Opinion Time to move

When newspapers reported last week that two of India’s richest industrialists were competing to buy a property in Amrita Shergill Marg that is valued at more than Rs 400 crores,I had hoped that our hyperactive news channels would notice. They did not and nor did us equally hyperactive anti-corruption crusaders in the print media. Only one newspaper,Mail Today,decided to investigate further and reported correctly that only 65 bungalows in this part of Delhi are privately owned. The rest are occupied by ministers,memorials,high mandarins and members of Parliament with high connections. Those without high connections live well too in apartments that would cost more than Rs 2 lakh a month to rent.

As your humble columnist points out often,it makes absolutely no sense for us taxpayers to continue paying for our elected representatives to live like billionaires. The contrast between how the ‘aam aadmi’ lives and how they live becomes especially ugly in Mumbai. Half the population of that city lives in windowless hovels in filthy shanties while ministers of the Government of Maharashtra occupy bungalows on Nariman Point where land costs hundreds of crore rupees an acre.

Our thrifty ‘socialist’ leaders are lavish when it comes to their own needs so there are buildings in Mumbai in which apartments worth crores are ‘allotted’ for a pittance to officials,politicians and even judges. It astonishes me every time I hear talk of the ‘Adarsh scam’ because what happened there was no different to what happens in hundreds of other buildings in our commercial capital. It turns out,by the way,that the building was never meant for war widows.

To return,though,to Lutyens’ Delhi and what the government can do if it is serious about the ‘socialist’ principles it professes. Let it start making commercial use of what,judging by recent transactions,is the most expensive real estate in India. And,although I would love to suggest that the people’s representatives be made to live in the one-room tenements built under such schemes as the Indira Awas Yojana,I know this is not practical. So I suggest a viable alternative. Let the vast estates behind Rashtrapati Bhawan be used to build cottages for ministers and a hostel for MPs? The President’s estate stretches over more than 300 acres so there should be room for everyone. Funds for this resettlement colony can be easily raised by selling Lutyens’ bungalows to billionaires who can pay market prices.

A side benefit could be that a better kind of person might start coming into politics. In the long years that I have covered politics and governance in this city,I am constantly amazed by how important a bungalow in Lutyens’ Delhi is in the calculations of those who get elected to Parliament. I have seen movie stars and maharajahs who are so loath to leave their bungalows that they have to be forcibly evicted. And,I have seen ministers who return to state politics only after ensuring that one of their children get their seat so that they can hang on to a bungalow in Lutyens’ Delhi.

The other way to hang on is to take the ‘memorial’ route. If Daddyji has been an important enough leader,his family can continue to occupy his home by declaring it a memorial. This is easily done. A barracks of some kind comes up in the garden and is filled with dusty photographs of the leader while his family continues living in the main house in the style to which they have become accustomed.

Is it not more than about time that we started seeing this kind of thing for what it really is? A gross misuse of public money and an outrage. It is obscene to house the people’s representatives in splendour in a country where more than seventy percent of dwellings are one-room tenements. So come on,Citizen Kejriwal,you can do more than just make a racket in the streets of Lutyens’ Delhi.

Follow Tavleen Singh on Twitter @ tavleen_singh