5 min readSep 13, 2026 08:00 AM IST
First published on: Sep 10, 2026 at 01:18 PM IST
Who, after all, is a Dilliwallah? For decades, Delhi has resisted answering this question. Instead, it has let its residents stitch something of themselves into an ever-expanding, ever-evolving patchwork of belonging. Its many-splendoured character refuses the easy definitions that questions of identity so often demand.
But cities change. Their doors may open wide for some, even as the meaning of belonging grows more uncertain for others. Has the Delhi of today begun to draw lines around who gets to call it home?
It is a question that has acquired a new urgency of late. The building collapse at Saidulajab in May, then another this week at Satya Niketan, followed just two days later by the assault on a musician from Manipur, Chongtham Vikram Singh, who had made the city his home, should be a moment of reckoning for the city. For they raise an uneasy question: Who gets to feel at home today in a city whose story has always been that of people arriving from elsewhere and finding a place within it?
Delhi has always had its cruelties. It has discriminated against the poor and has witnessed horrific communal violence. There have always been some enclaves whose residents made others feel less welcome. But there was something very reassuring about the city: People could arrive here without having to prove that they belonged.
Saidulajab and Satya Niketan are, in many ways, neighbourhoods of arrival: The first foothold in the city for several students and young people from across the country who come to Delhi in search of an education or a job. But what does the promise of a better life mean when the room in which they sleep becomes a death trap?
Official investigations may establish the immediate causes of these tragedies and hold the guilty to account. Conventional questions related to urban governance and planning failures must be answered. But it is also time to ask a more difficult question: What has made the city so indifferent to the humanity of its residents, especially those who come here for new possibilities?
Seven men have been arrested, and a juvenile has been detained for Chongtham Vikram Singh’s murder. An ordinary quarrel over loud noise ended with Singh being beaten so severely that he died in hospital a few hours later. We do not know if this was a hate crime. But the anxiety surrounding the possibility is telling. Singh had lived in Delhi for 30 years — long enough to be called a Dilliwallah by the elastic, undefined idea of belonging on which the city prides itself. Even then, his death has stirred fear among people from the Northeast who have long spoken of the casual racism and discrimination they encounter in Delhi. For many people from the region, the fear of being reminded that they are still seen as outsiders is an everyday reality.
Delhi continues to draw people from all parts of the country. But can it now shove aside the old question about identity with the insouciance of the past?
The trouble is that Delhi’s accommodative spirit never became the hallmark of its politics and governance. It did not translate into modern institutions that placed people’s welfare, dignity and humanity at their core. Delhi could give everyone a place, but it did not always make neighbourhoods liveable. Newcomers were absorbed but not always with protections that ought to come with citizenship and residence: Dignified housing, clean air, safe streets, reliable public services, and a law-and-order system that protects everyone equally. Delhi’s pollution control agencies, construction bodies, transport agencies, in fact, its municipal and administrative system were rarely informed by the undercurrents of humanity in the city’s ethos. And Delhi’s politics, mirroring the nation’s narrow identity politics, rarely nudged these agencies in this direction.
Perhaps this is where the city’s old compact has begun to fray. And perhaps that’s why Delhi must examine governance issues beyond the ways of textbooks. Master plans are important. But their technicalities obscure why Delhi’s institutional failures made its old promise of belonging harder to take for granted. The question, whether Delhi still has the generosity to make a newcomer feel at home, must, of course, be asked. The more important question is whether the expanding city has the institutions to make that belonging safe, dignified and secure. A city cannot claim to welcome everyone if its institutions fail to protect them. For a city built, again and again, by people who arrived from outside its boundaries, that’s perhaps the real test after last week’s horrific incidents.
The writer is senior associate editor, The Indian Express. kaushik.dasgupta@expressindia.com
Joshna Chongtham, wife of Chongtham Vikram Singh, at Manipur Bhawan on Tuesday. (Express Photo by Abhinav Saha)
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