Women argue with the police, who are trying to evict them from the occupied land, 22 June 2022.

The CPI(M)-led action was prompted by the state government’s failure to alleviate desperate land hunger in the region. The most recent government data shows that, between 2012–2017, there was a shortage of 18.8 million houses in urban India alone. Even this figure is inaccurate because it counts low-quality houses in highly congested city neighbourhoods as adequate housing. In November 2021, the World Bank announced the development of an Adequate Housing Index (AHI), which gives us a clearer picture. Their housing Gini figures show that, in India, two out of every three working-class families live in subpar housing. The AHI looked at data from 64 of the poorer nations and found a housing deficit of 268 million units across these countries, which impacts 1.26 billion people. Furthermore, a quarter of the housing stock in the poorer nations is plainly inadequate. With billions of people around the world unhoused or living in poor quality housing, and with no real plan to address this problem, it is unlikely that any poorer nation will meet the eleventh Sustainable Development Goal to ‘make cities and human settlements inclusive, safe, resilient, and sustainable’.

Land struggles in places such as Jakkaloddi resemble those led by Abahlali baseMjondolo, South Africa’s shack dweller movement, and Brazil’s Landless Workers’ Movement (MST). The crackdown and eviction of poor people from land occupations has become a regular occurrence across the globe. Similar attacks have been replicated in Guernica, Argentina, where 1,900 families were evicted on 29 October 2020, and in Otodo-Gbame, Nigeria, where over 30,000 people were evicted between November 2016–April 2017.

Such struggles are led by people who want to establish the material basis of living with dignity. In a recent dossier, our South African colleague Yvonne Phyllis uses a isiXhosa saying to refer to the land: umhlaba wookhokho bethu, ‘the land of our ancestors’. This phrase, so common in most cultures, demands that land be seen as a shared inheritance, not as the property of one person. This expression also invokes, as Phyllis describes it, a recognition of the ‘unresolved question of injustice’ inherited from ‘process[es] of colonial dispossession and deception that advanced the development of capitalism’. These struggles throughout the Global South mirror those in Warangal, where the CPI(M) is leading thousands of people in the fight for housing, successfully securing a total of 50,000 homes in 2008 and continuing to the fight for adequate housing to this day.

Some of the 10,000 huts and tents on the occupied land, 25 May 2022.

The appetite to transcend the global housing crisis is spreading. The people of Berlin – some 3.6 million residents – held a referendum in 2021 over the growing impossibility of finding housing in the German capital. The referendum called for the state to buy back apartments owned by any real estate companies with more than 3,000 units in the city, which could impact 243,000 out of 1.5 million rental apartments. The referendum passed, although it is non-binding. This – along with the growing confidence of people occupying vacant land and building their own homes – illustrates a new mood in the global movement for the right to housing. There is an increased understanding that housing must not be a financial asset used by the billionaire class for speculation or to shield their wealth from taxation. This sensibility is clear among organisations that fight for the right to housing such as Despejo Zero (Brazil) and Ndifuna Ukwazi (South Africa), among mass movements such as the MST and Abahlali, and among political parties such as the CPI(M) that organise people to transcend the housing crisis by occupying land.

Women, refusing to leave the land, roll tuniki leaves into bidis after the police demolished their huts and tents, 20 June 2022.

These land occupations are filled with tension and joy, the perils of being beaten by the police alongside the promise of collective life. Part of this collective life is represented in songs, often written in groups and released anonymously. We end this newsletter with one such song by a state committee member of the people’s cultural group Praja Natya Madali who goes by the pseudonym Sphoorti (meaning ‘inspiration’) from a chapbook called Sphoorti Patalu (‘inspiration songs’):

We will not move an inch
till we get land for our homes,
a morsel of food, and a strip of land.
We shall fight those who stop us.
On this land, the red flags we raised
stand ready for battle.

Birds nest in the branches.
Insects have homes in leaves.
We, who are born human,
thirst for a roof of our own,
for a patch of land for a home.

Drifting from place to place
in make-shift huts,
the shame of no address to our names.
Like leaves blowing in heavy winds,
with the pain of no place to call our own.

Well-healed bosses
steal thousands of acres
in the name of their children, birds, and animals.
For a little patch for which I ask,
the sticks beat me to the edge of death.

You, who have come to ask for our vote:
We demand food and shelter.
We are ready for battle till we get them.
We dare you to stop us.

We are grateful to Jagadish Kumar, a member of the CPI(M) state committee and the Jakkaloddi Struggle Committee, for collecting the photographs featured in this newsletter.

The post When People Want Housing in India, They Build It first appeared on Dissident Voice.