Delhi's Gymkhana Club faces eviction in a fight over colonial residue and real estate

The Delhi Gymkhana Club was founded in 1913 as a refuge for British officers on the subcontinent, and its colonnaded bar in Lutyens' Delhi has dispensed gin and tonic for longer than the Indian republic has existed. On 12 July 2026 the building that houses it sits inside a long-running dispute between its well-heeled members and a central government that has made the removal of imperial architecture a signature domestic cause.

The Gymkhana is one of several elite clubs in the capital whose leases on government land were summarily cancelled in recent years as part of a campaign by the administration of Prime Minister Narendra Modi to erase what it describes as vestiges of colonialism. Members of the Gymkhana believe the public anti-colonial language obscures a more conventional motive: control of some of the most expensive real estate in South Asia.

The architecture of the campaign

New Delhi's central vista was planned by the British architect Edwin Lutyens and Sir Herbert Baker in the early twentieth century, and the road that runs from Rashtrapati Bhavan down to India Gate is studded with institutions built for the Raj: the Imperial Record Office, the former viceroy's residence, a ring of sporting and social clubs reserved for officers and, later, for the Indian civil servants and businessmen who inherited the apparatus of the colonial state. For decades after independence these clubs functioned as informal annexes of the establishment, places where retired bureaucrats, diplomats and corporate executives networked over single malt.

The Modi government has framed the eviction drive as historical correction. The prime minister has publicly referred to the clubs as relics of foreign rule and argued that public land should revert to public use. The framing echoes the broader iconographic campaign of his administration, which has renamed streets, redesigned the central parliament and rebuilt civic monuments in a Hindu-nationalist idiom. Each act is presented as the completion of an unfinished project of decolonisation. Critics note that the campaign also conveniently opens up land that, in a saturated capital, is functionally irreplaceable.

What the members suspect

The New York Times, in reporting published this week, sets out the counter-narrative plainly: many of the Gymkhana's roughly 4,000 members believe the government's stated rationale is a cover for the more familiar business of urban land capture. The club sits on a multi-acre plot adjacent to the Prime Minister's office and within walking distance of the Parliament building, in a city where comparable sites change hands only at sovereign-buyer prices. The membership is wealthy, connected and politically diverse, which makes it an easier target than the entrenched interests that usually resist land acquisition in India. A successful eviction would let the state decide what is built there next.

There is a defensible case on the government's side. The original allotment of prime Lutyens' land to the clubs was a colonial act, and the leases were renegotiated at various points under Congress governments without ever being opened to wider civic use. The buildings themselves were designed as instruments of imperial social life, with membership criteria written around race and rank that Indian governments tolerated long after they would have been politically survivable elsewhere. Inherited privilege, dressed in period architecture, is a fair target for any administration that takes decolonisation seriously.

Two stories at once

The dispute is therefore two stories. The first is a story about historical reckoning, of a country deciding which of its inherited spaces should be repurposed in a register that no longer pretends the colonial period was neutral. The second is a story about how that language gets used in a city where land is the binding constraint on every other policy: housing, climate adaptation, transit, even the spatial dignity of the republic's own ceremonial core.

Most reporting, including the Times piece that surfaced this dispute, treats the campaign as principally ideological. The more parsimonious read is that the two motives are not in competition. Decolonisation rhetoric gives the government cover to act on land that successive administrations were too entangled with the clubs' members to touch, and the resulting land bank gives the campaign its concrete reward. To treat either element as the whole truth is to miss how the Indian state routinely combines moral language with material outcomes.

Stakes and limits

What the club loses is recoverable in cash terms. What the precedent sets is harder to reverse. If the government can void long-standing leases on grounds of colonial provenance, the question of which other institutions built on the same logic of imperial favour become eligible is large. India's armed forces, its higher civil service, its judiciary and its older universities all trace institutional habits, in different degrees, to the structures the Raj left behind. The campaign against the clubs does not, on present evidence, reach that far. It stops at the social institutions that are wealthy enough to be a target but not powerful enough to be untouchable, a useful line for any administration to draw.

The members' suspicion is also a measure of how thin the line has become. In a country where the state routinely invokes anticolonialism for purposes that are partly moral and partly municipal, the only honest reading of the Gymkhana fight is that both stories are true, and that the order in which they are told depends on who is paying the lawyer.

Monexus framed this against the grain of the dominant Western coverage by treating the Modi government's anti-colonial campaign as a hybrid project, half historical reckoning, half urban land capture, rather than picking one frame and discarding the other.