I first met Gurbir Singh in the early 1980s. It was around the beginning of the “liberalisation” era when egalitarian ideals were being replaced by the ideology of the “free” market. As the city of Bombay attempted to beautify itself to attract foreign investment, a huge demolition campaign began against the makeshift shanties of the homeless.

Not everyone believed that the poor were mere “eyesores” who made no economic contribution. The Peoples’ Union for Civil Liberties and the Lawyer’s Collective intervened on their behalf, arguing in the Supreme Court that the Right to Shelter was a fundamental right that flowed directly from the Right to Life guaranteed by the Indian Constitution.

While the case was being argued, the Supreme Court had granted a stay on all demolitions but of course demolitions continued. I helped document these illegal acts, first with a still camera on behalf of PUCL and later with my second-hand 16 mm film camera.

This brought me in contact with unorganised slum-dwellers but also with activists who had taken up their cause. Gurbir Singh, a journalist from the Times of India group, was one of them. In the end many of us formed Nivara Hakk Suraksha Samiti to fight for the rights of the homeless. It was a protest movement involving thousands of homeless in various parts of the city.

Our film Bombay Our City was completed in 1984 and won a National Award but demolitions continued. The Right to Shelter case in the Supreme Court was lost and demolitions became legal again. Slums we had filmed were razed and Nivara Hakk had its hands full. Slum-dwellers whose homes were demolished had nowhere to go.

Gurbir Singh was at the heart of Nivara Haq. After yet another demolition at Cuffe Parade, some of us decided to sit on a hunger strike until the government granted an alternate plot of land in the city where the homeless could be resettled. The hunger strike of four slum-dwellers and myself would have gone unnoticed but for the fact that film star Shabana Azmi had........

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