OPINION

The cat and mouse game between the Lieutenant Governor Vinai Kumar Saxena and Chief Minister Arvind Kejriwal may have entered a decisive phase. Refusing to buckle down under the offensive by the Aam Aadmi Party (AAP), Saxena, after the vitriolic attack let loose on him from the floor of Vidhan Sabha, has launched a counter.

He first wrote a long letter to the Chief Minister countering him on each of the allegation made against him, and thereafter extended an invitation to Kejriwal for a tête-à-tête that is face to face meeting. Realizing the gravitas of the letter, Kejriwal has not been rank dismissive of it, as he did in the past calling the missives love letters.

However, the Chief Minister has tried to wriggle out from a face to face meeting saying that he is preoccupied with party work in Punjab. The sharp politician that he is, Kejriwal has tried an indirect counter by moving the Supreme Court for a ‘time-bound’ conduct of the Mayor’s poll. It’s another matter that his party councilors have been as much responsible for the disruption of the house proceeding as their BJP counterparts.

The winter session of Delhi assembly concluded much before the winter ended in the national Capital. The grapevine is that the Lieutenant Governor did not allow the extension of the session as there was no evidence that there was any pending legislative agenda.

Going by the coverage of the Delhi assembly in the newspapers, it was amply clear that the proceedings of the four-day session had less to do with law making and more to do with mud-slinging. In the middle of the four-day session, Chief Minister Arvind Kejriwal took out time to fly to Hyderabad to attend a political rally. Rest of the days were marked by rumpus.

The issue in the nutshell is that it was pointless to have the session. The only justification was the constitutional provision that the state assembly must meet at least once in six months. The sparks from the session have spurred another round of diatribe between the Chief Minister and the Lieutenant Governor with the latter taking umbrage to the Chief Minister calling him names from the floor of the house.

Ministry of Home Affairs, to overcome the heat in the Kanjhawala murder case, has recommended suspension of 11 Delhi Police cops for dereliction of duty. This has been on the basis of a report filed by Special Commissioner of Police Shalini Singh. One is sure that the senior police official must have done a thorough job before recommending action. However, one wonders if she mentioned about the role of former Commissioner of Police Rakesh Asthana in dismantling several decades old PCR policing system.

Among the 11 cops suspended, six of them were on PCR duty and five were at a picket on the day of the incident. There have been news reports of the late response by PCRs and the fact that one of the PCR vans had not responded to a call at all. In all, two are sub-inspectors, four assistant sub-inspectors, four head constables and one constable have been suspended. They all belong to Rohini district.

The old timers would ask how come the Police Control Room (PCR) vans be part of the district policing. The PCR cops were supposed to do patrolling independent of the district police, which provided a system of checks and balances, which Asthana in his wisdom decided to dismantle.

The Delhi Police's control room patrolling vans in September 2021 were integrated with police stations ostensibly for better surveillance and to more efficiently attending to law and order issues. Under the then existing system, these vans, also called mobile patrol vans (MPVs), had their own patrol beats, base points and routes under the command of the central police control room (PCR). This merger was expected to boost the force's functioning, including investigation. However, Kanjhawala case has exposed the ‘mistake’ in dismantling the system of patrol by PCR vans.

Sometimes in the late 1990s a very enterprising Deputy Commissioner of Police of the North East district had conducted a survey on the social factors for the high rate of crime in the district. North-East district, in the pre-Metro days, was used to be most backward area consisting mostly of the shanty colonies.

The area was also known to be communally sensitive and on many occasions petty crimes led to communal flare ups. The survey carried out at the behest of the DCP showed a particular trend. Most of the crimes of snatching, loot and scuffle, sometimes catastrophic, happened between 7 pm and 9 pm.

This was the time when the wage earning residents of the shanty colonies returned home from work, in most of the cases carrying days’ earnings in cash. The area during this period also witnessed power cuts regularly allowing the crime to be committed, using the police lexicon, under the cover of darkness.

The enterprising DCP managed to persuade the local officials of then Delhi Vidyut Board to defer load-shedding hour to later in the night, when the people were largely at home. This yielded results as the cases of crime came down. During the late night power cuts, he organized motor-cycle patrolling in groups, which had salutary effect.

This is the centenary year of Delhi University. Founded in 1922, the 100-years-old university for at least last five decades has been the leading centre of academics for both the under-graduate and the post-graduate programmes in the country. Till a few years back, the newspapers gave screaming headlines saying that even a 100 percent score in the qualifying examination could not ensure you a seat on the prestigious campus.

Last week, read a squirming headline in the inside pages of the newspapers. It mentioned that the university still had 6000 seats vacant in the under-graduate programmes. This means that the university has been unable to fill almost 10 percent of the seats allocated to it.

This scenario compares with the situation, where the private, self-financing being the more appropriate word,  education institutions count on their vacant seats and try and find the remedial measures to meet the financial losses which the untaken seats would accrue to. Financial losses are not necessarily interpreted in the terms of loss of profit but the availability of finances to meet the salary and the infrastructure bills.

However, the Delhi University would not be much concerned about it as it lives on hefty grants from University Grants Commission (UGC) and other funding agencies. The exercise to undertake student-teacher ratio has always been throttled and workload prepared by the colleges seldom been scrutinized.