August 25, 2012
Desperate since 1995 to re-capture power in Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP)-ruled Gujarat, the opposition Congress has finally hit the bull–s eye and the Lady Luck has smiled on it just in time for the December assembly elections.
Earlier this week, the state unit of Sonia Gandhi's party resorted to crass populism by promising to offer dream homes at affordable prices to urban poor and lower middle-class women in 168 cities and towns if it emerged victorious at the hustings.
August 25, 2012
Desperate since 1995 to re-capture power in Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP)-ruled Gujarat, the opposition Congress has finally hit the bull–s eye and the Lady Luck has smiled on it just in time for the December assembly elections.
Earlier this week, the state unit of Sonia Gandhi's party resorted to crass populism by promising to offer dream homes at affordable prices to urban poor and lower middle-class women in 168 cities and towns if it emerged victorious at the hustings.
The idea has instantly struck a chord with the hard-up housewives. Thousands of them have been making a beeline to the party's 500-odd distribution centres in Ahmedabad, Rajkot and Vadodara to collect application forms for dwellings of their choice in three sizes.
Congress volunteers started giving away the forms from August 20, Rajiv Gandhi's birth anniversary, and by Friday, some 3.5 million homemakers had stood in serpentine queues for hours on end to register themselves for the 'own-your-house' scheme to be implemented in the next five years.
The tremendous response was no big surprise in a state where two million people are homeless and another two million live a wretched life in tumbledown shanties. After all, the applicant will have to initially pay only Rs70,000 to Rs180,000 and the remaining amount in installments with low interest rates.
The Congress wasted no time in again announcing free 100-yard residential plots in the name of women of shelterless families in rural areas.
Not surprisingly, saffronites turned green-eyed with envy at the grand success of the Congress gambit to win over their main vote-bank-women. BJP leaders, indeed, scoffed at the Congress stalwarts, saying they neither had land nor money for the proposed 1.5 million low-cost houses.
But Gujarat Congress chief Arjun Modhwadia retorted by saying that if voted to power, his party would seize all the land held by BJP leaders and also take back precious plots gifted to large industrial houses.
According to him, the BJP government had helped only builders and sold land worth millions of rupees for a song to industrialists, but had failed to provide affordable houses to the needy.
A shaken Modi ordered officials to reactivate the defunct Gujarat Housing Board which had built 175,000 cheap homes during previous Congress regimes but had not announced even a single housing scheme during his 10-year rule. He even promised to build 400,000 dwellings for those below the poverty line in an obvious bid to counter the Congress scheme for houses for homeless women.
There is, of course, no denying the fact that the BJP regime gave property rights to women for the first time in India, and women are exempted from paying registration fee and stamp duty for buying a house. But, at least for the time being, the Congress housing scheme has certainly taken the wind out of BJP sails.
Courtesy: Khaleej Times ()
