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Published by TEHELKA [Author: Shivani Chaudhry | Date Published: 29 January 2005] [Note: My piece on Brazil's remarkable Rural Landless Workers' Movement ( MST ) — which just commemorated 41 years — was  published in the weekly  newspaper  Tehelka .  Since the paper has been discontinued and its online archives deleted, I'm posting the article here.] "Power’s fence of war closes in on the rebels, for whom humanity is always grateful... But fences are broken. The rebels search each other out… They find each other and together break other fences..." (Zapatista leader, Subcomandante Marcos, Chiapas, Mexico) In some way, we are all fenced in. Enclosed within different fences. Fences that restrict, impede, ruin. But the struggle for justice, for equality, for change, is about breaking fences. Always. Everywhere. Breaking fences resolutely, passionately, strategically. That’s what Brazil’s Rural Landless Workers’ Movement ( Movimento dos Trabalhadores Rurais Sem Terra ...

Published by  THOMSON REUTERS FOUNDATION NEWS   [Author: Shivani Chaudhry | Date Published: 17 December 2020]   How can the Declaration on the Rights of Peasants address the exclusion of — and discrimination against — rural communities worldwide? Today (17 December 2020) marks the second anniversary of the historic United Nations (UN)  Declaration on the Rights of Peasants and Other People Working in Rural Areas  (UNDROP). As someone involved in its drafting process, I have celebrated its adoption. The result of a long struggle led by peasants’ movements, the Declaration is remarkable, at many levels.   The acute distress of rural communities around the world heightens the urgency of implementing this panoptic Declaration, which holds the promise of resolving various rural crises. Almost half of humanity, close to  3.4 billion people , lives in rural areas. The flawed policy assumption that “urbanization is inevitable” has neglected rural populations w...

Published by  THE WIRE [Author: Shivani Chaudhry | Date Published: 19 August 2020]   Imagine you are at home, sleeping. A thundering sound pierces the air. You peer out to find three bulldozers and a large police force wielding sticks. A crackling voice on a hand-held loudspeaker orders you to vacate your home. Children shriek and adults rush about, trying to gather their belongings. You cannot fathom what is happening. You have lived in this house for 20 years. Built it over time, with hard-earned savings. It is small, just a room-and-a half. And in a matter of a few hours, it is gone. Your home, your possessions, everything you have collected and saved, reduced to rubble. And now you are out on the streets.  Hard as it might be to imagine, this is what over 568,000 people in urban and rural India have gone through over the last three years –  forced evictions and demolition of their homes . The  Housing and Land Rights Network  (HLRN), through i...

Published by  GEORGETOWN JOURNAL OF INTERNATIONAL AFFAIRS [Washington, D.C., USA] Author:  Shivani Chaudhry |  Date Published: 22  March 2019 | On an early winter morning in 2015, Indian Railways leveled over 1,500 homes in  Shakur Basti, Delhi,  without notice or rehabilitation, rendering over 6,000 people homeless in the bitter cold. A six-month-old girl died during the demolition. Eight more people, including four children, subsequently died from the cold and inadequate living conditions. No one has been held accountable and the state denies any causality between the eviction and the deaths.   The story of Shakur Basti is not an isolated one. Indian cities, towns, and villages routinely witness forced evictions. In 2017, state authorities across India demolished  about 150 homes every day, violating laws and  international human rights standards . India’s housing crisis is characterized by the politics of land; an acute shortage of low-cos...

Published by  THOMSON REUTER'S FOUNDATION NEWS [Author: Shivani Chaudhry | Date Published: 1 October 2018] World Habitat Day reiterates the need to ensure adequate housing and land for everyone ===== At 5 a.m. on a cold December morning, the sound of bulldozers woke up Rukshana,* a woman in her late fifties. By 6 a.m., her home  in Delhi , where she had lived for 35 years, had been demolished and with it her meagre belongings.   Rukshana is just one of the world’s 1.6 billion people estimated to be inadequately housed, over 100 million of  whom are  considered to be homeless .   In India alone, about 54 million rural households are landless while over 3 million are homeless in cities. World Habitat Day, celebrated by the United Nations on the first Monday of October, is meant to remind us of the need to work towards ensuring the realization of the human right to adequate housing and land for everyone, everywhere.   The actions of states along with ec...