The New Indian Express By

The Allahabad High Court’s ruling against preferential treatment of VIP areas is a leg-up for equity. The court’s disappointment was over the uninterrupted supply of electricity to areas where VIPs and VVIPs stayed. Electricity is a state resource on which every citizen has an equal claim. To make it disproportionately available to the VIPs is to deny it to the ordinary people, which is against the principle of equality enshrined in the Constitution. The importance of the judgment is not limited to Uttar Pradesh, as the practice is common all over the country. The so-called VIPs, who include politicians, bureaucrats and even members of the judiciary, have traditionally monopolised state resources.

Nowhere else in the world is the VIP culture as pronounced as in India. In the national capital, particularly in the areas where the rich and the influential stay like central and south Delhi, services like water supply, electricity, roads and sewerage are maintained in such a way that they do not know how the poor live on the margins of the city. Even a large section of policemen is detailed for VIP duty at a time when there are not enough policemen to maintain law and order. Security has become a status symbol so much so that everybody who thinks he is a VIP wants to be surrounded by security men.

It should be said in fairness to the judiciary that courts have been taking a dim view of the preferential treatment of VIPs. For instance, it was a directive from the court that curtailed the wanton misuse of red light on official cars. The Supreme Court is hearing a petition seeking the court’s directive to the central and state governments to free maximum policemen from security duty. Again, it was on the court’s intervention that some of the quotas for VIPs in allotments of plots and flats were done away with. A reason why public utilities like buses, trains, hospitals and schools deteriorate is because the VIPs seldom use them as they depend on costly private utilities.