Pearly Gates?

Among the BMWs, Audis, helipads, swimming pools and other assorted bric-a-brac that enlivens the farmhouses of Chhatarpur in outer Delhi, lives a shy young Jersey cow. Every morning, long before young Shamsher Gurjar rises to face another day—his is a family of late risers, never fully up before 10 am—she is milked for the 19-year-old, six-foot scion of the ‘CDR’ establishment. “We keep several cows but this one is exclusively for Sha­msher. He must have at least two glasses of milk before he even opens his eyes,” says mother Aruna Gurjar, a dignified-looking fortysomething who has lived in one or another of the family’s several sprawling Chhatarpur-Mandir Road farmhouses for over 20 years.

Aruna married into Chhatarpur. It was an arranged marriage that transported her from a typical Delhi neighbourh­ood—Okhla, billowing out from a very 1980s-style industrial area—into the most prominent (and some say most wealthy) ‘rural’ family of this southernmost district of the capital. Her husband Trilok Gurjar’s father was the late Chaudhary Daya Ram, a.k.a. ‘CDRr’, a farmer-turned-real-estate-mogul who struck lucrative deals with hundreds of local farmers during the 1970s and ’80s. It was a time when builders were voraciously buying up village land on which, for instance, neighbouring Gurgaon’s high-rises and malls eventually came up.

Strung out in the ruruban swathe bet­ween Qutub Minar—once  land’s end for Delhiites—and millennial Gurgaon to the south, Chhatarpur and its 13 nearby villages form a strange hybrid. Parts of it still designated as a rural area in gov­er­nment records, this zone hosts roughly 300 farms. Altogether spanning some 700 acres, this is Delhi’s independent republic of far­mhouses. Its residents are a wealthy, quiet, reclusive bunch. Fif­t­een-foot-high walls enclose well-manicured gar­­dens with fountains and fancy dwellings. Musclemen man the gates.

The owners are obviously people who foresaw how much homes in green belts would be worth once the rest of Delhi (and lately, Gurgaon) bec­ame a concrete jungle. Typically, land sells for anywhere between Rs 2-10 crore an acre in Chha­t­a­rpur today. Their possessions tower over the otherwise modest roads and impoverished quarters that dot the landscape every few hundred yards. Besides the owners of large companies, it has proved to be an area of investment for real estate magnate DLF too—it has sold over 100 farmhouses here. DLF, of course, was a pioneer of the land bank model. Its deals negotiated in the early ’80s with local farmers ensured it a str­ong foothold in the Mehrauli-Gurgaon belt.

Security guards dutifully stonewall enquiries about the identity of resid­ents, but voter lists reveal some names. Businessman Rakesh Bharti Mittal owns a farmhouse here, as do lawyers R.K. Anand and K.K. Venugopal. Avtar Singh Rikhy (ex-LS secretary-general) figures, as does the infamous Ponty Chadha’s relative R.S. Chadha. Retired army officers too have made Chhat­arpur their home, as have writers such as William Dalrymple and several politicians. Diljit Titus, the reputed lawyer who owns a vintage car museum, is another one with a farmhouse here.

Last November, liquor baron Ponty Chadha and his brother and their priv­ate security forces—another trapping of Chhatarpur’s wealthy elite—whip­ped out guns and shot each other dead after a fierce gunbattle. The calm and privacy of Chhatarpur was shattered for awhile. Everyone got a peek into the massive houses from which the only signs of life at other times were the giant suvs zooming out at alarming regularity. But the residents quickly gathered themselves and restored normalcy—which is to say, retreated behind their walls. “Contrary to what people think, Chhatarpur is largely a regular colony of Delhi where ordinary people live ordinary lives,” says a resident who shares a boundary wall with the property Ponty Chadha and his brother died in. The family was not at home when the shootout took place.

One fixture of ordinary life in Chh­a­ta­r­pur is the need to leave the area for productive work—there are no regular office buildings, no factories, nor, really, even farms in the strictest sense in the area. In fact, there are no signs of a living, vibrant community—no libraries, malls or even shopping centres in the immediate vicinity. There is a dearth of public spaces—the seclusion of each house means residents have to meet via weekly rwa gatherings. “That’s when we get to see the neighbours,” says Sha­msher, most of whose friends live “in town”. Kitty parties, with 20 or more members, many from outside Chh­at­a­rpur, are a common way for women to interact. “It takes a long time to get used to living in a farmhouse, without neighbours dropping in,” says Aruna.

Earth movers The Trilok Gurjar family. (Photograph by Jitender Gupta)

For the rest of Delhi, Chhatarpur figures when there is a ‘big’ wedding to attend. Like in March 2011, when the “most expensive wedding ever” (sou­r­ces say some Rs 250 crore was spent) was held at Kanwar Singh Tanwar’s farmhouse when his son Lalit married Yogita, ex-MLA Sukhbir Singh Jauna­puria’s daughter. The groom was gifted a chopper, no less. The Gurjar family, though, isn’t too impressed. “People in Chhatarpur own aeroplanes, who’s in awe of a chopper?” asks Trilok Gurjar. The two families are, incidentally, rel­ated through marriage.

Indeed, Chhatarpur is “different” from the many other exclusive enclaves of the capital. From Jor Bagh to Sainik Farms to Nizamuddin to Sundar Nagar, there are many in Delhi which are wealthy and exclusive, even mysterious and forbidding. Some were car­ved out of rural areas or barren land but even among these, Chhatarpur is in a zone by itself. For one, things work like in a cabal: what happens in Chh­a­t­arpur stays there. It is an area that only opens its doors to you if you marry into it, if you are born here, or—and this is an increasingly popular route—if you make pots of money and buy your way in.

With the money rolling in, real estate firms such as CDR Estates, now led by Trilok Gurjar and son Shamsher, continue to shape Chhatarpur into an even more exclusive club—a mix of imp­reg­nable farmhouses and gated residential enclaves interspersed with older villa­ges. “Today’s Chhatarpur is a product of yesterday’s hard-nosed bargains with the landlords of 12 neighbouring villages who sold their holdings to builders in Delhi and Gurgaon,” says property broker Pradeep Mishra. The villages inc­lude Ghitorni, Sultanpur, Mangl­a­p­uri, Gadaipur, Satbari, Mandi, Jaunapur, Fatehpur and lead up to Bhatti Mines.

Parts of this region fall under the Delhi government’s expansion plans for residential buildings. Chhatarpur falls in the ‘J’ zone of Delhi’s master plan for 2021, which foresees residential expansion beyond farmhouses for the area. Even now, from time to time, the state breathes down the necks of residents living in areas still designated as rural.

In 1980, there were only five 1-acre plots in Chhatarpur proper that could flaunt their legal status as a “farmhouse”. For all others, the minimum size had to be 2.5 acres. Today there are at least 1,500 farmhouses in Chhatarpur and their sizes vary from 1 to 13 acres (some say even larger ‘farms’ exist). Slowly but surely, a complex web of approvals and permits are pulsing in favour of Chhatarpur farmhouses. Just last December, an obvious concession was made to the residents, builders and brokers. A new 30 per cent floor-area ratio was announced—a big break for those who had already constructed much bigger houses than allowed.

“From outside, you cannot see what is going on inside, the walls go way up and the gates always closed. The people living inside are also perhaps too powerful to question,” says a local property broker. Being a farmhouse owner means being bound by a number of tough laws—which still exist on paper. For instance, a farmhouse cannot be split into apartments. With the rules slowly changing, Chhatarpur may become an even more prominent status symbol for the elite. The rush has pushed a host of professionals into Chhatarpur homes over the last two decades. Chartered accountants, “soc­ial workers”, writers, businessmen and a host of others have started moving in.

This is something the Gurjar family and other original residents rue—and sort of poke fun at. “Many Dilliwallahs move to a farmhouse only to return to the hustle and bustle of Greater Kailash or Vasant Vihar within months,” says Trilok Gurjar. Life on the farm isn’t easy, even one within city limits. With peace and privacy comes the harsh reality of seclusion and isolation. Yet, the rush hasn’t abated.