If only, ah if only, the Supreme Court had gone a step further than it did last week when it ordered Buta Singh to be thrown out of his Delhi house. ‘‘What is the Bihar Governor doing with a house in Delhi? He cannot have a house here. Throw him out.’’ Quite right. Throw him out and throw all the others out too. Ministers and Members of Parliament, journalists, artists, dancers, musicians and even judges who sit like fat leeches on the back of Indian taxpayers. None of them should have an entitlement to government accommodation and yet they occupy the most expensive real estate in India, the smug, salubrious, tree-lined avenues of Lutyens’ Delhi.A small apartment in this neighbourhood costs no less than a couple of crores and this is the humblest accommodation available to our elected representatives and officials. The houses that ministers and senior bureaucrats live in could sell for between a hundred and two hundred crores each, and at market prices would fetch rents of more than Rs 5 lakhs a month. Only Governors of States and the President live better than this. Is it any wonder then that maharajahs, movie stars and millionaires have to be physically evicted when it is time to go? Is it any wonder that retiring bureaucrats scrabble around for retirement jobs as heads of commissions and cultural institutions so that they can continue living in the style to which they have become accustomed.Who pays the bill? We the taxpayers of India just as we pay for free travel and telephone calls and heavily subsidised water and electricity. It is a practice we copied from our former role models, China and the Soviet Union, where the people lived in misery while the leaders lived like kings in the Kremlin and the Forbidden City.It is a bad practice and must end not just because we cannot afford to pay the bill any more but also because we need our officials to experience the hardships of living standards in urban India if we want them to improve.So here is my plan. At this very moment our MPs and MLAs are mulling over a pay rise. Just a small one that would give them another Rs 10,000 or so in their pockets and a doubled travel allowance. I would like to suggest that they give themselves a massive hike instead and move out of their houses and surrender all ‘‘fringe benefits’’. If the houses they vacate are rented out at market prices our municipal governments will have more than enough money to build the infrastructure our cities so desperately need. Clean water, reliable supplies of electricity and housing for people in lower income groups.There is a ‘‘fringe benefit’’ to my cunning plan that even P Chidambaram would find hard to tax. We would attract people to public life who have a genuine interest in serving the people instead of a genuine interest in power, pelf and progeny. Hard though it might be to believe I know fond fathers and mothers who when they move from national politics to a State ensure that one of their children inherits their parliamentary constituency so that they can cling on to that house in Lutyens’ Delhi.Of the 465 people named by the Supreme Court as illegal occupants of government houses only one, Mulayam Singh Yadav, honourable Chief Minister of Uttar Pradesh, came up with a response. His party general secretary, Amar Singh, says that Mulayam is paying a ‘‘market rent’’ of Rs 1,75,000. The response gives rise to two questions. How can he afford such a high rent? And, is this how one of the last stalwarts of socialism should be living?In capitalist Western countries politicians and officials live more humbly. They do not get government accommodation or subsidised fringe benefits and if their salaries are high by Indian standards they are not by the standards of their own countries. So nowhere do you see the venal VIP culture that flourishes here and that results in our officials developing an exalted notion of who they are. One of the most nauseating examples of this VIP culture is visible on the Mumbai-Pune expressway where at the toll gate there is a special VIP lane which exempts politicians and high officials from paying toll.This kind of thing has to stop if India is ever to move from socialist feudalism to modernity and real democracy. Throwing politicians, officials and the sundry other leeches out of their government houses in Lutyens’ Delhi would be a great first step. Anyone out there ready to go to the Supreme Court with a PIL?Write to tavleensingh@expressindia.com
