Air Force Golf Course Near PM House Closed. How This Land Has Seen Many Turns Of History

The Air Force Sports Complex, home to a golf course inside the Air Force Station in the heart of New Delhi, was closed until further orders on October 28. The closure came as the Land and Development Office (L&DO) of the Ministry of Housing and Urban Affairs had already served notices asking for the land to be returned.

The closure also upended the farewell for Air Chief Marshal A P Singh, who retires on October 31. It was to be a "golfing out"; by tradition, the IAF chief is the patron-in-chief of the facility.

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Besides the course, the complex has some other sporting facilities, a swimming pool, and eateries. It is governed by a council of serving Air Force officers, according to a 2024 Delhi High Court judgment.

Closure Part Of Wider Plan

The complex is the latest property near the Prime Minister's residence on Lok Kalyan Marg (earlier called Race Course Road) set to be taken back this year. The other plots were held for decades under leases; no allotment document for the complex's land has been produced in court.

The Delhi Race Club's track and the Jaipur Polo Ground have already been reclaimed, and the Delhi Gymkhana Club's lease has been ended. The government has not said expressly what it plans to do with the land.

Over the past several weeks, it has begun a review, through the L&DO, of prime land parcels near Lok Kalyan Marg. The closest the government came to explaining its purpose was in May, when the ministry ended the Gymkhana's lease through the L&DO. The L&DO called the area a "highly sensitive and strategic area" and said the land was needed for "urgent institutional needs, governance infrastructure and public-interest projects" integrated with adjoining government land.

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100 Years On

How an Air Force golf course came to sit in the heart of Lutyens' Delhi, now a few hundred metres from the Prime Minister's home, is a story that has seen many turns over the same big parcel of land. The Indian Air Force is not where the story began. It began with horses, 100 years ago.

In 1926, the British colonial government leased land to the Delhi Race Club, according to the deed cited in a Delhi High Court order this year. The club laid out an oval track. Its stables, renovated in the 1940s, were built to shield the horses from Delhi's heat. Flying came to the neighbourhood around the same time. An airfield nearby, first named Willingdon and now Safdarjung, saw its first commercial flight in 1927, and the Delhi Flying Club was set up there the following year, according to records of the UK's Airborne Assault Museum.

On September 22, 1941, the Royal Air Force opened an Air Landing School in the airfield's south-west corner to train an Indian Army parachute formation. Its first official parachute course began on November 10 that year, with 11 officers and 13 other ranks of the 151 British Parachute Battalion. The school moved to Chaklala, near Rawalpindi, in October 1942.

As for the Delhi airfield, through the rest of the Second World War, it was a base for RAF (Royal Air Force) communication planes. Another RAF airfield opened at Palam, on the city's western edge, in 1943.

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Partition cost the air force "many permanent bases and other establishments". On September 1, 1947, it formed Air Force Station New Delhi at Race Course. The "Royal" prefix was dropped when India became a republic in January 1950.

Next door, part of the Race Club's premises was also taken over by the Indian Air Force, leaving the oval track in the horseshoe shape. The grounds have been used for sports, including golf, for years. In the same larger area, the Jaipur Polo Ground sat on an adjacent land parcel under a lease since at least 1951, according to an eviction order.

Over the decades, the station became much more than an administrative base. From 1980, the Air Force Association, a body for retired personnel, worked out of it "with kind courtesy of Air HQ", which gave it a room, some furniture, a typewriter and a clerk, according to the association's website. The Air Force Wives Welfare Association set up the Santushti shopping complex on the station's premises.

To Whom Does The Land Belong?

The sports complex eventually housed a golf club, a health club and a swimming pool. In a 2006 ruling in a case filed by a retired Air Vice Marshal who had been a member since 1987, a Delhi High Court bench called the complex "a private body only providing recreation to Air Force Officers". It held that government help such as "land for the golf course or a concession in liquor" did not make it an arm of the State.

As for whose land it stood on, the Defence Estates Officer for Delhi told the Central Information Commission in a 2014 submission that the Air Force occupied 126.948 acres of Urban Development Ministry land in the Race Course area. Of 100 acres allotted to the Defence Ministry for the area, only 52.80 acres had been formally transferred. The sports complex, the officer said, was "apparently" located on "MoUD land under the occupation of Air Force Station". The Ministry of Urban Development (MoUD) is now part of the Ministry of Housing and Urban Affairs, whose wing, the L&DO, is reclaiming the land of the complex, around 30 acres.

An attempt to take the land back came in 2017. On November 13 that year, the L&DO issued eviction notices to five properties on Lok Kalyan Marg (as Race Course Road was renamed in 2016). These were the race course, the polo ground, the sports complex, Old Willingdon Camp and the Santushti shopping complex. The notices then lay largely dormant.

In the latest turn of events, the L&DO served the Race Club and the polo association with notices in March. The Centre took possession of the polo ground on June 13, and of the Race Club on August 27. On October 28, the golf course was shut too.

There have been arguments about how such facilities are colonial legacies, or about the commercial value of the land, and, of course, its strategic value. Either way, history is taking a major turn as the geographical pins move in the Indian capital.