India protects the graves of British soldiers as "monuments of national importance." Not by accident. Because nobody ever checked the list.
Earlier this month, the ASI's own Director General, Yadubir Singh Rawat, admitted it: India's protected-monuments list still rests on a 1904 law passed under Viceroy Curzon. After Independence, it was adopted without a review. We renamed Rajpath. We never touched Curzon's list.
The numbers:
→ About 2,584 of today's 3,695 protected monuments were picked by the British before 1947.
→ In 1958, Parliament passed a new law and copied the old list wholesale.
→ No law has ever defined what "national importance" means.
→ From 1978 - 2024, not a single monument was removed. Forty-six years.
What India still guards:
→ About 75 British graves and cemeteries. The PM's own Economic Advisory Council said remove them.
→ Lt. H. Forbe's grave in Nagaland, which that report says has no historical or architectural significance.
→ The spot where John Nicholson's statue stood in Delhi. The statue left for Northern Ireland in 1958, and the empty site stayed protected for decades.
What India missed:
→ A 13th-C Kakatiya Shiva temple in Telangana. The ASI owned the land, yet the temple was never on the list until July 2026.
→ A 2,000-year-old Satavahana fortified city near Tirupati, also protected only in July 2026.
What India has already lost:
→ 24 protected monuments cannot be found. Gone.
→ The Telia Nala Buddhist ruins in Varanasi have been written off as untraceable.
→ 356 monuments are encroached.
→ Money: in 2019-20, UP's roughly 743 monuments got ₹15 crore, while Delhi's 173 got ₹30 crore.
The ASI is finally moving: a few deletions, two additions, new digs in Ujjain. But tinkering isn't reform.
Decolonisation can't stop at road signs.
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