Central Vista is
the Indian prime minister’s dream, to bequeath the world’s largest democracy a
capital that radiates native authenticity. The central vista precinct extends from the Rashtrapati Bhavan to India
Gate. It includes the North Block, South Block, the Parliament building, and
the central government secretariat buildings along Rajpath and all the way up
to the India Gate circle, and all the plots of land immediately around it.
According to the proposal, which does not have a detailed project report (DPR),
a redevelopment of the central vista is intended to take place, which shall
include construction of the new parliament building at the intersection of the
triangle of the Red Cross Road and the Raisina Road. The plan includes the
demolition of a few existing secretariat buildings like Shastri Bhavan and Rail
Bhavan etc, as well as the National Museum, the Ministry of External Affairs
building, Vice-President’s residence, and all other buildings along Rajpath with
the now sole exception of the National Archives.
For more than five
decades, the most mundane and exalted deliberations of Indian democracy were
enacted within Parliament House’s annular walls of heavy sandstone, which house
the Lok Sabha, the Rajya Sabha, and the majestically domed Central Hall ,where joint
sessions of both houses are held on rare occasions and proclaimed the birth of
modern India.
In the summer of
2002, the then speaker of the Indian parliament, Manohar Joshi, became
convinced that the building in which he worked, the circular Parliament House
built by the British, was cursed. A string of Joshi’s senior colleagues
had died in rapid succession over the preceding year. His predecessor as
speaker of the Lok Sabha, was killed in a freak helicopter crash months before
parliament convened that monsoon. The vice president of India, who chaired the
Rajya Sabha, died when parliament was in session. And eight months before the
vice president’s abrupt departure, more than half a dozen security personnel
had lost their lives in a gun battle at the gates of Parliament House while
thwarting armed militants backed by Pakistan from storming it. A massacre
had been averted, but death and division continued to haunt and paralyse the
corridors of power. Indian troops, awaiting orders on the border to punch into
Pakistan, were weighed down by heavy casualties. In New Delhi, the business of
government was juddering to a halt. Joshi, newly installed as speaker of the
Lok Sabha by the Bharatiya Janata Party which led a fragile coalition of a
dozen minor parties in government, decided to act. He summoned Ashwini
Kumar Bansal, a lawyer and a specialist in Vastu — the ancient Indian
discipline of architecture, akin to the Chinese Feng Shui — to survey
Parliament House and recommend remedies to rescue India.
Bansal, who has
published 30 books on Vastu and Feng Shui, spent two days wandering the
verandas and halls of the colonnaded camera contrived by Herbert Baker almost
as an appendage to the stupendous acropolis conceived by Edwin Lutyens. Bansal
experienced this during his inspection of the place. “It is the circular building,”
he declared in a confidential memo to the speaker, “which ails the nation’s
polity. To Bansal, it was an odd piece of architecture made according to the
whims and fancies of a foreigner. It evinced no fidelity to Hindu, Islamic, or Christian
conventions of construction, and its round shape,
evocative of zero and epitomising void and nothingness, endowed it with a
mystical power to destroy anything that interacts with it”. Bansal, citing
the sudden demise of a host of members of parliament and their children as
evidence of the building’s ill-fated, ascribed the unnatural deaths of four
Indian prime ministers to the flaws he detected in its configuration. He
advised the speaker to vacate the building, convert it into a museum, and
relocate parliament post-haste to a nearby convention center.
Bansal’s report,
commissioned and reviewed in all seriousness, was never acted upon. Anxious
that its contents might elicit hoots of derision from the left and the
Anglophone liberal elites who viewed Vastu as pseudoscience, Joshi sat on it.
When early elections were called two years later, the government was voted out
of the office and so was Joshi. As a result, the idea of moving parliament
appeared fated to fall by the wayside thereafter. But it was quietly mooted
again in 2012 by the Congress Party, which adduced wear and tear and health and
safety as the reasons for shifting out, and again it died in committee until
Narendra Modi revitalized it.
Unlike his forerunners,
Modi was not constrained by the demands of allies. The triumph of the BJP under
his leadership in the elections of 2014 shattered a 25-year spell of coalition
governments. Modi was not merely a prime minister in the traditional sense but commended
by his followers as nothing less than the father of what his admirers call “New
India”. And so what had been a relatively minor yet contentious idea to
renovate or relocate parliament blossomed under his supervision into a
gargantuan vanity project to raise a new New Delhi with more than 20000 crores allocated
for this venture.
New
Delhi was born as the physical expression of imperial power. It was to be, in
the words of Lord Hardinge, the Viceroy to India who became its most passionate
advocate, “the assertion of an unfaltering determination to maintain British
rule in India”. Calcutta, practically invented by the British and appointed the
capital of India after the subcontinent was assimilated into the empire
following the Mutiny of 1857, had outgrown its utility by the end of the nineteenth
century. The British had unwittingly imported a modern nationalist
consciousness to the Bengali natives who now clamored for concessions.
Transferring the capital from the troubled eastern extreme to Delhi would not
only strengthen British control. It would also enable Britain to cast itself as
the legitimate successor to the great native dynasties that once ruled from the
city.
No quarter was
given to warnings that Delhi was the graveyard of empires and dynasties. And on
15 December 1911, against great opposition from the mercantile set that
flourished in Calcutta, King George V, the only monarch to set foot in India,
laid the foundation stones for New Delhi. Edwin Lutyens, selected as the
principal architect, delegated lesser buildings to Herbert Baker. Each arrived
in India with his own ideas. Hardinge attempted to impress his pre-eminence on
the pair by reminding them that New Delhi “should be built in accordance with
Indian sentiments”. “Who are we building for,” he asked, “the Indian or the
British public?”
Lutyens, with an
impressive reputation and even more impressive connections — his
father-in-law, Lord Lytton, had served as Viceroy in Bengal when Queen Victoria
was proclaimed Empress of India was exasperated by such stipulations. He was
not without reverence for India’s antiquity and wished to represent her amazing
sense of the supernatural, with its complement to profound fatalism and
enduring patience in his work. But his appreciation of India existed
alongside a good measure of contempt for Indians. He ridiculed their
architecture scorned the low intellect of the natives, declared it undesirable
for Indians and whites to mix freely, and opined that mixed marriage is filthy
and beastly.
Hardinge had
dreamt of raising capital directly facing the walled city of Shahjahanabad
, Old Delhi, now the mausoleum of Mughal rule. Such a creation might have forced
racial and cultural intermixture. But the dread of disease, combined with a
lack of space, prompted the construction to be moved to the relative wilderness
of south Delhi, from where the central axis of the imperial capital radiated
eastward. Its gaze, averted from the subjects whose awe it was intended to
inspire, was directed instead at the vacant banks of the Yamuna river.
Suggestions to scrap the project proliferated as it made its difficult
progress. The eruption of the First World War only intensified opposition to
the costly enterprise. But Lutyens, though he moved in and out of the country
and undertook other projects, worked like a man possessed. Beginning at what is
now India Gate, a prodigious classical arch conceptualised by Lutyens to
commemorate soldiers who fell in the Great War, a broad processional way moved
for two tree-lined miles west to Government House. This palace of rhubarb
sandstone, built on 350 acres of flattened land on Raisina Hill to act as the
official residence of the Viceroy, was a marvel of civilizational
amalgamation.
Lutyens dedicated
every ounce of his intellect and soul to devising and perfecting it, from the
31 regal stairs that rise from its expansive forecourt to the 340 ornate rooms
nestled in its four storeys to the 227 Tuscan columns whose capitals, doing
away with coy Ionic volutes, were ornamented with bold Indian temple bells
sculpted in stone. The lofty central dome, a fusion of the great Buddhist
Stupa at Sanchi and the Pantheon of Rome, was laminated with copper and twice
the height of the complex it crowned. The lavish 13-acre Mughal garden, laid
out in quadrants divided by walkways and furbelowed with fountains, remains to
this day an eden of geometric precision.
Lutyens’s
principal personal regret upon its completion was that he could no longer wander
about it whenever I want to. It was not only the highest achievement of his
career; it was also the greatest single material accomplishment of the British
Raj. Robert Byron, the first critic to tour it, was far from exaggerating when
he declaimed that it had no rival, ancient or modern. Mahatma Gandhi, affronted by its opulence, wanted it converted into a
hospital but Republican India moved its president into it.
Government House
was flanked on either side by the Secretariat buildings put up by Herbert
Baker. Domed, red, and grafted with Indian motifs, they grew out of Baker’s
ambition to “give architectural expression to a common dignity and distinction
in the instrument of government as a united whole”. He had argued strenuously
for the Secretariats to be sited on the same elevated plain Lutyens had
earmarked exclusively for Government House. Lutyens pushed his building further
back in return for assurances that Baker’s Secretariats would not obscure the
view of his own masterwork. But that is what they did.
A “colossal the artistic blunder has been made,” Lutyens told Baker in a furious letter after
his attempts to force through alterations were rebuffed by London, “and future
generations will, I am convinced, recognise this and condemn its
perpetrator.” The vice-regal mansion envisaged as the axial point of the
city became practically invisible. Only its dome remained discernible from the
processional way. From this stupefying center extended a hexagonal maze of
interminably long boulevards that intersected at enormous roundabouts. The
Indian hierarchies of caste, perfectly complementing the British gradations of
class, were co-opted almost unselfconsciously by Lutyens into the design of New
Delhi.
On either side of
these roads, the public works department built bungalows with gardens that
ranged, depending upon the rank of the occupant, from a few furlongs to several
acres. The entire enterprise cost about £10 million. Willingly or not, Lutyens
had imparted a strange segregationist stamp on the city’s topography. When it
was inaugurated in 1931, the demographic of its airy interior was almost
exclusively. Its periphery, rather than tapering away, intensified with
Indian life. But New Delhi in the end did more to fortify the native
spirit than to fracture it. “Liberty does not descend upon a People,” Baker had
inscribed in gold letters above the entrance to his Secretariats, “A
People must raise themselves to Liberty.” By the time of the British arrival,
India had become so accustomed to being conquered, so habituated to being trodden upon, so detached from its past, that, as V.S. Naipaul once wrote, anyone
wishing to own an empire in the medieval world had only to stroll into India,
where the natives were willing to “build anybody a new Delhi”.
India’s ancient architectural
treasures, as the novelist Manu Joseph has observed, had
been wiped out by waves of pre-colonial invasions, and what remained bespoke
“the bravado of India’s conquerors”. It is only with the coming of the British,
with all the attendant savagery and plunder, that India’s revival began. Indian
nationalists denied this, but their movement could not have been possible in
the absence of the intellectual stimulus supplied by the British presence. Mahatma
Gandhi’s non-violent agitation for independence was the most elaborate
compliment ever paid by an oppressed people to their oppressors. New Delhi
consecrated Indian unity by granting India a definite center. Baker’s boast
that the new capital united “for the first time through the centuries all races
and religions of India” was not entirely empty. New Delhi drew India to it.
There is no other seat of government in the world, with the possible exception
of Washington, DC, that can rival it in scale or splendor. So extraordinary it
seemed even to contemplate that, as Baker confided to Lutyens, it “would only
be possible … under a despotism”. Its realisation, clarifying the conflict
between the rhetoric and the conduct of Britain in India, quickened the demise
of the Raj, almost every stage of the city’s advance coincided with a
corresponding collapse of the crown’s authority. Britain, challenged by Indian
nationalists in the language they had appropriated from the colonial power,
withdrew from India within 16 years of New Delhi’s birth.
Conceived in
hubris and executed with the hand of despotism, New Delhi became the laboratory
for history’s most audacious experiment in democracy after Britain’s exit. The
city’s slow physical deterioration thereafter was accompanied by the loss of
its prestige in the Indian consciousness as it became associated with, and
indistinguishable from, the spectacularly corrupt Congress establishment
presided over by the Nehru-Gandhi dynasty that ruled India for over half a
century.
Lutyens Delhi,
once signifying all that was noble about republican India, metamorphosed gradually
into a phrase that conjured up all its obscenities. It became, a metonym for
moral decay. The politicians who decried it most vehemently were those who
coveted it most passionately.
Modi was propelled
to power on a promise of draining Lutyens Delhi of the remnants of the
Anglo-Indian encounter. He was the hope pg the multitudes who had been sneered
at, marginalised, and subjected to cultural condescension and objectified for
anthropological amusement by India’s preening caste of English-speaking elites
who ran the country for most of its post-colonial existence. Modi saw himself
as an agent of destiny, the first self-consciously Hindu leader in centuries to
rule India from Delhi with an almost untrammeled authority. Last year,
ignoring protests from conservationists, he invited bids for the remaking of
New Delhi’s Central Vista. Half a dozen plans, crafted by firms flush with
cash, were eventually shortlisted by the government. One architect proposed
planting a star fashioned from glass multiple times the size of India Gate
right behind it as a symbol of a rising India. The crowning jewel of another proposal
was an iconic beacon again erected behind India Gate intended to serve as a new
landmark for New Delhi. The lucrative redesign contract was handed to
Bimal Patel, Modi’s fellow Gujarati and longstanding friend.
Many anguished and Anya Malhotra, a translator, and
Sohail Hashmi, a historian and documentary filmmaker, moved the HC to halt the
ongoing Central Vista Avenue Redevelopment Project. They argued that the
project was not an essential activity and therefore, could be put on hold in
light of the pandemic. Petitioners’ counsel, senior advocate Siddharth Luthra,
argued they were not seeking to overreach the Supreme Court’s January
judgment that permitted the Central Vista, and that the plea to stop the
construction was limited to the peak phase of the pandemic. The Centre said
that the petition is an attempt to halt the project with oblique motives.
A bench of Delhi High Court of Chief Justice D.N. Patel
and Justice Jyoti Singh passing order concluded that the Central Vista Project
is an essential project of national importance and needs to be completed in a
time-bound manner, and dismissed a Public Interest Litigation (PIL) seeking to
put on hold the ongoing construction activity amidst the raging second wave of
the pandemic and slapped a fine of Rs one lakh on the petitioners for filing
what the court described as a “motivated petition” and not a “genuine one.”
All set, Patel’s
plan is to build a new parliament, spired and triangular in shape and fit for a thousand occupants, opposite the existing structure; raze the administrative
blocks that went up after 1947 and replace them with a series of secretariats
of stone façade and glass-and-steel interior, big enough to accommodate a
hundred thousand bureaucrats, on either side of the processional way from India
Gate to Raisina Hill, and connect the buildings with an underground railway
system.
The existing
parliament and secretariats will become museums. A new mansion for Prime
Minister, not part of the original proposal approved by the government and
inserted quietly after it had been signed off, will go up next to Lutyens’s
presidential palace. Another building will be raised within its compound to
house the vice president. “These new iconic structures,” the Modi regime says,
“shall be a legacy for 150 to 200 years at the very least.”
Outside a very
small circle, nobody knows what is going to be leveled and what will remain
untouched. Modi’s decision in 2015 to withdraw Delhi’s application to
Unesco to be included in the list of World Heritage Cities means that nothing,
despite the government’s guarantees, is truly safe. What seems certain is that
in the summer of 2022, when India turns 75, parliament will convene in a new
building that will be a monument to Modi’s rule.
