Edwin Lutyens ultimately secured near-exclusive credit for New Delhi’s design not just because he was talented, but because he was an exceptional public-relations strategist on February 23, 2026, Edwin Lutyens’s bust was removed as part of the government’s ongoing decolonisation drive. In its place now stands the bust of C. Rajagopalachari, the first Indian Governor-General of independent India. Prime Minister Narendra Modi framed the move as an act of “leaving behind symbols of slavery,” while the Opposition, predictably, criticised it in familiar and unimaginative terms. This is not the first time a statue — or in this case, a bust— has been taken down. Such acts are attempts to wreak vengeance on the past and rewrite the future.