Preservation for Thee, Demolition for Us

There is a familiar species in India’s public life: the retired official who discovers the poetry of memory only after the paperwork of destruction has long been filed, stamped, and archived. In service, he speaks the language of acquisition, urgency, public purpose, skyline, security, beautification. In retirement, he discovers brick, feeling, texture, community sentiment, emotional resonance, and the sanctity of approach. By then, of course, the buildings are gone, the city has been edited, and memory is expected to be grateful for the improved view.

K.B.S. Sidhu’s article on Jallianwala Bagh belongs to that genre, whether he intended it to or not. It is thoughtful in isolation and self-incriminating in context. Read on its own, it is an argument for historical sensitivity. Read against his own role in the remaking of the Darbar Sahib periphery, it becomes something more interesting: a retired administrator’s meditation on the kind of state intervention he once helped dignify elsewhere.

In the Jallianwala piece, Sidhu objects to the reworking of the site’s approach and atmosphere. He argues that places like Jallianwala Bagh cannot be handled merely as technical conservation projects because their emotional force lives in inherited experience, local memory, and the physical feel of the place. He warns, in effect, that professionals do not always understand what history means to those who have carried it. That is a serious point. It is also a point that rebounds on him with uncommon force once one remembers Amritsar.

Because when the question was not Jallianwala Bagh but the dense and lived-in surroundings of Darbar Sahib, the governing instinct was rather different. Then the state was not being asked to preserve inherited urban texture. It was being invited to clear it. Then the city was not treated as memory. It was treated as obstruction.

At Jallianwala, the lane is sacred. At Darbar Sahib, the neighborhood was negotiable.

Sidhu’s own later writing on the Golden Temple periphery is what makes the contrast impossible to miss. In his article criticizing the proposed SGPC tower near the shrine, he recalls the earlier Galiara project as a moment of corrective vision. He describes how, after the late 1980s security phase, the state moved toward acquisition and demolition around the shrine, and how the project later evolved into a beautification exercise restoring what he presents as the proper visual dignity of Darbar Sahib. He places himself directly inside that history, and not as a silent witness. He writes as a man who helped steer the project into its beautification phase and who remains proud of the resulting visual order.

That is where his preservation ethics run into his administrative biography.

For Jallianwala Bagh, he says the original passage matters because memory lives in approach. For Darbar Sahib, the old city surrounding the shrine was not treated as an approach dense with inherited life, layered association, and accumulated sacred geography. It was treated as something to be opened up, regularized, disciplined, and, in large part, removed. When he writes about Jallianwala, he sounds like a defender of lived memory. When he writes about the Galiara, he sounds like memory’s zoning commissioner.

One can almost hear the contrast in tone. In one setting, the official arrives late and pleads for tenderness. In the other, the state arrived early with notifications.

That is the problem.

Not that he values memory now. Good. He should. The problem is that he seems to value it most when it has already survived state intervention somewhere else, not when the state itself was engaged in selecting which parts of memory deserved to remain visible in Amritsar.

The bulldozer always acquires a conscience after retirement.

The Galiara project was not born as an innocent exercise in urban reverence. The legal record matters because it strips away retrospective incense. The Punjab and Haryana High Court, in litigation over the 1988 acquisitions around the Golden Temple, records the state’s rationale in plain terms: public streets, parking, beautification, redevelopment, and also the preservation of peace, law and order, and public safety. The court upheld the urgency provisions and spoke with the old administrative candor that Indian citizens know well: individual interests must yield to public good, and inconvenience must drown before the needs of order.

There it is. Not memory as lived inheritance, but memory as something the state may rearrange once it has pronounced the rearrangement necessary.

It is important to be precise. Sidhu did not personally initiate the 1988 acquisition process. The machinery preceded his tenure as Deputy Commissioner. But that precision does not rescue him from the more important point. His own writings show that he later embraced and legitimized the project’s aesthetic logic. He did not describe it as a morally compromised undertaking forced upon him by harsher times. He did not say that a security operation regrettably swallowed historical texture. He described, rather approvingly, the conversion of a security belt into a beautification project and celebrated the restoration of Darbar Sahib’s “pristine” visual authority.

That is not reluctant inheritance. That is administrative adoption.

And once he adopts it, he also inherits its contradictions.

Because what exactly was cleared in the name of beautification? Not empty air. Not abstract clutter. A living urban fabric. Buildings. Histories. Lines of occupation. Layers of association. Structures that stood not in opposition to memory but inside it.

Tribune’s retrospective account of the Galliara project notes how it emerged from the tense security atmosphere of the late 1980s and then hardened into a beautification scheme around the shrine. It also notes that later expansion proposals involved older market areas and long-settled commercial zones in the old city. This is the familiar trick of state beautification: first call the living city a problem, then call its absence serenity.

One must admire the efficiency of the formula. Demolish first. Romanticize later.

Heritage, in the administrative imagination, is what remains after the state edits the scene.

Sidhu’s Jallianwala article insists that professionals alone cannot be trusted with emotionally charged sites. Fair enough. But around Darbar Sahib, who exactly was entrusted with deciding what counted as heritage, what counted as encroachment, what counted as dignity, and what counted as dispensable? Not the dispersed memory of the city. Not the everyday inheritors of the surrounding space. Not those who might have argued that a sacred complex is also shaped by the older neighborhoods, bungas, passages, occupations, and layered relationships that grow around it over generations.

The deciding authority was administrative. The state chose the frame, and then later congratulated itself on having improved the picture.

That is why later reporting about buried structures matters so much. In 2021, The Indian Express reported on an underground structure near the Golden Temple that descendants identified as Gianian Da Bunga, said to be associated with a former head granthi and linked to Darbar Sahib’s own historical ecosystem. According to the report, the family believed the building had been promised preservation as a heritage structure, but it was instead bulldozed in part and buried during the Galliara project. Even if every element of the claim still invites deeper archival scrutiny, the symbolic force is unmistakable. Beautification above ground, burial below it. Improvement on the surface, amnesia underneath.

And that is where Sidhu’s prose on Jallianwala begins to read less like wisdom and more like irony with citations.

For at Jallianwala he now says the original entrance mattered because it carried historical feeling. Around Darbar Sahib, the state over which he presided locally accepted the proposition that historical feeling could be subordinated to acquisition, urgency, visual order, and the devotional tidiness of open space. At Jallianwala, alteration becomes a wound. Around Darbar Sahib, alteration became a policy.

This is not merely hypocrisy in the ordinary sense. It is the deeper instinct of India’s bureaucratic imagination. It does not deny memory. That would be too crude. It reveres memory, but only after deciding which version of memory is tidy enough to preserve, photogenic enough to display, and administratively useful enough to bless. A lane may be sacred in one context, while an entire lived-in periphery may be expendable in another, provided the paperwork is orderly and the post-demolition rhetoric sufficiently elevated.

That is why Sidhu’s article is so revealing. It unintentionally restores a moral standard that can be used against his own record.

If historical preservation means what he now says it means, then the question is not whether the current generation has mishandled Jallianwala Bagh. The question is why those same principles were not applied to the city around Darbar Sahib when the state chose to make sanctity look cleaner by making history take up less room.

The old administrator might reply that the situations were not comparable. Darbar Sahib in the late 1980s and early 1990s lived under the shadow of militancy, counterinsurgency, state paranoia, and real security concern. True enough. But that concession only gets him so far. Security concern explains the coercive atmosphere. It does not dissolve the historical character of the urban fabric cleared under its cover. Nor does it transform demolition into preservation merely by waiting a few decades and changing the adjective from “security” to “beautification.”

And that, in the end, is the sentence that hangs over this entire comparison.

At Jallianwala Bagh, Sidhu discovered the sanctity of inherited approach. Around Darbar Sahib, he accepted the sanctity of inherited power.

The point is not that he must be forever disqualified from writing about preservation. The point is that his preservation rhetoric cannot be allowed to float free from his own administrative past. If he wishes to argue that brick, passage, atmosphere, and local attachment matter, then those principles must travel. They must cross the short distance from Jallianwala Bagh to the Galiara. They must apply not only to a national memorial whose renovation he dislikes, but also to the sacred city whose periphery the state once opened up, cleaned out, and repackaged as reverence.

Otherwise preservation becomes what it too often is in official hands: not the defense of memory, but the final draft of power.

And that is the sharpest reading of all. Sidhu’s Jallianwala essay is not wrong because it values historical feeling. It is dangerous because it is right. It states a principle broad enough to indict the very administrative tradition from which he speaks.

He has now supplied the standard.

Amritsar is entitled to use it.