Narendra Modi’s New New Delhi

Unlike other former colonies, India did not build a new capital; it made the old one its own, and continued the project of syncretistic blending. Modi clearly regarded this as a mistake, and he has made it his mandate to “liberate ourselves from the slavery mindset.” He seems to have been planning to reconstruct the heart of New Delhi since the earliest days of his premiership. The previous government had nominated parts of the capital, including the entire Central Vista, to be added to the UNESCO World Heritage List, preserving them in perpetuity. The application was under consideration when Modi first became Prime Minister, in 2014. The following year, according to UNESCO, the Indian government asked to postpone it. (A spokesperson for India’s Ministry of Housing denies this.)

In 2019, after Modi was reëlected, resoundingly, to serve a second term, a public announcement appeared in major Indian newspapers. It requested “Consultancy Services for comprehensive Architectural & Engineering planning for the ‘Development / Redevelopment of Parliament Building, Common Central Secretariat and Central Vista at New Delhi,’ ” specifying that interested firms would have to transfer five million rupees of “earnest money” to an escrow account. (After backlash from architects, the monetary requirement was reduced by half.) The timeline was shockingly short. The British had taken years to plan India’s capital. The Modi government asked for a redevelopment proposal in six weeks. S. R. Sikka, an architect who fled to Delhi during Partition, trained with Le Corbusier, and went on to found one of the country’s most commercially successful architecture firms, told me, “Of course, as an architect, you would wish for more time for a once-in-a-lifetime project on the most important piece of land in the country.”

That September, an informational meeting turned into a contentious affair. Representatives of interested firms crowded around a horseshoe-shaped table in a conference room at the Central Public Works Department, which has overseen civic improvements in India since 1854. When the floor opened for questions, participants took turns expressing their discontent. How could a publicly funded project of this stature not be awarded through a more open process? The earnest-money requirement insured that only established architects would be able to participate. A few attendees drew up a petition to demand a fairer competition. As they canvassed the room for signatures, just one representative from a major firm refused to sign: Bobby Desai, of H.C.P., in Ahmedabad, the biggest city in Modi’s home state, Gujarat.

In the end, only six firms—H.C.P. and five others—were considered. Their mandate was largely open-ended; the guidelines did not specify whether they should upgrade the existing Parliament or build a new one. (Either way, the old Parliament, like many Raj-era structures, would need to be protected because of historic-preservation laws.) At least two of the firms suggested putting a new Parliament in the middle of the Central Vista. Hafeez Contractor, the principal at one of those firms, who is known for his flashy designs, said that he’d sited his Parliament, which would be built in the shape of an abstracted lotus flower, “on the main axis, so if you look from all the roads of New Delhi—from anywhere and everywhere—you’ll see it.” It would have risen five hundred feet higher than the Viceroy’s palace. “People said, ‘Oh, it shouldn’t be higher than the President’s house,’ ” he told me. “Why not? It should be higher!”

H.C.P. took a different tack. Its founder, Bimal Patel, knew Modi from Gujarat and had been doing projects with him for almost two decades. The firm called for bland sandstone office buildings lined with unadorned columns. Patel kept the Parliament sidelined, though he proposed including some of the subtler multifaith details from the old Central Vista, such as the stone latticework. Meanwhile, on a plot of land on the opposite side of the Central Vista, he proposed a new home-and-office complex for the Prime Minister. Under India’s parliamentary system, the Prime Minister is a member of the legislature, first among equals. Much as the British Prime Minister lives in a modest town house at 10 Downing Street, Modi lives in a bungalow on an ordinary street in Lutyens’s Delhi. Patel called for moving Modi onto the Central Vista, into an enormous residence that could accommodate a staff of five hundred. (According to later reports, the compound will be ringed by twenty-five watchtowers and include a V.I.P. tunnel connecting it to the new Parliament.) Building a new house for the Prime Minister was not part of the mandate for the design competition, and only one of the other five entrants had included one. Patel won.

Ahmedabad, the largest city in Gujarat, has long been an architectural hub. Shortly after independence, Ahmedabad’s textile magnates and their allies in government hired a group of renowned architects, including Le Corbusier and Louis Kahn, to construct offices, museums, and university campuses in the city. These international luminaries influenced a generation of local architects, who continued their modernist legacy. One of these locals was Hasmukh C. Patel, whose firm, H.C.P., subsequently put its stamp on Gujarat in concrete through banks, hospitals, and academic buildings.

In 1981, Hasmukh’s son, Bimal, who was nineteen years old, travelled through Europe by rail pass and by VW van. He was stunned by “how comfortable ordinary life can be for ordinary people.” Crowded yet well maintained, the urban streets, squares, and markets of Amsterdam, Paris, and Barcelona offered everyday Europeans a quality of life attainable only by the most privileged in India. In 1985, Bimal went to the United States, where he earned degrees in architecture and city planning from U.C. Berkeley. Afterward, he returned to Ahmedabad to take over H.C.P., hoping to transform Indian cities, which he said were “starved of public space.”

In January, I met Patel at a seven-mile pedestrian promenade he’d begun building, in the early two-thousands, along the Sabarmati River, which bisects Ahmedabad. Prior to the Central Vista commission, it was his largest urban-redevelopment project. I rented us an “aqua cycle”—a Dr. Seuss-like floating bicycle for two, with bulbous outboard waterwheels. Patel, who is slight and fit at sixty-two, wore chunky black glasses and threw a canary-yellow life jacket over his green Nehru vest. As we pedalled to the middle of the river, the city’s skyline appeared above the promenade. We could see a revolving restaurant, designed by his father, that looked like a blooming concrete flower on a narrow stem, as well as many newer, taller, shinier structures that rose around it. Modi, who had been chief minister of Gujarat from 2001 to 2014, presided over Ahmedabad’s dramatic twenty-first-century boom; he used this narrative of progress in the campaign that propelled him to national power.

Nilanjan Mukhopadhyay, who wrote a biography of Modi during this period, told me that the rising Gujarati politician was inspired by—and envious of—the model of development that he had seen in China. In 1980, the economies of China and India were roughly equal in size, but India had since fallen badly behind its neighbor. On his first trip over the border, in 2006, Modi travelled to Shenzhen, which had grown from a fishing village into a metropolis of nearly ten million, and to Pudong, Shanghai’s skyscraper-studded financial district, which, two decades before, had been a mix of warehouses and rice paddies. Modi “was greatly impressed with the urban-developmental policies of the Chinese government,” Mukhopadhyay told me, “especially that there’s very little people’s participation when the government wants to take land.”