Lopsided priorities

The two news items that have recently hogged media limelight and were the cause of a lot of breathless excitement on 24-hour news channels, dealt with the issue of heritage and conservation. These are not issues that normally engage the masses and “their media” in any sustained manner. This extraordinary interest should make us pause and reflect, because there is something here that does not fit the general picture.

The first news nugget was about a proposal from the Ministry of Urban Development to raze to the ground and rebuild the 516 bungalows that occupy the so called Lutyens’ Bungalow Zone (LBZ) in the erstwhile Imperial Delhi, known today as New Delhi. Built in the Twenties and Thirties of the last century, these bungalows are occupied by ministers, higher judiciary, senior officers of the armed forces and senior bureaucrats. It is proposed that 29 bungalows that have been declared ‘structurally unsafe’ be taken up for rebuilding in the first instance, at an approximate cost of Rs78 crores at the rate of approximately Rs2.7 crore per bungalow. If all the 516 were to be rebuilt simultaneously and at current prices, taxpayers will have to pay Rs1,393.2 crore. But the proposal is to rebuild these bungalows, in phases over a 20-year period, and the total estimated expenditure on construction has been kept at Rs3,000 crore. We shall return to this bit a little later in this article.

The second media item carried the news that the committee of experts that had been working at a proposal to request UNESCO to declare Delhi as a Heritage City, had completed its work, and the proposal was now ready for formal consideration of UNESCO. That, if everything falls in place, Delhi will be a heritage city by 2015. The proposal for acquiring heritage status for Delhi includes Shahjahanabad and New Delhi and this is the interesting part.

Normally, and this is the norm all over the world, a building or structure is included in the heritage list once it is more than a 100-125 years old. Not one building in all of New Delhi, excluding pre-British ruins of course, is even 100 years old. Age, however, is not the only criterion; the structure should also have some architectural or archaeological significance. Most surviving old buildings inside Shahjahanabad   have architectural and historical merit. Shahjahanabad is a city that was inaugurated around 1640  — almost 375 years ago. New Delhi, on the other hand, was inaugurated in 1931. The city will be 83 years old on February 13, 1914. While there is frenzied lobbying for converting New Delhi, especially the LBZ into a heritage zone, one does not see even an iota of similar concern for heritage from the Urban Development Ministry for Shahjahanabad and its many structures, streets, gardens, markets, lifestyle, language, cuisine, music and language.

It takes a couple of centuries at least before a settlement begins to approximate a city, many elements have to combine together in a compact geographical area for it to evolve into a city and all these elements are present, even today, in some shape or the other in Shahjahanabad — incidentally, it is the marked absence of all these elements that defines New Delhi. In fact, New Delhi was never meant to be a city; it was conceived as a symbol of imperial might, the jewel in the crown, a showpiece but nothing more. It was and continues to be a grandiose and hollow symbol of political power — a settlement without any resident population.

The ministers, the top rung of officialdom, the higher echelons of the judiciary and the seniormost secretaries to the government are all here as long as their tenure lasts. After that they retire to their places of birth or elsewhere. Till today New Delhi, aside from voluminous reports, has not produced anything. It has no crafts that it can call its own, no working class, no industry, no wholesale markets, no cuisine to call its own, no traditional hang-outs and none of the cultural markers that turn a habitat into a city.

This hullabaloo created by the Ministry of Urban Affairs is, therefore aimed at preserving a set of buildings that are barely 80 years old. By the way their life was meant to be 60 years and had the British continued to rule they would have replaced them with something else by now. But just as we stick to antiquated and antediluvian relics of the Raj, like Article 377, we also insist on preserving these Bungalows in the LBZ

This whole noise about heritage conservation begins to sound even more hollow when one realises that Lutyens designed only four Bungalows in the Viceregal Estate, near Wellington Crescent — the President’s Estate near Mother Teresa Crescent of today. What we are trying to preserve in Lutyens name were designed by junior engineers and other minions he had at his beck and call during the building of New Delhi.

And now we return to the proposal to rebuild. Heritage conservation demands that while restoring a heritage structure we use the same materials, the same instruments and the same building techniques that were employed while the original structure was built. The proposal moved by the Ministry of Urban Development talks of rebuilding these structures and making them earthquake-proof and to furnish them with all modern amenities and fittings that did not exist when the original construction took place. Obviously, this is a new building project with an original cost estimate of Rs3,000 crore, which will surely escalate as the value of rupee continues to nosedive and that of the US dollar continues to travel north.

How does one reconcile these two moves? On the one hand, is the effort to get the approval of the UNESCO to get the LBZ declared a heritage site, and this would mean not changing the original but only preserving and restoring. On the other hand, yet another department is getting to bring in big time construction companies to dig up and rebuild the entire residential quarter in New Delhi.

This can’t simply be a case of the right hand of the government not knowing what the left is up to. This sounds more like an orchestrated fraud perpetrated on both the public and the conservationists.

The author blogs at Kafila.org and conducts heritage walks in Delhi