The disappearance of governance from the state

Bang, Bang Bangalore
With coalition partners at each other's throat, governance disappears from the state
Outlook Magazine

The road leading to the proposed international airport in Bangalore is being expanded into a four-lane highway.
But the work is moving at a snail's pace. The gravel has spilled onto the existing road and daily two-three motorcycle riders skid and injure themselves—and if they are completely unlucky, are run over by demonic buses that ply that path to destinations like Bellary and Hyderabad.

If you come 1 km down the domestic airport towards the city, at a busy traffic junction, you will hear the creaky sound of rusted metal. That's an incomplete flyover and it has been in that condition for over a year. Equally bad is the state of the Bangalore-Mysore highway, one of the deadliest roads you've seen. The city's arterial roads were in such bad shape that a few months ago Lokayukta Justice N. Venkatachala had to shout at the municipal authorities to get basic repairs done.

These cases aren't being cited as examples of Bangalore's infrastructure problems, but to highlight the absence of administration even in this 'showpiece' city. Keep the city aside and think of rural districts, the mandate of which the
ruling coalition partner, JD(S), claims. There has been no news coming from there either, except for Naxal killings and their penetration into areas hitherto thought safe. According to a Congressman, "the only rural sound bites on TV these days are on the CM's pilgrimages or the deputy CM's caste meetings." Even former PM and JD(S) leader H.D. Deve Gowda, the self-professed 'son of the soil', has hardly made any noise outside Bangalore of late. As a columnist put it, "arthritic slowness" has become the defining feature of this government. Indeed, it took six months for it to have a semblance of a cabinet and there are still two vacancies.

But ironically, despite the absence of any development activity in the city, the focus of the government in this one year of being in power, by default, has only been Bangalore. The reason is the booming real estate in the city. This is the one issue that has caused rivalry between the ruling partners and the intensity of their courtroom battles has been such that the Opposition bjp has become irrelevant. "It is difficult to call this a government. It has been functioning like a real estate agency," says Basavaraj Bommai, JD(U) legislator and son of former chief minister S.R. Bommai. "It is a piquant situation for chief minister Dharam Singh who has to distance himself from his predecessor while remaining loyal to his party and Sonia Gandhi," says political analyst Prof Ravindra Reshme.

Right from the start, in quite an unprecedented manner, Deve Gowda took up the issue of land grab in and around Bangalore. He claimed it was to the tune of "tens of thousands of acres", and in a veiled manner started attacking the associates of former chief minister S.M. Krishna. He also started publicly examining every land deal that the previous regime had entered into. A rally of slum-dwellers and urban poor, organised in the city on April 30, marked a new high in this acrimonious process. Addressing the rally, Deve Gowda said: "This is a rally of 'daridra narayanas' and not West End Narayanas" (referring to the Taj West End Hotel and an associate of Krishna who is said to often stay there). Getting more overt, he said, "A hi-tech madness gripped the state between 1999 and 2004 and the ground beneath the poor was swept away by the tech tsunami." In an indirect reference to the previous CM, he sighed, "at least this chief minister has not grabbed any land, he has no joint ventures and no associates in star hotels."

Deve Gowda has also put the revenue department on the land recovery job. According to revenue secretary S.M. Jamedar, after this government came to power, it has recovered 1,989 acres of land in urban and rural Bangalore "Just last week, we recovered 124 acres of urban land and 35 acres of rural land," he said.

A senior Congressman told Outlook, "What Gowda is saying is correct, given the fact that some ministers from Krishna's cabinet are building the biggest malls in the city. But Gowda's brashness has spoilt the game. In Karnataka today, even 10 acres of irrigated land is considered a liability, while a 30x40 ft residential plot in Bangalore is treated like gold." It's in facts like these that a politician sees both money and a swelling constituency of urban poor. This has ensured that the public debate this past year only revolved around land prices and land mafia.

Here are the four most contentious projects over which the coalition partners have been punching each other's face in the last one-year:

The first project to come under fire was the Rs 2,250-crore Bangalore-Mysore Infrastructure Corridor Project, which aims to crunch travel time to Mysore and develop new townships en route. This is touted as a Rs 10,000-crore scam by the new government. The public works department, headed by Gowda's son H.D. Revanna, set up a technical committee to probe land acquisitions by NICE, the company implementing the project. The panel, in its interim findings, said that 2,450 acres of excess land had been acquired around Bangalore and even if a nominal commercial value of Rs 1,000 per sq ft were applied, it amounted to handing over a "largesse of Rs 10,000 crore to NICE". All through, NICE has been portrayed as being 'very close' to the Krishna regime. But on Tuesday, a high court judgement on a pil threw the government's claims to the winds. The court said the government had filed a false affidavit claiming ignorance on how NICE bagged the project and held the chief secretary guilty of 'perjury and withholding' documents. Gowda reacted saying, "This isn't the end of the road. It is unfortunate that we have to keep our ties with the Congress going."

The second major 'land deal' this government pored over closely was the 2,750-acre Arkavathy Housing Project of the Bangalore Development Authority. For 20,000 housing plots there were 2.5 lakh applicants and this was Krishna's dream project. Gowda again alleged irregularities in work tendering and land acquisition. The matter reached the high court and the entire project was quashed as "illegal". The judge even said "the project would help only the affluent". But on Tuesday, a bench of the high court stayed the single judge order quashing the project.

The third project is the international airport. Here again, Gowda said Krishna had allotted land in excess. After much deliberation and intervention from the prime minister, the government gave final clearances after withdrawing 408 acres of 'excess' land and handed over 3,884.5 acres to the project. This would still make the land area of the airport far bigger than that of London's Heathrow airport, one of the busiest in the world.

The fourth contentious issue has been the allotment of urban land to IT majors to extend their campuses. "Do they need the poor farmers' land to build golf courses?" asked a close Gowda associate.

Amidst all this, when Outlook asked Dharam Singh about his government's achievements, a top aide listed them: "Rice and wheat at Rs 3 per kg; six per cent interest on cooperative loans; abolition of online lottery and expansion of mid-day meal scheme." Do any of these sound new?