Over the past month, Gurgaon, the boomtown with the skyline of Shanghai and the infrastructure of rural India, has been at the receiving end of some unfamiliar attention from the civic authorities. Roads are being repaired, signage put up, saplings planted and encroachments removed.
If any of Gurgaon’s denizens think this is the result of a sudden revelation by the state bureaucracy to finally equip the city with a modicum of decent civic facilities they should be rapidly disabused of the notion. All this frenetic activity is part of the effort to ready the city to host to a major conference. This is the meeting of the Indian Ocean Rim – Association for Regional Cooperation, which goes by the initials IOR-ARC., from October 29 to November 2.
IOR-ARC’s agenda includes, among other things, facilitating trade, attracting foreign investment and so on. The four-day conference, news reports say, will be attended by 100 delegates from 19 member-countries as diverse as Singapore, the leader in the World Bank’s latest Doing Business report, to Iran, Kenya, Madagascar and South Africa. Chief Minister Bhupinder Singh Hooda will leave his Chandigarh fastness to address this conference.
This is the same bucolic politician who, when confronted with the mess that is Gurgaon, had recently declared that rural Haryana was his priority. Understandable, since Gurgaon’s floating population of professionals and migrant workers are unlikely to give him the kind of votes that he can rely on to stay in power. Like his predecessors, he ignores the fact that Gurgaon provides the state with the bulk of its tax revenue.
Still, it is difficult not to see in this frenetic activity to pretty up Gurgaon parallels in the fabled Potemkin Villages in the Russian empire or the showcase factories and towns that Stalin cobbled together to dupe intellectuals like George Bernard Shaw and H G Wells into writing breathlessly admiring reports about the Soviet Union.
So delegates to the IOR-ARC will, no doubt, be shown the wonders of the city’s glass and concrete skyline – in the development of which the political dispensation has played no role – but not the proliferation of Dickensian slums. Nor, as they partake of the luxuries of Gurgaon’s many luxury hotels, are they likely to experience the power, water, drainage and waste disposal problems that have attracted global comment.
Since none of the Gurgaon civic authorities is addressing the real, long-term problems of the city, this current beautification drive need not be taken seriously. Those parts of the city that are unlikely to come under foreign scrutiny continue to wallow in their backwardness.
The comedy of Gurgaon’s 21st century Potempkinisation is that reality has an inconvenient habit of popping up, as it does every so often in India. Take the case of what most Gurgaonites call “Jungle Rasta”, a four-lane road that was cut through the red laterite rock to provide the city’s commuter with a connector to neighbouring Delhi.
Till about two weeks ago, Jungle Rasta lived up to its name – a bumpy four-lane track bounded on either side by scrub and rock. Driving down it was not unpleasant, since the wilderness is soothing, the road wide enough to keep traffic moving smoothly. Hawkers selling green coconuts and cigarettes and paan bahaar provided convenient pit stops.
Then Jungle Rasta was suddenly widened and re-tarred, not once but twice. Lane markers were painted on its surface, hawkers unceremoniously swept away and the road even acquired a signpost with the name of some forgotten dignitary.
This being India, things couldn’t stay that way too long. So, within days of the facelift, a new problem emerged. All the retarring and relaying had affected the electric cables connecting the traffic lights. Since Jungle Rasta is a major crossing for traffic from Faridabad and Delhi, it is critical for the traffic signal to work. Without it, commuters are dependent on the services of a single, strikingly inept cop, so Jungle Rasta has also seen spectacular traffic jams over past two weeks.
The traffic lights were fixed, eventually -- but the moment the civic authorities departed with their cranes and cement mixers, the hawkers returned. No doubt, they will disappear again for the duration of the conference but it’s a fair bet they’ll be back after four days. And in six months, Gurgaon will return to its customary state of Snafu, the old-fashioned military term that stands for Situation Normal, All F****d Up.
