Phool Waalon ki Sair Festival Hangs in Balance

This year, at the beginning of November, the Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) slipped in two political decisions that jolted Delhi. Both the decisions landed in the same week, the first on 4th November and the second, the 6th of November. Timed with the certainty of a party that knows exactly what it wants to signal. One was caught in a bureaucratic web of claims and counater claims, and the other was dressed up as a bold commercial innovation. But together they do something more deliberate: they attempt to re-script Delhi’s cosmopolitan cultural DNA, easing the city away from its long, undeniable Muslim inheritance.

The first flashpoint was the abrupt cancellation of the Phool Walon Ki Sair (The Procession of Florists) in Mehrauli — a 300-year-old symbol of syncretic culture. The second was a push to throw open Delhi’s heritage monuments for weddings and cultural rentals. 

And in a display of bureaucratic acrobatics, the three centuries-old festival was halted on the pretext of pending clearance for Aam Bagh (the Mehrauli festival venue) from the Delhi Forest Department — an environmental concern — while the plan for the commercial takeover of fragile heritage sites, most of them mapped as existing green zones of the city, was proposed as a market-ready opportunity. The proposal, originally floated by Delhi Tourism Minister Kapil Mishra, is now being considered for implementation as a public-private-participation (PPP) model sweetened with GST relaxations.

Ever since the BJP came to power at the centre in 2014 the Capital has been out of reach for the party. The party had briefly dominated the city when the Delhi Legislative Assembly was established in 1993 – but at the time it had a metropolitan council with no legislative powers. The Congress ruled Delhi for the next three consecutive terms from 1998 to 2013 and then, the Aam Admi Party dominated the Capital from 2013 to 2025.  The February 2025 assembly elections brought the BJP to power in Delhi after 27 years with Rekha Gupta as its chief minister.

The signal behind the latest manoeuvres is plain enough. As social activist, filmmaker and poet Gauhar Raza puts it, “We have to accept that some of us will claim it as heritage and others not. But it does point to a permanent shift in culture that is based on hatred. What is important is erasure of history. That should not be done.”

His warning is not metaphor. It describes an ongoing project. Mehrauli holds distinction of being one of the seven medieval cities that constitutes the present union territory of Delhi. It’s home to the architectural remnants of the 12^th century Tomar dynasty (Lal Kot) as well as the Delhi Sultanate that followed it. While Mehrauli may appear like any other ordinary neighbourhood today, its historical significance lies not only in its architecture but also its syncretic culture. Phool Walon ki Sair is an annual festival symbolising communal harmony and unity, in which people from Hindu and Muslim communities together offer a flower chadar at the Dargah of Khwaja Qutubuddin Bakhtiyar Kaki and a flower pankha at the Yogmaya Temple. The event dates back to the Mughal period. 

The Delhi Development Authority (DDA) is the nodal agency that grants permission for holding of the festival. This time, it refused, citing lack of clearance from the Delhi Forest Department. It is not clear what the jurisdiction overlap is, except for the Yogmaya temple, which is located at the edge of the Sanjay Van, a protected city forest. It was only after Lt Governor V.K. Saxena intervened that a verbal approval to hold the festival was granted. However, the festival’s organising committee, Anjuman Sair-e-Gulfaroshan claims that it has still not received a written permission, “We have not yet received any written communication from DDA regarding the required permission,” Usha Kumar, general secretary of the organising committee said. 

The Mughals began the festival as an annual event (1811-1812), using it to project political authority among Hindu and Muslim subjects at a moment when the British resident at the court of Akbar Shah II had begun to wield more influence than the emperor himself. The Phool Walon Ki Sair festival (or the festival of Gulfaroshan as it was then known) can thus be read as the Mughal empire’s symbolic assertion of power over British power play. 

But this history sits uneasily with the Hindutva narrative, which seeks to portray Mughal rule as uniformly oppressive and anti-Hindu—a line of argument repeatedly underscored by the present regime’s frequent invocation of Aurangzeb. The narrative posits Indian history as a civilisational struggle between tolerant native Hindu majority and a repressive Muslim polity.

The second decision — to open Delhi’s 80 heritage sites to commercial rentals majority of them Muslim — effectively turns Muslim and British colonial monuments into empty backdrops for lavish weddings, Ramlilas and Viksit Bharat corporate gala dinners. It is historical monuments repurposed as décor the way classical Indian music is reduced to an elevator ambient hum in luxury hotels.And this aesthetic thinning isn’t new. It runs through the earlier Central government–sponsored remodelling of Lutyens’ Delhi (the new parliament building, the North and South Blocks, the Central Vista); the demolition of post-Independence modernism once embodied in the Hall of Nations at Pragati Maidan; and its replacement with the retro-futurist facadism of the Bharat Mandapam. 

It reaches into the growing desire to rebrand India’s Muslim architectural heritage as scenic filler — much like the Red Fort, the backdrop for the Prime Minister’s Independence Day address, now consumed on television as a grand stage prop. Now the shift has reached the city’s cultural life. The uncertainty around Phool Walon Ki Sair — its abrupt deferral — offers a preview of what a slow, quiet phasing-out looks like when history becomes ideologically inconvenient. And this is how, history is erased. Not by grand decrees, but by small, calculated interventions and interruptions.