When Prime Minister Modi announced special package for Bihar, he was roundly criticised. Some questioned his style, and some accused him of trying to bribe the voters of Bihar. It didn’t work, and Arvind Kejriwal probably learnt from this. As elections come due in the municipalities under his rule, he didn’t try to bribe them. He has decided to make them suffer and threaten them with more suffering unless they elect his party. Ladies and gentlemen, this is नई तरह की राजनीति in action.
Of course, Kejriwal needs no education in playing dirty. This time, however, it’s not just taking oath on his kids’ head, he’s immersing Delhi in filth by throttling the funding of Delhi’s cash strapped municipalities. AAP is most to blame, but many cooks have spoiled this broth.
Kejriwal-MCD Tussle: The Division of Municipal Corporations
It starts with Sheila Dixit. MCD, the municipal corporation of Delhi, was divided into three separate entities. East, North, and South. Everyone warned that this will lead to imbalance. South is rich, North poor, and East the poorest. But Congress thought they can win at least one area by dividing. Well, that didn’t happen, but Delhi became saddled with another bureaucratic complication.
South Delhi has the rich areas, and farmhouses too. It collects a lot of property tax. It even collects huge amounts in parking fee. The east and north, on the other hand, are saddled with loads of unauthorised constructions. Delhi finance commission estimates that only about 25% of all Delhi pays property tax. Bulk of those come in South.
Kejriwal-MCD Tussle: Kejriwal’s support to unauthorized colonies
So the recipe for failure seems built in. What accelerated the process was the explicit and implicit support of the AAP to unauthorised colonies. It was, in fact one of their promises to never take action against them. In addition the AAP started supplying utilities to those colonies. A double whammy of hit on revenues and increased costs to the municipalities.
Then the seventh pay commission was implemented, and the two unhealthy corporations became certifiably sick. The corporations running losses in low hundreds of crores started running losses in thousands of crores. (2700 crores for North and 2100 for the East)
Kejriwal-MCD Tussle: The filth mountain appears for the first time
This mismatch led to the problems in mid 2015. That is when the filth piled up in Delhi for the first time. After making Delhi suffer for weeks the state government finally released 5800 crores to manage the situation.
That this problem occurred again is the next tragedy. There already is a solution available. Back in 2009 the 4th Delhi State Finance Commission laid down what needs to be done. Congress sat on the report for years. Didn’t even table it in Vidhan Sabha, forget implementing it. AAP & BJP demanded tabling. Then AAP was elected, and only BJP was demanding that. After several months of agitation, and finally a High Court directive, Manish Sisodia tabled the report in December 2015.
Kejriwal-MCD Tussle: The Government’s inaction
The report calls for greatly increasing the funding of municipal corporations and taking healthcare and education away from them. This will allow the corporations to focus on only the municipal issues, and will give them enough funds to keep the Delhi clean. But the AAP govt has refused to implement the report. They demand several actions at municipal level and a higher share in central funds before they do anything. Basically everyone else has to act and complete their parts, then these guys will rise from their sleep to check whether the whole system is being run according to their specifications. And only when His Honesty certifies everyone else to be perfect will they take any steps to do their duty. In other words, never. In addition, the AAP government has blocked the municipal reform funds in view of “MCD’s poor performance.”
Kejriwal-MCD Tussle: MCD no Holy Cow!
MCD is no holy organisation, of course. It is corrupt, inefficient and may have several issues, but it was running relatively smoothly till recently. AAP, as usual, claims that corruption is the cause for the problems. Did corruption suddenly sprout in the middle of 2015? Because filth piling on streets never happened in past.
But wait, hasn’t every AAP guy been shouting from rooftops that they have already released all the funds? They can’t be lying, surely? Well they are not TECHNICALLY lying. They have released all the funds the state allocated. But there’s a small problem. That allocation was insufficient. Enormously. See they also played a trick. They increased the allocations to all three by a few hundred crores. While the deficit, remember, went up by thousands of crores. So now Mr Sisodia is loudly claiming that they have released record funds, and they have, but these are grossly insufficient, and AAP knows that.
According to their own statement in high court, they have released about 2000 crores for the entire year. Remember that in 2015 they released 5800 crores as an interim measure. And they called upon Mr Jaitley and asked for 3000 crores for half a year. They know that the amount they are allocating is not enough. They just don’t care.
Or maybe they do care. Just not about how clean Delhi is. They care about the upcoming elections in MCD. All three corporations are currently controlled by BJP. AAP wants them, and is blackmailing the people of Delhi by withholding services. Either you support us, or you rot with your garbage piling up all around you.
This is dirty politics in every sense of the word. Only someone as unscrupulous as Arvind Kejriwal could have pulled this off.