Land of his father

Land of his father
The Indian Express

Not even Congress and BJP national leaders have the guts to speak for urban regeneration

Hopes that the new Karnataka government will be different in its handling of big infrastructure projects should now perhaps be buried. There’s a appropriate burial site, too—the 47.26 acres of land owned by the chief minister which just happens to be next to the Bangalore Mysore Infrastructure Corridor (BMIC) which, in turn, is in the process of being taken over by the chief minister’s government and which proves how much of his father’s son Kumaraswamy is. Deve Gowda must be delighted that the little tiff over “secularism” hasn’t changed the family’s fundamentals. The son is as prepared to de facto dishonour legal rulings as his father was and his heart bleeds as much for “poor farmers”. The son told this newspaper he will resign if anyone can prove he or his family members owns land in the project’s alignment area. Since we asked him the question only after obtaining land records from his own government’s database, he has his conscience to answer.


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But even assuming Kumaraswamy morally wrestles with the issue, the future of Bangalore and that of urban regeneration in general looks bleaker than ever. There’s already abundant evidence of politicians treating law like a sodden tissue paper when it comes to real estate. In Delhi and Mumbai, enabling laws have been passed to legalise law breaking. In Bangalore, the high court’s and then the Supreme Court’s clear ruling in favour of the private investors have been ignored. Politicians everywhere are watching and learning: there are more ways now to extract rent from real estate, not just the old fashioned, over-stuffed brown envelope. Since governments have neither the money nor the expertise to build large projects, since India’s urban landscape is littered with the detritus of five decades of PWD-ism and since the infrastructure bottleneck can squeeze the economy back to pre-reform dimensions, the price of putting off private investors can be calamitous.

Worse, the two national parties, expected to have a broader vision, are fully in this. The BJP, Kumaraswamy’s partner in Karnataka, has nothing to say. The Congress in Maharashtra championed the law that retrospectively authorised mafia-built structures. The BJP and the Congress both agitated against ridding Delhi of unauthorised construction. Congress and BJP national leaders, it must be said, haven’t had the guts to speak up for the country’s future.