When power built a classroom

Institutions often outlive the moments that created them. Over time, buildings become routine, and the circumstances that once made them improbable slowly recede from memory.

In Shahabad Markanda, generations of young women have entered classrooms without necessarily knowing that a political decision made decades ago helped make those doors possible. 

In the years after Independence, girls’ education in towns across Haryana remained shaped by hesitation as much as aspiration. Families weighed distance, social expectations, and questions of propriety before allowing daughters to continue their studies.

In such a scenario, the establishment of a girls’ college was never merely administrative. It meant altering the social possibilities available to women in the town.

It was in this setting that Banu Ram Gupta made a choice that now feels unusually restrained for public life. A freedom fighter who had been imprisoned several times — including in Mianwali Jail, now in Pakistan, for defying colonial orders and hoisting the national flag — he belonged to a generation for whom politics were closely tied to institution building.

The occasion arose during the 1969 by-election in Shahabad Markanda. He stepped aside when the ruling party nominated another candidate, despite being considered a strong contender for the ticket. At the request of the then chief minister Bansi Lal, he campaigned for the party nominee.

In a political culture where support often carries expectations of office, influence, or accommodation, Banu Ram Gupta followed a different path. After the party candidate won, the jubilant chief minister asked him what he wanted in return. He requested financial assistance of Rs 1 lakh for a girls’ college in Shahabad Markanda. The amount was sanctioned.

Today, the figure itself may not appear extraordinary. But institutions are not measured only in money. Sometimes, their significance lies in someone, at a particular historical moment, choosing to direct power away from personal advancement and towards a public need whose value would unfold gradually across generations.

For many families, a local girls’ college changed the geography of permission. Distances that once discouraged higher study became manageable. Futures that earlier depended upon negotiation within the family acquired a degree of legitimacy through proximity and access.

What remains striking about such episodes is not idealism alone, but clarity — the recognition that lasting public change is often built through institutions whose significance unfolds gradually across generations. At a time when public life is increasingly shaped by visibility, and symbolic positioning, the slower work of building institutions often recedes from attention.

Yet enduring change rarely emerges from rhetoric. It is sustained through schools, colleges, libraries, and public structures that widen access over time. The measure of political intent finally lies not in how often it is proclaimed but in what it leaves behind for others to inherit.

The story of that request made in 1969 survives now mostly in fragments of local recollection, gradually receding from the shared memory of Shahabad even as the institution it helped build continues to shape lives across generations.