Quarantine Notebook

JUST AS A person’s courage is determined when under fire, just as one’s worth is judged by how one treats one’s subordinates; we can tell a peoples’ character by how they react to a crisis. To overcome lockdown anxieties, the young and old in Rome started belting out arias from their balconies; in Denver, neighbours with self-deprecating humour howled in unison at the moon; in Kolkata, cops serenaded residents with syrupy songs, and in Delhi, people harassed doctors, nurses and medical students for fear they were carrying the coronavirus.

Delhi does not feature alone in this gallery of shame, there is Bengaluru, Hyderabad, Malegaon, Nashik, Indore, and perhaps, a few more. These cities may be far apart but they share a few features in common and Delhi brings those out most clearly, because we don’t expect it to be clubbed with them. For one, none of these urban centres, Delhi included, have a deep generational depth. This is signalled by two upfront features. The first is that the populations in these cities have soared in recent decades and, second, the young here vastly outnumber the old. In short, we are talking of a mobile, restless agglomeration that has been ‘pulled up’ and not quite ‘brought up’ to big city status.

Consequently, though many of these cities qualify to be considered as urban, they are not actually ‘urbane’. They are officially urban because they satisfy Census standards, but their hearts have not evolved and they hesitate to pay the bill. Cities are where citizens live, not just people, and true urban living has civilisational content that sheer numbers do not bring to the table. Come to think of it, both the words ‘urban’ and ‘city’ are derived from the same linguistic root as are ‘urbane’ and ‘citizen’, respectively. Like all precious things of life, an urban centre brews slowly, evolves graciously and then, over a period of time, becomes a city worthy of citizens.

If Mumbai and Kolkata have not shown equal enthusiasm in assaulting frontline coronavirus health workers, then perhaps Delhi needs to explain itself. In this process, Delhi will have to admit that it is a big city but it still thinks small. It may plead extenuating circumstances because it is a relative newcomer in metro circles. Kolkata, Mumbai and Chennai are of older vintage for they functioned as Presidency centres well before Delhi was anointed capital by the British in 1911. Sure, that gave them a head start, but that is not all. After Partition, Delhi’s population grew phenomenally. Refugees from Pakistan swamped the city, but they remained nostalgic about Lahore and Lyallpur, with little love for their current neighbourhoods. Even those who were born soon after Partition in India, saw themselves as refugees whose real home was Lahore or Lyallpur. This was the reason that spawned night-long jagrans in Delhi, a practice that was hitherto unknown. It may have been driven by devotion, but its unstated urge was the need refugees felt for bonding with others in an alien land.

Be that as it may, Delhi falls behind in becoming a true metro for a number of reasons. Top on the list is the unstable population of this city. There are many more rootless migrants who come to Delhi than to any other traditional metro, like Kolkata, Chennai, even Mumbai. In fact, the last Census showed that both Kolkata and Mumbai recorded a fall in numbers, but not Delhi. True, Delhi did record a fall in the rate of growth, but not in terms of total numbers. Predictably, Delhi’s age structure too differs from other metros because of the greater proportion of young people in its population. Older cities like Kolkata and Chennai have over 50 per cent of its residents above the age of 30, and Delhi is not even close. The bottom line is that Delhi has more fresh migrants and younger residents than any other major metro that together aggravate its shallow urban depth. It is almost as if Delhi is a small city stretched thin to cover big city dimensions.

This rise in numbers is true of all the non-metro cities we have mentioned so far. In the last inter-Censal decade, between 2001 and 2011, there was a 38 per cent jump in Indore’s population, Bengaluru went up by about 47 per cent and Nashik 23 per cent. In comparison, at 22 per cent, Delhi’s rise was lower than the others just mentioned, but still way ahead of Mumbai, Chennai and Kolkata. In these older metros, numbers were not just standing still but were beginning to fall. This was like Paris, Rome and Madrid, which have not grown for decades with stable populations and familiar coordinates. Delhi was the outlier in this regard. Here was a metro that had yet to stop growing and where its residents were still some distance away from feeling comfortable with one another.

Women’s status is another indicator of urbanity. Normally, literacy rates should be convincing enough to satisfy this criterion. However, if Annual Status of Education (ASER) reports are anything to go by, so many of those who pass school here are ill-equipped in the basics. This, unfortunately, makes literacy an inadequate marker. Even so, female literacy rate in Delhi is substantially lower than Kolkata and even Chennai and Mumbai. It would, however, be more convincing to look at fertility rate to demonstrate women’s autonomy and capacity to assert themselves. Once again, Delhi does not come out smelling like roses. Kolkata’s fertility rate at 1.2 is almost half the national average. Mumbai’s is higher at 1.4 but Delhi is even more at 1.7. Endogenous growth is not the only thing that has contributed to Delhi’s population growth but that adds to the exogenous factors, primarily migration, mentioned earlier.

Further—and this is a bitter pill to swallow—when we examine the incidence of crime, we find that Delhi resembles other smaller cities than it does the other large metros. The Crime Records statistics demonstrate that the rate of crime is, in general, higher in smaller towns than in larger cities. We generally assume that crime is a big-city phenomenon but actually smaller urban agglomerations are more prone to illegal activities than bigger cities are. Once again, Delhi resembles smaller cities on this issue, and not Mumbai, Kolkata or Chennai. What should also be factored into this discussion is that Delhi abuts neighbouring Uttar Pradesh, which leads all other states in ‘cognizable crimes’. Not surprising then that Delhi tops the list of cities in terms of crimes reported, including violent crimes.

A simple mind, bred on traditional sob stories, might assume that poverty and crime go together, but that is not the case. If anything, crime grows when culturally adrift people congregate in cities but are still far from being urbane. Neither Nashik, nor Hyderabad, nor Delhi is poor. When it comes to car sales, Delhi is right on top and Mumbai is a lowly number four, not even earning a place on the victory podium. Mint Research points out that Delhi is again number one in the sale of luxury cars. At the same time, Delhi’s tax collection is only Rs 1.6 lakh crore, but Mumbai’s is more than double of that (Rs 3.5 lakh crore), though Delhi has a higher population. Now, what might that mean?

It is not as if everybody in Delhi shares characteristics similar to those who beat up doctors and stop them from entering their homes. There are many ‘urbane’ people in the capital, but the presence of the non-urbane ones who dare authorities to stop them from behaving like boors is serious enough. It was so bad that it prompted the director of the All India Institute of Medical Sciences to publicly state that many of his colleagues were facing hardships outside the hospitals. In some cases, these hapless professionals were even debarred from using the lift. Other residents, even their immediate neighbours, feared that these doctors and nurses were carrying back the virus from the hospital and that would contaminate their homes.

To many, that is bound to sound utterly pre-modern, if not actually medieval. This is how doctors and quarantining officials were treated in the 18th and 19th centuries. This is also why Jews in Europe were systematically killed 600 years ago for supposedly spreading the plague. Of course, modern-day bigotry cannot match those barbaric standards, but when a big city behaves badly, it is time to introspect and reform. Thus, while we may symbolically clang bells, light candles and diyas, such shows of gratitude are immediately undone by acts of thoughtless pettiness that does not befit urban living.

An old metropolis is confident within, it can joke about itself, it can be at ease and not always assertive, and it can win respect without gloating. So often one has heard of how class-conscious Delhi people are and how important one’s residential address is in all social gatherings. This is probably why there are so many luxury cars in this city. Even the flashy bric-a-brac in Delhi living rooms would make most well-off homes in Mumbai and Kolkata look like a bootcamp. This has often been put down as a cultural characteristic of those in India’s Northwest states, but that is not true. These traits have less to do with ‘culture’ and more to do with a city whose population has not stabilised. In such environs, everyday conviviality shakily extends its hands, courtesy remains dependent on contact and privilege, all because people are unsure of, and unused to, their neighbours.

Delhi is just about trying on its long pants and fumbling. This is because it may be ‘feely’ like a big city but is still ‘touchy’ like a small town.

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