Indian Middle class' Hypocrisy

There are couple of Newspaper editors who do an awesome job everyday. I follow Shekhar Gupta of IE on Saturday and Vir Sanghvi of HT every Sunday. I dont even know the name of the editor of India's largest circulated Newspaper, so you can forget about the editorials. Should be as crappy!

Ok so VS wrote a very though provoking article on the Delhi demolition of illegal structures. It is an awesome read and he touches on the hypocrisy of the middle-class in India. Its a good read I am just copy pasting that part...

You would think that an urban middle class that spent so long complaining about the decline of our cities would vociferously oppose any deviation from the rules and would fight against the offenders to preserve the character of their hometowns.

On the contrary. As long as we can add illegal balconies to our houses, run offices in our basements and let out our garages to small manufacturers, we don’t really give a damn.

The complaints are made in the abstract. The offenders are people we don’t know. As long as we can bend the rules by paying off some official, we are content to hammer one more nail into the coffin of urban India.

There is no better illustration of our selfishness than in our attitude to illegal encroachments by those at the margins of our society: the slum-dwellers.

I am something of a fundamentalist (extremist, even) when it comes to urban planning. Nevertheless, I am deeply saddened by the spectacle of shanties being bulldozed out of existence; of poor people clutching their few pathetic belongings and surveying the wreckage of their homes.

But, as much as all this upsets me, I recognise that the alternative is even worse. We cannot hope to retain any sense of urban planning if people are allowed to construct illegal slum colonies wherever they want. Finally, an encroachment is an encroachment and must be treated as such. It is up to us to be humane in removing the encroachment or in resettling those displaced. But no city in the world can afford to permit the spread of slum encroachment all over its environs.

Most middle class people share my view; they hate slums, they consider them eyesores, they are worried about the security implications (even though they will cheerfully employ domestic help from those very slums) and they treat them as examples of the venality of the political class: the slums survive because they contain voters.

But why is it wrong for poor people to construct illegal structures and perfectly okay for middle class people to do exactly the same thing?

What is the difference between an illegal slum and an illegal sari showroom? Aesthetics, perhaps (though, judging by many sari showrooms these days, I am not even sure of that). But otherwise the arguments are much the same: both are encroachments, both place unacceptable strain on the infrastructure and both destroy any sense of urban planning.

And yet, such is our middle class hypocrisy that the very people who complain about slums and demand that the homes of the poor be destroyed are content to make crores out of shops and offices that are just as illegal and illegitimate.

Logic suggests that if there is any sympathy to be directed at encroachers, it should go to the poor slum-dwellers. Instead, nearly all of it goes to the traders, the shopkeepers, the businessmen and the fat cats. And that’s because they are middle class — like us. The marginalised people whose homes we want destroyed, on the other hand, are almost sub-human and worthy of no consideration at all.

Its quite true and his thoughts ring a bell when you look at it. When we built our house, we made sure that we left so many feet on either side of the house to take care of the corporation norms. There were roads on two sides of my house, which meant that we had to leave an extra feet on those two sides. I am sure a lot of law-abiding citizens do that. And it pains when you see a shop jutting out on the road or a balcony protruding out into the road. And when the Govt authorities come to demolish it, the sympathy is always with the affected. I mean if you knew you were doing something illegal and wrong, you should pay for it.