BENDING THE RULES

Politics around land has always been problematic, especially in post-Independence India. Maharashtra’s Revenue Minister Eknath Khadse was plain unlucky when his get-rich-quick deal was exposed even before the ink could dry due to his tiff with a Pune builder, but over the years a legion of senior politicians have gone on to become billionaires, appropriating and misappropriating public land in urban Maharashtra, especially Mumbai and Pune.

Before words like RTI and transparency entered the popular lexicon, politicians exercised near absolute powers to allocate public lands the way they pleased. Aside from giving it to family and friends, they changed land use at whim, distributed acquired lands to crony capi- talists without any questions being asked. And not just politicians, all sections of society gained from this freefor- all policy. Members of the higher judiciary, bureaucrats, even journalists and artists, all got prime pieces of land at throwaway prices in Mumbai and in other urban conglomerates.

In fact, Maharashtra politicians had exercised such untrammelled powers that until the early 1980s they were requisitioning plum flats in the priciest South Mumbai buildings and allocating these to themselves or anyone else in the name of public interest. And eventually they came to own them. Almost every well-known politician in Maharashtra has thus made a huge fortune, Sharad Pawar, of course, being the biggest “landlord” of them all.

But Pawar only fine-tuned what had begun in right earnest during the time of Chief Minister V.P. Naik. In league with Rajni Patel, the high-living Mumbai Congress boss, Naik forked out plots of land in what is now Nariman Point to hand-