Eviction in the days of development

Anyone who has witnessed Ashura in and around of Mirpur may have noticed a two-storey red and gold taziya. Tucked inside a one-roomed imambara mausoleum on Lane 18 of Mirpur-11, locked behind green warehouse doors, this taziya is one of the stranded Pakistani community's best kept secrets. They raised funds to import the monument from Iran in 2002. Housed in a small chamber within the taziya is a fistful of soil from the battlefield of Karbala, brought from the Iraqi city with the same name. Every Ashura, the community gets out onto the streets, and rallies around it. The intricately carved shrine is an attempt for this disenfranchised community to have a semblance of heritage.

This taziya—and the imambara that carefully shields it from the eyes of the general public for most of the year—may be torn down this week.

"There was a meeting at the ward councillor's office on March 6 where we were instructed to tear down the imambara in the next ten days or face the government's bulldozer," says Saeed Shahid Hossaini, the main custodian of the taziya, "I don't know what to do."

Well, the ward councillor Kazi Jahirul Islam Manik certainly does. "The Biharis missed the deadline, so we will break it down. Probably this week."

The dispute surrounding the imambara can be described in a nutshell: the ward councillor says it was built by encroaching on the road—and the people at the mausoleum disagree.

But that has been the crux of almost all land-related problems of the Bihari community—they say it's their land and someone else, usually a Bangali, says it's not. When the custodian of the taziya had urgently called last week to tell me that the bulldozers are at it again, the knee-jerk reflex on my part was "so what else is new?".

The Mirpur Bihari community was first resettled by the International Commission for Red Cross in 1972, in what was then the outskirts of the city. Each family unit was given a sizeable one-roomed camp house. As children gave birth to grandchildren and the population swelled, the inhabitants started chopping up one room into two, adding vertical space, and probably, claiming inches from the streets.

Back then it wasn't as big of a problem since the locality was suburban and far away. The area has been undergoing gentrification over the past two decades—real estate value went up with time and better connectivity, Mirpur DOHS sprung up in the neighbourhood as an elite enclave, the Kalshi flyover and connecting system of roadways were built, and most recently, the neighbourhood was selected to be a stop in the metro rail's inaugural line. And just to show how seriously this neighbourhood takes urbanisation, there is actually a khaki coloured earth digger memorialised as a sculpture at the ECB Chattar roundabout!

Now all that is standing between the Kalshi flyover and the metro line is the long strip of Bihari camps that stretch all the way from the sector-10 circle to DOHS, their camps and their squatter settlements.

"Did you know that because of that imambara we are not being able to implement a Tk 22 crore project of the government?" says Manik, the ward councillor, "This is impeding development." He uses the word unnoyon, a term that over the last decade and more has come to denote what economists call "big-D" Development—i.e. large scale "Development" that changes landscapes and infrastructures, but often fails at inclusivity.

Currently at least two large unnoyon-themed government projects threaten the community with eviction. One is the project mentioned by Manik, although he understated the figure—the actual worth of the project is closer to Tk 600 crore, according to project documents. The project aims to widen narrow roads and spans the entirety of Dhaka North City Corporation. At least a total of 22 roads going through the Bihari camps of Mirpur have been selected for the project. The idea is that the government will claim up to five or six feet in space on both sides of the roads to widen them. Many homes have had to give up their tiny front-lawns, or store-fronts. But when the government agencies came to claim the same 5-6 feet from the houses in the camps, entire families were threatened with homelessness because most of the houses are so tiny, they are basically just that much in length. The imambara where the taziya is housed is also a one-room structure—although it is a bit longer than the average Bihari home, by a foot or so. 

"A few feet taken away from a large flat won't matter but Bihari homes are barely eight feet in width. How do we spare even an inch from there?" says Shahid Ali Bablu, the general secretary of Urdu Speaking Peoples Youth Rehabilitation Movement (USPYRM).

The other project is a plot distribution scheme undertaken by the National Housing Authority. In 1995, the premier housing governance body sold 642 low-cost residential plots to "middle-class" customers. The project was meant to create affordable home-ownership, but unfortunately, many of these plots are spread out across different Bihari camps. The plot owners filed a writ petition in 2011 and got a green signal to evict the Biharis. The Biharis also filed their own writ petition in 2017 demanding that their homes be saved, and also got a judgment in their favour—putting the entire issue in a stalemate until somebody decides which court order to uphold.

In both cases, the government is adamant that camp boundaries are being respected, calling the homes that are falling in the line of fire "illegal squatter settlements".

But the community begs to differ.

"Camps were demolished to build the Journalists' Residential Area, and the Biharis were relocated elsewhere in Mirpur 11. Camps also had to be demolished to build the road that leads from Kalshi to Mirpur DOHS. These are only two examples, but the community is constantly evicted and rehabilitated so nobody knows the exact boundaries of these camps," says Bablu. This was also a point raised by the court when the Bihari community filed a writ petition against the road-widening project—he court said that the government must survey the borders of the camps and figure out exactly where they lie, because honestly, nobody knows.

As the phone call from Shahid, the taziya's custodian, shows, the eviction threat is not a silent elephant in the room. It is very much an active threat that rears its head whenever it finds opportunity. 

"The bulldozers come every now and then and we have to show the court order to the magistrate each time. The last one was in February 20, 2019," he says.

He describes how it happed then. "We woke up around 8 am to find the vegetable carts being scuttled away. When we asked why they were moving, they said that it had been announced in the mosque after fazr prayers that the imambara will be destroyed because it is against the religion," says Shahid. Shahid is a practising Shi'a, and hence was not party to the dawn prayers being held at the mosque which predominantly caters to Sunni worshippers. Like clockwork, a bulldozer arrived, along with people from the utility departments who were going to sever the gas and electricity connections.

"I had to convince them that there is an outstanding court order asking the government to verify the camp boundaries before going on eviction drives. The magistrate was convinced—but the pressure from the ward commissioner is immense," claims Shahid.

And the pressure—Shahid believes—is fuelled by prejudice against the community. "A day before the meeting at the ward commissioner's officer, he came to the imambara with nearly 250 men to persuade me to break down the shrine. He said we were practicing idolatry, which is forbidden in Islam. He also said that if this was a mosque or a madrasa, he would pay for the compensation, but he can't do the same for the imambara because it would land him in hell," claims Shahid. Three other people who are devotees of the shrine also alleges the same.

The ward commissioner Manik denied, however, denied that such an exchange happened. "It is not about religion, this was built squatting on the road, so it must be broken."

Squatters, illegal, inconvenient—that's how the stranded Pakistani community is generally perceived. But perhaps it is time to question how much of this perception is based in the truth, and how much of it stems from our society refusing to include this community in the overall development of Mirpur. Are they being evicted because the roads need to be widened, or because they are a low-income population with limited purchasing power who cannot fully partake in, or contribute to rapid gentrification going on in Mirpur? Who stands to gain if the community can be thinned out, and their homes redistributed as plots to build multi-storey buildings? Does their relevance to the society end only in their capacity to weave wedding saris and maintain the Benarasi Palli—what about their right to inhabit the area? We like the idea of hosting refugees, but we sure don't know how to integrate them into the society in the long run.