Capital146;s landed gentry

The BJP8217;s response to the Express expose on how prime land in the Capital was being parcelled out to party favourites and affiliates wa...

The BJP8217;s response to the Express expose on how prime land in the Capital was being parcelled out to party favourites and affiliates was two-fold: the first was a spirited defence of the practice by party apparatchiks like Mukhtar Abbas Naqvi. The second was to pretend that the process followed was squeaky clean, as Ananth Kumar, minister for urban development, had passionately argued. Both approaches are seriously flawed. The first is amoral, an attempt to brazen it out. The other is a clear falsehood. The facts speak for themselves. You cannot claim that the process of selection of applicants for this bonanza in the shape of extremely expensive, well-located plots of land in the Capital was above board, if a large number of the 94 plots that went to non-government agencies and institutions ended up with sangh parivar affiliates. The Samarth Siksha Samiti, an RSS organisation, for instance, received not one but seven plots. Does this point to a transparent and fair process of selection?

In many way, the issues thrown up by the petrol pump scam that rocked Parliament a few days ago raise their heads in this instance as well. Here, too, is political patronage at its most crass; here, too, are a few favoured parties benefitting from a public resource to the detriment of the national exchequer. Yes, valuable land given away at prices one-tenth their actual value amounts to cheating us, the people, and the sooner the BJP gets the message the better. Resorting to the old trick of dusting down the records from the Congress days may be useful in exposing that party even more, but it cannot be used as justification for an unacceptable practice.

It follows then that the NDA government must take immediate action. So far, all that has been offered is Ananth Kumar8217;s promise that he will put the data of fifty years of allotments on his ministry8217;s website. While we do not want to discourage him from demonstrating his technological savvy, this is clearly not enough. In the wake of the petrol pump scam, Prime Minister Vajpayee had cancelled all allotments with effect from January 2000, to demonstrate his government8217;s commitment to transparency. Similarly, his government must now cancel all the said allotments of land in the Capital made under its dispensation. This should be followed up with ending, once and for all, the practice of the government doling out public land on a discretionary basis. It is a practice that is always open to great abuse in the hands of those in power, as experience has demonstrated time and again. As for the Bharatiya Janata Property Party, it should set its house in order and ask its hangers-on to look for independent sources of funding and patronage.