The latest of the harebrain ideas to hit the capital is the attempt by the authorities to construct a tunnel to assist athletes to get to their venue on time, without having to go through the trauma of the wild, chaotic and uncontrollable traffic snarls that citizens are forced to live with. For the convenience of some participants in the Commonwealth Games, an important historic space will be brutalized and damaged, contracts will be got, money made, and Delhi further degraded. Of course, there will be those who will emphatically declaim that nothing is being weakened or destroyed, that traffic bottlenecks will be sorted out, et al. But in this case, the argument makes no sense at all. The traffic police could do what the Games committee has asked for — have a dedicated lane for the swift transit of athletes to the venue. If traffic can be diverted and, more often than not, stopped indefinitely for VIP movement and for Republic Day rehearsals, surely, the same can be done for the Games.

If the decision to destroy this part of ancient Delhi gets permission, there will be celebrities and VIPs — the only voices that the political class and babus listen to — standing in front of the bulldozers to prevent the horror from happening, Games notwithstanding, I am surprised that the establishment has not handed over the Ridge in Delhi, the only surviving lung of the city, to a private sector baron for setting up an SEZ. The SEZs are fast becoming a land-grabbing, real-estate racket. Chief ministers across India are pleading that the SEZs which were commissioned be set up since stalling the move would put an end to the deals transacted. To think that India needs to allocate prime land to SEZs for accelerated industrial growth is embarrassingly silly. Everyone knows what the game is about.

Insular existence

The tragedy is that government agencies and their chosen contractors will benefit from such an exercise. Eager beavers, they rear their heads when such opportunities come their way and manipulate everyone concerned so that decisions are taken that feather their nests at the cost of generations of future dilliwallahs. Much money is to be made by a few through these projects, which is why we see our urban areas in disarray, unlike any similar town or city anywhere in the world. We epitomize the “how-not-to-do-it” truth. We have failed miserably to make our urban habitats liveable. With the exception of Lutyens’s Delhi, where the rulers of India live in isolated splendour, blind to the cesspools they have created, urban India wallows in filth, refuse and garbage. If the traffic police and the municipalities did their jobs honestly, roads would have more space because illegal parking on the side of the kerbs would cease, and garbage collection would clear much space.

Why doesn’t the prime minister, the chief ministers and their cabinets demand that municipalities and the enforcement authorities do their jobs? Why do those who do not deliver remain in power? Why is the ordinary citizen constantly insulted by the powerful? Why do leaders who enter the public domain with the best of intentions descend into insular and sterile spaces? What makes them mouth the same predictable excuses? What makes them blind to the realities they were part of a few years earlier? How do they manage to transform themselves into another animal altogether? Living in their walled-in security zones, they become exploiters of the people, unwilling to see or hear. They are delighted with their new environment, as they soak it in and fast get used to a different, comfortable personal life with everyone doing their bidding.

At the end of it all, we will fail at the sports field, and in the Commonwealth Games as well. We just do not have it in us — the discipline of training or the killer instinct to win.