Takeover attempt of Delhi Gymkhana is govt overreach

Days after the government’s decision to take over the Delhi Gymkhana Club was challenged in the court, Union housing & urban affairs minister Manohar Lal asserted that the government can take back its leased land for development work and any other purpose. More ominously, he announced that similar action would be taken in other cases wherever warranted. Yes ominously, because if the government succeeds in retrieving a piece of leased land just because it wants to, it will result in an unprecedented and dangerous empowerment of the state at the expense of individual, social, civil, and cultural rights.

“In most cases, land has been given on lease. The leased land can be vacated depending upon the expiry of the lease or even before the expiry for any other purpose,” the minister said. To the extent that the government owns the land, his claim is valid: the owner can take back their land when they want it. But the government is unlike the individual; while the latter can use, even abuse, their property in whichever way they like, the former, however, cannot use its property arbitrarily. Decisions of government, especially those of an elected one, cannot be the results of whims and fancies, or ideological predilections; they must be in tune with the letter and spirit of the Constitution.

The Bharatiya Janata Party-led government in Delhi must acknowledge the fact that if it can reclaim the land leased to the Delhi Gymkhana Club, a non-BJP government can also take back the pieces of real estate in the heart of the national capital, and elsewhere, which have been given to numerous other organizations. The boot can be on the other foot.

The attempted takeover is also bad because it is a stark endeavor of executive overreach, indeed executive arbitrariness, for Manohar Lal made it clear that the government can take back any land leased to any entity “for any other purpose.” The import of this statement is stupendous; it means that the beneficiary entity—club, school, charitable body, whatever—can be dispossessed of the land parcel that was leased to it. The lease, in effect, becomes a sword of Damocles.

This implies that countless organizations will not be unable to displease the government. The total number of the organizations that have got land leased by government are not known, but it must run in tens of thousands, if not lakhs. Consider this: two years ago, the Pune administration cracked down on 102 educational, charitable, and other institutions in the district for alleged violation of conditions under which government land was granted to them on lease or occupancy terms.

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If in just a single district there are over a hundred non-complying beneficiaries, all over the country the number of total beneficiaries will be huge.

Hopefully, courts will ensure that the government is not given carte blanche to take back any piece of land citing whatever pretext. In the Delhi Gymkhana case, it claimed to acquire it for “strengthening and securing Defence infrastructure.” A more ludicrous ruse was hard to find. Do they plan to set up a missile factory at the 28 acres in which the Club is sprawled? As for the security of the Prime Minister, whose residence shares a boundary with the Club, the nation has seen far worse days of terror in the 1980s, 1990s, and 2000s. There has never been any danger from the premises of the Club to the Prime Minister.

The Club is accused of being exclusive, but then a club—or, for that matter, any organization—by definition is exclusive; it is not a restaurant or an amusement park where anyone can walk in. If there are any issues regarding some people being denied entry on grounds of caste, community, etc., the government can and should step in, but there have been no such charges against it.

Further, there is the problem of centralization of powers. It will be interesting to know what Russell Kirk had to say on the issue of local, civil bodies. A graceful author, essayist, and lecturer, his magnum opus, The Conservative Mind (1953), shaped American conservatism. He is said to have made conservatism intellectually respectable in the modern era. In a lecture at the Heritage Foundation in 1987, Kirk said, “In a genuine community, the decisions most directly affecting the lives of citizens are made locally and voluntarily. Some of these functions are carried out by local political bodies, others by private associations: so long as they are kept local, and are marked by the general agreement of those affected, they constitute healthy community. But when these functions pass by default or usurpation to centralized authority, then community is in serious danger.”

In a case of unlovely irony, a supposedly conservative party is waging a jihad against the institutions that can make communities healthy. At any rate, it is a dismal situation.

Last, but not the least, the saffron dispensation’s excessive antipathy toward the British Raj has also played a role in the anti-Club move. The progeny of Macaulay enjoying themselves on the lawns and old-fashioned halls is anathema to them.

In a nutshell, the order to take over the Delhi Gymkhana Club is deplorable government overreach which must be resisted.

The author is not a member of the Delhi Gymkhana Club.

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