Chandni Chowk’s Redevelopment Mirrors India’s Silent Monopolisation

Chandni Chowk’s redevelopment offers a stark contrast to the devastation the pandemic has caused in the area. In many ways, this offer’s a brief insight into India’s own attitude toward COVID.

To the first-time visitor, the initial rendezvous with Chandni Chowk might seem hardly worth the hype created by historians, travellers and their tour guide. Why, many Delhites too will rant over the mess that Chandni Chowk is, how it’s no longer any more than a glorified traffic bottleneck, how it’s hardly been able to retain the charm it once had. But – as Dilliwalas will tell you – Chandni Chowk tends to grow over one. Any vantage point on the Chandni Chowk Bazaar is capable of taking you back to any temporal location from the last four-odd centuries.

What the Bazaar can also do is give you a taste of the Indian buyer’s sentiment. Almost in preparation for what lies ahead, you are welcomed by the Corinthian pillars of a two-hundred-year-old State Bank branch. What follows is viewed by many as a celebration of India’s consumer spirit, others a bedlam of oxymorons. The latest trends in electronics, the newest fashion trends and upcoming culinary fads find their home in dilapidated structures that otherwise compete on the four-digit number following Estd. At any time during the day, it is hard to differentiate among road and pavement, ruins and restoration, the 17^th century and the 21^st.

This is the Chandni Chowk Dilli remembers – pre-lockdown, pre-redevelopment.

It is perhaps by coincidence that a significant chunk of Chandni Chowk’s redevelopment has coincided with the COVID-19-induced lockdown and the ensuing reduction in consumer spending. What can’t be ignored, though, is the contrast between an area being beautified as its inhabitants suffer the ravages of the economic slowdown. As rows of red sandstone bollards come up along the main Bazaar, decades-old shops lining the edges of the new granite tiles have closed down. Chandni Chowk is nowhere close to its pre-COVID heyday – the fear remains, that it will never be.

This mirror, in more ways than one, India’s response to the pandemic. Millions have been relocated, thousands have lost lives, many more, livelihoods. What this has been met by, is stark indifference from a power centre that seems more concerned with rebuilding its own annals in the heart of Delhi than the homes of people devastated by a draconian lockdown. If one goes by the book, we’re nearly back to pre-COVID regulations – our people, though, aren’t the same anymore. This monopolisation of India’s economy during the lockdown has seen its rich significantly improve their worth, while those less fortunate suffer at the fringes, beyond the capitalist granite-tiling.

The people of Chandni Chowk, much like those of India, retain a positive face. Rickshawallahs on either side of the Bazaar will still offer a ride of all there is to see, photography included. The veteran, though, will note – they charge a lot less now.

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