Two ruins have featured prominently in the news recently. The collapse of a student PG in Delhi’s Satya Niketan, and the demolition of a 100-year-old mosque in Saharanpur. In one case, the state failed to enforce building regulations – resulting in seven deaths – and in the other, it invoked building regulations to enact explicit celebratory violence in the form of bulldozer politics against Muslims. The two events initially seem to represent opposite failures. Saharanpur appears as a story of an excessively muscular state, and Satya Niketan, as that of an absent one. However, they are better understood as two expressions of the same kind of urban governance.
Deaths due to neglect of building regulations in Indian cities and violence using building regulations as bulldozer politics have been a feature of India’s urban governance for some years now. People have died because of collapsing flyovers, bridges, fires etc. and thousands of Muslims have been made homeless in bulldozer politics. Arguments around selective reinforcement, hypocrisy, and double standards have been rightfully made in this conversation, but they fail to capture the depth of this issue – they fail to illuminate a more holistic view of the Indian state’s relationship to the built environment today.
