The Honourable Judge Raghunath Tiwari had been a civil court judge in Lucknow for twenty-two years, and in those twenty-two years he had seen property disputes of every possible variety — disputes between families, between companies, between neighbours who had hated each other for three generations over six square feet of shared wall. He had seen disputes over land, over flats, over agricultural plots, over parking spaces, over the exact boundary of a veranda that had been causing problems since 1987.
He had never seen a property dispute quite like this one.
The dispute was over Flat 4-C, Shivam Residency, Civil Lines, Lucknow — a three-bedroom apartment in one of the cleaner parts of the city, owned, according to one set of documents, by the Uttar Pradesh unit of the Bharatiya Janata Party as constituency accommodation for their Lucknow North candidate, and owned, according to a different set of documents, by the Samajwadi Alliance as a registered party office and constituency campaign base.
Both sets of documents were legitimate. Both sets had been legitimately registered through legitimately different mechanisms at legitimately different sub-registrar offices, which was either an enormous administrative coincidence or — and Judge Tiwari's twenty-two years strongly suggested the latter — a piece of deliberate political maneuvering by one or both parties that had gone wrong in a way neither had anticipated.
