OPINION

Country’s strategy to fight Coronavirus though not totally dreary but has certainly been vacillating at places. The most disturbing evidence of the same was the siege which the migrant labourers from across the national Capital laid at Anand Vihar - Kaushambi on Delhi-Uttar Pradesh border. The crisis emanated not just from the lack of coordination between the two state governments but also the various arms of state government working at cross purposes.

This happened because of the erosion of the political edifice and larger than life role assigned to the social media. The support provided by the Delhi Transport Corporation (DTC) to ferry migrant labour to the border has been attributed to a message by Uttar Pradesh chief minister Yogi Adityanath on the micro blogging site Twitter. Can a social media post be taken as cornerstone of inter-state relationship?

The protocol in such situations is that the chief secretary of one state calls up the counterpart of the other before embarking on any such mission involving public life and safety. In the crisis under review, the transport commissioners of the two states could have been further delegated the responsibility of coordination. That obviously did not happen and we are keeping our fingers crossed, God forbid, on an impending human tragedy.

Bang on Delhi-Uttar Pradesh border across Anand Vihar is a small quite colony – Kaushambi. The colony is home to mutli-storeyed apartment towers, which were built much before they came into vogue in Noida or for that matter Gurugram. Several of these towers house quarters of the officials of the Indian Revenue Service, SAIL, HPCL, public sector banks, Bureau of Indian Standards and such other prominent institutions in addition to privately owned apartments and bungalows.

The township was in news a few days ago when a Corona positive case was detected in one of the towers and thereafter it has been in a lockdown. Though next to Ghazipur vegetable and meat wholesale market, both are in short supply. The upmarket provision stores, which have been listed by the Uttar Pradesh administration as supply points, have not been able to bring much succor to, would not say starved but definitely mentally harassed residents.

The misery was eased when a few good old street vendors started to make appearance with cartful of vegetables and fruits. The bread vendor is also holding fort outside the colony’s Mother Dairy booth. In keeping with the Navratra spirit, a Bengali resident of the colony remarked them to be incarnation of ‘Annapurna’ (Goddess of food). Another from a central police organization was quick to say that the vendors were proving to be the last line of defence.

As one approaches Delhi from the North, the first major landscape which attracts attention on entering the national Capital is the garbage mount at the Mukarba Chowk. Once a busy crossroad leading to jams, the movement here is now relatively free thanks to the grade separators built during the Commonwealth Games. On taking left turn from Mukarba Chowk and driving down the road one approaches the sleekly built Signature Bridge.

Built about eight years back and made operational only two years ago, the Signature Bridge is gateway to North-East Delhi, the epicenter of the recent Hindu-Muslim conflagration. Parallel to the Signature Bridge still exists the Old Wazirabad Bridge and the road leading into this portion of the sprawling trans-Yamuna area is called the Wazirabad Road.

This arterial road today, largely thanks to the development agenda pursued by the Sheila Dikshit government, is six-lane replete with flyovers though certain bottlenecks still exists. As one takes the road from the bridge to the Uttar Pradesh border near Hindon Air Terminal, a picture of skewed development is writ large.

Unlike such bridges in the other global cities, the Signature Bridge of Delhi takes the traveler to city’s underbelly. During the 10 kilometre long drive on the road, except for Yamuna Vihar, it’s difficult to locate any planned colony.

That the Delhi BJP is in poor shape, one really did not really need to know from the organ of the Rashtriya Swayamsewak Sangh – Organiser. In the editorial of its latest edition, it has been stated that the state units should not expect Prime Minister Narendra Modi and Home Minister Amit Shah to win all elections for them.

What the editorial preferred not to mention was that if the Delhi state unit was in poor shape, it was the making of the Central leadership. The state unit has been led for past four years by Manoj Tiwari, who is for sure is not an organisation man. A political traveler, Tiwari started his career from the Samajwadi Party in Uttar Pradesh, hobnobbed with the Congress for a while and finally took refuge in the Bharatiya Janata Party.

He may claim to be a second time member of Lok Sabha from Delhi, and that is the party’s tragedy in the national Capital. Of the seven BJP MPs from the national Capital, at best two – Dr Harshvardhan and Ramesh Bidhuri, can claim to have risen from the ranks of the organization, the rest are all paratroopers. Likes of Hans Raj Hans and Gautam Gambhir may be celebrities in their own right but when comes to providing leadership to a political machinery they proved to be absolute nincompoops.

The results of the Delhi Vidhan Sabha polls were somewhat foretold in the statement of RSS top functionary Suresh Bhaiyaji Joshi, who just a day earlier had mentioned that those opposing the Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) were not necessarily opposing the Hindus. He also mentioned that the BJP was just a political party and it should not be equated with Hindu being.

The resounding victory of Arvind Kejriwal-led Aam Aadmi Party (AAP) in the just concluded Delhi assembly polls has shown that a majority of the Hindus living in nation’s Capital have decided to vote against the BJP. The apparatchiks and the propagandists for the BJP are already blaming the “selfish Delhi voters” for having overlooked the “need to care for nation’s security and Hindus safety.”

Unfortunately, the BJP and its sympathisers don’t look have to look farther than its own actions in the past three months in the national Capital for its rout. The three major campuses in the national Capital -- Jamia Milia Islamia, Jawaharlal Nehru University and the Delhi University, have been facing an unrest for the past three months. To a great extent this has proved to be the major cause for BJP’s thrashing at the hustling.