The sight of a truculent security guard at Bengaluru’s historic Cubbon Park clutching a bundle of books he had ‘confiscated’ from people gathered to exchange books at a Secret Santa event last December has settled into the park’s infamous lore. Cubbon Park was once a freely accessible space where Dalits, farmers, and trade unions held militant protests and rallies demanding attention or accountability from the government. Today, it is tightly regulated, with parts of it fenced-in and manicured lawns that visitors can only admire from afar. For people wishing to escape the concrete jungle and use the park as a public space where communities could gather, hell hath no fury like a Horticulture Department (and police) scorned.
Officially called Sri Chamarajendra Wadiyar Park, Cubbon Park, as it is popularly known, is a large expanse of green in the heart of Bengaluru, of which generations of the city’s people have fond memories. Since the 1990s, citizens and activists have pushed back against the government’s attempts to encroach on parkland, whether it was to build parking lots or denotify sections of the park. But over the years, the protesting public has lost several battles as they could not withstand the combined might of the state government and Karnataka High Court.
The High Court permitted the government to build an annexe to the Legislators’ Home in 1998, and in 2019, the HC granted permission to build an annexe building for the court itself. Other facilities, like expanding parking areas, have also come up despite the government’s insistence on park conservation policies. While the government has continued to flex its presence in Cubbon Park, the public has been subjected to a bewildering array of dos and don'ts and increased policing on who is allowed to use the park and how. Security guards and park officials arbitrarily routinely evict those they deem a threat to the park’s aesthetics and environment.
Fed up, many people who’ve been at the receiving end of park officials’ and security guards’ ire are now demanding that the Horticulture Department, which manages the park, be more transparent, disclose the rules publicly, and involve all types of users of the park – not just the elite ones – in decision-making.
‘You can’t do this here’
The process of controlling access to Cubbon Park arguably began in 1998, when the park was first fenced and gates installed. But the last few years have seen park officials and security guards increasingly restrict the activities of people for vaguely muttered “rules.”
P Rohini Rajasekaran, a Bengaluru-based artist and writer, has been running activities for a small group called ‘Koota’ near the gazebo for over two years. Meaning “gathering” in Kannada, the group started as a response to the demolition of activist Afreen Fatima’s house in UP’s Prayagraj (formerly Allahabad) in June 2022.
It became a monthly affair, with organisers inviting people to doodle, draw, paint, write, or even perform on a chosen theme, and about a dozen people usually turned up. Rohini said that it was usually when performances were involved that Koota drew attention from park visitors.
Tired of being repeatedly questioned about what they were doing, Rohini, in November 2022, started providing detailed explanations regarding the group’s activities to the Horticulture Department. Things came to a head in August 2024, when Koota chose press freedom as the theme in memory of journalist-activist Gauri Lankesh, who was murdered on September 5, 2017.
The Cubbon Park police had seen the poster and informed the Horticulture Department, who then demanded answers. A frustrating exchange followed. The Department insisted that a letter given earlier for Koota events could not be treated as permission. “They did not have an answer when I asked them what rules we were violating. There is nothing that says what the rules are,” Rohini said.
On the day of the event, the police arrived. “They said such an event was to be held at Freedom Park, and that we had to wrap it up. We refused. Just her name (Gauri Lankesh) had everybody frazzled. It was ridiculous.”
The police then asked them to write a concept note explaining their activities and get it approved by the Horticulture Department. At this point, they hit a dead end. The Department told them that only three kinds of activities were permitted: marathons and walkathons, events organised by the Department, and environmental awareness events. “There is no way to build a relationship with the Department,” Rohini said.
The Ambedkar Reading Circle (ARC) is another group that meets once a month at the park. Vignesh Shiva Subramanian, one of the founders, told TNM that about 15-20 people turn up with their books, read, and discuss what they’ve read. For people from marginalised backgrounds, ARC has become a safe haven. “No one talks about how the city is segregated. It took some of us so long to open up and be able to talk about our experiences of discrimination in urban spaces and how difficult it is to get a house in this city. ARC became a safe space for us,” Vignesh said.
He had read the rules reported in the media in the wake of the Secret Santa fiasco about gatherings of people above 20 not being permitted. “Even though no one has disturbed us, we are constantly under surveillance. The guards are always staring at us. Participants also feel threatened because of this.”
Vignesh said conflicts with the authorities could have harsher consequences for people from marginalised communities. “We cannot afford to get into trouble with authorities. We can’t go against the government directly or fight back if something goes wrong. If trouble occurs, it will hurt the other organisations and movements we are associated with,” he said.
Where is the line?
So far, the public has been discovering the rules when security guards frantically blow their whistles at clueless visitors. After the Secret Santa fiasco, Deputy Director for Horticulture (Cubbon Park) G Kusuma mentioned some of the rules to the media.
However, the full list is longer, and the don’ts outnumber the dos—practically all activity in the park except walking is prohibited. Although some rules are listed on notices put up all over the park, a full list is also not available in the public domain.
The usual restrictions on using plastic, smoking and drinking, littering, urinating, and defecating anywhere other than in toilets, displaying banners or posters, bursting crackers, or conducting activities that cause noise, water or air pollution, begging, fortune-telling, collection of donations, commercial activities, photography/videography for weddings, or modelling are not prohibited in the park. Street vendors are also not allowed entry into the park.
The recreational activities banned in the park include eating, playing on the lawns, climbing trees, swinging from tree branches, plucking leaves or flowers, and playing with balloons or other toys.
The last rule on the list is the one that gives the Horticulture Department the authority to pretty much ban anything and everything: “Public gatherings, peace meetings, press meets, birthdays, and any other celebrations (except for events associated with the park, national festivals, and government programmes) are not allowed.”
Allowed activities – all of which need prior permission from the Department – include walkathons and marathons (for a fee), government programmes to create awareness, events at the bandstand, photography of flora and fauna, yoga/meditation in groups not exceeding 10, reading and writing in groups not exceeding 10 people, medical camps by registered charitable organisations, cycling in the park between 8 am and 6 pm (training is not allowed), and skating is allowed on the road inside the park from the NGO entrance to the children’s library between 6 am and 6 pm on days when vehicles are banned.
Deputy Director for Horticulture (Cubbon Park) G Kusuma told TNM that park rules – of which TNM has a copy – were framed in November 2024 during a Cubbon Park Preservation Committee meeting and that a government order is yet to be issued.
The Cubbon Park Preservation Committee has members from various government departments and other bodies whose premises are located in Cubbon Park, such as the Karnataka High Court, Department of Archaeology, Museums, and Heritage, the Visvesvaraya Industrial and Technological Museum, the BBMP, etc. It also includes domain experts in botany, entomology, forestry, and environmental sciences.
Among the members of the public, five are listed as from the Cubbon Park Walkers’ Association, while one member is listed as “other representatives who wish to be part of the committee.” It is unclear who this person is.
A committee member who declined to be named said that the government had already framed the rules and merely placed it before the committee for debate before being finalised. However, they believed that while the organisers of the Secret Santa event had been irresponsible, and the Horticulture Department too had been highhanded. “They went and enforced rules without telling anybody what they were,” they said.
For two years, folk researcher and artiste Shilpa Mudbi performed in Cubbon Park but COVID-19 brought an end to it. Her performance was so popular that she would inform people through a WhatsApp group that she would not be able to make it. “The park was everything for me. It was my office; it was a place where musicians would gather. If we had to meet anyone, we would just say, ‘Come to the park’,” Shilpa said.
But throughout that time, she said, she saw security guards pick on people. “Security guards have so much power. They lack the consciousness that they are there to avert problems, not create them. I understand that security guards need some power, but they have become a menace in Cubbon Park. There is a need for security guards to know why the park exists and where they have to draw the line,” Shilpa said.
Where do we go from here?
From the militant protests that were held in a corner of the park facing Vidhana Soudha right up until the 1980s, to the plays that were staged in the bamboo grove, the picnics and games, the musicians who sang there, the place that gave us the iconic song Naguva Nayana Madhura Mouna, Cubbon Park is possibly the one place in Bengaluru that was truly public because people claimed it as their own and made it an integral part of their lives. Until, of course, the authorities started throwing people out or restricting activities as a result of middle-class activism and judicial orders, and of late, rules that are not publicly accessible. There is simply no way at present to protest or question the grounds of one’s eviction from the park—a public place.
A great deal of research on public spaces across the world has shown how caste and class shape access to open spaces and parks in urban areas and how the poor, people who “look” poor, and people who fall foul of elite notions of acceptable activities and behaviour are pushed out. This holds true of Bengaluru too.
Cubbon Park too has seen this trajectory. The 1970s saw the beginnings of the ‘privatisation’ of public spaces in Bengaluru to the 1970s, when calls for ‘beauty by banning’ began to be made with the formation of the Bangalore Urban Arts Commission.
In 1993, the state government set up a High Power Committee with a mandate to come up with a ‘time-bound plan for restoring the beauty of Bangalore. The committee called for banning public rallies and political or labour demonstrations in the park. This objective was finally achieved in 1997 when the then Police Commissioner L Revanasiddaiah issued a ban order.
It was also around the same time that activists such as NH Desai were filing PILs in the Karnataka High Court, seeking orders against the dumping of debris in the park and the like. The installation of gates around this time was a “triumph” of middle-class environment activism, Janaki Nair said in her book, The Promise of the Metropolis: Bangalore's Twentieth Century.
Fencing off the park amounted to “privatisation of a public space,” creating an atmosphere where individuals such as joggers, walkers, or families ended up having ‘user rights’, Janaki said. “This ‘ownership of rights’ over a public space replaces all public collective uses with strictly privatised ones and represents a triumph of the discourse on the environment.”
However, in Bengaluru’s context, the environmental concern is closely linked to its insistence on ‘beautification’, a concept that has been tied to every discussion of city development since the time of Dewan Mirza Ismail.
It was unsurprising therefore, when Deputy Director Kusuma too cited conservation as justification for several of the rules in force today, such as the ban on eating, playing, and lying down on the grass. “Even if the bins are right in front of them, people litter the park. You should see what people get up to. They climb the trees; they swing. The plants and lawns get damaged,” she said.
For a large number of people, Cubbon Park is not just a green space but a public place that should belong to the public and can have multiple uses, including social and cultural ones.
“It’s like buying books for a library and then locking them all up. If gathering in a public space is a problem, it defeats the purpose of a public place,” said Vignesh of ARC.
Many people are calling on the government to be more responsive toward social users of the park and involve all groups of users in the decision-making process.
Bengaluru-based activist Vinay Sreenivasa made a similar demand. Maintaining that conservation efforts must be balanced with the needs of the public, he asked, “How were the public members of the Cubbon Park Preservation Committee chosen? Why are the rules being formed without any public consultation? Can the meetings of the committee not be open to the public?”
Secretary for the Horticulture Department Shamla Iqbal told TNM that guidelines had already been framed for groups who meet in the park regularly and that a mechanism had been put in place to seek permission or inform them about planned activities.
She also said a decision had also been made to train security guards on how to interact with the public amicably. She also said that the committee would be taking up the question of setting up designated areas for cultural activities, street vendors, and picnic areas where people could eat.
Rohan D’Souza, an environment researcher and park user, draws parallels between the conflicts over Cubbon Park and those over Bengaluru’s system of interconnected tanks designed to meet the city’s water needs. These tanks had different uses, such as fishing, bathing livestock, religious rituals, and water harvesting.
In the recent past, some of these tanks have been managed not by government bodies but by Resident Welfare Associations (RWA) and corporate groups who pushed out traditional users through measures such as fences and entry fees.
“This is the protected area mentality. People who live close to forests will destroy them. Keep the common folk away, or else they will destroy the place,” Rohan said, referring to an idea that underpins many conservation efforts across the world, including in India, through provisions of the Wildlife Protection Act under which human habitation and activities are controlled or banned outright in protected areas.
Referring to Cubbon Park’s large and diverse group of users, Rohan said, “Conflicts between the naturalists and social users are common. Everybody wants a public space to cater to their needs.”
Is there room to negotiate? Citing the example of Kaikondrahalli Lake in southeast Bengaluru, Rohan said that the residents formed a committee with representatives of all groups of users and worked out a solution to meet the needs of all users. They created a separate pond to bathe livestock, areas for those who wanted to collect fodder and the like.
“Can the Horticulture Department identify different groups of users and call for a public consultation that is well-publicised and announced well in advance so that all groups can present their ideas? The rules cannot just be decided on the whims and fancies of the Horticulture Department or any other group,” Rohan said.