When the VVIP is Home

NOT EVERYONE IS excited at Nizamuddin East, a relatively quiet colony in South Delhi, at the thought of Rahul Gandhi living amidst them. Of course, most residents couldn’t be bothered but quite a few are concerned about the obtrusive security that must protect the VVIP 24×7 with a Z-plus security detail. The forbidding presence of gun-toting cops inevitably ends up giving jitters to the uninitiated and inconveniencing others in the vicinity. Besides, the security must pitch their tent outside his house, with well-built hunks hanging around all over the place.

Given that Sheila Dikshit, the former chief minister of Delhi, had the good sense to own a house on what is easily the most peaceful road which literally abuts Humayan’s Tomb, it is popular with residents for morning walks and post-prandial strolls. Now the thought of questioning eyes assessing all passersby is making some people feel uneasy. They might skip the road when the VVIP is home. Of course, for long-term residents Sheila Dikshit was one of them. She nonetheless occupied her official house on Purana Qila Road, the road that suffered knee-deep water in houses in the recent deluge under the benign Kejriwal Sarkar.

Only occasionally would one see groups of favour-seekers clustering around Dikshit’s house the few times she visited the neighbourhood as chief minister. But one question that has defied a satisfactory response is why her son, Sandeep Dikshit, a former Congress MP from East Delhi, is vacating the house for his leader. Sandeep apparently is renting a place nearby.

Every time Rahul Gandhi comes to his new home, he will have to necessarily drive past the house of his long-time bête noire, Subramanian Swamy. The former BJP MP with Z-category security, which has built a little shed outside his house, lives on the same road only a few hundred yards from the Gandhi scion’s new living quarters.

And were Gandhi to drive a few hundred yards farther on the Abdul Rahim Khan Road from which one enters the colony, he might come across another high-security VVIP. Former Jammu and Kashmir Chief Minister Omar Abdullah has carloads of gun-toting security men on the road whenever he is in town. Abdullah owns a well-appointed flat in a building. The writer Vikram Seth owns a penthouse in the same building.

While still on the famous, or controversial, have your pick, residents of Nizamuddin East, one recalls the late Jag Pravesh Chandra, the former chief executive councillor of Delhi, saying that it is the only colony to boast a park, small or big, for every 16 houses. He ought to have known. After all, as the right-hand man of the Works and Housing Minister Mehr Chand Khanna, he had played a major role in allocating houses to Partition refugees. Ever a decent man, for himself he reserved but a one-room tenement over a shop in a side lane of Khan Market. He died a forlorn man in that tiny house, forgotten by his own party colleagues and several others on whom he had bestowed favours in his long political career.

EARLIER THEY SAID if you wanted your past to be bared, contest an election. Now you can add ‘join a social media platform and expose yourself’, warts and all. In that sense, social media is a great leveller. Trinamool Congress MP Mahua Moitra, never lost for words, for once found herself on the backfoot when someone referred to her as Mahua Lars Brorson. The social media denizen was responding to her mean-spirited claim that she would never call Uttar Pradesh Chief Minister Yogi Adityanath. Instead, she insisted on calling him by his pre-sanyas avatar as Ajay Bisht, the name his parents had given him. He became Yogi Adityanath after embracing the Gorakhpur Math at the young age of 10 or 11.

Surprised how they had dug out her married name, she blocked those calling her by it, insisting that after her divorce she had reverted to her maiden name. In support, she pleaded tradition, eliciting a quick response. After he had embraced the Gorakhpur Math, he had ceased to be Ajay Bisht and become Yogi Adityanath. Then came the clincher: “Would you call Swami Vivekananda by his birth name Narendranath Datta?”

About The Author

Virendra Kapoor

Virendra Kapoor is a political commentator based in Delhi