July 24, 2003	Thursday	Jumadi-ul-Awwal 23, 1424

NEW DELHI: After surviving three and half centuries of wars, vandalism and the vagaries of nature, India’s most famous monument, the Taj Mahal, is beset by a new threat — real estate developers.

Last week, fans of the Taj — located in Agra city in northern Uttar Pradesh state — heaved a sigh of relief when the Supreme Court ordered a high-level probe to fix responsibility for a 1.8 billion US dollar project for the construction of shopping malls, restaurants and tourist complexes near the monument area.

On July 16, the court asked no less than India’s Central Bureau of Investigation, to look into the matter despite attempts by the Uttar Pradesh government to show it was taking action, including by its dismissal of a state official recently.

The “Heritage Corridor” project was approved and funded by the state government but apparently went along unnoticed, even by the union government in New Delhi, until when construction was well underway.

Work on the project has been suspended for now although it has not been permanently halted, but many questions remain — and apparently leave even the Supreme Court perplexed.

The project, which would have tourist facilities coming up between two World Heritage Sites, the Taj Mahal and the historic Agra Fort, had all the makings of Mughal-court intrigue.

Uttar Pradesh officials claim to have obtained the approval of the union government before construction started.

But “how can we approve it? It is in total violation of Archaeological Survey of India (ASI) rules and guidelines of UNESCO,” a defensive union minister for tourism and culture, Jagmohan told IPS.

The private contractor, Ishvakoo (India) Pvt Ltd, has already received five million dollars for the project, the most massive construction attempted in the Taj Mahal area.

But state officials are defending the Heritage Corridor project. They say it is part of a plan to implement earlier Supreme Court orders requiring the relocation of shops and small industries further away from the white marble monument, which draws close to a million overseas tourists to Agra each year.

The project would include filling up the curve in the Jamuna river, on a majestically wide meander of which the Taj Mahal and the Agra Fort are sited, and building a walkway between the Taj and the fort on the river bed.

UNESCO’s local office in New Delhi said it was keeping a close watch over the situation. Programme officer R.P.Perera said the monuments could be placed in the “World Heritage in Danger” list of UNESCO if the “authenticity and integrity of the site” is affected and it gains “negative visual impact”.

Visual impact is everything at the sprawling complex.

Its builder, the Mughal emperor Shah Jahan, spent his last years imprisoned in the Agra Fort.

But his son and usurper, Aurangzeb, allowed his father the concession of a window that afforded a panoramic view of the grandest of his constructions, which include the Red Fort and the Jama Masjid in the national capital.

It had taken Shah Jahan 22 years to lovingly build the symmetrical minarets, dome and mosques of the Taj Mahal, using pure white marble and embellishing it with calligraphy and fine inlay work, as a mausoleum to his favourite wife Mumtaz Mahal.

Enterprise based on the “monument to love” began even while Shah Jahan was on the famed peacock throne.

Historians have recovered letters written by Aurangzeb to his father claiming to have carried out repair work on the Taj Mahal using golden dowels. But the wily prince used ordinary iron while stashing away the differences to build a war chest.

This he effectively used to defeat the imperial armies and seize the Mughal empire, which included what is now Afghanistan and Pakistan and stretched to Burma in the east.

The iron dowels were believed to be responsible for cracks that allowed water to seep in and collect dangerously in the sealed upper dome. When water suddenly gushed out into the main cenotaph chamber in the mid-80s, it sparked a public outcry.

Not everybody is happy with that description though and Hindu extremist groups who see it more as symbol of imperial Islam than anything else have added to the headaches of those charged with its safety.

In October 2001, supporters of the Prime Minister Atal Bihari Vajpayee’s pro-Hindu Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) defaced it while he was visiting Agra.

In March 1997, the Greek music composer Yanni used the Taj Mahal as the backdrop for a live concert that he cautiously staged on the opposite banks of the Jamuna river.

Even then, he managed to raise a cacophony of protests. Silence descended only after Yanni’s baton rang down, and he donated the close to three million dollars he earned from the concert to a fund meant for the preservation of the monument.

Historians like Romila Thapar point out that the real danger lay in the promotion of a mausoleum, where prayers continue to be held, as a “commercial object”.

“Where all this money is going nobody knows,” Thapar said in a refrain that must have echoed through centuries around that “bubble or marble” as the writer Mark Twain called it.

Still, the Taj is a lot safer and better regarded now than it was in 1830, when Lord William Bentinck, the British colonial governor general of India, devised a plan to dismantle the Taj Mahal and auction off the marble in Britain.

Had Bentinck collected enough money to cover shipping costs, there would have been nothing left.—Dawn/InterPress News Service.