The Last Club Standing
Power · Legacy · Delhi · May 2026
The Last Club Standing
113 years of scotch, secrets, and power. Delhi Gymkhana is finally being evicted — and with it, an entire idea of who India belongs to.
Picture it: a Tuesday evening on Safdarjung Road. A retired IAS officer nursing a Scotch. A former judge on his third gin. A newspaper editor whispering into an MP's ear. Nobody's really paying — it's all on tab, and the tab at Delhi Gymkhana has always been, in one way or another, on India. That party ends June 5, 2026, when the government ordered the club to vacate its 27.3 acres. All of it. Gone.
Born imperial. Stayed imperial.
The British founded this club in 1913 as a social fortress — initially meant for colonial officers who didn't want to socialise with the people they governed. After 1947, India got independence. The club just dropped "Imperial" from its name and kept everything else: the dress code, the billiards room, the class hierarchy. IAS officers slotted neatly into the spots where British collectors once sat. The system didn't change. Only the accents did.
To get in, money alone was never enough. There was a concept called clubability — a vibe check, essentially — to determine whether your face fit. With a 37-year waiting list, many applicants died before their name was called. Those who got in never let anyone forget it.
The Lutyens Gang — India's original old boys' network
Edwin Lutyens designed New Delhi's grand bungalows and boulevards for colonial administrators. After independence, those bungalows went to the new elite — cabinet secretaries, judges, MPs, and their families. Over generations, the people who lived inside this zone developed something more dangerous than wealth: a shared worldview. They ran the same social circuit, read newspapers written by each other, and treated governance as an inherited right. This is the Lutyens Gang — not a formal conspiracy, but an informal network of bureaucrats, politicians, journalists, and academics, all rotating through the same rooms. Delhi Gymkhana was their living room. Deals that couldn't survive daylight were made over dinner here.
The fall: 2021 to 2026
When Modi came to power in 2014 and coined "Khan Market Gang" as a political insult, many Gymkhana members still weren't worried. The club had survived partition, the Emergency, and liberalisation. It would survive this too. It wouldn't. In 2021, Ministry of Corporate Affairs officials arrived with police, bureaucrats, and cameras — and announced a takeover citing "financial mismanagement" and a "family fiefdom" culture. The General Committee was suspended. And the man installed as the club's new administrator? Om Pathak — a BJP operative who'd applied for Gymkhana membership in 1982 and been rejected. The symbolism was not subtle.
— Former committee member, to the Financial Times
The honest verdict
The Gymkhana was simultaneously an excellent club — superb tennis courts, a real library, a literary festival — and a symbol of staggering, unaccountable privilege: 27 acres of prime government land, rented at a rate that bore no relationship to market value, occupied by people who were already India's most comfortable. The Lutyens Gang was real. The self-perpetuating network was real. The way it insulated itself from accountability was genuinely corrosive.
But what replaces it is its own elite: saffron-accented, RSS-networked, with its own clubs, its own journalists, its own sinecures. India hasn't dismantled its power networks. It has changed the guest list. The club is dead. Long live the club.
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