Sunil Sethi: Why the Taj is a dirty word

AL FRESCO

It was a small, attractive park in central Delhi bounded on three sides by residential buildings. Filling in for the municipality's neglect, local residents paid for its upkeep. A few Sikh families, who also contributed, asked if they could use the park for weekly prayer meetings.

The residents' association readily agreed. Very soon the visiting priests had planted a flagstaff to mark the place of prayer. Before the residents could protest a wooden shack came up, with a squad of priests in residence as squatters, claiming it to be gurudwara property.

Horrified, the residents' association took the matter to court to obtain an eviction order but it took six tedious years, including lobbying the chief minister and cornering the local MLA, before the structure could be dismantled and its occupants thrown out. A minor favour ended up as an agonised wrangle to prevent plain and simple land grab.

It happens everywhere and all the time. Temples, mosques and gurudwaras sprout overnight at street corners, in public spaces and even at busy traffic intersections. In my neighbourhood, a garish pink-tiled Sathya Sai Baba temple has erupted at record speed, elbowing out a reeking garbage dump, where all that stood once were a few trees.

Is it surprising that the Sunni Wakf Board of Uttar Pradesh has popped up to claim that the Taj Mahal is its private property, bequeathed by a Mughal emperor? Religion and history""or ancestor worship, for that matter""may have their uses but not as unlawful acquisition of public property?

Saddled with the maintenance of 3,598 monuments of national importance in the country, including 16 world heritage monuments that include the Taj, the Archaeological Survey of India has plenty on its plate without having to waste time and money to contest the rightful ownership of one of the world's biggest tourist attractions.

The UP Wakf Board's claim, legally speaking, is the equivalent of an annoying crank call and such callers should be outlawed before they become dangerous.

The Taj Mahal has been a centrally protected monument, maintained and administered since 1861, the year of the ASI's birth, which should be enough evidence rather than admit the claim of a medieval mullah, who had it second hand from Shahjahan that the Taj was wakf property. Typically, such controversies detract from the real issues concerning the Taj or, indeed, the city of Agra.

It is odd that, for a monument universally acknowledged as a symbol of pristine grandeur, most responses tend to come encrusted with dirt of one kind and another. From the Mayawati government's outrageous scheme for building shopping malls on the Taj embankment, chemical pollution and the ASI's woeful maintenance, the Taj and the city of Agra evoke the word "dirty".

Here is an accurate summing up of the Taj by one foreign tourist, posted on an opinion website: "One more thing, it's a wonder to me how something as great exists in the city of Agra. They have not maintained it. The city is falling apart. One of the most rundown cities I've seen in India, and I've been to many parts of India. Also, in terms of the actual Taj Mahal, I feel that they are embezzling the money they charge the tourists who enter the gates. The Taj Mahal can never look ugly, ever. However, it will very soon start to lose some of its magnificence. They aren't maintaining it, which is very important. Just the little things, all the grass surrounding it was dead, the bathroom for tourists was a hole in the wall, very dirty. The walls of the Taj Mahal collect so much black dirt. Overall, they need to do much more, after all, it's the Taj Mahal. Need I say more?"