New Delhi, Oct. 5 -- The government's decision to determine the perpetual lease of the Delhi Gymkhana Club and take back its 27.3 acres has arisen perhaps due to a distorted image of this club - as a decadent relic of the Raj, as a playground for colonial officials - to which independent India owes nothing. Archival records tell a radically different story.
It is a myth that Gymkhana was built for the British alone. Government (Finance Department) records state its purpose, from the very beginning, as serving "Europeans and Indians alike." Its Articles of Association imposed no bar on Indians. At a time when many clubs across the empire shut their doors to Indians, Gymkhana was open to them.
Gymkhana club wasn't another private commercial venture that got government land as a lucky deal. The New Capital Committee proposed the club at its present site in August 1926, with the government providing land on perpetual lease and a loan to build a clubhouse and residential quarters for officers.
The reasoning was practical. Officers on transferable postings needed continuity of comfort wherever they were sent, and the club was conceived as social infrastructure for them. That intent is written into the documents - the loan agreement required that "not less than 75% of the residential quarters" built with the loan be reserved for government servants who were members.
The perpetual lease itself records that the 27.3 acres, carved out of land acquired for the new capital, were given "under the instructions of the Government of India." A body whose construction the government financed, and pledged to complete, cannot credibly be recast as an interloper on public land.
Why, then, was the land leased rather than granted outright? It could have been given on free title, but for the Rs 5 lakh loan. The soft loan was approved first, and the land was conveyed through a perpetual lease so that the government's money stayed secured. The clause permitting determination was an enabling provision to safeguard the loan's return, not a weapon to be drawn a century later.
The loan agreement and lease mirror each other, linking the grant of land, the Rs 5 lakh loan and the obligation to construct the clubhouse within two years.
The documents were vetted by then Solicitor of India Sir T.E.T. Upton, who saw their congruence plainly. "The Lease must be executed before the Mortgage and should have a previous date," he cautioned. Loan and lease were thus one interlinked transaction, driven by the government.
This was never a landlord dealing with a private tenant pursuing a solitary commercial objective. It was a relationship of principal and agent: a government and an entity it brought into being for a social purpose, bound by mutual confidence, expectation and trust.
The terms on which land in the new capital was leased to social institutions were set by the Imperial Delhi Committee in instructions dated 24 December 1914, conveyed to the Department of Revenue and Agriculture and preserved in Home Department records. "The Committee was very strongly in favor of the granting of permanent leases," they record. Even terminable 80-year leases, it said, would not be summarily ended but renewed.
In theory, the Committee reasoned, government could resume a site or raise ground rent without limit when a lease fell in. That it would ever exercise those rights to the full was "out of the question," because "less than any other landlord can Government afford to earn the reputation of harsh and inequitable dealing." Its framers understood that without such confidence, nobody would make long-term investments in the land.
Gymkhana held a perpetual lease, a stronger tenure still, and it paid for it. The premium was fixed at Rs 200 an acre, the prevailing market rate, and the club paid the full Rs 5,460 for its 27.3 acres before the lease was signed. The lease acknowledges that premium as "paid before the execution of these presents." Having paid the capital value of the leasehold estate, the club became, with the government's blessing and as its agent, the owner of that estate. The transaction was contractually closed.
Gymkhana's heritage also lies in its role in the making of India's independence. Its first General Committee included senior government representatives, Indian princes and legal luminary Sir S.R. Das. Several rulers of princely states subsequently became members. The club became an informal meeting ground for the princes, which helped ease their subsequent integration into the Indian nation. The Gandhi-Irwin talks took place in Gymkhana, arranged by the Nawab of Bhopal. Lord Hardinge was a patron and visitor.
Government records describe Gymkhana as a provider of social and leisure activities. In over 100 years, it has not digressed from that charter.
Much of what stands today was built on goodwill. In 1935, Lady Willingdon, the Viceroy's wife, donated Rs 21,000 for the covered swimming pool and the squash courts, commemorated on a marble plaque as the Lady Willingdon Bath and the Willingdon Squash Courts.
Determining Gymkhana's lease is to turn a clause written only to secure a loan into an instrument of expropriation, and negate the principles the Imperial Delhi Committee decided - that government would never earn a reputation for harsh and inequitable dealing. It will also be a rejection of history and heritage.
Views expressed are personal. The writer is a former Secretary to the GoI
Published by HT Digital Content Services with permission from Millennium Post.