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8/24/2022 When government won’t provide housing, India’s Communists organize people to build it themselves By: Vijay PrashadRead Now Sagar, the CPI(M) secretary of Ragasaipeta and a leader of the Jakkaloddi Struggle Committee, addresses members at a general body meeting of the Jakkaloddi campaign on June 18, 2022. | Jagadish Kumar / CPI(M) It all started with a survey. In April 2022, members of the Communist Party of India (Marxist), or CPI(M), went door to door in the town of Warangal in Telangana state. The party was already aware of challenges in the community but wanted to collect data before working on a plan of action. Thirty-five teams of three to four CPI(M) members and supporters went to 45,000 homes and learned how people were suffering from a range of issues, such as the lack of pensions and subsidized food. Many expressed anxieties around the absence of permanent housing, with a third saying that they were not homeowners and could not pay their rents. The government had promised to build two-bedroom apartments for the poor, but these promises evaporated. With inflation eating into their meager incomes and serious unemployment due to the collapse of the local bidi (cigarette) industry, desperation marked the people the communists met. Many in the community expressed their willingness to fight for better living conditions, especially for more huts (gudisela poratam) to be built. In the words of one of the residents, “Whatever the consequences, even if we are beaten or killed, we will join this struggle.”
On May 25, 2022, 8,000 people marched to the Warangal Municipal Corporation and handed in 10,000 state housing applications. When they moved to occupy the vacant land, the police told them to stay away and prevented them from entering. Despite this, the Jakkaloddi Struggle Committee, made up of those who had occupied the land, managed to organize the construction of 3,000 huts on the land. At 3 a.m. on June 20, the police arrived, set many of the huts alight while people slept, and beat the occupants as they emerged from their temporary homes. Over 400 people were arrested. The next day, local officials placed a sign outside the area: “This site is for the construction of a court complex.” Neither this sign nor the brutality of the police could stop the people, who returned and continued to camp there for 60 days, G. Nagaiah, a state secretariat member of the CPI(M), told P. Ambedkar of Tricontinental Research Services (India). On June 26, they began to build 2,000 new huts. The police tried to stop them with more acts of violence, but the people fought back and forced them to retreat. Now, there are 4,600 huts in total. The CPI(M)-led action was prompted by the state government’s failure to alleviate desperate land hunger in the region. The most recent government data shows that, between 2012 and 2017, there was a shortage of 18.8 million houses in urban India alone. Even this figure is inaccurate because it counts low-quality houses in highly congested city neighborhoods as adequate housing.
The AHI looked at data from 64 of the poorer nations and found a housing deficit of 268 million units across these countries, which impacts 1.26 billion people. Furthermore, a quarter of the housing stock in the poorer nations is plainly inadequate. With billions of people around the world unhoused or living in poor quality housing, and with no real plan to address this problem, it is unlikely that any poorer nation will meet the eleventh Sustainable Development Goal to “make cities and human settlements inclusive, safe, resilient, and sustainable.” Land struggles in places such as Jakkaloddi resemble those led by Abahlali baseMjondolo, South Africa’s shack dweller movement, and Brazil’s Landless Workers’ Movement (MST). The crackdown and eviction of poor people from land occupations has become a regular occurrence across the globe. Similar attacks have been replicated in Guernica, Argentina, where 1,900 families were evicted on Oct. 29, 2020, and in Otodo-Gbame, Nigeria, where over 30,000 people were evicted between November 2016 and April 2017. Such struggles are led by people who want to establish the material basis of living with dignity. In a recent dossier, South African researcher Yvonne Phyllis uses a isiXhosa saying to refer to the land: umhlaba wookhokho bethu, “the land of our ancestors.” This phrase, so common in most cultures, demands that land be seen as a shared inheritance, not as the property of one person. This expression also invokes, as Phyllis describes it, a recognition of the “unresolved question of injustice” inherited from “process[es] of colonial dispossession and deception that advanced the development of capitalism.” These struggles throughout the Global South mirror those in Warangal, where the CPI(M) is leading thousands of people in the fight for housing, successfully securing a total of 50,000 homes in 2008 and continuing to the fight for adequate housing to this day.
This—along with the growing confidence of people occupying vacant land and building their own homes—illustrates a new mood in the global movement for the right to housing. There is an increased understanding that housing must not be a financial asset used by the billionaire class for speculation or to shield their wealth from taxation. This sensibility is clear among organizations that fight for the right to housing such as Despejo Zero (Brazil) and Ndifuna Ukwazi (South Africa), among mass movements such as the MST and Abahlali, and among political parties such as the CPI(M) that organize people to transcend the housing crisis by occupying land. These land occupations are filled with tension and joy, the perils of being beaten by the police alongside the promise of collective life. Part of this collective life is represented in songs, often written in groups and released anonymously. We end with one such song by a state committee member of the people’s cultural group Praja Natya Madali, who goes by the pseudonym Sphoorti (meaning Inspiration) from a small book called Sphoorti Patalu (Inspiration Songs):
AuthorVijay Prashad is an Indian historian, editor, and journalist. He is the chief editor of LeftWord Books and the director of Tricontinental: Institute for Social Research. He is a senior non-resident fellow at Chongyang Institute for Financial Studies, Renmin University of China. He has written more than 20 books, including "The Darker Nations" and "The Poorer Nations." His latest book is "Washington Bullets," with an introduction by Evo Morales Ayma. This article was republished from People's World. Archives August 2022
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