Encroachment Politics

Delhi

An anti-encroachment drive should ideally be a modest municipal exercise. Instead, the one near Delhi’s Ramlila Maidan has become another case study in how routine governance is repeatedly converted into controversy. Acting on a Delhi High Court order, the Municipal Corporation of Delhi began removing unauthorised structures adjoining the Syed Faiz Elahi mosque and a nearby graveyard at Turkman Gate. Following frenzied speculation that the mosque was about to be demolished, an irate mob which gathered within hours pelted stones with such fury that several police personnel were injured in the melee.

In November, the High Court had directed the MCD and the Public Works Department to clear nearly 39,000 sq ft of encroachments at Ramlila Ground. Notices were issued in December. The civic body demarcated the land, stating that the mosque itself, occupying 0.195 acres, lay outside the proposed action, while adjoining structures did not.

A pattern, evident in the Turkman demolition drive is that the moment a surveyor’s tape or a bulldozer appears anywhere near a mosque, a predictable escalation follows. Recent years have witnessed the hysteria at Sambhal to other pockets of Uttar Pradesh, Madhya Pradesh and Rajasthan, where even preliminary surveys have repeatedly been met with violence.

The Delhi Police’s search for a local YouTuber, Salman, accused of using social media to mobilise residents during the Turkman Gate violence, adds a revealing layer to the episode.

The episode was clearly not just misinformation spreading organically but amplification with sinister intent. The rise of such hyperlocal ‘influencers’ who livestream civic action as communal threat raises an obvious question: who sustains them? How is it that what begins as a municipal notice decreed by the court gets rapidly reframed online as “Muslims under attack” - a narrative that travels effortlessly from fringe channels to mainstream commentary?

Equally telling is the reflex of a section of left-liberal opinion that reads routine civic enforcement through a permanent lens of minority peril. For such people, court orders are stripped of all legal context and recast as ‘cultural aggression.’

Leaders from the Samajwadi Party were quick to describe the Turkman Gate violence as an “action–reaction,” arguing that rumours made such an outcome inevitable. This formulation is revealing as it conveniently shifts responsibility away from those who threw stones and towards an abstract sense of hurt, as though misinformation were a mitigating circumstance. It also reflects a broader political habit of part of certain Opposition parties who have thrived on vote-bank and identity politics which is to treat any administrative action involving minority neighbourhoods, however legal, as inherently provocative.

Agreed that the Turkman Gate still carries memories of the Emergency-era demolitions of the 1970s, when coercive clearances left deep scars. One can contend that that past may explain local anxiety. However, that has no connection with the current episode where the bulldozers had come to raze patently illegal structures nor does it excuse political leaders who trade in insinuation instead of reassurance. In fact, reports showed that the bulldozers exposed more than illegal structures. A number of local street vendors, who spoke out after the Turkman Gate action, revealed how money was extorted at the dargah even from poor and helpless people for marriages and rituals.

Parties such as the Congress and the Samajwadi Party have long positioned themselves as guardians of minority interests. In practice, that guardianship, too often, has taken the form of mobilising fear. By hinting that routine enforcement is a ‘communal’ act, they turn legal disputes into identity conflicts.

What truly corrodes minority interests is not the bulldozer but the politics that treats Muslims as a permanent emergency who are too volatile for normal governance and too aggrieved for civic rules. By validating the stone-pelting as a ‘justified’ reaction, such parties infantilise the very voters they claim to protect, reducing them to a mob to be mobilised rather than citizens to be represented.

Urban India has an encroachment problem that cuts across communities and classes. Addressing it will be contentious. The choice is between managing that contention through law and administration, or inflaming it through rumour and political opportunism. The events at Ramlila Maidan suggest that too many still prefer the latter.