As protests erupt in Delhi’s Turkman Gate, memories of a dark Emergency-era episode resurface

Turkman Gate in Delhi’s history

Turkman Gate was constructed in the 17th century during the reign of Mughal emperor Shah Jahan, when he founded his new capital at Shahjahanabad. Yet the site’s historical significance predates the Mughal city and is rooted in a period when Delhi was a thriving centre of Sufism.

As historian Swapna Liddle notes in Chandni Chowk: The Mughal City of Delhi (2017), Shahjahanabad was not built on empty land. Instead, it incorporated older settlements, shrines, and road alignments into its urban fabric. In an interview with The Indian Express, Liddle explained that the road running from Fatepuri Masjid in the northwest to Turkman Gate was an important pre-existing thoroughfare, lined with older structures when Shah Jahan established his capital.

“It was beside this road that a Sufi saint called Shah Turkman Bayabani lived and was buried,” Liddle said. His dargah lies on the road leading to Hauz Qazi. Adjacent to the shrine is the grave traditionally identified as that of Razia Sultan, the first and only woman to rule the Delhi Sultanate in the 13th century.

When Shahjahanabad’s city walls were laid out, these older areas were enclosed within them. The gate built nearest to Shah Turkman’s shrine came to be known as Turkman Darwaza, or Turkman Gate. Although little is known about Shah Turkman himself, Liddle says that Razia Sultan’s burial near his shrine and the naming of a Mughal gateway after him indicate the reverence he continued to command long after his death.

The gate survived the upheavals of rebellion, colonial rule and Partition. After the uprising of 1857, British authorities demolished sections of the city walls on either side of the gate to prevent the walled city from sealing itself off. In the early 20th century, further portions of the walls were removed to facilitate commercial expansion. The gate itself, however, remained standing.

Turkman Gate during the Emergency

Much of what is known about the events at Turkman Gate during the Emergency comes from memoirs, inquiry records, journalistic investigations and later oral histories.

In the mid-1970s, Turkman Gate acquired sudden political prominence when Sanjay Gandhi spearheaded a controversial “beautification” drive in Delhi. The campaign aimed to clear slums and unauthorised settlements as part of an urban renewal effort, and followed an aggressive family-planning programme that disproportionately affected the urban poor.

In April 1976, the old walled city — home to a predominantly Muslim population — became a major target of this drive. In his memoir of the Emergency, economist Ashok Chakravarti wrote that Sanjay Gandhi visited Turkman Gate earlier that year and was angered by the hostile reception he received. “It is said that he was also unhappy that the buildings around Turkman Gate restricted his view from where he stood all the way to the Jama Masjid,” Chakravarti noted.

According to contemporaneous accounts and later testimonies, a decision was taken soon after to demolish the slums and structures surrounding Turkman Gate.

The first bulldozer arrived on April 13, 1976. Initial demolitions of outlying hutments met with little resistance. Soon after, however, a family-planning clinic was opened less than two kilometres away at Dujana House near Jama Masjid. It was run by Rukhsana Sultana, a prominent socialite-turned-activist with close links to Sanjay Gandhi. Residents later testified that men and women were pressured to undergo sterilisation in exchange for cash and other inducements.

The pressure soon escalated into coercion. “People of the area watched in horror as beggars were rounded up in the streets and bundled into a basement clinic, from which some never emerged,” anthropologist Emma Tarlo wrote in Unsettling Memories: Narratives of the Emergency in Delhi (2003).

As demolitions continued at Turkman Gate, panic spread among residents who feared their homes would be next. Some sought Sultana’s intervention. Tarlo records that she agreed to help only if residents allowed her to set up a family-planning clinic in the area and supply 300 sterilisation cases within a week.

At the same time, a more militant response was taking shape. Workers from a nearby lace factory convened meetings and resolved to mobilise residents to resist further demolitions.

On April 19, when bulldozers advanced deeper into the neighbourhood, protesters emerged from their homes and attacked the family-planning centre at Dujana House. Police responded with tear gas and lathi charges. Chakravarti recalled: “At 1.30 pm, a large group of women and children collected on the main road at Turkman Gate.” As police action intensified, the crowd reportedly swelled to between 5,000 and 6,000 people.

The confrontation escalated through the day, with stone-pelting by protesters followed by police firing. Eyewitnesses later told inquiry commissions and researchers that police officers could be heard instructing their men to fire on the protesters.

That night, bulldozers were sent in to complete the demolitions. According to Chakravarti’s account, rubble was cleared along with bodies, including injured people who were still alive, and disposed of along with debris at what he described as a refuse site some distance away. “The screams of those who were injured or trapped in the rubble could not be heard over the roaring and clanking of the machines. There was no pity, no respite,” he wrote.

Demolitions continued for nearly ten more days. Journalists John Dayal and Ajoy Bose, in For Reasons of State: Delhi under Emergency (2018), wrote: “The bulldozers worked round the clock till April 22, till they had obliterated all signs of life as well as death at Turkman Gate.” Subsequent research and survivor accounts have estimated the death toll at around 400, with more than 1,000 people injured.

The events at Turkman Gate were examined by the Shah Commission, established in 1977 to investigate abuses committed during the Emergency. Despite its findings, no prosecution followed and no senior official was punished for one of the darkest episodes in Delhi’s modern history.