Opinion | Why ‘Seva Teerth’ Marks The Most Decisive Move To End India’s Colonial Hangover

Tuhin A Sinha & Nishant Kumar Hota

Through ‘Seva Teerth’, the Modi government seeks to align the physical seat of governance with a civilisational self-image rooted in service rather than subordination

On the midnight of 15 August 1947, as the tricolour rose over Delhi and a new nation took its first breath, millions of Indians felt the burden of nearly two centuries lifted from their shoulders. Freedom was not an abstraction. It was the right to speak without fear, to govern without foreign masters, to imagine a future without subjugation. Yet history rarely changes in a single stroke. Political power may transfer overnight, but institutions, habits, laws and symbols often linger far longer.

In the decades after Independence, however, India retained much of the administrative and legal scaffolding designed by the British Empire. The Indian Penal Code of 1860 and the Code of Criminal Procedure of 1898 continued to shape criminal justice. The architecture of governance remained centred in imposing colonial-era buildings such as North Block and South Block. The steel frame of the bureaucracy, once crafted to serve imperial priorities, evolved but did not entirely shed its inherited mindset. The phrase “brown sahibs" captured a certain discomfort, the sense that while rulers had changed, the style and symbolism of rule sometimes had not.

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For a long period in independent India’s history the so-called Grand Old Party in power did nothing to change it. However, the approach has changed under the present government. The present government has articulated a conscious effort to move from India as a post-colonial state to Bharat as a civilisational nation confident in its own ethos. This shift seeks to address visible inheritances of colonialism.

The inauguration of Seva Teerth by Prime Minister Narendra Modi stands as a milestone in this broader transformation. Conceived as part of the larger Central Vista redevelopment, Seva Teerth is designed to house key executive offices under one integrated and secure complex. It brings together the Prime Minister’s Office, the Cabinet Secretariat and the National Security Council Secretariat within a unified administrative core. Alongside this, the Common Central Secretariat connects dozens of ministries in a coordinated architectural framework.

The idea behind Seva Teerth goes beyond bricks and mortar. It seeks to replace the imperial aesthetic of distance and grandeur with the civilisational ethic of service. The very term “Seva" signals a philosophical shift. Governance is not an act of command but of service to the people. “Teerth" evokes sacred purpose. In combining these ideas, the new complex attempts to symbolically reframe the seat of power as a space of responsibility rather than authority.

Functionally, the integrated structure reduces bureaucratic silos. In the older arrangement, key offices were physically separated by considerable distance. Files travelled slowly. Inter-ministerial coordination required elaborate scheduling. In the new configuration, senior officials can meet within minutes. Sensitive deliberations on security, economic policy or disaster response can take place without logistical friction. Efficiency becomes not only an administrative virtue but a national necessity in an era where decisions must often be made at the speed of events.

Symbolically, Seva Teerth marks a departure from the colonial aesthetic that once defined governance. For decades, Indian laws were framed and administered from buildings designed to project imperial dominance. The architecture itself carried a psychological imprint of subordination. By relocating core executive functions into a space conceptualised in independent India, the government signals that the republic is ready to write its future from within its own civilisational framework.

This is another major addition to getting bharatiya identity back like the replacement of the Indian Penal Code with the Bharatiya Nyaya Sanhita or the Mission Karmayogi to reform and transform the culture of the civil services so that the bureaucracy could be about sevaks than sahibs.

This effort to reclaim institutional confidence finds echoes in Indian history. Chhatrapati Shivaji Maharaj offers a compelling example. In the seventeenth century, as he carved out a sovereign Maratha state, he did not confine his struggle to the battlefield. He also sought to shape the cultural and administrative character of his kingdom. Shivaji encouraged the use of Marathi and Sanskrit in administration instead of Persian, which had become dominant under preceding regimes. He commissioned the Rajyavyavahar Kosha to standardise administrative terminology in indigenous idioms. This was not an act of exclusion but of assertion. Political sovereignty, he understood, required cultural and linguistic self-respect.

The process he initiated may be described as a deliberate “de-Turkisation" and “de-Persianisation" of administration. It signalled that governance in his realm would draw legitimacy from local tradition rather than foreign influence. The message was clear. A state confident in its identity does not need to borrow its language of power.

In a different historical context, the present government’s reforms reflect a similar impulse. Through Seva Teerth, it seeks to align the physical seat of governance with a civilisational self-image rooted in service rather than subordination.

None of these steps alone can erase the complexities of history. Colonialism shaped India in profound ways, some painful, some structurally embedded. But nations mature when they consciously examine what they have inherited and decide what they wish to retain and what they wish to transform.

The midnight of 1947 gave India political freedom. The decades that followed tested its resilience. The present moment reflects an attempt to complete another layer of that journey, to ensure that the institutions of governance, the language of law and the spaces of power reflect not the memory of subjugation but the confidence of sovereignty. In that sense, Seva Teerth is more than an administrative complex. It is part of a larger conversation about identity, service and self-respect. Just as Shivaji reshaped the idiom of power in his time, contemporary reforms aim to ensure that the Republic of India, in spirit and structure, increasingly resembles Bharat.

Tuhin A Sinha is a national spokesperson of BJP, besides being an acclaimed author; Nishant Kumar Hota is a public policy professional. Views expressed in the above piece are personal and solely those of the authors. They do not necessarily reflect News18’s views.

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