A rippling electric current of alarm is spreading through India’s elite clubs following the stated intent of the BJP/NDA government at the Centre to nationalise the Delhi Gymkhana (estb.1913) which sprawls across 27 lush green acres in the national capital. Suddenly, the ruling dispensation has become aware that the club which includes a golf course, several bars and restaurants, is not only a culturally misaligned westernised institution, it also poses a security threat to Prime Minister Modi’s far-from-spartan residence next door. Hence the orchestrated chorus call for revoking a government land lease for this institution signed at a rent of Rs.1,000 per annum, which is being dutifully voiced by the saffron hordes and ‘Godi Media’.

Ex facie contentions advanced in favour of the proposition are seductive. Leisure clubs were established by our erstwhile colonial masters, mainly bureaucrats and army officers, who invoking eminent domain awarded themselves prime government real estate in major townships countrywide  and barred Indians — be they ever so high — from entering them except as bearers and servants. Why should these institutions, a reminder of past humiliation and overt racial discrimination of sanctimonius Red Devils be allowed to endure?

Yet clubs need to be left alone for the same reason as they were established: they provide a refuge for establishment leaders, businessmen and professionals from the urban chaos engineered by rural import politicians hell-bent upon reducing India’s cities to the status of disorderly, unplanned village habitats. Surprisingly, most elite clubs are well-administered, rules-based oases of calm and order in our chaotic cities. So if establishment worthies have gifted themselves a few acres of India’s 3.29 million sq.km real estate, it’s hardly a national calamity.

Disclosure: Your editor is a member of ‘elite’ clubs in Bombay and Bangalore to which I often repair to escape the noise, dirt and mayhem outside club walls.