Chandigarh was built from 1951 as the capital of a Punjab that had lost Lahore. In 1966 it became the shared capital of Punjab and Haryana and a union territory administered by the centre.
The arrangement was described at the time as temporary. In 1970 the central government announced that Chandigarh would go to Punjab, with Haryana compensated and given time to build its own capital. That transfer has been announced, scheduled and postponed repeatedly since, in 1970, in the Rajiv-Longowal accord of 1985, and afterward.
It has not happened. Sixty years on, two states are governed from a city belonging to neither, in offices divided by a fixed ratio, with a police force answering to Delhi.
The city itself was designed by Le Corbusier with Pierre Jeanneret, Jane Drew and Maxwell Fry, on a grid of sectors, and is one of the most studied planned cities of the twentieth century. Its Capitol Complex is a UNESCO World Heritage Site.
The unresolved status is a live political issue in both states and the resolution proposed in 1970 has never been withdrawn or carried out.
The territory is run by an Administrator who is also the Governor of Punjab, with officers deputed from the two states in a fixed ratio of sixty to forty in the services. Changing that ratio, or moving a post out of it, is read in both states as a move on the underlying question and is resisted as one.
The city was built on the land of about fifty villages of the Kharar tehsil, whose people were bought out and moved for it. The sectors are numbered rather than named, so those village names survive in the revenue record, in a handful of road names and in nothing else.
Sixty years is a long temporary arrangement. Every Punjab government has raised it and every one of them has left office with it unresolved.