In real estate, location is everything, but after decades of occupying, modifying and trying to make do with limited space in 11, Ashoka Road, a bungalow in the heart of Lutyens’ Delhi, the BJP has realised that there are merits to having more office space. On Thursday, Prime Minister Narendra Modi and BJP president Amit Shah will perform the “bhoomi pooja” a ritualistic start of construction work for a new, bigger, fancier headquarters for the party at Deendayal Upadhyaya (DDU) Marg.
A senior party office-bearer intimately connected with the process of finalising the plans and architect, Mumbai-based Arvind Nandapurkar of Nandapurkar Associates, told The Hindu that the construction on the two-acre plot on DDU Marg will be “traditional on the outside, but completely modern with its gadgetry and connectivity.”
The plot was allotted to BJP, as was done for other political parties, in the same area (either DDU Marg, as in the case of BJP, or Kotla Road, adjacent to it) a few years ago, with a view to getting bungalows in the protected Lutyen’s Zone vacated as office space and making the bungalows available in the Parliamentary housing pool again. The BJP is the first big party to initiate the move out.
“The office will be a three-building cluster, a central one with seven stories which shall have office space, screening rooms, conference and seminar rooms, a big conference room with space for more than 400 people, and two smaller buildings of three floors each for various other personal offices of party leaders,” said a senior party general secretary.
“The design motif will be the Lotus, the party symbol, and we will have an underground car park for up to 200 vehicles. Solar panels will be set up, and a big lawn will be developed. There was a proposal for a helipad, considering that Prime Minister Narendra Modi’s visits to the party headquarters have security implications, but that idea was nixed. The construction will take up to two years, and we intend to, in stages, completely vacate 11 Ashoka Road in time,” said the source. Party men and women have been asked to contribute to the building fund, now running to more than Rs. 65 crores. “We haven’t estimated the full cost of the project,” said the office bearer.
“The BJP’s shifting will give more force to the government’s requests that other parties do the same,” said the leader.
The BJP, at the time of Deendayal Upadhyaya, operated from a small office at Ajmeri Gate (near Old Delhi). “The letterhead on correspondence from Deendayalji bears the Ajmeri Gate address. Later, when Atalji [Former Prime Minister Atal Behari Vajpayee] became a member of Parliament, the action shifted to 30 Rajendra Prasad Marg [in Lutyen’s Delhi and Mr Vajpayee’s residence]. In fact, Deendayalji’s funeral cortege left from that house,” said Dr Mahesh Sharma, director of the Deendayal Research Institute, and considered by many as the chronicler of party history.
After the Janata Party came to power, with the Jan Sangh merging into it, senior party leaders of the erstwhile party used 11 Ashoka Road (the current party headquarters) as a place to meet. That bungalow had been allotted to Jagdish Prasad Mathur, one of the founding members of the Jan Sangh after he was nominated to the Rajya Sabha in 1978.
