OPINION

The clouds had started to recede and pouring from the sky also started to reduce on the national Capital. However, Delhi chief minister Arvind Kejriwal and his ministerial colleague Saurabh Bhardwaj chose to blame the floods in Yamuna river for the three days of water-logging in the national Capital, before Yamuna over flew the banks.

Ironically Yamuna started to rise only when the water logging in the city had started to clear. Delhi government is misleading the people when it blames floods in the Yamuna for water logging in the city, which happened because the silt from the choked drains were not cleared.

Delhi faced temporary deluge because the state government ministers handled the matter in the most immature and amateurish manner. They chose the misery to be another photo opportunity otherwise how did it help the city by the Minister standing in knee-deep water or taking a boat ride.

A Minister’s responsibility is to put a system in place in advance and keep it functional to avoid such miseries. Turing such unfortunate situations into photo opportunities can best be called an scavenging act.

The grapevine is that Congress leader Rahul Gandhi is moving to a house whose balcony faces Humayun’s tomb. More than the archaeological heritage, it was the character of the second Mughal emperor which was a great inspiration for the flat’s late owner Sheila Dikshit.

Gandhi is moving to the first floor three-bedroom apartment now belonging to former MP Sandeep Dikshit, son of late Delhi chief minister. Hedged into a quiet neighbourhood of Nizamuddin East, the three-bedroom apartment shot into prominence when Sheila Dhikshit was nominated as Congress candidate from the East Delhi Lok Sabha seat in 1998.

Later in the year, she was appointed Delhi Congress president and brought the party out from wilderness leading it to power in the national capital winning three consecutive assembly elections in 1998, 2003 and 2008. During this one year period in 1998, this place remained nerve centre of party’s local unit, which also gave an opportunity to the party cadres to differentiate Sheila culturally from the existing leadership, which was anyway on decline.

On becoming chief minister Dikshit moved to a bungalow on Mathura Road, now occupied by former Delhi deputy CM Manish Sisodia and then to a sprawling bungalow at Motilal Nehru Place, which is now occupied by former Prime Minister Manmohan Singh. On losing office, Dikshit for a few months went to Thiruvananthapuram as Governor but returned to Delhi following the defeat of the Congress government in 2014 Lok Sabha polls.

In these very columns a very days back we had mentioned that how Delhi was already flooded in several areas even before the water from Hathni Kund Barrage arrived in the national Capital. These were the areas which were much away from the river and they stood water logged largely because of the unclean and clogged drainage system.

This happened due to the failure of the Delhi Jal Board and the Municipal Corporation of Delhi (MCD), to clean the drains on time, as practise in the past, before the arrival of the Monsoon in the city. Both these autonomous bodies are firmly under the political control of Aam Aadmi Party, with its MLA Somanth Bharti heading the Jal Board and its leader Shelly Oberoi as Mayor heading the MCD.

Now let’s come to the floods in the Yamuna, whose waters have entered the areas between the Red Fort and the river and further down the river near the ITO crossing. The flood waters entered the seat of Delhi Government, the Players’ Building on the Yamuna bank and the adjoining Indira Gandhi Stadium complex.

The Lieutenant Governor and the Chief Minister of the national Capital are at the loggerheads. But then that’s no news, they always are. This time around they are fighting on the issue of increasing crime rate in the national Capital.

A very successful Vinai Kumar Saxena may have done very well as the Lieutenant Governor on several fronts but law and order, much to the glee of Chief Minister Arvind Kejriwal, is proving to be his Achilles ’ heel. Though Saxena has no direct role in the appointment of the Police Commissioner of Delhi but as L-G he has to own responsibility of the failings of Delhi Police.

The Regiment of Artillery of the Indian Army has this motto – ‘Izzat Aur Iqbal’ that is respect and force. Any armed organisation works on the basis of respect it commands. In the matters of police, you may add the word – “raub” that is awe.

For the followers of Marxism and its variants, axioms like a child being born with a golden spoon are fit for abomination. But what would the Marxist parents of Delhi Cabinet Number Two, Atishi Singh aka Marlena would have to say about their child. Atishi’s long-time surname, now dropped, Marlena is portmanteau of Marx and Lenin.

Delhi chief minister Arvind Kejriwal’s ministerial team has undergone a huge transfiguration since it first came to power in the winter of 2013. Let’s check on names which were part of the first Cabinet in 2013, when the anti-corruption movement was at its peak – Manish Sisodia, Satyender Jain, Saurabh Bhardwaj, Somnath Bharti, Girish Soni and Rakhi Birla.

When a much more politically powerful Kejriwal returned to power in 2015, of these members, just Sisodia and Jain were retained. Even the assembly speaker MS Dhir had fallen by the wayside. In the next eight years we have seen many a ministers being dropped.

In some instances like Jitender Tomar they faced criminal cases. However, in most of the other occasions they did not survive Kejriwal’s loyalty test and were dropped – Asim Ahmed Khan, Kapil Mishra, Sandeep Kumar and Rajendra Pal Gautam. Two of the senior most members – Manish Sisodia and Satyender Jain have since been incarcerated in corruption cases, and two surviving members from second Cabinet are – Kailash Gahlot and Gopal Rai.