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FIFTH COLUMN An Estate called India Why are taxpayer's free housing for the Gandhi's? By Tavleen Singh As a conscientious objector to India having an Italian prime minister, and as there are so few of us in political pundit circles, I am often asked why I dislike the Nehru-Gandhi dynasty. Is it only Sonia's foreignness, they ask me, or are there other things about our leading political family that I consider bad for the country? There are several things that I find objectionable. The sycophants they surround themselves with, the durbar culture they favour, the sham secularism they use to divide Hindus and Muslims, the feudal socialism that has been their leitmotif, and a host of other things. But one of the things I object most to is the manner in which they treat India as their family estate. Which is why it pleased me that the Delhi High Court recently permitted the government to take action against those in the Indira Gandhi National Centre for the Arts (IGNCA) who used public land and taxpayers' money to set up a private trust. The observation was buried in the plethora of election stories that currently fill our newspapers but it is more important than all those constituency reports put together because it gives our next government a chance to stop this kind of thing once and for all. For those of you who have not been following it closely, the IGNCA case came to court as the result of a public-interest petition challenging the manner in which the centre's trustees in May 1995 converted a public institution into a private trust although it was being run on 23 acres of government land and with Rs 133 crore of taxpayers' money. The judges are believed to have commented in court that if "it is a trust over which government has no control, why should largesse be given to it? Why should the money not be taken back?". The story of the centre begins in 1987 when it was set up following a cabinet resolution. Rajiv Gandhi was made the president along with a group of Gandhi family loyalists as trustees but the President of India was given the right to supervise the functioning of the trust so that it would be accountable to the government. In May 1995 the trustees met, allegedly surreptitiously, did away with government supervision and made Sonia Gandhi president for life along with five of her close associates. This won instant approval from the then HRD minister Madhavrao Scindia. So despite taxpayers' money funding it, despite it being located on prime government land in the heart of Delhi, the IGNCA became part of the Gandhi family's private estate. This estate always manages to expand with public money but somehow successive governments have been not just compliant but unusually generous. Remember what happened with the Rajiv Gandhi Foundation? How Manmohan Singh attempted to bestow upon it a generous grant -- Rs 100 crore -- from his first budget and how the controversy only died when Sonia graciously declined to accept the money? She raised it instead from a group of willing industrialists. But as graciously as she declined the Rs 100 crore because of the uproar it caused, she happily accepted the newly built Congress headquarters as the foundation's new office. Again this was government land given to the Congress to build itself a party office. Personally I believe parties should pay for their own offices but even if we can accept the practice of donating them public land because they are performing a public function, how can we accept this land being donated to a private trust? The family estate is bigger still. The Gandhi family is already in occupation of vast tracts of Lutyens' Delhi in the name of memorials and museums. Indira Gandhi's former home is a memorial, Sanjay Gandhi's former home is also a memorial, not to mention the palatial house with its vast grounds where Jawaharlal Nehru lived as prime minister and which now houses the Jawaharlal Nehru Memorial and Library. All these properties and trusts are under Sonia's personal control. Coming to more current times we have Priyanka Gandhi's bridal home, a government house generously gifted to her by H.D. Deve Gowda when he was prime minister, on the grounds that she could not be provided adequate security elsewhere. Since she has been mummy's main helper in this election why couldn't she have shared mummy's home? Sonia occupies two large government houses, surely there would have been enough space? The most worrying aspect of taxpayers' money being spent on housing and providing for the Gandhi family is that if you allow it for one political family why not for some others? As it is, in close emulation of the Nehru-Gandhi example, we now have a situation in which no MP gives up his seat unless he can hand it to a wife, a daughter or a son. As for bigger leaders there isn't one left among them who does not appear to believe that the country owes him a living for his supposed contribution to public life. How many of them can we continue to support? Should we not be asking whether it is right for taxpayers' money to be providing free housing to politicians who have been so singularly incapable of providing housing to those who really need it. Sonia has repeated that she has not entered politics for personal power or aggrandisement but because she wants to "serve the people". A party spokesman put it even better when he said that her reason for being in politics was noblesse oblige: the moral obligation of the rich or highborn to display honourable or charitable conduct. How easy noblesse oblige becomes when it comes out of taxpayers' money. |
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