The Big Story: New Delhi vs Delhi

Not much can be said about the woeful relationship between the Bharatiya Janata Party-run Central government and the Aam Aadmi Party-led Delhi government that has not been said before. Except for this: There might be light at the end of the tunnel. The buzz in New Delhi is that the Supreme Court Constitution Bench is set to deliver its judgment soon on the question of whether the Lieutenant Governor of Delhi is bound by the decisions of the state chief minister and his Cabinet.

Whichever way the court leans, it should settle at least some of the questions that have plagued the Delhi government since it came to power in 2015, as the Centre used the Lieutenant Governor to hinder several Aam Aadmi Party initiatives in the Capital. Developments from this week offered the perfect example: The Centre decided to cancel the appointment of nine advisors to the Delhi government on the grounds that they had not been cleared by the Central government.

As has often been the case in this New Delhi vs Delhi fight, the Centre is in the right – but only on a technicality. The Delhi government’s Cabinet chose to make those appointments. But the Centre decided that it had not been consulted and so it struck them down. However, many of those appointments are several years old at this point and most of the advisors are no longer in those roles. Perhaps it wasn’t a coincidence that this belated decision came not long after Delhi Chief Minister Arvind Kejriwal presented an “LG Outcome Budget”, a document that critically evaluated the work done by the Lieutenant Governor.

The Centre could have easily pushed the Delhi government to seek post-facto clearance, since there has been no suggestion that the advisors themselves or the posts that were created were illegal. That would have been in the spirit of co-operative federalism that Prime Minister Narendra Modi likes to espouse. Instead, we have the farce of the Centre canceling decisions made by an elected state Cabinet on the technicality that the Centre had not cleared those decisions.

It is important to remember that the Aam Aadmi Party won a remarkable victory in the last Delhi elections: it swept 67 of the 70 seats in the Assembly. Its mandate to represent the people of the city cannot be questioned. But even if it only had a slim majority, the Centre’s obstructionism would have been grating. Residents of the Capital deserve to be governed by those they elected. If that were not the case, what is the point of elections and an assembly in Delhi in the first place?

The Big Scroll

Punditry

  1. Badri Narayanan writes in the Indian Express of how BR Ambedkar has gone beyond a legal and political icon, and become a source of inspiration for song, drama and literature in Dalit communities.
  2. India is creating a new “super committee” for defence that will seek to drive the country’s military and security strategy, writes Shishir Gupta in the Hindustan Times.
  3. “The police are tools of the political and class elite, and torture and violence are used as tools of punishment, control and retribution. The police are repositories of all our social biases, an institution where objectivity and independence are hard to come by,” writes Urmila Pullat in Mint. “The Kathua and Unnao cases starkly expose the fault lines in our policing system, where those who are meant to protect and uphold the law sometimes turn out to be criminals in uniform lacking basic investigative intent, skills or facilities.”
  4. “Nihal Singh was an editor of an earlier era, and he let his unsigned editorials do the talking. But when the going got tough, he fought back, defending freedom – not his alone, but the freedom of everyone,” writes Salil Tripathi, also in Mint.
  5. “This byline broke hard news and harder reader loyalties. The latter wasn’t easy. Way back in the 1970s, the typical Kerala home was deeply committed to its first paper, which even for the English-knowing was a Malayalam daily. Our circles that swore by Mathrubhumi made a ready switch to the Malayala Manorama where a certain T V R Shenoy was reporting the Bangladesh war,” writes EP Unny in the Indian Express. “India was winning the 1971 war but the writing had none of the triumphalist tone of the ruling classes. Nor did it talk too much about the inevitable misery of war. Among the earliest reporters to reach Dacca, this little-known young man was writing for the language press with the élan of a big time professional.”

Giggle

Don’t miss

Malini Nair writes about theatre activist Safdar Hashmi’s plays for children, which are still loved and relevant.

“Hashmi, the theatre activist who was murdered by political thugs in 1989 in Ghaziabad midway through a street play, is known mostly for his seminal works such as Machine and Aurat, which raised questions on human labour and women’s rights. But he also left behind a relatively lesser-known collection of fine writings for children – five plays and 20 poems.

There is no heavy-handed messaging in these works, no sermonising and no stuffing of morals down the throat. They are pure fun, with great emphasis on wordplay, rhythm and the colours of the world around children.

‘The problem with what is written for children is that it is moralistic in tone which means the artistic experience is lost,’ said Moloyshree Hashmi, the secretary of Jana Natya Manch [Janam], the theatre troupe set up by Safdar Hashmi and his associates in the 1970s. ‘Even when Girgit is performed in schools, teachers tend to ask: “Toh kya seekha?” (“What did you learn?”). But children get the point without any moral science lessons. It is about brute force, toadyism, how the powerful get away – everything they see around them.”