A house for Mr Arvind Kejriwal: Why Delhi won't have him as a tenant

Arvind Kejriwal is out to tackle the county’s biggest problems – law and order to corruption, people’s participation in decision making to housing – but he is apparently facing a huge personal issue. No one is willing to give him a house on rent in Delhi. Unless he has one, he cannot vacate the Tilak Lane residence which he had got on becoming Delhi’s chief minister. The stormy petrel of Indian politics had planned to move out to another privately rented place earlier this week but the landlord of the apartment in East Delhi’s Mayur Vihar area backed out, according to  Punya Prasoon Bajpai, Aaj Tak‘s executive editor. He wrote on his blog on Tuesday that Kejriwal is not letting this setback put brakes on his political progress. In fact, landlords are not keen on him as a tenant for a variety of reasons. Though on the face of it, it seems as if the house owners have a problem with Kejriwal as a person, in reality, they are more worried about the implications of his tenancy. [caption id=“attachment_1578379” align=“alignleft” width=“380”]  Delhi landlords are not willing to rent out their premises to Kejriwal. AFP.[/caption] Bajpai points out that the AAP leader had promised to regularise the informal housing in the country’s capital. During his tenure, he had also let street-dwellers occupy unused houses during Delhi’s terrifying winter. Interestingly, while Kejriwal’s conversation with Bajpai during the breaks in the interview had gone viral because it showed Kejriwal asking for certain portions of the conversation to be played up, social media or mainstream media hasn’t bothered about this strange problem the AAP chief is faced with. I don’t track Bajpai’s blog but noticed the link when it started doing the rounds of social media. While some pitied him while sharing the blog, some others mocked him over an issue which can be distressful to any average human. Bajpai notes in his blog that the grounds on which the unnamed Mayur Vihar landlord objected to Kejriwal’s tenancy, was that he feared unnecessary media attention on him.  Also, he has apparently built an extra room in the said house without the approval of the municipal corporation, which, he feared would be revealed and he could be booked. The writer notes that it is clear that the landlord is more worried about the consequences of having Kejriwal as a CM, than Kejriwal himself. It was not known that Kejriwal doesn’t own a house in Delhi (he oused to live in an apartment in Kaushambi in Ghaziabad initially) until the day he happened to mention it to Bajpai over a casual conversation. When Bajpai ran a story on his channel mentioning that Kejriwal was supposed to move to a new house, suddenly things changed. Before the Mayur Vihar house was finalised, Kejriwal has found other landlords were also reluctant to rent out their premises to him. Apparently, they were intimidated by the idea that a former CM would live there, there would be incessant activities, flurry of important people visiting the premises and in the process the house owners would invite the wrath of Kejirwal’s opponents - BJP and Congress. However, Bajpai points out that while visiting Kejriwal a few days after the Mayur Vihar deal fell though, his wife told the journalist to not turn the same into a news item. The AAP leader, till then, had been putting up at the Tilak Lane residence that he got during his term as a CM. He was asked to pay a rent of Rs 85,000 for the premises, which was way beyond what he could afford. He wanted an earlier the extension as is daughter was taking her board exams. His entitlement ended on March 1, which is 15 days after his resignation on February 14. Kejriwal’s IIT batchmates were pooling in the rent for the Tilak Lane house, like they helped put together the Rs 9 lakh that was required for him to quit and pay the Income Tax board. You can read Bajpai’s blog here.