Bulldozers take the stables at Delhi Race Club after the Centre seizes 53 acres

Bulldozers entered the Delhi Race Club on Thursday morning, hours after the Land and Development Office took possession of 53.24 acres on Lok Kalyan Marg in Lutyens' Delhi. The stables, the bookmakers' ring, the winning post, the photo-finish camera and the saddling enclosure came down the same day. New Delhi police stood on the ground. No clash was reported. The land has been handed to the Central Public Works Department.

The legal path was short at the end and long before that. An estate officer, acting under the Public Premises (Eviction of Unauthorised Occupants) Act, 1971, ordered the club on 11 August to leave within 15 days. The officer held that the lease expired on 31 December 1994 and was never renewed. Patiala House Court on Tuesday refused an interim stay. The club's main appeal is listed for 26 September. Demolition did not wait for that date.

The dispute opened in March, when L&DO gave 15 days' notice and said the plot was needed for public purposes. The club went to the Delhi High Court. On 26 May a division bench set aside an earlier interim order that had paused show-cause proceedings. From that point the eviction file moved.

More than 250 horses lived on the course. About 200 have already gone back to owners. Club officials said roughly 50 remained on Thursday, one count said 52. They have until 14 September to finish the move and expect to send the rest in one or two weeks. The stables, rebuilt in the 1940s, were designed to keep animals cool in Delhi's summer and to keep air moving through the stalls. By evening the stalls were brick and hay.

Delhi Race Club (1940) Limited ran racing on a strip of government land a short walk from the Prime Minister's residence. For owners, trainers and punters it was the capital's only remaining course. For the Centre it was an expired lease on some of the most expensive acres in the country. Those two descriptions were always going to collide once a court declined to freeze the eviction.

What the land becomes is not in Thursday's orders. CPWD has custody. No detailed public plan for housing, offices or a park has been issued with the possession papers. The club can still argue the appeal in September. The buildings that made a race meeting possible are already gone. Even a legal win would not put the winning post back on Thursday's alignment.

The horses now on the road are the part of the story that does not wait for a judgment. Fifty thoroughbreds in late August heat need boxes, transport and receiving stables in other centres. The club said owners have taken most of them. The two-week window is the operational deadline that matters more than the 26 September hearing. After 14 September, any animal still on Lok Kalyan Marg is on land the state has already treated as its own.