The question never occurred to me while travelling through tsunami-devastated Tamil Nadu in January. But just two weeks later, in the municipality-devastated northern Bombay suburb of Ambujwadi, it was the entirely natural thing to ask: when did you come here? People living on the rubble of their homes, and the first question I have is: when did you come here?
When it comes to slums in Bombay, but only slums, there’s this peculiar notion of a cut-off date. The government picks such a date, with no more logic or reasoning than throwing darts might need, and sets the date in stone. That stone currently reads 1 January 1995. What it means is simple: If you were in your slum home before that date, you’re legal. If you were not, you’re not. Your legal slum-dwelling status, in the misty world of government slum policy, is this trivially determined.

It is as if the government were to pronounce: anyone born in Bombay after this arbitrary cut-off date lives here illegally. Who would stand for that? Are my two children illegal for being born after 1 January 1995? After all, if we lived in a slum, they would not be able to prove residence before that date, for the simple reason that they did not exist before that date. Yet, in what way is being born different from coming into the city? In what way is a hypothetical pronouncement about a cut-off date for births different from a real pronouncement about a cut-off date for residence?
But of course, you think, this is airy speculation. So consider what is quite real instead: the way the government of Maharashtra is destroying hutments in Bombay, like in Ambujwadi. Several hundred here, 80,000 and counting all over the city as I write this. Close to half a million people – more than there are people in all of Iceland, think of that – suddenly without a home.
In Tamil Nadu, a tsunami damaged 30,000 homes, affecting about 150,000 people. It left thousands dead, yes; but in its other effects, the wave wasn’t close to as efficiently destructive as a city a thousand miles away was. And that efficiency, we are told, owes something to a date.
Of course, the trouble with setting a date in stone is that years go by. The date recedes too far into the past to make sense (if it ever did). The government finds it has not taken it seriously, not made any reasonable attempt to implement it. So the government moves the cut-off date up a few years. That’s how trivially that, too, is determined. In fact, the current Maharashtra government came to office on an explicit election promise to move the date to 1 January 2000. (I breathed more easily. At least my son would be a legal Bombayite).
But in office, they changed their governmental minds. The cut-off date has slid back to 1995, and that’s what has determined the current spate of slum demolitions in Bombay.
The emptiness of this kind of policy-making, the cavalier nature of such an approach to the issue of slums and the thousands of lives in them, the arbitrariness of cut-off dates, and the way all this wilfully ignores the real reasons for slums – these don’t seem to concern too many of us who live outside slums. No, we are satisfied with legality determined by a date. Simple.
In Ambujwadi of course, this kind of legality is a serious concern. Not only that, in Ambujwadi it has a curious resonance. Because most of the people who live here are Pardhis, members of a tribe that was once actually defined as criminal. That is still widely seen that way. Thing is, if you were born a Pardhi, you were a criminal. So to a Pardhi, the notion of a cut-off date must seem entirely in the scheme of things: I’m born, I’m criminal. I live here, I’m illegal. What will they do with me when I die?
So that question, odd or not, is certainly natural: when did you come here? I ask it again and again in Ambujwadi, and as I’ve known Pardhis to do elsewhere, they run off and bring me pieces of paper. Ration cards, letters, election ID cards, copies of appeals, various municipal forms...and when I examine them, I’m left appalled by the injustice and tragedy of what happened here.
Not just one, but the majority of the people I meet have ration cards that list them as residents of this very spot (mentioning “Ambujwadi” in their address), and are dated before 1 January 1995. That is, by the government’s own cut-off date criterion, even given its arbitrariness, these people were legal residents here.
Yet their homes were razed.
And now please excuse me, I have a sudden urge to go check on my kids.

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