Why displaced slum residents in Delhi want to vote NOTA
Voters are angry that neither the Aam Aadmi Party nor the BJP have helped them while promising subsidised housing for other untouched settlements.
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On May 12, as the mercury soared to 40 degrees celsius in Delhi, Suman, 37, made her way back from work to her one-room home in Churiya Mohalla of Tughlaqabad village. She was hoping the air cooler would provide some respite, but that afternoon, it refused to work.
“Another thing that I need to get fixed,” she said. Only a few days ago, she had gotten her television repaired after it was damaged when her home was demolished in 2023 as part of an “anti-encroachment” drive around the Tughlaqabad Fort by the Archaeological Survey of India.
The drive, carried out on April 30 and May 1 last year, had rendered homeless at least 2.5 lakh residents of the Bengali Camp in Tughlaqabad village, according to a fact-finding report by the research and advocacy group Housing and Land Rights Network. Some of the residents had been living in the area for nearly three decades and had slowly transformed their homes from shanties to brick-and-tin structures.
The area is part of the South Delhi parliamentary constituency which goes to the polls on May 25.
A year since the demolition and with no prospects of rehabilitation in sight, residents say they have lost faith in the Aam Aadmi Party-led Delhi government and the Bharatiya...
