can spot are a few kekar shrubs and road rollers flattening the surface of the roughly 13-acre plot to make way for a road to an apartment complex. A cattle pond is perhaps the last relic of the village that was razed to the ground after a Haryana and Punjab High Court order.
Maya, one of the residents of Fatehpur Jharsa who had moved there after she got married --“sometime before the death of Indira Gandhi” -- walks along the dusty stretch of land with her husband, Kishan Gopal, pointing at the spot that was their house before it was demolished. She says when she first came here, there was nothing but jungles and that she’s seen all the buildings come up before her eyes. “I’d never imagined even in my dreams that Gurgaon would become what it is today.”
Reports in the media described the demolition as another one of those “anti-encroachment” drives to remove “squatters” that are routine in the National Capital Region. Yet, other reports based on the version of Anita Yadav, an administrator with Haryana Urban Development Authority (Huda), gave the sense that this was a slum where jhuggis were rented to Bangladeshi immigrants.
According to Yadav, about 17.22 acres of land, acquired by HUDA in Fatehpur Jharsa, was under "illegal possession of land mafia and 'jhuggis' on this piece of land were rented out to outsiders, majority of whom are Bangladeshis".
For the villagers of Fatehpur Jharsa, nothing could be further from the truth. Most describe themselves as original inhabitants and victims of a nexus between the state and builders. More importantly, they state there were no jhuggis in Fatehpur Jharsa and they all had pukka houses.
Situated in what is known as Sector 47, Fatehpur Jharsa was established when people from the Jharsa village, one of the bigger villages of Gurgaon, came and settled there. It is essentially an offshoot -- called a dhani -- which traditionally comes up around a johar, or a pond.
The former sarpanch of the village for 17 years, Khajaan Singh, who’s now a Congress leader, says the history of the village dates back to 1857. “The village was first destroyed by the British during the Gadar Kranti. It was re-established again when people from the Kashyap community settled there. They come under the Other Backward Castes category in Haryana. This is rightfully their land, and the demolition was an abuse of the Land Acquisition Act,” says Khajaan Singh.
According to Khajaan Singh, Huda first made an attempt to acquire the land in 2003 when it notified the village under Section 4 and Section 6. The villagers had objected back then under Section 5A of the Land Acquisition Bill, 1894. Gurgaon, then, had a Panchayati system and the Panchayat, with Khajaan Singh as the Sarpanch, had asserted that it wanted a release of the land. According to Khajaan Singh, Huda, however, announced an award in 2005, which the villagers again refused except for one person.
By 2008, the Panchayati system was abolished and the Municipal Corporation of Gurgaon (MCG) was formed, which then accepted the award and carried forward the transfer of Fatehpur Jharsa to Huda, claims Khajaan Singh. The MCG had no elected representative from Fatehpur Jharsa. And, though, on paper, the village came to be government land, on the ground, it continued to be populated by villagers who remained hopeful for a release.
Yadav, when contacted for Huda’s version on the way Fatehpur Jharsa was acquired, refused to comment.
Khajaan Singh says there had been no attempt to move the villagers till 2010. In 2011, there was an attempt to demolish the settlement but the government under Bhupinder Singh Hooda did not allow it, though it never released the land either.
Sector 47, meanwhile, was developing fast with builder apartments mushrooming around Fatehpur Jharsa. One of the housing societies that was nearing completion was that of real estate firm Unitech, called Uniworld Garden-II.
The license agreement for Uniworld Garden-II included an access road, which on the map passed through the village. If the road had to be built, then Fatehpur Jharsa had to be demolished. Unitech went to the Haryana and Punjab High Court to get Huda to provide land for the approach road. The court on April 29 directed Huda to do so. Again, there was no representation from the people living in Fatehpur Jharsa in the high court.
The demolition happened early in the morning on Friday (May 15). Villagers say they were given a notice the previous evening and the demolition drive happened in less than 24 hours.
“Everything we owned was destroyed. We weren’t given any time to pick up our belongings and leave. A lot of people in the village drive autos for a living. The police smashed most of our vehicles,” claims one of the villagers. Nand Kishore, another resident of Fatehpur Jharsa who recently retired from the army, claims the police beat up women and elderly people too. Close to 19 people were sent to jail for resisting, which included the local councilor and Aam Aadmi Party member, Nisha Singh.
Nisha Singh, who has been following the case of Fatehpur Jharsa’s residents, got bail after being in the police lock-up for about three days. She breaks down several times while recounting the events of May 15 when the demolishment took place.
“I was there before the Huda officials began the drive and asked them for the permission letter. They refused and once they started the drive, I took cover and began filming the process with my mobile. Within no time, a policewoman approached me and took me to a squad of about 20 women from the Rapid Action Force. Thereon I was beaten and thrashed and thrown into the police van,” says Nisha Singh.
Singh was charged with attempt to murder, Section 307, all for filming with her mobile camera. She says close to nine women were also detained along with her and were in the same barrack as her. “I was able to hire lawyers who convinced the judge that the charges against me were baseless and thus I got bail. But the other women don’t have the means to do so,” says Nisha Singh.
Deputy Commissioner of Gurgaon TL Satyaprakash said, “There were petrol and cylinders thrown and we needed to deploy a hard force. Between December and March, I postponed three or four requests for a demolition drive until April. I told the villagers personally that I will get them EWS [economic weaker section] houses allotted and asked them if they would be willing to negotiate but they said no.” Adding that the biggest internal threat is mob frenzy, he said there is a reasonable way of protesting – “if you come to a demolition drive, there will be a problem. Two of my officers got hurt, obviously I will be enraged”.
On the question of acquisition, he says it did happen but it is Huda that takes the ownership for it and it is their job to do the due diligence.
For now, most villagers are staying on the roads and parks in the vicinity of Fatehpur Jharsa. Inhabitants of Tikri village – a mid-sized village in Gurgaon – have given some of them space on their land to stay for a while. They say they do not want compensation or government flats. They want their land back. Many blame the current BJP government in Haryana stating that its prime concern is builders and industrialists and not the poor.
Khajaan Singh and the residents of Fatehpur Jharsa have, meanwhile, filed a writ petition in the Punjab and Haryana High Court for a stay on the acquisition deeming it illegal. “The High Court has accepted it,” says Khajaan Singh.
The law as always will take its own course. But as often happens in such cases, the voice of the villagers will likely fade in the face of powerful corporate interests. If this can happen in the backdrop of NCR, the prospect of forced land acquisition in other parts of the country can only be imagined. And as for the law, when the powers that be are pushing for more lenient land acquisition measures, it is any wonder that a poor villager of this country feels threatened?
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