In the winter of 1911, as the dust of the Delhi Durbar settled over the plains of Shahjahanabad, King George V laid the foundation stone for a capital that was intended to be an eternal testament to British supremacy. It is said that Edward Lutyens, surveying the scrubland of Raisina Hill, envisioned a city that would not merely house a government but would overawe a civilization. Architecture became a tool of power assertion and a deliberate exercise to establish spatial hegemony. Thus, it was designed to ensure that the Indian subjects, standing before the vast red-sandstone expanse of the Viceroy’s House, felt the formidable might and august supremacy of a power that claimed to be perennial.
For decades following independence, however, this statuesque authority occupied an uneasy place in the political imagination. Due to a legacy of political inertia, leadership failure, and bureaucratic lethargy, Bharat continued to operate within a matrix designed for its own subjugation. The potential for a true psychological reclamation was thus squandered and New Delhi remained in an uncertain scenario; politically independent yet structurally and epistemically embedded in the design and memory of a colonised state.
It is within this context of policy paralysis that the current dispensation has initiated a structural reorientation, moving India from a state of defensive management to one of purposeful stewardship of its critical national assets, both material and symbolic.
On February 23, 2026, a decisive step was taken to address this inherited inertia. President Draupadi Murmu unveiled the bust of C. Rajagopalachari (popularly known as Rajaji) at the Grand Open Staircase of the Rashtrapati Bhavan. This installation, which replaced the bust of Edward Lutyens, signals a transition from romanticised colonial history, sentimental preservation of such relics to the strategic assertion of the Republic.
It is important to note that Lutyens’ Delhi was never an aesthetic project in isolation. It was rather an architectural manifestation of an imperial ideology. Within the Polybian schema of Anacyclosis, the British Raj functioned as a Degenerate Oligarchy, a system where power is concentrated within a narrow, hierarchical elite, increasingly insulated from the common men. And within this framework, architecture, signs, and symbols are deployed as a tool to establish legitimacy, projecting an illusion of permanence to mask an inherent fragility.
In this world, where throughout political cycles and regimes, power has been expressed through physical statures and structure, whether from the Ashoka Stambh, statue of Cecil Rhodes or Leopold II to the Arc de Triomphe, Alexander Column or Luxor Obelisk, all have in common the rudimentary objective of instilling their presence and importance in people’s minds through displaying their grandeur through symbolism. Yet, the history remains a testament to the fact that no imperium can immunize itself to the ruin wrought by time and change.
Thus, for almost seven decades, the physical structure carved upon Raisina Hill served to weaken Bharat’s collective conscience. The “runaway anxiety” of earlier dispensations allowed these symbols of plenipotentiary reach to persist, forcing our minds to bear the weight of colonial subjugation long after the colonisers had fled.
The replacement of Lutyens with Rajaji is the long-overdue rejection of this atavistic strength. By striking down this tainted legacy, the Indian state signals that the limited lifespan of colonial symbols has reached its inevitable entropy.
The figure who now occupies this central axis of authority is a stalwart of the freedom struggle whose intellectual contributions once compelled these colonisers to retreat.
C. Rajagopalachari was not merely a statesman; he was the undying flame of Swatantra Bharat. As the first and last Indian Governor-General, Rajaji marks the crucial shift from the bondage and authoritarianism of the Raj to the democratised political machinery of independent Bharat. Beyond statecraft, Rajaji’s translations of the Ramayana, Mahabharata, and Bhagavad Gita testify as vital acts of intellectual insurgency during those times. He popularised traditional Indian heritage against the virtuous decay intended by the Macaulayan project to weaken the national collective conscience. His commitment to Swadeshi and Atma-nirbharta serves as the foundational guidepost for India’s contemporary long-term vision of a developed nation.
The placement of Rajaji opposite the statue of Mahatma Gandhi creates a profound symbolic dialectic. While Gandhi represents the moral force of the revolution, Rajaji represents the sophisticated statecraft and institutional continuity of the sovereign state. This dialogue, staged in the heart of the Republic, ensures that the office, which once symbolised imperial authority now becomes a beacon of India’s geopolitical autonomy.
Beyond the domestic realm, Rajaji left his footprint across democracies, particularly through his contentions opposing nuclear weapons and advocacy for world peace. His engagements were characterised by a firm belief in moral authority, pragmatic diplomacy and constitutional prudence. The famous ‘Rajaji Formula’ evinced his belief that enduring peace could not be achieved through territorial absolution or militarisation.
Since 2014, a systematic decolonisation agenda has reframed India’s characteristics of statehood. This shift is guided not by sentiment but by a long standing strategic necessity. The government has persistently taken deliberate efforts in decolonising Bharat’s identity, which is also substantiated by the shift of the PMO to Seva Teerth and designating Finance and Home ministries’ landmarks as Kartavya Path.
These actions are driven by the Panch Pran, specifically the necessity to remove every trace of a colonial mindset. As Frantz Fanon argues, true liberation requires the ‘revaluation of self’ along with the rejection of internalised colonial attitudes. The Congress regime was characterized by a lethargy and inertia in reclaiming such identity figures. In contrast, the current leadership recognizes that symbols of consolidated imperium must be replaced with icons of indigenous strength to project an unequivocal voice on the global stage.
Construing it as politically motivated, the current opposition has tainted what is otherwise a purely commemorative breakthrough. Revolving around three major concerns: selective remembrance, symbolic prioritisation and political timing, the opposition has yet again dwindled the contributions of our forefathers, projecting their contemporary ideological lens, allowing present political compulsions to eclipse the broader constitutional, national and historical continuum such measures of remembrance seek to uphold.
The removal of Lutyens’ bust is not an isolated event of ‘statue politics’ or the ‘renaming game,’ it is an integral part of the body of reforms aimed at a comprehensive civilizational revival. This same philosophy of De-Maculayisation is currently operationalized through the National Education Policy 2020, which seeks to dismantle the epistemic colonisation of the Indian mind by re-anchoring pedagogy in indigenous knowledge systems.
Just as the statutory independence granted to regulatory bodies ends the absurd arrangement of promoter-regulator conflicts in critical infrastructure, the installation of Rajaji ends the conflict between India’s republican reality and its imperial aesthetic. We are not using Rajaji’s statue as a minor excuse to praise de-colonising efforts; we are recognizing it as a mandatory component of a structural overhaul of the state.
The enshrinement of Rajaji’s legacy at the Rashtrapati Bhavan reflects an evolution in how the Republic curates its own historical and constitutional inheritance. Rather than rupture, what it represents is a calibrated transition from an Empire to a Republic. This is the definitive closing of the colonial bracket. Whereas previous inaction produced a state of stagnation and runaway anxiety, a clear shift towards purposeful stewardship is now visible. This is the restorative phase of the Indian political cycle (as theorized by Polybius) where the colonial ruins of the post-colonial era is being arrested by a return to ancient and foundational principles.
As Rajaji reflected, a nation is built through the empowerment of its citizens and the preservation of its cultural integrity. Thus, by reviving its sovereign presence, Bharat is no longer managing the inherited burden of an alien schema, but is projecting influence as a responsible power of its own destiny.
The office on Raisina Hill has finally shed its colonial remnants to become the true seat of a self-governing Republic, a civilizational bedrock for the century to come. In the grand sweep of history, Lutyens’ Delhi was but a brief interruption and the installation of Rajaji marks a remarkable milestone towards Viksit Bharat.
