Crisis of governance in Delhi seems to escalate

The needling and paralysing of the elected Aam Aadmi Party government in Delhi by the Centre, using as cat’s paw lieutenant-governor Anil Baijal, who seems to have thrown constitutional propriety to the winds in almost instigating the NCT’s top bureaucracy to challenge the political executive, has now gone way beyond Delhi.

The unusual goings-on have helped strengthen the process of the non-Congress Opposition coming into its own, with the Congress, which attacks the AAP government across the board even at the risk of not differentiating its stand from the BJP, watching the political play from the sidelines.

This was evident from Saturday’s failed effort, which was nationally publicised, by four chief ministers of different parties — former NDA leader N. Chandrababu Naidu, Mamata Banerjee, Pinarayi Vijayan and Congress ally H.D. Kumaraswamy — to meet Delhi CM Arvind Kejriwal, who has been camping at Raj Niwas for the past week along with his Cabinet colleagues to get an appointment with the L-G.

While it’s extraordinary the L-G should refuse to meet his own CM to discuss governance issues in the nation’s capital, the L-G continued to wear  the cloak of brief authority to deny the visiting CMs permission to meet the Delhi CM. This sequence of events was Kafkaesque.

Raising their game, the four CMs used the Niti Aayog’s forum on Sunday to accost Prime Minister Narendra Modi and home minister Rajnath Singh on the curious goings-on in the governance of Delhi even as the PM passes up no opportunity to proclaim his devotion to “cooperative federalism”. This unfolded as the AAP staged a loud protest march in Delhi to condemn the Centre’s attitude.

On the same day, pettyfogging bureaucrats, under the banner of an IAS Officers’ Forum, affronted the political executive by holding a press conference to suggest that the Delhi CM and his colleagues were playing politics on the backs of civil servants. Somewhere, Mr Baijal will be required to answer for this, and those involved with the press conference be made to confront their conduct rules and be held responsible for dereliction of duty, if necessary.

If Mr Baijal, in effect, is taking shelter behind the constitutionally unusual position of Delhi as a UT (whose overlordship does lie with the Centre in the constitutional scheme) to dance to the tune of the ruling party, it hardly behoves him to pit serving civil servants against the very government they are meant to serve. (At their press meet, the IAS officers offered nothing but a drain inspector’s report to belabour the point that they are “not on strike”, although they hold a five-minute protest against the elected executive during the lunch hour).

The non-Congress Opposition has raised its profile, and the Congress is missing the woods for the trees, as the Centre provokes a revolt of bureaucrats against the elected Delhi government.