Pass The Salt, Comrades

This is a controversy that might take a long time to die down. Last week, Calcutta was shocked after a Supreme Court ruling asked retired Calcutta High Court judge Bhagawati Prasad Banerjee to vacate his house in the satellite township of Salt Lake because he had allegedly used his judicial position to wangle the plot from then chief minister Jyoti Basu. Referring to "an unholy nexus between duty and interest," the apex court said the fact that "the learned judge has misused his judicial function as liveries to obtain personal interest is clearly discernible."

But Trinamool Congress vice-president Tarak Singh, who had filed the public interest litigation in the Supreme Court, says the Justice Banerjee case is just the tip of the land allotment scam. This week, Singh will push for a review of the case. "I had challenged 293 other allotments, all made by Jyoti Basu," says Singh. "But only Justice Banerjee was singled out for action. What about the rest?" Singh wants to put them all in the dock.

That will be quite a crowd. According to Trinamool MLA Deepak Ghosh, who has also filed a writ with the Supreme Court challenging allotments in Salt Lake, as many as 2,185 plots were allotted "unconstitutionally, illegally, arbitrarily, whimsically, capriciously, with malafide motive and in a clandestine manner." The Justice Banerjee incident has blown the lid off a long-running allotment scam of the Left Front government which goes as far back as the mid-1970s, when the satellite township of Salt Lake was coming up.

It now appears that the Left heaped land largesse on its minions—partymen and their kin, bureaucrats, retired judges, Left-aligned professionals, businessmen and supporters in general—contravening the legal process of fair and transparent allocation. Plots were apparently bequeathed to people like Basu biographer Surabhi Banerjee's husband, Basu's brother-in-law Subimal Bose, son Chandan, Calcutta University's pro-VC and historian Suranjan Das, sundry ministers, top cops and other loyalists. Most of this was cleared by Basu under the chief minister's discretionary quota.

But leaders like Subhas Chakraborty and Prasanta Sur also allegedly farmed out plots to sycophants and relatives. The two lawsuits allege that then urban development minister Sur, in one instance, gave out about 159 plots in a single day, bypassing the sole deterrent that a plot-holder couldn't own land elsewhere in the Calcutta municipal area. Sur doesn't deny this. "What's the harm if I did?" he asks indignantly. "I only gave land to people I thought were needy. If some owned land elsewhere in the city and suppressed the fact, what could I do?" That his most generous dole-out occurred just a day after the assembly polls doesn't strike Sur as ironic. "My conscience is clear," he says. "We had a mandate to populate Salt Lake as fast as possible. If we stopped for in-depth investigation into every case, that would never have happened."

His daughter-in-law, who acquired three cottahs (one cottah is 720 sq ft) shortly after Sur's term ended, was "given the land by the chief minister." And, he adds, "she doesn't own property elsewhere." Land given out to some 138 'cooperatives' is also under the scanner: Many apparently no longer exist. How did this happen? Salt Lake or Bidhannagar (named after its founder, former CM Bidhan Chandra Roy) was envisioned "to provide residential plots to middle-class people at reasonable rates," says a 1977 Public Works Department report. For a decade from the 1960s, when Salt Lake was reclaimed from the marshy East Calcutta wetlands, there was no demand for land in the area. From the mid-1970s, there was a mad scramble. Allotments were initially the responsibility of an administrator, then passed onto the urban development minister and the chief minister, and were to be done through public notices inviting applications and a lottery.

By 1987—thanks to a series of judgements by Justice Banerjee himself—it was whittled down to only the chief minister having a discretionary quota (Banerjee had first issued a stay on allotments, then deemed that only the CM could allow it, and acquired his land about two months later). But the rot had set in. Compounding this is the fact that the allotments have come dirt cheap. According to estimates, land in the vicinity of Salt Lake—in the neighbouring residential pockets of Lake Town and Baguiati—has a market rate of Rs 2 or 3 lakh a cottah. In Salt Lake, most allotments have gone for Rs 10,000 to Rs 30,000 a cottah (Justice Banerjee declared he had paid Rs 41,006 for a four-cottah plot).

It's not just the two recent lawsuits (one of them was first put before the Calcutta High Court in 1997) which have focused on the scam. In 1986, the Biddhannagar (Salt Lake) Welfare Association, a strictly non-political body comprising local residents, had moved the Calcutta High Court alleging that the state government had been carving out plots from civic amenities and green spaces, in direct violation of the master plan. "Practically every market in Sector I was under threat," says association vice-president Ramen Das. "The tennis grounds marked out were never constructed, and the space around the City Centre market today is also much smaller than designated."

There was also a rampant sub-letting of plots. A few years later, the association stepped up its protest with a Biddhannagar Bachao Committee, and took their complaints to then urban development minister Buddhadeb Bhattacharya. Though Buddhadeb promised action, Das says, nothing happened. After years of turning a blind eye, the Supreme Court directive has finally spurred the Left Front into damage-control mode. The urban development department is attacking Justice Banerjee's case with a vengeance—and also trying to save face. Minister Asoke Bhattacharya has said he does not want this to become a precedent, and has reiterated that Justice Banerjee's property is likely to come under the auctioneer's hammer soon. And the others? "What others?" asks Bhattacharya. "The Supreme Court found only this one case to be illegal. All the other cases were dismissed."

The man in the eye of the storm, the former chief minister, himself cried off when asked about his grant to Justice Banerjee. "Lots of other retired judges were also given plots," says Basu. "Do you think it's possible for me to know them all personally?" The incident has shaken the Buddhadeb government. All eyes are now on the chief minister to see what punitive measures he will take against the other high-profile beneficiaries. In response to one of the cases, high court judge Pinaki Ghosh had ruled in 1997 that allotment should be more transparent. Yet the government refuses to divulge why some applications were rejected over others.

That's not much consolation to a host of people who are contemplating buying plots in Calcutta's second township, New Town in Rajarhat. Work on this satellite settlement is on in full swing. More than 5,550 plots have already been sold as part of the first one-and-a-half phases of development. But sadly, there are strong procedural resonances with Salt Lake. The chairman of the Housing and Infrastructure Development Corporation (Hidco), which is in charge of distributing plots by lottery, is to Rajarhat what the urban development minister and the then chief minister were to Salt lake: He is the one with a five per cent discretionary quota.

The lessons from these recent fracas—if it can be called that—have not been incorporated in New Town. There's no committee to ensure checks and balances on possible dubious allotments. Hidco chairman and housing minister Goutam Deb thinks there is, in fact, no need for any reassurance to prospective buyers at all.He dismisses their fears that those in need may actually be passed over in favour of minions. "Plot allotment in Salt Lake has no relevance in Rajarhat," says an irritated Deb. "There is no question of reassuring anyone about this. The courts are there for anyone to challenge any allotment. If that happens, I will have my say."

The discretionary power, however, stays. Will Rajarhat become Salt Lake II? It's hard to say 'no' with any certainty.