Jawahar Lal Nehru died in 1964, Lal Bahadur Shastri in 1966, Dr Zakir Hussain in 1969, Fakhruddin Ali Ahmed in 1977, Indira Gandhi in 1984, Jagjivan Ram in 1986 and Chaudhari Charan Singh in 1987. Two presidents, four prime ministers and a deputy prime minister of India – they have at least one thing in common among them. Long after their death they still haunt important addresses in New Delhi like palpable presences. The authorities had this taste of sensory perception while evicting Chaudhari Charan Singh’s son, former Union Minister Chaudhary Ajit Singh from the sprawling Tughlak Road bungalow which had been allotted to the Senior Chaudhari back in 1977. The bungalow is now earmarked for a new cabinet minister who has been living in a guest house ever since the formation of the BJP Government some four months ago. We are indebted to the personages for their contributions to shape our lives. But must they be made into phantoms to inconvenience the living?
‘Phantoms’, son, is not a polite word to use for the dignitaries you named,’ said Kaga Bhushundiji, admonishing me. ‘Such men and women are larger than life. They don’t go away with their corpuses but continue to thrive on the prevailing wind. When that dies down, their kin and others who had basked in their glory blow their own wind till they too tire out…’
‘Kagaji, you are overworking your metaphor. Make it simple.’
‘See, fifty years ago when Jawahar Lal Nehru breathed his last, no Bharatvasi wanted to part with him. Such was the wind that prevailed in the country. The sarkar that he had headed for seventeen long years promptly decided that the palatial house near the Rashtrapati Bhavan in New Delhi which had been his abode be thrown open to the public. Thus the Teen Murti Bhavan became the Nehru Memorial Museum and Library rather than being made into a permanent address of the future Prime Ministers.’
‘With that precedent, Kagaji, it must have been easy for the Congress Governments to declare the residences of Prime Ministers Lal Bahadur Shastri and Indira Gandhi as memorials to them on their demise.
‘That’s the way it was. Shastriji had retained 10-Janpath (since redesignated as 1-Moti Lal Road) even after his elevation to prime ministership. It now houses a memorial to the heroic man who endeared himself to the nation during the 1965 war. Indiraji’s residence at 1-Safdarjang Road too was dedicated as a memorial to her when she was assassinated by her own security personnel on 31 October 1984.’
‘I see. If prime ministers could get this posthumous honour, why not the presidents too, who had passed away in the Rashtrapati Bhavan?’
‘Mercifully, the Rashtrapati Bhavan did not go the Teen Murti Bhavan way, though Dr Zakir Hussain and Fakhruddin Ali Ahmed do have their memorials in New Delhi. Then died Babu Jagjivan Ram. He was a freedom fighter, an illustrious Dalit neta, a cabinet minister and a deputy prime minister who could as well have been a prime minister. Luckily, his daughter, Meira Kumar, was then an MP from Bijnore, Uttar Pradesh. So the bungalow occupied by the late Babuji at 6 Krishna Menon Marg went to her as a matter of course. Now Smt Kumar in her own turn has been a four-time member of Parliament, a cabinet minister and Bharat’s first woman Lok Sabha Adhyakhya – I mean the Speaker. Who would begrudge her the small facility of retaining the property during the periods she was not holding any office? I don’t have anything to say about an order passed in 2000 to disallow memorials in Government bungalows, or an unpaid bill of Rs.1.8 crore that was sent to Meira ji ‘under RTI pressure.’ All I say is that by an order of the previous Government, she can retain the bungalow till 2038 when, Ram ji ki kripa se, she will be 93 …’
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