Gymkhana Clubbed. Rightly So

THE MEMBERS OF the Delhi Gymkhana Club are a nervous lot these days. The running of the club has been taken away from them. For the last two years, its administration has been in the hands of government nominees. First, there were six of them and now, eight. Will the members ever get their be­loved club back? Not everyone is counting on it.

One thing is certain. The place will be made more inclu­sive. The members are themselves to be blamed for the mess that has been created, giving the government the excuse to take control. The rules under which the club was granted a long lease on government land have been brazenly flouted.

The club’s troubles began nine years ago when the govern­ment launched an investigation into its alleged failure to pay tax dues amounting to `3 crore. More serious was the charge that what was intended to be a sport club had been turned into a hereditary club for members and their children. It has be­come, over the years, a watering hole for the elite of the city with sport far from the minds of most members. There is more action in the club’s several bars than on its tennis courts.

THE CLUB IS LOCATED on prime land, in the heart of Lutyens’ Delhi. There are few buildings in New Delhi to match the club’s elegance. It has a magnificent ballroom at the centre where the sahibs of another era danced. It is rarely used these days. Another elegant building houses its library. The club claims that its 25 tennis courts rank second in number worldwide, and only Wimbledon with 38 has more. That could well be true.

It was founded in 1913 as the Imperial Delhi Gymkhana Club soon after the capital of British India moved from Calcutta to Delhi. The original site was in Civil Lines on the north of the Walled City. Unlike many posh clubs of the Raj era, Delhi Gymkhana’s membership was not re­stricted to expats.

Several maharajas, including Gwalior, Jaipur, Jodhpur and Udaipur, were made life members at the start, as was the Nawab of Bhopal. They had made generous contribu­tions to setting up the club. Selected Indian ICS officers were also given membership. It helped if you studied at Oxbridge and you knew how to foxtrot.

Its first president was Sir Spencer Harcourt Butler, governor of the then United Provinces of Agra and Oudh. As one would expect, until Independence, all presidents were senior British civil servants or army officers.

Fifteen years later, in 1928, the club moved to its present locality which covers over 20 acres in the heart of Lutyens’ Delhi. The contract for the new building was given to Robert Russell, the architect who designed Connaught Place. It lacked a swimming pool when it was ready and the viceroy’s wife, Lady Willingdon, liked to swim. She persuad­ed her husband to donate `21,000 for the con­struction of a pool at the club.

Lord Willingdon was one of our more lib­eral viceroys. His previous posting was as the governor of Bombay where he founded the Willingdon Club. It was after he was refused permission to entertain an Indian maharaja at the all-white Royal Bombay Yacht Club. The new club wel­comed both Indians and Europeans.

The word ‘imperial’ was dropped from Gymkhana’s name soon after India’s Independence. The first Indian president of the club was Sir Usha Nath Sen. He was elected in 1947 for a two-year term. To everyone’s surprise, he decided to run for a third term. And he won! This was not considered kosher by the members and a convention was established that one could be president only for two years. That understanding has been breached several times since then by presidents unwilling to step down.

There is also a convention that the presidentship will rotate every two years between civil and defence services. Outsiders don’t stand a chance. Before the government take­over, the club annually elected a managing committee of 16 members. The president is elected directly by members through a separate ballot. Air Marshal PS Ahluwalia was the last elected president of the club.

The prime minister’s current residence is on the oth­er side of the club’s wall. That adds to the jitter of members who are worried they will never be able to free their beloved club from the clutches of the government.

AMONG THE CLUB’S various shenanigans that led to the government takeover, the most outrageous is that a club that was meant for everyone had been turned into a hereditary club. The children of existing members get priority when they apply for membership in the non-gov­ernment category.

The members found an ingenious way of doing this. They invented a new class of membership, the green card, meant solely for their children. They were given all rights to enjoy the facilities of the club, except the right to vote. To do this, they had to reduce the number of non-government applicants the club would take every year.

The Articles of Association of the club, under which it was established, mention only four categories of members—permanent, garrison, temporary, casual and special. The creation of the ‘green card’ category was a fiddle, in fact illegal. It has resulted in a drastic reduction in the admission of outsiders who were keen on joining. The waiting period for these applicants is over 30 years.

To rub salt in their wounds, the club took ‘deposits’ from those applying, calling them ‘application fees’ with no interest being paid on them during the long waiting period. The deposit required for non-government applicants was `7.5 lakh. The club put this money in securities and fixed deposits.

Matters came to a head in April last year. The Ministry of Corporate Affairs took notice of the sorry state of affairs at the club and filed a petition with the National Company Law Tribunal to take over its affairs. The tribunal determined that the club was run in a manner “prejudicial to public interest” and appointed six nominees as its administrators. The nomi­nees included a national spokesperson of the Bharatiya Janata Party and the party’s general secretary for Delhi.

The new administrators meant business. “The club, as per its Articles of Association, can have 5,600 members, but when we took over last year, there were over 16,000 people using the club,” one nominee told the media. “We have to take corrective steps.”

The obvious corrective step to get rid of the excess fat would be to expel all the green-card holders from member­ship. They have no legal right to be members; the rules of the club were disregarded to admit them through the backdoor. But expulsion is easier said than done. Many green-card holders are children of ministers and senior civil servants.

The club’s elected committee remains dissolved and its members are in a sulk. But they should have seen it coming. During the Covid crisis, when liquor shops were closed, bot­tles of Scotch went missing from the club’s stocks and found their way into the lockers of some of its elected members. The culprits would have got away with the scam if a disgruntled employee, dismissed from service, had not blown the whistle.

When elections come round, lakhs of rupees are spent in wining and dining the members to entice their votes. It is against the rules to canvas for votes, but no one pays any attention to that. Being an office-bearer of the club can be quite lucrative.

Rumours are making the rounds that the government plans to turn the club’s premises into a centre to promote yoga worldwide. That seems unlikely to happen but, all things considered, it may not be a bad idea.

About The Author

Bhaichand Patel

Bhaichand Patel is a former director of the United Nations. He retired in 1997