A Capital That Belongs to No State

A capital is not a city that happens to contain a government. It is a place whose reason for existing is to hold one, and whose economy is therefore a payroll with streets attached. Chandigarh is the purest example in India, because it was built from nothing for that purpose and has never been anything else.

What makes it unusual is the second half of the story. The state it was built for lost control of it within twenty years, and the city has been governed ever since by an administrator appointed from Delhi, on behalf of two states that both use it and neither of which owns it.

Why it is there at all

In 1947 Punjab's capital was Lahore, and Lahore became part of Pakistan. The Indian part of the province had a secretariat with nowhere to sit, and the decision to build a new capital was taken almost immediately — first at a site near Shimla, then on the plain at the foot of the Shivaliks, where land was flat, water was available and the climate was not Delhi's.

The first plan was American, by Albert Mayer with Matthew Nowicki. After Nowicki died in a plane crash the project passed to a team led by Le Corbusier, with Pierre Jeanneret, Maxwell Fry and Jane Drew, and the grid of sectors, the concrete, the brise-soleil and the Capitol at the head of the city all date from that second phase, from 1951 onwards.

The grid as an administrative object

A sector in Chandigarh is not a neighbourhood that grew; it is an allotment. The city was laid out as a grid of sectors of roughly the same size, each with housing, a market, a school and open space, connected by roads classified by speed. That is a planning decision, and it is also an administrative one: if every sector has the same obligations, the city can be governed by a rulebook instead of by negotiation.

The land underneath is the part that matters most. It was acquired by the state at the time of building, and most of it was allotted on long lease rather than sold outright. That single choice means the administration is not only the regulator of the city but its landlord — it collects lease rent, it controls change of use, and it can, in principle, enforce what the plan intended long after the planner is gone.

1966: the city becomes nobody's

Punjab was divided again in 1966, and Haryana was carved out of it. The capital could not be handed to one without the other losing it, so Chandigarh was made a union territory and named the joint capital of both states. Punjab's own secretariat moved out to a new town of its own; Haryana built one too. Both kept offices in the city.

The result is a place with two of everything except a government of its own. Two state secretariats, two police headquarters with jurisdiction outside the city, two sets of state employees commuting in, and one union territory administration that runs the water, the roads and the land — under an administrator who is also the Governor of Punjab, an office with an interest in one of the two tenants.

The one institution that is genuinely shared

The secretariats are tenants; the High Court is a joint institution. The Punjab and Haryana High Court sits in Chandigarh and has jurisdiction over both states and over the union territory, which makes it the one body in the arrangement that neither state can simply move out of. Judges are appointed from both cadres, the bar draws from both, and the building is one of the Capitol Complex's neighbours rather than a state's property.

That is the arrangement in miniature: everything that must be shared was put in one place and given a joint constitution, and everything that could be duplicated was duplicated. Two secretariats, two police forces, two public service commissions, two sets of state schemes — and one court, one airport, one railway station, one grid of roads that both states use to reach their own territory.

What joint custody costs

The city's budget is a union territory budget. It is financed by its own receipts — lease rent, water and power charges, licence fees — plus transfers from the centre, and it is not a line in either state's budget. Residents pay state-like taxes to a territory that has a narrower legislative list, and the services they receive are decided by an administrator rather than by an assembly.

The awkward parts are small and permanent. Employment in the administration, admission to its schools and colleges, and the domicile rules that govern both are a standing negotiation between two states that each regard the city as partly theirs. The municipal corporation is elected, but its powers stop short of the things residents argue about most: land, water rates, and the transport that connects the city to the two states around it.

And the city has grown past its boundary. The metropolitan area now spills into Mohali in Punjab and Panchkula in Haryana, on roads that were designed as approaches to a capital and are now commuter corridors. The plan covers 114 square kilometres; the economy covers several times that, and the part outside the line is governed by two different states with two different sets of rules.

A plan that became an export

The Capitol Complex — the Assembly, the Secretariat, the High Court and the monuments between them — was inscribed on the world heritage list in 2016 as part of Le Corbusier's architectural work. That listing is a form of protection, and it is also an admission: the thing the city is famous for is a set of buildings designed for a government, in a city that no longer has one of its own.

What Chandigarh exported was not concrete. It was the idea that a city can be administered as a rule before it is inhabited — that a plan can be a governance instrument rather than a drawing. The idea worked here because the land was owned by the planner and the population arrived afterwards, which is a condition no other Indian city has been able to reproduce.