At the beginning of the 20th century, two men moved to India from South Africa: One to dismantle the edifice of the British Empire and the other to build an edifice that would keep reminding us of our colonial past. Seventy-seven years after the death of M K Gandhi, who gave us his three famous ideological monkeys and secured freedom for India, the government is moving out of the North and South blocks built by Herbert Baker. Both Gandhi and Baker came to India after spending many years of their professional life in South Africa.
When I first stepped into North Block, joining the Ministry of Finance as a director in the Department of Economic Affairs (DEA) on September 1, 1997, the inside of the building resembled an unkept, neglected relic of the past. Soon, it will be its veritable treasure, turned into a museum from a seat of authority, shaping the future.
I was allotted a room on the ground floor, one of six I occupied in my decade-long stint in various ministries in that majestic building. After being director and joint secretary in the DEA till 2002, I returned to another ministry, occupying the other end of North Block — the Ministry of Home Affairs — as joint secretary in 2009-10. Eventually, in October 2017, I bade farewell to my career working out of North Block, which will soon cease to be the nerve centre of governance.
Internal security, finance, and personnel were housed in North Block, facing its counterpart, South Block, which housed the critical ministries of defence, external affairs, and the Prime Minister’s Office. Both these blocks of governance stood guard over the Rashtrapati Bhavan, the seat of the republic.
Coming as I did from Chandigarh, the city planned by the French architect Le Corbusier, to New Delhi, the city created by Edwin Landseer Lutyens, was like a time warp. The cities were vastly different. The former was independent India’s statement of modernity; the latter was a glorious inheritance of an inglorious past. The rectangular grids of Corbusier were easy to understand, but the circular layout of Delhi required familiarisation, quite like its political milieu. The prominent roads of Chandigarh were named Uttar, Dakshin, Madhya, and residential areas divided into sectors that followed a numerical order. Delhi was history, ancient, mediaeval, and modern, with some roads proclaiming the nation’s accomplishments and political philosophy — Janpath, Rajpath, Vijay Chowk, Shanti, Niti, Panchsheel; the inhabitations and other roads a mixed tapestry of its history — Ashok, Akbar, Aurangzeb, Curzon, Kautilya, Chanakya, Rabindra, Lodhi. The colony where I lived, Kaka Nagar, was named after Kaka Kalelkar, originally built to accommodate the staff of the Bhakra-Beas hydel projects.
It was a bare seven-minute drive from Kaka Nagar to North Block. The first day, as I parked my Maruti 800 in the parking lot of North Block, I saw something frightening and funny. On the bonnet of the car parked next to mine sat a monkey chewing the wiper, and on another car, his colleague was playing with the rear-view mirror. Unsure whether this was a glimpse of bureaucratic shenanigans inside the building, I walked in nervously, now a part of the charmed circle of the power that the Centre wielded over the states.
My nervousness turned into shock when my boss called me to his room after 5 in the evening, but my peon warned me not to go. Confused at this power equation, as I prepared to step out, he said he would accompany me and quickly got hold of a tubelight rod that he kept behind the office almirah like a secret weapon. With the rod in hand, he opened the door. The sight was enough for me to seek an immediate reversion from central deputation — the corridor was full of monkeys and my peon’s responsibility was to keep them at bay while I walked to my destination.
The administration tried everything to keep these biological ancestors from interfering with people who were attempting to shape the history of a free nation that had commenced its march to modernity. Electronic devices were installed to emit soundwaves to scare the simians, but like bureaucrats, they too got used to unintelligible noise. Wire meshes were fixed to prevent them from trespassing into the corridors of power, but they came through the doors meant for humans. A man was employed to walk with a langoor whose dark face supposedly frightened the red-faced monkeys but the financial advisor of the ministry objected to procuring their services without following the financial rules.
The North Block way of life
Gradually, I got used to walking in those mighty corridors, greeting seniors only if there were no monkeys strutting around or sitting on the numerous mysterious almirahs overflowing with files, lining the verandas. Nobody could satisfactorily explain the presence of the monkeys in the building, nor of the countless files, both equally unmoved.
It took Jaswant Singh, the royal from Rajasthan, when he took over as Finance Minister, to remove the inanimate objects from the corridors. The monkeys, who were witness to some major meetings with foreign delegations and pathbreaking economic reforms, management of the elite civil services, and mobilisation of the central police forces, survived his initiatives of sprucing up the building, installing statues, and carpeting the main staircase. Any museum created in North Block would be untrue to history if it didn’t depict the creatures who were an integral part of the North Block way of life, and unfair to the four-legged who thought that it was the two-legged who displaced them in the first place.
This process of displacement started in 1911 when the Crown decided to move the capital from Calcutta to New Delhi. Lutyens, a British architect, was entrusted with the town planning for New Delhi, and Baker, another compatriot architect, with designing the North and South Blocks. It was a British design executed by Indian skills — the construction contractors were Sardar Bahadur Basakha Singh Sandhu and Sir Sobha Singh. Their names are inscribed on a stone under one of the small canopies facing Vijay Chowk, where the spectacular Beating the Retreat ceremony is conducted to mark the climax of Republic Day celebrations.
Many a time, on that rare day when I left the office early, I admired the setting sun slowly hiding behind the Rashtrapati Bhavan dome, reflecting in the rear-view mirror of my car. The sun will soon set on these buildings as they move deeper into the recesses of history, housing memorabilia.
The writer is a former election commissioner
