Days ahead of polls, displaced slum residents in Delhi found names deleted from electoral rolls

Seeking to dislodge the Aam Aadmi Party government in Delhi, the Bharatiya Janata Party has made a sweeping promise to slum dwellers in the capital: “Jahan jhuggi, wahan makaan” – a house for you where you live.

But as the state goes to the polls on Wednesday, the promise rings hollow for Mohammad Yunus. “Na jhuggi bachhi hai, na vote.” Neither is the slum left now, nor our vote, said the 49-year-old tailor.

In November 2023, civic authorities flattened Yunus’s home and those of nearly 300 others in a slum near Sundar Nursery in South Delhi. About 1,000 people living in the area were rendered homeless. Nearly 2.8 lakh people were evicted from their homes in 2023, according to the Housing and Land Rights network in Delhi.

The demolition near Sundar Nursery was carried out on the directions of the Delhi High Court, which held that the slum did not exist before January 1, 2006 – the cut-off under the Delhi Slum and Jhuggi Jhopri Rehabilitation and Relocation Policy. Slums that existed before the cut-off cannot be removed without rehabilitating the residents.

Yunus, who said his family had lived in the slum since at least 1974, moved to another slum neighbourhood, in Nizamuddin West, about a kilometre away. Although it is part…

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