On Tuesday, as bulldozers entered the Chandola Lake area, scrap dealer Sangram Amtabhai Devipujak and his family loaded their belongings onto handcarts and moved them to his shop on the main road. By Wednesday, that shop was also demolished.
“They gave us a four-hour notice to vacate our shops but razed them within two hours with most of our luggage still inside,” said the 65-year-old whose shop was 50 metres from a police chowki and right opposite the Siddheshwar Mahadev Temple in Isanpur.
As the demolition drive in the area entered Day 2, like Devipujak, many who had made Chandola lake their homes over the years – a number of them claim to have been living here for generations – rued the loss of both home and source of livelihood.
As many as 50 families are engaged in scrap business along the shoreline of the smaller Chandola Lake.
Their trouble began at 3am on April 26 when Ahmedabad City police came knocking at this slum in Dani Limda area of Ahmedabad, taking away 890 of the inhabitants on the suspicion of being “Bangladeshi intruders”. A majority of them were let off after it was verified that they were Indians. But late on Monday night, bulldozers began assembling outside the area, signalling that there was more to come.
At 4am on Tuesday, the demolitions started. The residents moved the Gujarat High Court for an urgent hearing but got no respite.
“We have lived here for more than three generations with my husband’s grandfather and father having grown crops on this lake bed,” said Gauri Ramesh Dantani, a mother of five children, pointing at a small island in the middle of one of the lakes – there are three of them – behind her now-demolished shop. “There used to be a well here which my ancestors used while farming on the lake bed in the 1990s,” she added.
After the demolition action on the Danilimda side of Chandola Lake on Tuesday, the bulldozers reached Isanpur section on Wednesday. In a statement on Wednesday evening, the Ahmedabad Municipal Corporation (AMC) said, “There has been encroachment at Chandola Lake for the last several years. On the basis of a police report stating that illegal activities are carried out here, the AMC provided manpower and machinery, clearing approximately 4,000 structures including 1,000 pucca structures and 3,000 kutcha structures, clearing 1.5 lakh square metres of land in two days.”
Later in the day, as the convoy of Minister of State for Home, Harsh Sanghavi, passed by the demolished structures, the inhabitants lined up the road and raised slogans.
The scrap dealers accused officials engaged in the demolitions of having acted in bad faith. Sangeeta Devipujak, whose mother-in-law reached Ahmedabad on Wednesday from Mehsana district, in time to see her shop being torn down, said, “They didn’t even give us enough time to pick up our belongings and load them on to vehicles before sending the bulldozers. Around 10 am, officials said the demolition of our shops would take place at 2 pm. That gave us some time before eviction. Instead, they came by 12 pm and began destroying everything with our stuff still inside.”
While those who have lost their homes and shops scrambled to salvage whatever they could, anxiety was palpable among others who seem to have been spared, for now.
Dinesh Aud, a casual labourer, was at work at a site in Jamalpur when he received a call from his wife Rekha, informing that the electric metres of their house had “vanished”.
Notably, there has been an outage on Monday but power had returned to the area on Tuesday evening. Within 12 hours, their electricity was cut off. Speaking to The Indian Express, Rekha said, “I was inside the house, cooking food, when the fan suddenly stopped working. I stepped out to check whether this was another power outage and my neighbour pointed to my electric box: the metre inside was gone!”
Rekha’s son Hitesh had recently appeared in Class 10 board exams and is awaiting results. Sweltering in the April heat, the family packed their belongings in a steel cupboard, a couple of bags and some containers, anticipating eviction but unsure of whether it was coming or not.
Several residents showed their power bills to prove that they were paying customers. They said they were not sure whether their homes were to be demolished or not. Till Wednesday evening, they had no answers to their apprehensions.
“We are neither Pakistanis, nor Bangladeshis. We support the government in removing illegal immigrants and, in fact, had cooperated during the partial demolitions that had taken place in 2010. But this time, there has been no notice, just harassment,” said one resident, voicing the sentiments of several others.
‘Deportation proceedings underway’
Meanwhile, on the status of illegal immigrants, DCP Ajit Rajian of the Crime Branch said, “We have confirmed 200 persons as illegal immigrants from Bangladesh and sent them to the Joint Interrogation Centre (JIC) while deportation proceedings are underway.”
About the rest of the 890 people originally detained from Chandola talav na chhapra and paraded to the Crime Branch headquarters on Saturday, DCP Rajian said that they had all been allowed to leave. However, adding a caveat, he said, “We have let them go for now but we are calling them in for questioning as and when required because there are mismatches between documents of domicile and other facts. We are also investigating the possibility of forged documents in the cases of several people.”