By nightfall, the enclave was nowhere to be seen. The
plastic-roofed shanties that are home to more than 200 people — laborers who
have spent the last year fixing up the city's roads for the games — had
disappeared behind the smiling tiger.
While poverty remains one of India's most intractable and
enduring problems, officials have tried to ensure it is not what games visitors
remember. Many of this city's beggars have been arrested or forced from the
streets, migrants have been rousted, and thousands of homes have been hidden
from sight.
New Delhi Chief Minister Sheila Dikshit, the equivalent of
the city's mayor, denied that the banners, hundreds of which have been put up
around the city in the past couple days, had anything to do with disguising
poverty. Even if many were placed in front of slums.
“It's to give the city a festive look,” she told reporters
Monday.
But the message was clear to Chaitran Rahu, one of the migrant
laborers whose home was hidden last week by the 10—foot (3—meter) tall banners,
which are made of thick plastic and mounted on metal and bamboo frames.
“They know that we're laborers and we're dirty and they
don't want anyone to see us from the road,” he said, growing increasingly angry
as he spoke. “We work for the government but they still treat us like garbage,”
he said — using a far stronger word than “garbage.” He makes about $2.75 a day
shoveling tar, working on a road gang for a subcontractor. If that seems like
miserable pay, it puts him well ahead of more than 800 million Indians who,
according to World Bank estimates, survive on less than $2 a day.
The Commonwealth Games is an Olympic style competition held
every four years that brings together nearly 7,000 athletes and officials from
71 countries and territories.
India wanted the games to help showcase its reputation as a
growing economic power — and help it shed its old cliches of poverty and
illiteracy. Instead, its image has been battered by its chaotic last-minute
efforts to get ready for an event it was supposed to begin preparing for in
2003.
Days before the Oct. 3 opening ceremony, organizers were
facing criticism over everything from the filthy state of some rooms in the
athletes' village to questionable construction to security worries and snakes
reportedly found in the athletes' village.
As for poverty, officials seem to want no one to ask at all.
Officials launched a drive against beggars, slum
neighborhoods and the homeless earlier in 2010 that was so aggressive —
demolishing thousands of slum homes and arresting or displacing thousands of
people, rights group say — that the courts finally stepped in to stop them.
“You cannot just take bulldozers anywhere and demolish
anyone's house in the name of the Commonwealth Games,” a New Delhi court said
after city officials tore down a series of homeless shelters and shanty towns. “We
think you want to show the foreigners coming for the Commonwealth Games that
there are no poor people in India.” New Delhi, of course, is not the first city
to try to hide its rougher edges. The Chinese government tore town and rebuilt
large parts of Beijing in the years before the 2008 Olympics, demolishing
entire blocks of housing and forcing thousands of residents to move.
But Indian officials like to point out that they govern the
world's most populous democracy — unlike China, its main regional competitor
for economic power — and that the needs of normal people need to be taken into
account.
But the common man is getting little from these games.
Just ask him.
“The government is just trying to hide its ineptitude,” said
a now homeless man named Ilyas, a civil servant who said he'd moved to New
Delhi a month ago after a bitter family feud and a battle with depression. He
had been living on the streets, near a mosque where free food is regularly
distributed. But now he's hiding in a city park and sleeping in the bushes. “The
police tell us to get off the streets, so we come back here.” P. Sainath, an
Indian journalist who often writes about India's growing economic divide, said
he was not surprised by the government's actions.
“All this captures the elite of India very well,” he said,
referring to the government's proud recitations of its booming economic growth
and increasing consumerist culture. “India is not really about 'Slumdog
Millionaire.' It's about slumdogs versus millionaires, and that's what you're
seeing in Delhi now.” But on Monday, on a New Delhi street corner, some things
continued as they have for years.
New Delhi is believed to have about 60,000 beggars. Many are
handicapped. Nearly all are from India's poor northern states. If begging is
ubiquitous in many parts of the city, it remains officially illegal and the
least lucky beggars are convicted in all-but-forgotten special courts and then
trucked out of town to rundown facilities that are often little better than
prisons.
While most beggars have been chased off the streets in
recent weeks by police — and at least some driven from town — a team of young
girls were working cars stopped at a traffic light near the city center. One
was performing second rate gymnastics while the other held out a bowl for
donations.
The older one, who was about 13 and who identified herself
only as Seema, said they regularly had to dodge the authorities these days.
“The police say the Olympics are coming, and we have to stay
away and come back in one month.”
