In the heart of Delhi, a short distance from the Indian prime minister’s residence, a small mosque stands amid piles of rubble. Its pale walls and pointed arches remain intact, its courtyard still lined with green-and-white tiles.
But the people who gave life to the place are gone.
Mohammad Wasim, 50, points across the rubble to the spot where his house once stood.
“My father was married there, and, decades later, so was my daughter,” says Wasim, a driver.
Wasim and his family were among hundreds of people who lived around the mosque in a patchwork of modest homes tucked between military compounds, exclusive clubs and sprawling bungalows in Race Course, one of the Indian capital’s wealthiest and most heavily guarded neighbourhoods. Many of them had lived here for generations, working as drivers, cleaners and gardeners in the wealthy houses around them.
On 7 October, the authorities demolished their houses across three settlements, saying they had been built illegally on government land. They also raised security concerns because of the houses’ proximity to military installations. Some 717 families were relocated to Savda Ghevra, a colony nearly 31 miles away, on the city’s outskirts.
Residents had challenged the evictions in the Delhi High Court, arguing that moving so far from their jobs, schools and communities would upend their lives. But in August, the court allowed the relocation, accepting the government’s security concerns and noting that alternative housing had been provided.
Only the mosque and a nearby Hindu temple were left standing. But their water and electricity supplies were cut off that day, and access to the compound has since been restricted. Worshippers are generally turned away at the gates, though some are occasionally allowed through after pleading with guards.
The government says it owns the land on which the mosque stands, but mosque authorities say it was registered in 1977 as waqf property – land or buildings set aside under Islamic law for religious or charitable purposes – and is listed as a heritage structure. The Delhi Waqf Board says it is nearly 300 years old, though other estimates put its age at 125-150 years.
The board has written to the authorities seeking restoration of the mosque’s water and electricity and raising concerns about its future. Separately, a worshipper has petitioned the high court over restrictions on prayers and fears that the mosque could be demolished.
On 29 October, the government told the court it would take no action against the mosque for four weeks while considering the board’s objections. It opposed restoring access for prayers, citing safety concerns during demolition work, a position disputed by the worshippers’ lawyer. The court declined to intervene and scheduled another hearing for 16 December.
While the mosque’s future remains uncertain, for those who once lived around it, the question now is what can be salvaged of the lives they built there.
Wasim still returns to the mosque to pray when he can, though guards sometimes turn him away. On a recent afternoon, he was among just four or five worshippers inside. A generator chugged loudly outside, supplying electricity after the power had been cut off.
“Our hearts and entire lives are tied to this place,” he says. “How can we let it go, when our childhood was spent playing here?”
Rekha, a widow, remembers the colony with longing. She washed dishes in nearby homes, raised her family and performed seva (voluntary service) at the local temple.
To her, the word rehabilitation seems painfully inadequate: “How can a life built over decades be uprooted and planted somewhere else?” she asks.
Since the move, she has lost the work she depended on. Her 19-year-old son is struggling to find a job. She has been allotted a third-floor apartment but climbing stairs is painful because of a metal rod in her leg after an operation.
“I may have a house but my home was snatched away.”
Critics say these experiences are part of a longer history of displacement in Delhi, where working-class communities have repeatedly been pushed to the city’s distant edges because they lack documents proving legal ownership of land they have lived on for decades.
“Relocation disconnects them from both jobs and networks, resulting in livelihood and income loss,” urban researcher Mukta Naik told the BBC.
As families scatter in search of work, she says, the informal support systems they once relied on become harder to rebuild.
“This leaves families to fend for themselves,” she says.
The Delhi government’s housing agency, the local municipal council and the central government’s land office did not respond to requests for comment.
Savda Ghevra was established in 2006 on farmland near Delhi’s border with Haryana state, to house families displaced from elsewhere in the city.
The first arrivals found little more than bare plots, without roads, running water or electricity. Over time, they built homes, opened shops and fought for basic services. By the early 2020s, an estimated 50,000 people lived here, having made a neighbourhood out of a place they had little choice but to inhabit.
Now the families from Race Course have begun the same slow work.
They have traded the lush tree-lined avenues of central Delhi for rows of nearly identical concrete blocks, with open fields stretching beyond. Life is going on, but much of what sustained these families remains on the other side of the city.
Every day, Babloo leaves home at 5am to take his children by metro to their old school in central Delhi, changing trains three times along the way. He waits out the six hours until classes finish at a tea stall outside his former neighbourhood. When he has work his wife makes the journey.
Their new home is too far away, he says, to return between the school runs. By the time the family reaches Savda Ghevra, it is around 4pm.
Babloo once worked at a club in Race Course. He has now found work in Meerut, a town to the north-east of Delhi. Residents knew they might have to leave, he says, but they hoped they would be relocated somewhere close enough to continue their jobs and their children’s schooling.
The government says suitable apartments were unavailable closer to Race Course. In court, it cited Savda Ghevra’s schools, dispensaries and transport links as evidence that the area could accommodate the displaced families.
But the presence of these facilities offers little reassurance to Naeem Khan, 63. His two grandsons have hearing and speech disabilities and need specialised care and schooling that he says are unavailable in the area.
The move has also scattered Naeem’s family. One son and a divorced daughter share his tiny one-room apartment, while his two other sons had to move elsewhere due to lack of space.
“We have been thrown 20 years backward,” he says.
The distance has been especially costly for women. Naik says childcare responsibilities, transport costs and safety concerns make long commutes to work particularly difficult for them.
At Race Course, the wealth surrounding the settlements offered small but vital ways to earn money – dishes to wash, gardens to tend, discarded bottles to collect and sell.
Akhtari, an elderly widow, collected mineral-water bottles for about 100 rupees (about $1.05; £0.80) a day and dried leftover rotis, or flatbreads, to sell as cattle feed.
Now even these modest sources of income have disappeared.
“Everyone living here was evicted; everyone is poor, broken, and struggling themselves,” Akhtari says. “Who will hire someone else for housework?”
At Race Course, when she had nothing, the mosque’s imam or a neighbour might give her money for flour. Her neighbours checked on her. In the new apartment, she has a roof over her head, but few people to fall back on.
She has begun to worry about what will happen if she falls ill.
“If I collapse and die inside, no one will even know,” she says. ” Hopefully someone will break down the door and find me.”
