Death by Bunda

 

Sometime in the early twentieth century, when Africa was still lazily described as the “Dark Continent,” two white men were captured by a tribe deep in the jungle.

They were dragged before the Chief, who had learnt, perhaps through bitter experience, that white men arriving in these parts rarely meant anything good. After a brief consultation with his tribesmen, he pronounced sentence on the first captive: ‘Bunda.’

Bunda? What on earth was that? the two men wondered. They found out soon enough.

One of them was held down and… Bunda’d.

‘My God,” thought the second man, ‘this is unspeakable.’

So when his own turn came, and the Chief solemnly pronounced ‘Death,’ he felt briefly relieved. Briefly.

Because the full sentence, as it turned out, was: ‘Death by Bunda.’ Last seen, he was being carried away by the tribesmen - to be Bunda’d till death.

Forgive me this not entirely refined detour. It will make sense presently.

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Let us begin with what was once the edge of Delhi - Sainik Farms.

Originally allotted by the Ministry of Defence to ex-servicemen after 1962, the scheme consisted of 102 farm plots spread across roughly 161 acres. On paper, it was a noble idea: retired officers cultivating modest agricultural holdings on the outskirts of the capital.

In practice, it bordered on parody.

Electricity was sanctioned for a single tubewell. Construction was restricted to a tiny pump room, intended to double as quarters for a mali, caretaker, or, if one stretched bureaucratic imagination to breaking point, the owner himself.

The assumption seemed to be that a decorated officer would somehow live elsewhere and periodically commute to his agricultural idyll. Where he would live, how he would travel, and with what infrastructure was left delightfully unspecified.

Predictably, reality intervened early.

Electricity arrived only for a few erratic hours a day. Without power there was no water. Without water there was no farming. The dream of orchards and green fields quickly dissolved into scrubland, frustration, and neglect.

What had been presented as a reward for service became, with astonishing speed, an administrative burden.

Many original allottees sold out, often cheaply, to those with the means, patience, and ingenuity to bend land-use rules without technically breaking them. 

Thus began the slow mutation of Sainik Farms.

My first visit there was in 1980, for a college friend’s birthday. A modest three-room house with a barbed wire fencing and a mehndi hedge on a dirt road. Her uncle had purchased the property from a retired colonel who was only too happy to escape the experiment and retreat to Dehradun with his dignity intact.

That house still stands today, almost unchanged. A fossil from a more innocent era.

Then came the more colourful chapter. In 1982, H.P. Nanda of Escorts acquired a property there, only for portions of it to be demolished within weeks by the MCD as it was vaguely defined as illegal. Delhi, being Delhi, whispers circulated immediately: this, many believed, was political retribution linked to the Swaraj Paul–Escorts battle, with Mrs Indira Gandhi settling scores through municipal enthusiasm.

But that is another story. 

Back to Sainik Farms. Yes, over the decades a number of “palatial” residences, Delhi’s uniquely theatrical interpretation of the farmhouse have appeared. 

But the overwhelming reality is far less glamorous. Most plots are merely 500–700 square yards, packed with hastily constructed homes, septic tanks and tubewells in alarming proximity, and a complete disregard for even the most elementary principles of urban planning.

Hovering permanently above it all is the familiar nexus of municipal authorities and police, ever watchful, ever hungry, extracting their due from residents who have technically violated regulations that no one can clearly define, consistently interpret, or honestly enforce.

Around Sainik Farms, unauthorised colonies with neither building bylaws nor any coherent plans for sanitation or drainage have not only been regularised, but, unsurprisingly, gone on to surpass Sainik Farms itself in land values.

During the monsoon, the rainwater and sewage from these recently regularised colonies flows freely through what the media and general public still imagine is an ‘elite enclave’ – where roads crumble but repairs are prohibited. Vacant plots become garbage dumps because even boundary walls cannot legally be repaired without inviting official attention.

Sixty-four years later, Sainik Farms still does not know what it is.

Legal? Illegal? Tolerated? Targeted? Because it exists in a state of permanent administrative limbo.

That is Death by Bunda.

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Now consider Santushti. Established in 1985 for a token sum and managed by the Air Force Wives Welfare Association. It was conceived as a modest shopping complex where regimental units could sell handicrafts and small goods to members of the Air Force community.

It did not remain modest for very long.

Barely two hundred metres from the Prime Minister’s residence, Santushti evolved into one of Delhi’s most fashionable addresses: boutiques, linen stores, jewellers, florists, pottery shops, gift stores, and a beloved restaurant. Diplomats frequented it. Expatriates adored it and Delhi’s well-heeled claimed it as their own.

And then, inevitably, the file began to move. The Defence Minister at the time, Mulayam Singh Yadav, observed that the complex had been established without proper government approval, terming it a ‘serious irregularity.’

Committees were formed and reports were submitted. The matter reached the Delhi High Court. In 1995, the Defence Ministry instructed the Air Force to shut the complex down.

Nothing happened. In 1997, the directive was reiterated but still, nothing happened.

And so Santushti lingered. Neither fully authorised nor decisively extinguished. Today, in 2026, it survives, but only just. Not demolished, not revived, merely diminished.

Another case of Death by Bunda.

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And now we arrive at the Delhi Gymkhana Club. The question is no longer whether there will be an end. The only question is this: Will it be swift?

Or will it too be condemned to that uniquely subcontinental punishment?

For very long what has passed for governance in this country is often neither reform nor decisiveness, but something far stranger: a perpetual administrative twilight in which illegality is tolerated, legality is impractical, and resolution is endlessly deferred.

From Sainik Farms to Santushti and now the Delhi Gymkhana Club, the pattern is unmistakable. The State creates frameworks it neither meaningfully enforces nor rationally updates, leaving citizens and institutions suspended between obsolete regulations and selective crackdowns.

Laws survive long after their logic has expired. Policies are invoked not as instruments of order but as tools of convenience - applied, ignored, or weaponised according to circumstance.

The result is not governance. It is slow suffocation.

Systems are prevented from functioning legally, yet are never fully dismantled. Everyone adapts to the ambiguity. Officials extract rent. Residents improvise survival. Institutions slowly lose coherence and purpose.

Nothing quite dies but nothing is permitted fully to live either.

This is governance by attrition. A kind of administrative asphyxiation stretched over decades. 

Instead of confronting structural contradictions, regularising what is viable, dismantling what is not - the State allows everything to drift into managed decay.

It is not the drama of decisive action, but the quiet exhaustion of intent.

Not death, exactly. Something far more enduring.

Death by Bunda.