Hi This letter is self explanatory. Date: 13-Apr-2013 To His Excellency Governor of Karnataka Dr.

Hans Raj Bharadwaj Raj Bhavan Road Bangalore 560 001 State of Karnataka Copy to, 1. Honble Minister of Home Affairs

Sri Sushil Kumar Shambajirao Shinde Government of India North Block, Central Secretariat New Delhi 110 001 2. Honble Minister of Law and Justice

Sri Ashwani Kumar Government of India IV floor, A Wing, Shastri Bhavan New Delhi 110 001 3. The Chief Secretary

Government of Karnataka Sri S.V. Ranganath Vidhana Soudha

Bangalore 560 001 State of Karnataka 4. Honble Chairperson

Sri K.G.Balakrishnan National Human Rights Commission Faridkot House Copernicus Marg New Delhi 110 001 5. Honble Chairperson

Karnataka State Human Rights Commission M S Building, 4th Floor 5th Phase, Ambedkar Veedhi Bangalore 560 001 State of Karnataka Sub: To stall and to disband two caste-based townships just outside the city of Bangalore Dear Sir 1. My name is K.V.Dhananjay. I am an advocate in practice at the Supreme Court of India and at the Delhi and Karnataka High Courts. 2. I am attaching herewith, a copy of a very shocking newsreport published in the Bangalore Mirror newspaper on 09-Apr-2013. This news report speaks of two separate residential townships that are in advanced stages of development outside the city of Bangalore. The disturbing part of these two residential townships development is this each is reserved exclusively for members of a certain caste and are not sold to any other person who is of a different caste. Sociologists would term the two castes at issue here as higher-order Hindu castes. 3. I am quite aware of rampant caste-based housing discrimination across the major cities of India. However, that reality is covert, secretive, not openly solicited, isolated, disorganised, behind the shadows and above all, fearful of the law.

4. A housewife who prefers a certain caste or religious person as her tenant and writes a two-line note in a newspaper classified asking that interested tenants be of a certain food type is no doubt discrimination and does much to divide the society along caste lines. However, in order to see the grave illegality in the Bangalore caste townships, one only has to notice that even that anonymous housewife would exhibit a sensitivity to not openly ask for tenants of a specific caste. She knows, either innately or as a matter of law, that it would be illegal to openly solicit tenants only from a specific caste. Therefore, the underground discrimination that we routinely see in our cities still demonstrates a certain sensitivity and a fear or respect for the law. What to say now of these two openly caste townships just outside Bangalore? 5. A caste-based housing project is plainly and doubtless illegal. Period. 6. What is strikingly disturbing about the Bangalore caste townships is that they are openly advertised, sold and solicited as specific caste only townships both on their websites and elsewhere. Both these townships also claim to comply with the applicable regulatory laws. Interestingly, both claim to be backed by professionals with knowledge about the law and one township has been happy to express that it is guided by a highly qualified team of senior advocates. 7. Caste equations dominate most matters in our country and I am quite aware of it. However, fortunately, we have a set of laws that enforce tolerance in the matter of castes and I am writing here, as a lawyer, to ask you to enforce the laws against caste-based housing discrimination in respect of these two Bangalore caste-townships. 8. It is evident from a reading of the news report that the authorities in Bangalore are simply unwilling to stall or to disband the two castes based townships as each government department appears to pretend that it is some other departments responsibility to address the caste component of these townships. In the result, these two caste townships appear to have briskly progressed and one of them has even claimed on its website that the first batch has just been sold out to high-ranking professionals from its caste. In the background of numerous laws already in existence in this country to check housing based caste discrimination, I am wondering whether the Government of Karnataka is tacitly involved in supporting these two caste-based townships as some form of social engineering or experiment? After all, even the Chief Minister is reported to have done nothing to halt these two caste townships despite becoming aware of it. 9. Finally, I am keen to point out that notwithstanding all the laws in existence to check caste-based discrimination, we must all lament that we truly lack men of imagination in our midst. If laws didnt seem

deterrent enough to the promoters of these two caste townships, somebody in the Government could have summoned the promoters therein and assigned them a simple task as such forget building a caste township, just come back for regulatory approvals after you are fully satisfied that you can construct and complete even one house with only members of one caste. The promoters would have then realised that it is practically impossible to construct and complete any house with only members of one caste. People from plenty of castes should come together to build and complete any house dozens of castes are involved therein as people with skills in excavation, groundwork, bricklaying, concrete and cementing, drawing, planning and layout, flooring, tile or marble placing, electrical wiring, gardening and landscaping, kitchen designing, carpentry, furnishing and fittings, paints and plastering, ergonomics, devotion room making, sanitation and plumbing, cooling or heating come from a diverse caste spectrum in our society. Therefore, any obsession with a caste-based housing would only seem to be an expression of a spurious human emotion as no house could possibly be built unless diverse caste people come together and work with each other. Equally, even after a house is designated as a caste house and prohibited to members of other castes, the occupants therein may consider themselves to be caste independent only by completely deluding themselves. The food, fruits and vegetables that one must consume thrice daily to even subsist are simply the result of labour of men and women not necessarily of ones own caste. Not to forget, the guards and watchmen who keep a watch over ones head and wealth in a crime infested city such as Bangalore and whose services are indispensible to prevent oneself from becoming another crime-statistic or crime-story are mostly drawn from a distance of hundreds of miles, often from unknown or unfamiliar castes. 10. So, whoever designed the caste system initially must have clearly recognised its limits and could have only intended that all castes be inter-dependent. As said earlier, whether at present or once upon a time, any obsession about castes is nothing more than a spurious or a dishonest expression of human emotion. 11. Also, any member of any given caste who wishes to practice the so called caste independence to an intellectually honest extent would find himself having to abandon food, utensils, shelter, clothing, martial protection, medicine and therefore, civilization itself. Therefore, from time immemorial, the wise have always said that only fools believe that they are quite independent of others. The sane have always known that life is impossible to live without interdependence. Dangerously here, the two caste townships do invite dire consequences for our national integration. 12. My concern is whether these two Bangalore townships have effectively heralded the end of underground housing discrimination in India and have instead brought caste basing housing discrimination into the mainstream market. If so, the consequences could be grave, drastic, extra-ordinary and put our national integration into trouble. Not to

mention, a national free fall into regression. 13. There is enough number of laws in existence that forbid caste-based discrimination in housing and I am not keen to reproduce them here. Notwithstanding that senior advocates are claimed to have blessed these Bangalore caste townships, I must sympathise with the plight of those who paid monies to buy housing in these two townships. Their money is plainly paid on an arrangement that the law in this country does not recognise as a valid agreement. Our law on contract as contained in the Indian Contract Act, 1872is in a monumental piece of legislation and none of the arrangements entered into between the township promoters and those who have sunk their money into it would be recognised under the law as a valid agreement. This is because Section 23 of the Contract Act states that arrangements that are prohibited by any law or those that offend public policy or morality are void and no Court could enforce such an arrangement. Therefore, if monies have been sunk by A who clearly knew that Township B would sell houses only to members of a particular caste and to no other, A then clearly knew that he being a person of a certain caste was the essence of the arrangement by him to invest money in Township B. As no court of law would enforce this arrangement as the same would be void in terms of Section 23 of the Indian Contract Act, 1872, monies sunk by A cannot be recovered legally from Township B and neither can A ask a Court of law to direct the promoter to allot to him, the agreed upon plot in the Township should the promoter thereof be unwilling to perform his part of the promise. And, Section 65 of the Contract Act that directs restitution of monies if in the event that any agreement is declared to be void by a Court of law would have no application is a situation such as this where both parties clearly knew the scope of their arrangement and even if one party could plead that he was misled by expert legal opinion vouching for the legality of the project, the improbability of such a person being able to prove that he is altogether ignorant of laws prohibiting caste-based discrimination in other aspects of general life in India coupled with his inability to identify any other openly caste-based housing project in Bangalore or India would operate against restitution of any money that changes hands in such an openly caste-based township. 14. I am wondering when I would get to read that other parts of India have also taken a clue from the Bangalore case and have emulated it with worse consequences for our national integration. After all, it is generally observed that people from certain communities and religion reside together in many of our cities and if the Bangalore caste townships should be cut off to members from other castes, it should be equally foreseeable that caste and religious communities in the rest of India would also want to declare their existing territory as exclusively reserved to themselves and to forbid members from different castes or communities from entering or residing in such territories. Moreover, if senior advocates in Bangalore could offer a good set of legal reasons to support the two caste-based townships here, I wonder why senior advocates in Delhi, Mumbai, Kolkata, Lucknow, Chennai or Hyderabad cannot similarly advise their clients to

build caste townships or to fortify existing communities and to declare them as reserved for specific castes or communities only. And junior advocates in smaller cities, towns and villages should be able to dispense similar guidance to their clients and communities. And what then would become the fate of India that we know today? 15. Finally, I hereby request the Government of India and the Government of Karnataka to stall the continuation of the two caste-based townships referred to in this letter and to disband them in entirety in the context of existing laws and in the interest of our national integration. I have also marked the Human Rights Commission here because caste-based discrimination, when so openly marketed and practiced could definitely lead to emulation and retaliation by the rest. Thereby, our collective human rights risk reduction into mere school-textbook illustrations and nothing more. Sincerely K.V.Dhananjay Advocate