In the late 1970s,
when my grandparents were living in a missionary bungalow up in Civil Lines,
when Ambassadors were still the only make of car on the road,
back when you could still smell the smoke from the timber merchants’ fire,
we learned that Sanjay Gandhi had been sentenced to jail, not for all the horrific crimes against the poor he committed during the Emergency that had just ended, but for confiscating and then burning the original prints and negatives of Amrit Nahasa's: Kissa Kursi Ka (Tale of Throne)…
…arguably the most important Indian satire of all time in which Sanjay and his failed schemes were lambasted.
The animations of forced slum clearance to make way for towers has become an enduring nightmare.
In the mid 70s, after Indira Gandhi took control of the government through declaring an Emergency, after her unelected son Sanjay brought on the horrors of a police state, the nation was gripped by moral shock.
How could you call for a media blackout, and the imprisonment of opposition party members without trial?
How could you displace thousands of undesirables to the periphery of the city?
How could you bend to the pressures of western banks and aggressively sterilize 11 million slum-dwelling men and women just so you could get a plot of land?
During the Emergency is when people started going down in droves to the ruins of the Firoz Shah Kotla to implore the resident djinns for help by writing letters to them and tacking them onto the stones.
After the Emergency, home-grown authoritarianism in India left a very bad taste in the public's mouth.
Local politicians stopped using the word slum, and started reframing these areas as ‘informal settlements’ or 'unauthorized constructions.'
In the late 1970s, with bulldozers fully demonized and officials looking the other way, there was an explosion of slum life….
….and that’s when the Puppet Colony became more firmly established - in an era of tolerance following egregious crimes against humanity.