OPINION

As the Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) and Aam Aadmi Party (AAP) dominate political diatribe in the run-up to the polls of the Municipal Corporation of Delhi (MCD), Congress suddenly entered the news columns for different reasons. Nomination of former Union Minister Jagdish Tytler on the party’s poll committee has got the Congress the much missed headlines.

Tytler’s nomination matters, and no wonder the party is ready to take the risk. With its vote share down to less than five percent in the last assembly polls, it doesn’t lose anything more in the name of four-time Lok Sabha member. On the other hand bringing the veteran out from forced hibernation may (or may not) help revive the dormant party organisation.

Product of the Youth Congress of Sanjay Gandhi’s generation, Tytler rubbed shoulders and remained friends with Congress stalwarts like Kamal Nath and made a steady progress on the political ladder. He had a reasonably successful tenure as Minister in PV Narasimha Rao Cabinet between 1991and 1996.

In Delhi’s politics he was seen as rival to Congress’ long time strongman Har Kishan Lal Bhagat, who enjoyed the epithet of ‘uncrowned king of Delhi’. Tytler on the other hand formed the opposite axis within Congress through 1980s and 1990s, holding his own.

Delhi chief minister Arvind Kejriwal with party colleague and Punjab chief minister Bhagwant Mann has finally said that heavy pollution in Delhi is due to stubble burning in Punjab. They went onto add that the situation became grim as their government in Punjab was just six months old and that they needed time to overcome the challenge.

That Mr Kejriwal had ever cared he could have learnt from the columns of this newspaper as far back as July this year about the emerging situation. This year, as had been promised by Kejriwal last year, the stubble decomposition capsules developed at Pusa Institute in Delhi was to wonders.

It works like this that four Pusa capsules have to be dissolved in water to make a 25-litre solution, which is enough to spray on one hectare of land. After the solution is sprayed, it takes about 20 to 25 days for the crop remnants to decompose. The crisis now reveals that while Punjab used the capsules in just a few thousand acres, the neighbouring states of Haryana and Uttar Pradesh have brought down the incidents of stubble burning by using this solution in the lakhs of acres. 

The monitoring bodies have reported that in comparison to stubble fire incidents of several thousands in Punjab, it was down to a mere few hundreds in Haryana and UP. Governance is secondary for Kejriwal and he cowed down to accept negligence only after Delhi was turned into an absolute gas chamber with irrefutable evidences that it was happening because of unabated stubble fire from Punjab.

In VK Saxena, the new Lieutenant Governor of Delhi, Arvind Kejriwal has bumped into the most serious challenge of his remarkable political journey till now. The master manipulator of public discourse, Kejriwal’s politics revolves around projecting himself as the righteous underdog. This well-crafted image honed through deft media management and spending 1000s of crores of rupees in advertising, has taken a severe hit ever since Saxena took over as LG, five months back.

Saxena, a self-proclaimed activist like Kejriwal himself, has given the latter a run for his money on his own pitch. Saxena’s activism, sans rhetoric has started resulting in concrete and visible work on the ground for all to see. That he also chooses to be on the streets and communicates with the people and the Media proactively has put the ever aggressive Aam Aadmi Party (AAP) on the back foot, with little to attack Saxena with. This result oriented and time bound approach of Saxena to get things done is in stark contrast to the “all sound no fury” style of the Delhi CM.

What makes it difficult for Kejriwal is the façade which he created on ‘delivery’ has started to crack with dents made by Saxena’s approach. For the first time there seems to be an air of disbelief vis-a-vis the claims made by Kejriwal and team through advertising blitzkriegs bleeding the exchequer.

Diwali is here and so is the worsening Air Quality Index (AQI) in the national Capital region. While the promise of no paddy stubble burning in the fields of Punjab has come a cropper, the saving grace has been Supreme Court’s tough stand on not allowing sale of fire crackers in the national Capital.

The Delhi government, under pressure from the Supreme Court-appointed Commission for Air Quality Management (CAQM) and the measures initiated by it, has banned the storage, sale and use of firecrackers in Delhi with stringent punishment for those violating the ban. However, this has been sought to be made into a political issue by the Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) especially with an eye on the upcoming Municipal Corporation polls.

The BJP wants the ban to go and has blamed the AAP government for deliberately banning firecrackers on a ‘Hindu festival’ that is Diwali. They attacked AAP for practicing double standards citing videos of AAP workers burning fire crackers in the party celebrations. The BJP has asked how is it that the AAP workers have the ‘license’ to burn firecrackers without the threat of any stringent punishment.

Delhi government while putting a complete ban on manufacturing, storing, and selling firecrackers in the national capital, had made violation of the ban a punishable offence. The violators of the ban would attract a fine of up to Rs 5,000 and three years in jail.

During the heydays of Anna Hazare agitation, two young faces started to appear on the television as the spokesperson for movement leader Arvind Kejriwal. One was doing article ship for chartered accountancy, and the second had left behind her job as a school teacher to be part of the movement.

The former was Raghav Chadda and the other Atishi Marlena. They in a way represented the Indian youth, who supported the movement to seek a change in the political system.

Last heard Chadha is likely to be interrogated in the Delhi liquor scam, which is alleged to have funded Aam Aadmi Party's poll campaign Punjab. Atishi on the other hand was seen justifying Arvind Kejriwal's desire to have Goddess Lakshmi's picture on the currency notes.

Atishi taking up the cudgels for having Goddess Lakshmi on the notes can well be said to be death irony. Why one says so because her initiation into politics was through her parents.