OPINION

Last weekend many a newspapers carried the news that the Centre was planning to bring a policy to facilitate release of poor prisoners. Christened as ‘Support for Poor Prisoners’, the scheme envisages the provision of required financial support to poor persons who are in prisons and unable to afford the penalty or the bail amount.

While there is no denying the good intent of Home Minister Amit Shah, who is said to be personally mentoring the scheme, this move can cause many a social and personal ripples. The world of the jail has much more it than just the incarcerated politicians, famous gang lords and often corrupt officials. There also is a huge population for whom nobody is seeking out.

Last week a lawyer friend had called to inform that he had managed acquittal of the relative of a support staff from my old organisation. When this information was conveyed to this staff, he didn’t sound very happy about the outcome of the case in the form of an acquittal.

The story went like this that the said prisoner was accused in an almost 20-year-old case of murder in his village. Since it was a case of murder and since the family did not have the wherewithal to hire best of the lawyers, he was never granted bail.

About two decades ago, this writer first came to know Manish Sisodia, one of the two jailed erstwhile ministers of Arvind Kejriwal government. There was a seminar at Miranda House on Right to Information in which Kejriwal was participating. Sheila Dikshit government had just brought the Right to Information (RTI) Act, in which Kejriwal had played an important role.

Then an activist, Kejriwal had convinced Dikshit about the need to have such an act for better functioning of the government. This act was later dovetailed into the central act, which was brought by Manmohan Singh government a few years later.

During the course of conversation post the seminar, Kejriwal had mentioned about a young journalist who was dedicatedly working with him for the cause of Right to Information. This journalist went by the name of Manish Sisodia. No wonder Sisodia has remained most trusted lieutenant of Kejriwal as their relationship goes to the days when Kejriwal was hardly known. In fact, Kejriwal himself was introduced to Dikshit by the veteran people’s rights activist Aruna Roy.

While many a people boarded onto Kejriwal’s bandwagon and many left for varied reasons, Sisodia had been a constant companion. There is story about Kejriwal, Sisodia and Anna Hazare sleeping at veteran cop and rights activist Kiran Bedi’s residence a day before they launched India Against Corruption movement a decade ago.

Have faced defeat in the municipal polls, BJP leadership has since been proactively trying to revive its unit in the national Capital. Soon after the defeat in the polls, it replaced its president Adesh Kumar Gupta and gave temporary charge to vice president Virendra Sachdeva.

After a few months of probation, Sachdeva has now been given a full term and would be leading the party’s Delhi unit during the Lok Sabha polls in 2024. Sachdeva’s appointment has a message for the Punjabi community in the national Capital that the saffron party continues to trust them for support.

It’s matter of record that the Punjabis have had a major role in building up the BJP in the national Capital, as also its predecessor the Bharatiya Jana Sangh. The triumvirate of Vijay Kumar Malhotra, Kedarnath Sahni and Madanlal Khurana for long not just dominated the party in the national Capital but also city’s politics.

The other community which competed for space are the Vaishyas, who mostly played second fiddle to the Punjabis both within the BJP and also the Congress where Har Kishan Lal Bhagat remaining its undisputed leader for very long. The constituency of Delhi Dehat (rural) flourished for a while but the huge migration from Purvanchal (eastern Uttar Pradesh and Bihar) diminished their support base.

Ever since his senior colleague Manish Sisodia was sent to the jail, chief minister Arvind Kejriwal has got active in the city. For once he is giving time to his duties as the head of the city government rather than spending all his time on his functioning as the leader of Aam Aadmi Partyu (AAP).

This has brought him into a direct bout with the Lieutenant Governor, VK Saxena vis-à-vis discharge of their respective responsibilities for the national Capital. In the earlier arrangement, Sisodia routinely berated the Lieutenant Governor for his initiatives saying this meant trespass into the dominion of the elected government.

There has been a change in this contest for credit with both the Raj Niwas and the CM’s office rather than targeting what the other is doing, are releasing information about what they are delivering. Thus we have Kejriwal probably for the first time in public memory visiting the garbage mounds on the northern and eastern fringe of the city at Bhalsawa and Gazipur respectively.

He has claimed that that the city would be free of mounds by March 2024. After the 2019 order of the National Green Tribunal (NGT) work began to remove waste from Bhalswa landfill site. The mound at that time was estimated to contain around 80 lakh metric tons of waste.

Last week, soon after the arrest of second in command of the Aam Aadmi Party (AAP) Manish Sisodia, party leader Arvind Kejriwal said, “The AAP is a storm. No wall, no mountain in the world is strong enough to stop this storm. No one can stop the idea whose time has come. AAP’s time has come.”

Delhi chief minister has travelled thus far in politics on building perceptions. These perceptions are fabricated largely on letting loose a narrative with the right choice of phrases and words. He is a fine communicator and so one must look at him in awe when he compares the cases of corruption heaped on his party leaders with the racial discrimination against the Blacks in the United States.

The words – Our time has come – were first famously used by Reverend Jesse Louis Jackson, an American political activist and Baptist minister, who was a candidate for the Democratic presidential nomination in 1984 and 1988. The context of his speech was that the time had come for Black population of the United States to claim their rightful place in American society and politics.