Opinion Mrinal Pande writes | Delhi remade for G20 is for citizens as spectators, not participants

Thus do eras change. One suddenly understood the truth behind Kunwar Narayan’s lines on the mediaeval poet Kabir living in self exile in Maghar during his final years: Aajkal Maghar mein rehte hain Kabirdas/… Yada kada dikh jate fakiron ke bhes mein/… Sah nahin sake jab/ jag ki ulat bansi/chhod diya Kasi/ Aajkal kam hi lautate hain ve/ apne madhyakaal mein/ Rehte hain Trikaal mein. (Kabir lives in Maghar now, no longer able to stand every familiar spot being turned upside down. He rarely visits his time or his Kashi now/ living instead, in a hazy mix of the past, present and future.)
Kabir lived through great regime changes similar to ours. But the media covering the current undoing and redoing of Delhi’s landscape routinely describe these changes as “creative” and inspired by a visionary leadership. But “create” is not the right word anymore. To create is to take a seed, plant it and help it sprout and grow. The New Delhi we have watched come up — with its strobe lights, potted plants, flyovers and public toilets displaying faux folk art — is all about control. The shared labour and love that enables people to experience ownership in a democracy has been scarce on the ground.

Millions watched these images of a “work in progress”, on their TV screens or while commuting. They saw reflected in them not the India — sorry, Bharat — that they grew up loving as a democracy with free speech, but the greatest ambition of a visionary leadership which seeks to surpass England, France, Germany, Italy and, finally, China, to make Bharat the number two power in the world.

All we writers can do is inhabit, like Kabir, a vast space where times past and times present meet times future. Writers today are misfits in the field of communication dominated by the media. Young reporters breathlessly reported on the summit. They were not privy to the baat-cheet, but were asked to hand in reports so the anchors and party representatives and specialists could pontificate and fight. It is not entirely the media’s fault. Without proper press conferences after bilaterals or multilaterals they had no chance to ask questions and live-stream answers. They gave long reports on the millet-based vegetarian meals everyone ate so happily. Most of India is non-vegetarian, and as for millets, they are still considered poor man’s food. Given a choice, most of the poor would opt for refined flour, white rice, momos, bun maska and pav.

But a certain amount of delusion was perhaps necessary to bend time and truth for presenting the New Bharat and its capital as a symbol of a once-colonised Bharat that has acquired its own persona and reinvented healthy repasts.

Watching all this drove home the real meaning of the grand electoral triumph for the BJP-led NDA in 2019. It has by now resulted in the expropriation of vast swathes of public land around the erstwhile Rajpath. For years, Delhi’s citizens have come here with their families to take in the lovely sights. Putting up ministerial buildings filled with meek and obedient babus over much of that means a marked shrinking of the space where ice cream, balloons, peanuts, candy floss, cheap sunglasses, hand-made bamboo flutes and fragrant floral garlands have been sold for years.

What do the inhabitants of Delhi say about this? Nothing. Life goes on. In the morning, those lucky to have government jobs hurry on; children go to school by bus or riding pillion with weary, stubble-faced fathers, women sigh and try to conserve gas, water, vegetables, rice and flour. There is still a certain friendliness in the streets once you leave Lutyens Delhi behind. In back alleys, live embers still glow where a thin woman sits roasting corn and rubbing salt and lemon over it before handing it to customers. Small boys washing pots in a dhaba playfully hit each other with rags, while the owner roasts kebabs, his eyes staring into the tandoor. It is a gaze as if beyond place and time, the Trikaal of Kabir where one sits and thinks — or doesn’t.

The writer is a freelance journalist and former chairperson, Prasar Bharati