On April 1, a Saturday morning, a crowd gathered on a Delhi sidewalk as if before a piece of street theater. The police were there in large numbers. And then the stars showed up — a trio of yellow bulldozers. Protected by their police escort, the bulldozers proceeded to demolish a Muslim shrine that was, the shrine’s caretaker said, centuries old.

“My heart started beating faster,” Yusuf Beg, the caretaker, told me, as he described a phone call he had received that morning. For much of the previous month, the city authorities had been asking Beg to raze parts of the shrine. On March 15, he received a letter from the Delhi Public Works Department that claimed the shrine was encroaching on the pavement. He removed some of the construction with his own hands, but it wasn’t enough. “We want the whole pavement cleared,” Beg says the public works department officials told him. On the morning of April 1, Beg received a call to inform him that the bulldozers were on their way.

Sheba Khan, a singer, was among those gathered around the debris where a prayer room once stood. “There are so many illegal constructions in the city,” she told me. Did the authorities really  have to come here? What hazard did this particular shrine represent? “It was such a peaceful place,” she said.

Beg was astonished that the bulldozers had been deployed even when he had attempted to cooperate with the authorities. “Tell me,” Beg said, welling up, “did the footpath come first or this 400-year-old shrine?”