Ajit Singh vacates house, protests to continue

For the last few days Singh's supporters have been agitating against his eviction

Former civil aviation minister Ajit Singh on Tuesday decided to vacate the 12, Tughlaq Road, bungalow that has been with his family for 36 years.

“I am vacating today. But the government is yet to take charge,” Singh, president of the Rashtriya Lok Dal (RLD), told Business Standard. The days leading to the surrender of this bungalow were not easy for Singh or for the Union government. For the past few days, Singh’s supporters, mostly farmers from western Uttar Pradesh where Singh’s family holds sway over a large number of people from the Jat community, have been agitating against his eviction. The protest turned ugly when some of them threatened to cut the water supply to Delhi. On Tuesday, many were held while trying to hold a mahapanchyat at 12, Tughlaq Road.

“The protest will continue till the government heeds our demand,” Singh said. The protesters are demanding that the bungalow be converted to a memorial in the name of Singh’s father Chaudhary Charan Singh, a former prime minister.

The government has denied the request citing a 2000 Cabinet decision and a Supreme Court judgment of May 2013, banning new memorials in New Delhi’s Lutyens Bungalow Zone.“In the last 10 years, the government created four memorials. The Indira Gandhi Memorial came up just four years ago, and the Babu Jagjivan Ram Memorial is not even a few months old. The others were the Lal Bahadur Shastri and the Kanshi Ram memorials. We are demanding a memorial on similar lines,” Singh said.

Allottees of bungalows in the Lutyens zone are supposed to vacate their houses within 15 days of being served a notice or pay market rent of between Rs 2 lakh and Rs 6.5 lakh a month. Recently, former Union minister Kapil Sibal rented private accommodation for Rs 16 lakh a month.

Asked why he did not raise the demand for a memorial when he was a minister in the previous Congress-led United Progressive Alliance government, Singh said: “My house was always open for farmers from across the country. Farmers will no longer have a house in Delhi. It is not that I am going to stay in the house. Babu Jagjivan Ram’s daughter, Meira Kumar, does not stay in the same bungalow. It will be given to a trust or non-profit organisation.” “Our demand has been supported by Haryana Chief Minister Bhupinder Hooda and others. The government should not have a problem. Urban Development Minister Venkaiah Naidu’s words have hurt us the most.”

Naidu had rejected the demand outright. “We are inundated with such demands but we do not have a single bungalow to spare. It is already so difficult to meet demands for accommodating ministers, judges, heads of constitutional authorities, commissions and senior bureaucrats,” said a high-ranking government official who refused to be quoted.

This view is backed by previous instances of governments leveraging bungalows for political gains. According to The Indian Express, in 2012 the Cabinet Committee on Accommodation (CCA), then headed by Congress troubleshooter Kamal Nath, had cleared within a day Bahujan Samaj Party chief Mayawati’s plea for the use of three adjoining bungalows on Gurudwara Rakabganj Road as a memorial to party founder Kanshi Ram. It was reportedly done to get the BSP chief’s support in the Lok Sabha on foreign direct investment in multi-brand retail. In a similar fashion, 12, Krishna Menon Marg, was given to the Babu Jagjivan Ram Trust as a memorial to the Dalit leader.