Engineer Who

Lutyens Delhi was built on roughly 150 villages, majority of which were Jat settlements. Maninder Dabas, a journalist from Delhi, notes that nearly one-third of the President’s Estate about 1,792 acres belonged to the Jats of Malcha Mahal, who were forcibly uprooted, in some instances using cannons. Another 2,000 acres were taken from the Jat village of Raisina. Lutyens Delhi is widely regarded as one of the most expensive real estate in the world. Chandigarh is another city from which Jats were primarily displaced. In fact, most cities from Delhi to West Punjab were established on former Jat settlements. Prior to partition of India land was appropriated from native Jats through the use of force, the introduction of credit and private property systems that were completely alien to their jointly held shared cultivable lands and the takeover of village common lands placed under Colonial government control where favored zamindars and biswedars were installed for tax collection. Later retrospective texts and settlement reports were crafted that reassigned ownership of many such areas to non-Jats.