All sound and fury: The Campa Cola row is a farce

So, after hours of carefully constructed melodrama outside their gates, the residents of Mumbai’s Campa Cola buildings have ended their havan and retreated into their homes. The day’s proceedings played out precisely as expected. The BMC, pulled up previously for trying to enter the building by force, enacted its little farce of sending officials to negotiate with the residents who had already approached the police commissioner on Thursday to request permission for a peaceful non-cooperation.

The residents stood their ground, young women presenting palms joined in plea and prayer to the cameras. Two well-known Bharatiya Janata Party leaders, Malabar Hill MLA Mangal Prabhat Lodha and Shaina NC, negotiated on their behalf with a deputy municipal commissioner and his team. Dozens of policemen stood around, the bandobast detail, media scrum and residents far outnumbering the BMC team sent to act out its part.

Nobody expected the BMC to even enter the gates to the buildings that have between them 96 unauthorised flats, leave alone actually disconnect utilities. Why not?

Seven months after the Supreme Court ordered the demolition of the unauthorised flats in the buildings, the Campa Cola issue is paradoxically a hot potato as well as a politician-magnet.

The BMC would prefer to stay as far away from the building as possible. Officials know the residents are organised and determined and the last time they tried to enter despite that kind of resistance from women, senior citizens and youngsters pleading for their homes to be spared, the Supreme Court stepped in to rap their knuckles for high-handedness. What followed was a sudden extension of deadline by six months, purely on “humanitarian grounds”.

It’s little wonder then that all the BMC wanted to do today was ensure they get clear videography of their peaceful entreaties to the residents to let them do their job as mandated by the Supreme Court. Using the protest as evidence while slapping cases of contempt of court and of obstructing civic officials makes much more sense than engaging in a free for all in which those trying to execute a Supreme Court order come away looking bad.

The Congress’s chief minister would also like to stay as far away from the Campa Cola mess as possible. The already beleaguered Prithviraj Chavan has said the government’s role here is minimal and that political interference in the “strict and specific orders” would be improper. In fact, the Supreme Court order of 2013 expressly forbids the state government from interfering in any way.

That leaves the BJP, which incidentally runs the BMC along with the Shiv Sena, but earned some brownie points anyway by being the first and most committed politicians on site today. By the end of the day, of course, some NCP leaders had joined the fray too. Former MP of South Mumbai Milind Deora, who appeared to be staging a dharna against his own government last year, stayed away today.

But despite the Campa Cola residents’ literal worship of Narendra Modi – they were photographed performing an aarti in front of a photograph of the then prime ministerial candidate a few months back – the NDA government is wary too. After weeks of the residents trying to reach out to senior NDA leaders, Urban Development minister Venkaiah Naidu said on Friday that there was little they could do “at this stage” apart from buy the residents some more time.

But time is not what the residents want. Not any longer, at least. Seven months after they undertook to voluntarily vacate their homes at the end of the six-month extension of deadline on humanitarian grounds, the residents have put forward a phalanx of “conditions” if they are to vacate. These conditions are a blend of the half-baked arguments in favour of regularising the buildings and the utterly blind falsehoods and generalisations about Mumbai’s famed illegal constructions and slum structures.

1. Demolish “all illegal structures” along with these 96 flats, the residents have dared the government. And never, ever pass an ordinance regularising any illegality in construction. This is facetious and misleading as we would no doubt rush to insist if every petty thief and fraudster demanded action on the rest of their ilk first.

Let’s turn it around on its head a bit: If the BJP government at the Centre moves towards regularising this illegality, wouldn’t it be declaring its willingness to play ball with every single slumlord and unscrupulous builder in the country?

Why single us out, the Campa Cola residents have asked. The victimhood is understandable, but not justified. The impending demolition comes at the end of a very long litigation that ended with the residents exhausting all available legal options and the Supreme Court not only ordering the demolition but also declaring that this is a fit case for denying regularisation of any kind, as their lawyers ranging from Abhishek Manu Singhvi to Mukul Rohatgi will tell them.

2. Slum-dwellers are squatters who know they are breaking the law, is the argument against comparing Campa Cola with the financial capital’s teeming shanty-towns. Here’s what the SC order says about that : “The fact remains that the construction was made in the teeth of the notices and the directions to stop the unauthorized construction.” Those who had invested money in the under construction flats, at rates lower than market rates in the area at the time, were aware of the stop work notices. Impudence, assumptions that people like us usually manage to get these things regularised and a general expectation that some ‘connections’ will come good for them are at the root of Campa Cola’s current troubles.

“It is time that the message goes aboard that those who defy the law would not be permitted to reap the benefit of their defiance of law,” the SC order says. That defiance of the law, then as well as today, is what actually marks out the SoBo protestors from the slumdwellers – officials and policemen would have no compunctions about throwing slumdwellers into jail for obstructing government bulldozers outside their homes. Stop work notices were issued as far back as November 1984. Besides, the absent water supply and occupation certificates would have been a persistent alarm bell – the housing societies had to file writ petitions demanding water supply from the Brihanmumbai Municipal Corporation, as Firstpost has reported earlier .

3. It’s their lifetime’s savings. Go after the conniving municipal officials and unscrupulous builders instead, the residents have demanded. Indeed, this is true also. Unfortunately, one wrong does not cancel out another. The SC order has in fact said the flat-owners can well avail remedy against the developers and builders. The state governments should levy heavy penalties on other such builders too, the SC verdict says. Certainly, municipal bodies and state governments should protect citizens from unscrupulous builders across the range of construction activities, from the FSI violations of multi-storey towers to slumlords extracting every last penny slumdwellers have for a few square feet of marshy land.

It’s not very difficult to stick one’s neck out to predict that not a brick will be removed from the 96 illegal flats until Maharashtra goes to polls. The ruling alliance’s MLAs have shown up to display their sympathy. They didn’t have much of a choice really, it was that or suffering bad publicity and ceding support of large sections of upper middle class housing societies in the coming Assembly elections.

The BMC, run by the Sena and BJP whose leaders have also declared their support for the residents’ agitation, will probbalyy re-approach the apex court and declare its inability to conduct a demolition peacefully. It’s a win-win for all political parties involved, and the residents can take satisfaction that they will be able to buy some more time, something nobody grudges them.

If there is one thing that has lost, it is the rule of law.