Capital Crime

DELHI IS A STATE without true statehood. Its chief minister has powers but no absolute authority.

As we count down to the Delhi Assembly election scheduled for February 5, it is worth remembering these clichés. It could be convincingly argued that the very outcome of the election hangs on how voters comprehend them.

The Delhi chief minister serves at the pleasure of the people but exercises authority arguably at the discretion of an unelected plenipotentiary called the lieutenant governor (LG). The fact that the people don’t put the LG in office means the incumbent exercises control over the executive without accountability.

On the ground, this de jure separation of powers has meant that the Delhi government run by AAP is obliged to seek the sanction of the LG for implementing policy. And given that the LG is appointed by the BJP-led NDA government at the Centre, there is every chance of a clash. And that is what Delhi voters have been witness to over the last decade since AAP won the state and BJP the Centre.

Power ordinarily is a type of glue, but in Delhi sharing has only produced discord and administrative paralysis. And to think that the blame for this paralysing dichotomy at the heart of government lies with an Act of Parliament.

In this age of parties promising Ram Rajya, one would have thought that BJP and AAP, (self-proclaimed bhakts of the deity) would have been inspired by Ram’s twin sons— Luv and Kush—who strove to work in perfect harmony to serve the people.

Sadly, for the Delhiite, AAP and BJP are more like Romulus and Remus. The mythological Roman twins who never saw eye-to-eye. They were ordained to install a new capital, but they differed on the mother of all fundamentals: where to build it. In the end they went to war. Romulus won and Remus was killed.

AAP and BJP, like the pathologically dyspeptic Roman twins, have also been at war over every issue of existential importance to us, the ‘Aam Aadmi’. Rather than spending time on governance, they have frittered it away on trying to frame each other for the asphyxiating miasma that is the air we breathe, for the toxic chemical cocktail that is our water, and the pestilential waste that is our soil. As hard as they might try to fool the public, the truth is that they share the blame for dysfunction in Delhi.

For this reason, the spectre of double anti-incumbency hangs over AAP and BJP. But when voters vote to decide, only one guilty party will be punished.

Ideally, the ‘Aam’ Delhiite should be allowed two votes each. One to punish the BJP-led NDA that has allegedly used the LG to devise schemes to thwart AAP. And a second vote to punish AAP that has conveniently shifted the blame for every governance failure on to the LG.

Had AAP and BJP set aside their parlous politicking and put the public interest first, Delhi might be a better place for children to grow up in, the old to retire to, and the young to live their dreams.

But the legally contrived administrative schizophrenia in Delhi means your vote does not affix accountability in full measure. Punishing AAP will merely bring in BJP, the best placed on present electoral form to defeat it. Indeed, the same BJP whose pursuit of a cynical scorched-earth politics has brought Delhi to the doorstep of, to paraphrase Prime Minister Narendra Modi, aapda or crisis. Rejecting both brings in Congress and the same inevitable Centre-state strife.

The tragedy for Delhi’s voters is that ‘full statehood’, the only real panacea, is not even on the ballot. Full statehood, Delhi’s only hope, ensures that the keys of governance are handed to only the elected government guaranteeing full accountability. Sure, all the parties will list ‘full statehood’ as a major electoral promise in their manifesto, but only as a formality. A

ritualistic invocation. A directive principle, like the hifalutin ones we have in our Constitution striving for the unattainable. Evidently, casting a vote in Delhi under the present circumstances is a pyrrhic exercise that promises no change. Only continuity by another name.

AAPadministrationArvind KejriwalAssembly Elections 2025Delhi Assembly ElectionLG