 Welcome once again to this episode on the Central Vista. And as you are aware, we've been running a series on the Central Vista. In fact, we started long back when it was being envisioned. And at that time we were going to walk to Central Vista. And now it's apparently not possible to walk along the Central Vista because it's in that fact. And in the series today, we have a watch page to talk about the issue of the Central Vista, especially this trajectory that has taken place from the Nenubian model of the Central Vista to the modern. I mean, I won't even call it post-modernism. It's probably more to do with feudal mindset. Yeah, the way it's being done. And welcome to this show. And let me also use the Nyaam. So it doesn't require much introduction. Nyaam is a writer, a historian, and is also a fellow with the Center for Development Society here in India. And she's offered many books. And one of the books that I think is mentioned here is The Right is a Public or Political Foundation. Welcome, Anand. And I'm not sure whether you've watched our previous shows, but, you know, we've done series right from having somebody calling it, you know, linked with Vastu. Somebody saying it's a complete waste of money. The other saying, why are you doing this pandemic? But, you know, there has been both. And of course, the severest of criticism has come from the architects who are pointing out that, you know, it's either it's truly professional, be some of them are even pointing fingers at, you know, the drawing a parallel between what Hitler and Albert Speer were doing in Germany. Quite similar to that is what we have been seeing here in the Central West now. But yeah, I think you have your own take on it. I mean, what do you think? I mean, is it a genuinely thoroughly discussed plan? Or is it just more to do with, you know, new biopic of our prime minister who is really the value force for the Central Vista? You know, I mean, I think that there are a lot of questions about the need to redo the Central Vista, the particular changes that are being made, the speed at which the project is progressing, the way in which laws, conventions, norms, precedents, regulations, you know, institutional jurisdictions, all of that has been disregarded and set aside in order to enable this to go ahead in a particular manner. And according to a particular sort of brief, right? A particular? Brief that I think the, you know, the architects and the builders have from the government, from the highest levels of the government. And in order to, you know, realize that brief, I think there's been, you know, a complete kind of overriding of what are the actual limitations of the space, what are the capacities, what are the needs and, you know, what are going to be the costs of this whole enterprise? So, you know, I'm a historian and I mean, my initial concern was with, I mean, I've written about the constitution and the making of the constitution and I, you know, I work on a bait car and I have visited the parliament just before 2014 national elections. I went to actually look at, you know, look at the building and look at the way things were arranged. I was trying to reimagine the Constituent Assembly debates and so my first concern was, you know, why do we need a new parliament and what's going to happen to the existing Sunset government and, you know, why all of a sudden this very drastic dramatic kind of addition. So what do you think why, when you say why, I mean, what do you think why? Well, I mean, the explanation that's been given is that, you know, we're going to have more constituencies. There's going to be a delimitation of constituencies and more legislators. So we, you know, we're going to have more members of parliament and we need a larger space and the space that is there is not enough, it's not comfortable, it's very cramped, et cetera, these kind of explanations. But still, you know, you feel that you could possibly have, you know, a set of renovations, a set of expansions within the existing structure. You don't necessarily need to build a whole new structure and that too in a drastically different shape, you know, which will totally overpower and sort of undermine the historic, you know, the round building of the original constitution, of the original parliament house, the Sons of Burma. In any case, so that's where I kind of first became aware of what is happening. And then I also live in Delhi and, you know, even though there's been a lockdown and, you know, movement has been very restricted over the last 15, 16 months, nevertheless, you know, one knows if a certain part of town there's going to be a massive construction project and roads are closed and, you know, entire kind of areas are blocked off and access becomes difficult to central Delhi, to the India Gate area, to the whole Lachin's area, to Karnat place and so on. So then, you know, I began to realize that this is really going to take a very long time to realize this building of the parliament. And it's going to really sort of, you know, bring central Delhi to a halt for effectively for people who live in the city for a number of years. But really my alarm sort of went through the roof, started going through the roof and I realized that the National Museum and the National Archives, as well as the Indra Gandhi National Center for the Arts, all three of which are institutions that, I mean, I, you know, have used for work to look for manuscripts or to look at art objects, you know, for all kinds of historical research. And these are, you know, places I've been going throughout my academic career, throughout my life, from the time I was a student and earlier at one point, I was also a fellow at Teemudvi at the Nehru Memorial Museum and Library. So, you know, I've had a lot to do with these institutions. Yeah, just tell me. Yeah, just tell me. The idea that probably would maybe moved, but that the very buildings, the structures would be demolished and that we had no clear sense of where they would be relocated, how soon they would be relocated and how actually they would make, you know, they would transfer the contents of any of these, you know, the Archives Museum or the IGNCA, how they would safely, you know, move all the contents of these three institutions to new locations and why, you know, that became a real subject of concern, not just for me, but for the entire community of art historians, of researchers, of, you know, people at all who deal professionally with, you know, with the past and who need sources, who need archives, you know. Tell me, Ananya, I mean, that that is another question. What is it that you are fearing? Because the government and, you know, various agencies of government including the Ministry of Health Affairs have categorically said that, look, everything will be preserved or shall I say, will be protected. But you're saying it's not clear, I mean, where would you find them? All that material that is there. And, you know, they, I can understand the need for bringing down some of the older buildings, but even some of the buildings are not even 40 years to the, I mean, since they were constructed. So what is it that you're fearing? I mean, I mean, do you think because some of the historians earlier pointed out, they want to erase, you know, the historical, the so-called modernism of our historical, conjunctures or, you know, whatever you've been able to do in post-independence. So are you drawing kind of similar conclusion while doing so? Or is it just that you are making a point? Let's look, take care of it. Well, no, I mean, there's, there's a couple of things here that are of concern. Okay, one is the sort of physical location, the centrality and the accessibility of, you know, key national institutions, right? I mean, a museum, a nationalism, the national archives, right? You know, different states have archives, different parts of the country. I mean, I've traveled all over the country for research and I've used the Maharashtra State Archives, which are in Mumbai in the, you know, in the Elphinstone College building. I've used, you know, I've looked at museums in Calcutta, in, you know, all over the country, right? But the point is that this is your national museum, right? It is the key museum, which represents the entire kind of art history of the Indian nation in its kind of, you know, post-colonial avatar. And it's full of priceless things, right? Similarly, the National Archives, and there are millions and millions of documents there. The IGNCA is a more specialized institution, but it has a fabulous collection of manuscripts, you know, and I actually work with Sanskrit and with pre-modern pre-colonial archives and texts. I work primarily on texts. And I've been using the IGNCA, you know, since I was, you know, a student at JNU. So there's a library there as well, a very large and excellent library for pre-modernists. So one issue is, you know, do we have a complete inventory of what is in each of these places? Do we have safe ways to store them, pack them up, move them somewhere else, and then put them out again for display, right? Is there enough space to do that? That's one set of issues, right? But the other set of issues is that, you know, these buildings and others in that area basically constitute a kind of cultural district, right? A key cultural district, right? Which is also walkable, right? So there's a lot of footfalls, there's a lot of tourist traffic. People come to see the National Museum from all over the world, right? And at the same time, they're also able to visit the India Gate. They're also able to see the Rasupati Bhavan. They're also able to, you know, have a tour of that entire kind of, you know, seat of government which is, you know, quite ceremonial and also marks the transition that India made from a British colony to an independent republic, right? So it's a lot of open space and there's a lot of things to see and do, not just for specialists like me who are actually going to use the materials that are there, but also for travelers, for tourists, for people who come to Delhi for the first time, they could be Indians, they could be foreigners and so on. And for scholars and researchers who've come from the world over. So there's a lot of, you know, advantage to all these things being close together where they are currently basically at the intersection of Rajput and Janpur, you know, on either side of Janpur. So, you know, you can walk, you know, and spend a day or two and you would be able to see, you know, the sites as it were. Secondly, all these buildings and campuses, I mean, you know, of course they have problems in the sense that they need to be refurbished, they need repairs, you know, they need upkeep, they need updating, right? In terms of their technological and infrastructure, kind of facilities, you know, their ability to keep old things safe, you know, you need the right kind of temperatures and light control and air conditioning, you need the right kind of computing power, you need the right kind of public facilities, you know, bathrooms, cafes, shops and so on. You know, you need all of that, but you can also do that whilst retaining what is, you know, a very graceful and historic set of buildings, but also the fact that they're clustered together in a way that is very, very convenient, even if you're on foot as a visitor, a traveler or, you know, a user of any of these places. So that now seems to be all about to go away, right? In the sense that these buildings will be demolished, right? Which is in itself a loss of heritage, even if it's not colonial heritage, it's post-colonial heritage, even if these buildings are not 100 years old, but they're only 40, 50 years old, that's still a loss, right? Because they exemplify a certain stage of the early republic, the early years of independence, you know, when the early kind of administration of Nehru was busy building up all these institutions and so many well-known architects, curators, artists, designers, you know, were brought in to kind of, you know, create this vista and create this district, this cultural district. So first of all, all of that is going to be scattered in different places, different parts of the city, okay? And we don't even know clearly exactly where anything is going. Secondly, we are not assured of the safety of the objects themselves. And thirdly, it's hard to understand, you know, why you can't fix up what are basically very good buildings with a sound kind of capacity and design, rather than, you know, going all out and trying to make everything from scratch, right? Or moving, as in the case of the National Museum, we've been told that potentially all its contents are going to go to the North Block and the South Block, which are currently government offices, further up the rise in a hill. And that suggests, you know, there's no imagination that buildings are designed to suit a particular purpose. Now, an office building is not a museum building and was a birdsong, right? And the kind of, you know, work that would take to convert one into the other, when you already have a perfectly good museum, right? Which you could, you know, who could renovate, right? That part isn't clear at all, right? And that's why we've been asked to do it. Too loud, I mean, but then you can answer both of them together. A, because, you know, large number of our viewers, are not historians, they don't know, yeah, they don't know much about the National Archives. So, when you are building this argument that it is so important to preserve every bit of the manuscripts, every bit of what we have collected, post-colonial, even, even, even, even past, because I believe archives have all them. So, how do you translate or correlate it to a common man? You know, the common person, and why is it important? Be also, I mean, because I come from a political background in the sense that, you know, so explain it politically. You know, Nehru was kind of someone who steered modernism and bringing out diversity of a country. So, it really took time to develop infrastructure, trying to develop, you know, that whole consciousness amongst our countrymen. And that's why you have this large district that is in the cultural district here. But then over the period of time, we are finding this transformation that is taking place. One part of it is already taken away by the war memorial, you know, so that pride of the nation, you know, fighting some enemies. And then now, again, this would be usurped by the government agencies to just showcase the look, the government is very powerful. So, just answer both these questions. I mean, how, I mean, is there a relationship between both? I mean, both the things that there is. Yeah. So, your first question was, you know, how would ordinary people and citizens relate to this whole question? I mean, would they see it as being urgent, right? And I think the answer is yes. Because Anand, they just left me a point out, because, you know, they can correlate by their open spaces being usurped by, you know, their urban commons being taken over, for example. But particularly what you've mentioned about this, you know, the historical value of it. Yeah, let me understand that. I mean, you know, when you visit any place, you know, it could be a small place, like your hometown, like Shimla, right? Or, which actually was the summer capital of the British, right? Or you visit, you know, one of the great centres of modern Indian art, Baroda, right? Or you go to Shantini Kepa, right? Or you go to, of course, a big city like Calcutta, Mumbai, or you go abroad anywhere, you go to Rome, you go to, you know, Paris, you go to Berlin. What do you always, as a visitor, want to see, right? You want to see the historic part of the city. You want to see the sights, right? You want to see the monuments. You want to get a sense of, you know, how the urban layout reflects, right? The culture, the history, the past, the present, you know, the mentality of the place that you're in, right? So just like people would go to Old Delhi, right? Or people would go to Nizamunddin, or people would go to Meroli, right? When they come to see Delhi, people also go to Lachin's Delhi, and they go to Kanat place, and they go to India Gate, right? So if you're going to completely transform, let's say one part of this historic kind of, you know, center, the heart of the capital, right? That concerns everybody. That doesn't just concern people who are actually going into the museum or the archives, you know, with a view to study, you know, objects or documents that are preserved there, right? And the open spaces all around, you know, the lawns from where you watch the Republic Day Parade, you know, where you can, you know, go and take a walk in the evening, you know, where protests are held and have been held in recent years over all kinds of issues, right? Where spontaneously people can gather. I mean, there is a feeling of public-ness to this entire area, right? Even though it houses the presidential palace, the Rajapathy Pavan, it is nevertheless open for people to see, enjoy, and use, right? And to feel part of a kind of collective, right? Of citizenry and of, you know, sort of being ordinary Indians, right? Without fear or favor. So in that sense, you know, you've seen thousands of people signing these petitions which are circulating online. And most of those people are not at all specialists or historians or scholars or architects or anything like that. They're just like regular people saying, why are you tearing up the most iconic, beautiful part of our capital city, right? Now the second question you asked was about the politics, right, of this entire venture. And there we enter into genuinely problematic territory. Because I think that, you know, this administration's regime, I would say, that is, you know, currently in power. I mean, has been very keen to minimize or undermine the role of, you know, Nehruvian, specifically Nehruvian ideology and Nehruvian developmentalism and Nehruvian socialism in the making of modern India. I mean, in their view, from a Hindu right perspective, you know, India took a wrong turn at independence by going in that direction and by becoming sort of, you know, the kind of secular socialist democratic developing country that it was throughout the 60s, 60s, 70s, 80s, 90s and even, you know, until quite recently. But the point is, you know, you may disagree ideologically with the way things happened, right? But those were popular decisions. There was an electoral mandate just like there is today, right? And at the time, a very big task faced the new government, right, which was to create an independent idea of identity, right? Which was authentic, which was rooted in the past, but which was also, you know, aspiring to make India, you know, powerful, self-sufficient, you know, the world's largest democracy when it had emerged from the shadow of colonialism through a big struggle, right? So how to do that? How to retain the legacy of a rich and complex and very diverse past, right? For a very vast population, right? With very little resources and at the same time, create the institution and the infrastructure so that things would continuously get better and India would become stronger and freer, right? It would realize the promise that was made at the time of independence. So in order to do that, you know, a lot of things had to be built, built for the first time and nobody says that mistakes weren't made, you know? We now see the kind of downside of the green revolution. We see the downside of a certain kind of developmentalism which is not ecologically sensitive, right? We are living with, you know, massive pollution. We are living with resource scarcity, right? We are living with a certain kind of urbanism which is very, very problematic. It's not sustainable, right? We have models of development that are not sustainable. So those mistakes were made, but at the same time, it's an entire kind of era, you know, half a century or more of India's history, of India's modern history, right? And you can't simply erase it, physically erase it and start over, right? And pretend that it never happened, right? You have to work with what the past gives you in order to fashion maybe a different path, right? That remains to be seen, but it can't be, you know, it can't be by executive order, you know, that you simply stamp out what was before, right? And say that, you know, this is worthless and this is completely wrong, you know? It isn't, first of all, you know, it has served us well for the most part, right? And there are many things there to be proud of. And whilst preserving and valuing those, we need to think about what we need for the future, right? But that kind of consensus-building exercise has not been undertaken, especially around this Central Visca redevelopment, right? People have not been taken on board, you know, advice has not been taken from those who are experienced, those who are experts, those who know what they're talking about, you know, whether it's planners or it's conservationists or it's people in heritage or people in architecture, people in, you know, urban affairs, you know, historians, nobody's been sort of taken on board, right? And instead a whole series of these announcements are made, right, but now this is gonna happen. Now that is gonna happen. We're gonna build this, we're gonna break that, you know, we're gonna expand this, we're gonna demolish that. But, you know, you need to explain to the public why this is necessary, why it's important, how it is justified, and how it's gonna be paid for. And especially during a pandemic, and national emergency, a health emergency, the worst kind of public disaster you've had, you know, since World War II, right? Or on such a scale globally, right? And India is the worst hit, of course, you know, given its population. So why is it that, you know, we have to be redesigning, you know, a part of our capital city when our resources would be better put elsewhere? That is a political question. It's not just, you know, a design question or an aesthetic question. Got it. Now the last point, I mean, of course, this is what I've been asking all the time. What do you see as a future? You know, this is what I ask everyone. Sure, you said to this guy, what do you think is going to happen? See, I'm not very encouraged by the track record of this government. In terms of any of their big schemes, right? I mean, I feel there is a pattern here and there is a tendency to make a big announcement, make a big splash, you know, you know, suddenly declare, you know, anything from demonetization to a lockdown to, you know, this campaign, that campaign, you know, a complete change in the order of things, right? Without the requisite planning, right? Without a sense of the potential dangers, right? Or even any kind of expectation, right? That doesn't seem to, they don't display any expectation that there may be resistance to this, that people may ask questions, that there may be a challenge, you know, to whatever it is that you want to do, right? This tendency to do stuff overnight, right? The way in which, you know, Article 370 was suddenly abrogated in Kashmir, right? The way in which demonetization came about, literally you woke up one morning, you know, on the morning of the American election and low and behold, you know, all your currency is valued as, right? And these things have long-term implications and ramifications, right? So I feel that, and you know, the outcomes are not what they're promised to be, right? The reality is that your economy is doing very badly, right? The reality is that our pandemic management has been disastrous, right? The vaccine rollout was announced, largest vaccine rollout in the world, you know, and look at where we are, hardly 3% or 4% of the population is vaccinated and it's a disaster for the whole world, right? So I feel that the future of the central vista is similarly kind of, you know, has this dark cloud hanging over it because we don't necessarily have the money for it. We don't necessarily have plans that makes sense, right? We have not anticipated that so many people will have so many questions and how are we gonna answer them, right? And essentially the message is, it's all gonna be okay and we need this and we have the money to do it, but that is not the truth, right? Which is that, you know, you need your money elsewhere. The truth is that, you know, you are exposing hundreds of workers, you know, to infection and to danger by keeping them together on an open construction site, you know, in the midst of your lockdown and your, you know, your wave, your second wave, your third wave, whatever, right? And the future in this case, rather than, you know, a sudden glorious reappearance of, you know, a whole new kind of power center which is being projected, I think the reality is gonna be much more messy, much more expensive, much more destructive and much more contested, you know, as you've seen from a series of these court cases and, you know, challenges that people have filed in court, you know, on environmental grounds, on grounds of land use, on issues of access, you know, on issues of design, all kinds of things people have said, you know, this is not in the public interest. And I think that like many other decisions that this government has made, many other announcements that it's made, the lack of planning, the lack of consensus building, the lack of public information and openness and transparency and the willingness to have a public conversation about public issues, right? That also afflates the central Vista, right? In exactly the same way, in that same pattern which is, which doesn't inspire confidence, right? Thank you, thank you very much. Thank you. And I think there's something very interesting, you said, glorious reappearance, you know? So it's reappearance of the government wants to really project, yeah. So that's very interesting what you've said. And I think also correctly pointed out and I mean, what you pointed out is about demonetization about, you know, political decisions. But if, for example, the Sabar Mathees comes, that is Sabar Mathees become a phone now. It's such a dirty place where the pictures that are really hitting us every day. Yeah, so that's a specific thing. That's a specific thing. So you might instantly see the glorious reappearance that, I mean, so the pattern that you're trying to build that the pattern already exists, I mean, it is already there. Well, that's, yeah. So that is specific to the particular architectural form and the particular architect and the particular design ideology, you could say, or the kind of practice that this particular form has, right, and it's track record. So, you know, HCP and, you know, Vimal Patel, the chief architect have, you know, been working closely with the prime minister when he was the chief minister of Gujarat, right? And they've done a number of projects together there of which the Sabar Mathees riverfront is a good example. You know, again, that doesn't inspire confidence, right? It would be something, that's what you've done. You've done something beautiful. That's what I was trying to do. Yeah, you know, then we say, oh, now you're ready to move up and scale it out, right? But if you've got a series of disasters behind you, right? And you have the residents of Endabad saying, you know, what the hell has happened to our city, right? And then you- You'll gush it for that much. You'll gush it back to the national capital and you'll say, oh, now I'm going to do this all over again and bigger and much more expensive. I mean, recently I heard or read something where, you know, there was talk about redoing the Yamuna riverfront. Right. And, you know, it strikes fear in your heart because if what's going to happen to the Yamuna- You've seen what is happening to Kashi, yeah? Yeah. Thank you so much. With the only wish, I mean, I mean, you've really brought the whole picture of the importance of the natural archive and the historical perspective to, you know, this cultural district. With the only hope, you know, we know Albert Speer was fired during the boss, yeah? I mean, I mean, I mean, I mean, during the- So let's hope, let's hope something similar happens here. And as you said, it's a nonsense, it's an untrust-enabled model, it's an untrust-enabled complete, not just project, but, you know, the pattern, the pattern that we would think. No, the key thing is not whether somebody was fired or not. The key thing is the analogy, no, no. The analogy that you're drawing is from, you know, the kind of worst modern dictator that the world has seen. And his vision of the new Nazi capital of, you know, which is going to replace Berlin as it existed, you know, and build this kind of, you know, Germania. Yeah, okay. And the kind of fascist vision that was, you know, literally going to be realized there, you know, as a physical reordering of the city of Berlin. You know, if that analogy is coming to your mind, right, that in itself is deeply disturbing, because we are... Yes, because that's been pointed out repeatedly, by bringing out, you know, those traits for... Yeah. I mean, I, you know, I think at least thus far, you know, this government would not, you know, it's very proud of its electoral mandate. You know, it still imagines that it is, it is really, you know, you know, there's a valid kind of majority that it has won in the 2019 election. And, you know, whatever it's doing, it's doing for the growth of this democracy, right? Nevertheless, the pattern it seems to be following is rather authoritarian, right? Not to say fascist. I mean, we won't even get it. Yeah, I think we can go into those, yeah, yeah. But I'm, you know, it's concerning that, you know, you refer to sphere, you know, more than once in terms of the kind of effect of, you know, power, that is sheer political power and authority that is sought to be expressed architecturally through this central history design. Yeah. You know, that is essentially undemocratic. Let's put it that way, you know? And that is not acceptable in the world's biggest democracy, right? Especially with one with such a glorious history of constitutional making and the way in which, you know, we won independence and the way in which we created this democratic structure with people like, you know, Ambedkar and Heru at the helm, you know, to then take this kind of a turn is shameful. You know, whether we end up agreeing or not, it is certainly worthy of a massive public debate before, you know, these decisions are taken. And that debate is still to be had. Great. So thank you Ananya and thank you also for bringing out the pattern that speaks about, you know, it's more for optics than, you know, than for optics. Yeah. For optics, yeah. In case it's about optics. Actually, yeah, so. That we took up a decision. Yeah. I mean, you know, this is transformational. This is completely, you know, you know, to change everything, but for the better or not, mostly not, right? Okay, thank you so much. Thank you for staying. Thanks together. Thanks. Thank you.