How the Vidhana Soudha became such a hostile public space
The Vidhana Soudha is the largest state legislative building in India and one of the most popular tourist attractions in Bangalore city. In fact it is so popular that it has even spawned replicas all over the state.
Once a beacon of openness and accessibility, the Vidhana Soudha today is cloaked in layers of security and restriction. Surveillance abounds, with police stationed at every turn, creating an atmosphere that feels more like trespassing than visiting a public landmark.
The majestic building, though imposing in its grandeur, is distanced by layers of fencing, leaving visitors feeling disconnected and unwelcome.
Where once families picnicked on lush lawns, now stands a barren landscape devoid of benches, shade, or even basic amenities like drinking water and dustbins.
Cars line up, their owners hurriedly capturing snapshots before being shooed away by authorities. Vendors navigate a maze of restrictions, their makeshift dustbins a silent testament to the eroded sense of community.
Thousands of people come here every weekend but everything is designed to push them away.
It wasn’t always like this. In old photos you can see how people had access all the way up the steps of the building. There were fewer police & no fences. The roads were much calmer.
What changed? How did we get here?
Without getting into specifics of how the government looks at the people it’s meant to serve, this story traces the reasons behind the transformation of Vidhana Soudha into a hostile public space. What physical and social infrastructures contribute to this hostility? And how do people in response adapt, navigate, and make do?
1947–2000: ‘City Beautiful’ and its discontents
When the Kingdom of Mysore acceded to India after independence, the capital of the newly formed Mysore state was shifted to Bangalore. Both its legislative houses were moved to the British-built Attara Kacheri which already housed the High Court of Mysore.
It soon became evident that the new capital needed a new, more spacious legislative assembly.
The original plan for this new building imagined a modest, two-story structure with plain and simple American-style architecture. Its foundation stone was laid at an empty plot right opposite the High Court in 1951.
When Kengal Hanumanthaiya was elected to the CM’s office in 1952, he revised the plan to something much more grander in scale & intent. Instead of just two floors, it now had 6, and apart from the assembly, it also housed other government offices, archives, a library, and a banquet hall.
To the committee he set up to design anew Vidhana Soudha, he said:
Power of rule now vests with the people and therefore the design of the House of Legislature should be such as to convey this idea of power and dignity, the style being Indian, particularly of Mysore and not purely Western.
The redesigned Vidhana Soudha had motifs from a range of distinctly Hindu dynastic styles including the Cholas, Hoysalas and the Vijayanagara empire. Hanumanthaiya’s far more lavish and ornamentally embellished legislature-cum-government complex cost the state exchequer a massive INR 1.8 crore at the time. It would cost more if not for the 5000 convicts employed to build it.
Inaugurated on October 10, 1956, three weeks before the formation of the state, the new Vidhana Soudha was celebrated for its ‘poetry-in-stone’ neo-Dravidian architecture, earning titles such as ‘Temple to the nation’ and the ‘Taj Mahal of South India.’
The reassertion of monarchical styles from a distant past produced, outside the building, a public grounds subservient to the structure; a space from which people could pay homage to authority. But Hanumanthaiya always maintained that his Vidhana Soudha must be a place which people can enter fearlessly.
For most of the 20th century this stayed true. There was no fence in front of the Vidhana Soudha. No gates. The steps of the structure were separated from the street by a sloped lawn of green grass where people picnicked and spent evenings with their families and friends. The street in front and Cubbon Park right opposite provided a hospitable resting ground for citizens as well as employees of the many government offices nearby.
However, these everyday rights to the Vidhana Soudha and its grounds were gradually eroded. Through the 1980s and 1990s a variety of aesthetic and environmental concerns along with the ritualized use of the Vidhana Soudha, confined, segregated, and thereby redefined public life on Ambedkar Veedhi.
Right through the sixties, seventies, and early eighties, many memorable struggles converged at a corner of Cubbon Park across the vasthu shastra compliant eastern entrance of the Vidhana Soudha. Groups of workers, peasants, students, and others addressed the state legislature directly from the street, sometimes squarely confronting their elected representatives within the building.
But in the early 1980s, a vocal middle-class citizenry, through the Bangalore Urban Arts Commission (BUAC), focused its ire on these organized political movements and their use of the street and park.
Their efforts led to the police growing increasingly reluctant to give permissions for meetings. Worker’s marches were rerouted to places like Chinnaswamy Stadium and Silver Jubilee Park where surveillance was easier and protestors could easily be kept away from the more central Vidhana Soudha area.
The ‘Bring Back Beauty to Bangalore’ campaign of the early 1980s led to the relocation of three hundred families of construction workers from nearby the Vidhana Soudha to Laggere on the western edge of the city. Those who had toiled to build the administrative structure were declared unaesthetic, a blot on the landscape, deserving eviction to another space.
Then in 1985, the 10th CM of Karnataka, Ramakrishna Hegde was sworn-in at the Vidhana Soudha steps, kickstarting a ritual that is followed till date. Temporary barricades were installed to manage the large masses of spectators.
In 1993, the committee to beautify Bangalore called for the banning of public rallies and demonstrations near the Vidhana Soudha and Cubbon Park citing destruction of greenery during a farmers protest. Concerned that there was a conspiracy to kill Cubbon Park, their proposal called for charging an entrance fee and designing aesthetically pleasing railings and barricades where necessary.
This led to the High Court eventually ordering a ban on public rallies in the area in 1997. The familiar corner at which hunger strikes, protests, and dharnas were held was sealed off, forcing dissidents to seek other locations. Points of access to and entry into the park were also drastically reduced.
By 1998, the park and its surroundings were more or less privatized with the installation of chain-linked fences, large gates, and grills. Designed by the BUAC, these ornaments of segregation were also extended to the Vidhana Soudha’s compound. The emergent middle class had successfully exercised ownership over public space in the city, replacing all collective uses by strictly individualized ones.
The eastern lawns of the Vidhana Soudha saw their own transformation with the installation of statues of national heroes. First of Dr. B.R. Ambedkar in 1981, followed soon by Jawaharlal Nehru and Subhash Chandra Bose, each serving as a symbolic means of rallying specific political identities while also also enabling a particularly nostalgic idea of beautification.
2001 onwards: Special Security Zones, cars and the BMRCL’s assault on public space
But perhaps the most dramatic changes to the public space around Vidhana Soudha occurred following the attack on the Indian Parliament in New Delhi on December 13, 2001. Hours after the attack, police constables at the 4 entrances of the Vidhana Soudha were replaced by armed forces, entry to the secretariat was screened with hand-held metal detectors, secretarial staff were frisked, and maximum vigilance was ordered at all public premises.
The police proposed building a compound wall around the Vidhana Soudha to prevent future attacks. Consequently, the grills in front of the eastern lawns were replaced by a solid 10-foot-high steel fencing, watch towers and automatic doors were added, and entry to the building was restricted to only 1 of the earlier 4 gates. From this point onwards, one had to obtain prior written permission from an office-bearer in the secretariat for visiting the building.
A second attack in December 2005, this time closer to home at the Indian Institute of Science (IISc), prompted the setting-up of a special security zone (SSZ) comprising high-profile buildings in central Bangalore including the Vidhana Soudha, Vikasa Soudha, Raj Bhavan, and the Attara Kacheri. An additional iron-fence security ring was built around the Vidhana Soudha, objected to at first as an eye-sore, but eventually accepted since it helped manage crowds visiting Cubbon Park.
On May 30, 2008, Chief Minister B.S. Yediyurappa and his cabinet took oath on the Vidhana Soudha’s steps. Thousands of supporters gathered at Ambedkar Veedhi not only cheered-on the new government but also cheered-down part of the iron fence. For the next two months, the damaged fence produced an entry point into an otherwise inaccessible area allowing visitors and tourists to temporarily relive the glory days, converting the front lawns into a picnic spot on weekends.
Public discourse shifted from city beautification of late 20th Century to improving security and surveillance in the first two decades of the 21st. Task forces were set up in a bid to help the government tackle terror. Talk of banning mobile phones, vacating 25 shops from the Legislative House, installation of CCTV cameras at each gate, and mandatory photo identification at the entrance gained more traction and were eventually implemented.
However, frequent reports of chauffeurs of VIPs taking security personnel for a ride, conmen posing as ministers operating offices from inside, and poor facilities for police on duty including defunct scanners, suggest that the Vidhana Soudha is neither public nor very secure.
Car car car car yal nodi car
While cars have been a common sight in the Garden City since the early 1900s, it is particularly in the 2000s that their numbers started to increase at a rate much higher than population growth. Ownership of private vehicles shot up from 284 per 1000 people in 2001 to 419 in 2011 to 640 in 2018.
In the mid-2000s, with road infrastructure suddenly overburdened, the state government went on a road widening and flyover building rampage without concern for what value was added or taken away from civic and public life.
Gradually, the city’s best public spaces, footpaths, and tree-shaded avenues were taken away from people and delivered with folded hands to cars, an obsession that continues even today.
State government spending on luxury SUVs for MLAs and MPs also increased from INR 5 crore in 2013 to INR 11.5 crore in 2016 to INR 14 crore in 2021, and an additional INR 10 crore in 2023 despite a drought and financial crises in the state.
With more cars circulating in and around the Vidhana Soudha today, Hanumanthaiya’s people’s palace has been turned into a palace for cars. Trees and proposed water bodies have been encroached upon by hundred’s of parking spaces that largely lie empty.
Where in old photos you saw cycles, horse-drawn carts and buses, today you see luxury SUVs of MLAs and MPs, that not only impede pedestrian traffic but also block an appreciative view of the structure itself.
BMRCL’s assault on public spaces in Bengaluru
Between 2010 and 2015, Bangalore Metro Rail Corporation Ltd (BMRCL) was allowed to dig-up three crucial public spaces during its first phase of construction — the MG Road Boulevard, the entry to Cubbon Park at Minsk Square, and a 500-metre stretch of Ambedkar Veedhi including the grounds in front of the Vidhana Soudha and the High Court.
As a result, several trees and ornamental plants were removed. Entry and exit from the eastern gates of the Vidhana Soudha was prohibited. Traffic was diverted through an alternate road in front of the High Court, and all three statues in front of the lawns were relocated to the western gate behind the Vidhana Soudha.
After 5 years, Ambedkar Veedhi was re-opened for public use in August 2015. BMRCL had white-topped the 6-lane road, widened footpaths, installed bollards, and with the help of the state’s Horticultural department, ‘beautified’ the stretch by restoring its greenery. The Vidhana Soudha metro station entrances were also constructed with the intention to mirror the material and style of the building.
In 2016, Dr. B.R. Ambedkar’s statue was reinstalled at its original location followed by Nehru’s in 2021. As of November 2023, statues of Basavanna and Nadaprabhu Kempegowda were also added. But for anyone wanting to pay homage to these personalities, the gates to access the statues remain locked.
Despite increased spending by the Public Works Department to maintain the grass, median, footpaths, fencing and gates, there is not a single resting point for tourists or citizens from across the state that visit even today.
A once thriving open public space and source of pride for the hundreds that worked within the Vidhana Soudha was thus transformed into the hostile space you experience today.
Visiting the Vidhana Soudha today
At first glance, what you’ll notice is the surveillance. The number of cops hovering around make you feel like you’re overstaying your welcome.
The building, massive in scale, feels like its right in front of you but is in fact three curtains of fences away. The ground it sits on is higher than the ground we’re allowed to stand on. Hanumanthaiya’s grand flight of steps, built to undo the imagined humiliation of the father of the nation during colonialism, today segregates, and in-turn humiliates the public.
On 26th January 2024, multiple groups of people stood by the fence taking photos to celebrate the formation of our republic. Not a single bench, no shade, no drinking water, no public toilets, no dust-bins. Instead all you see are tall gates, gold-tipped spikey fences, and locks. Public space yes, but unwelcoming in every aspect.
A line of cars and autos are parked, waiting for their owners to finish taking photos, so they can leave before they’re asked to by the police. A group of photographers solicit tourists, their camera, printers and heads all covered in cloth to protect against the heat.
You can’t cross the road from the Vidhana Soudha to the High Court like you could in the 1990s. You have to go 200 meters down the road and around the fenced median.
The few vendors that are there do laps around this median because the cops keep chasing them away, pointing to the sign prohibiting vending. Since vending isn’t allowed, there are no official dustbins. But unofficially, the hole at the bottom of the streetlights have become the dustbin of choice for the unwelcome visitors of the Vidhana Soudha.
The same sign also says walking on the lawn, protests and gatherings of more than 5 people will be met with punitive action. The design of the space ensures that spending more than 15 minutes is effectively against your interest, of both time and self-preservation.
The metro exits are fenced. The bus stops nearby are unmarked. And even when you manage to labour through the poorly designed public transport access to reach the front of the Vidhana Soudha, there is nothing else to do here after you finish taking that photo.
Imagine if God’s job was to run the Government
Could it have been different? Maybe.
A year after the Vidhana Soudha was inaugurated, there was a plan to replace the inscription Government Work is God’s Work with Satyameva Jayate (meaning Truth alone triumphs), which was adopted as the India’s national motto, the day she became a republic.
But that never happened.
Maybe if it had, Vidhana Soudha’s built form could have retained a sense of openness as opposed to the sense of sacredness and religiosity. Government workers would have been less like priests at a temple, removed and raised above their subjects, but rather servants to the citizens of the new nation state.
Maybe the fear of democracy that developed among the middle-class post independence could have been challenged by a resolute commitment to the democratic ideals that the building was originally meant to represent.
Early critics of the BUAC reimagined the Vidhana Soudha grounds as a public plaza. The space outside the Vidhana Soudha, High Court, GPO, LIC building and Cubbon Park — all one continuous & connected space open to all. A space made completely vehicle-free, buzzing with activity, performances and music.
Are ‘security reasons’ enough to deny people a higher quality of life?
Instead of restricting and confining the civic culture of the city to only a few neighbourhoods and high-streets, can we choose to respect and raise civic participation in the making and maintaining of our public spaces?
Bonus for reaching the end
🦸 Interview with Mr. Anand, professional Vidhana Soudha photographer
🌍 Timeline of events that led to Vidhana Soudha grounds being so hostile today
🕺 YouTube playlist of movies & songs featuring Vidhana Soudha
🌌 Compare Vidhana Soudhas; 1990 vs. 2024
🏰 Explore Vidhana Soudha in 3D
🗄️ Download the full Vidhana Soudha 3D model (coming soon)
Originally published at https://bengawalk.com.
