by Harish Gupta, National Editor, Lokmat Group
Weekly Coloumn : BJP's Capital Problem
It was not yet 9 pm that Radha (name changed) had
finished her shift at an office in Central Delhi.
Rather than waiting for the office car at its scheduled departure time, 9:30
pm, she decided to hop into the auto-rickshaw waiting just outside office and go
to her parents' house in South Delhi. It was
after the auto had gone past the well-lit Ashoka Hotel area to go through the
deserted central road of Chanakyapuri, the enclave of foreign embassies that
fall silent at night. It soon became clear to Radha that a motorbike was
following the auto, and the auto-driver was suspiciously unconcerned about
someone tailing him. Her apprehension became a reality when the bike got close
and two riders, their faces covered, targeted her bag. It contained, apart from
a fancy smartphone she had bought with her savings, a few thousand rupees that
she'd withdrawn in the late afternoon from an ATM near her office.
A tug-of-war for the bag soon followed, with Radha
putting up a spirited resistance with the bag handle fastened round her neck,
and her tormentors pulling it in their direction. The auto-driver pedaled on
his vehicle as though he were participant in a snails' race—to come slowest,
that is. The snatchers finally got the bag, but not before the handle had cut
deep into the flesh of Radha's neck. By the time she reached her parents' house
she was so traumatized that she forgot to note down the auto-rickshaw
registration number. Not that it could be of much use as the autos that work in
league with snatcher gangs on the road generally use counterfeit license
plates. Nor was it useful to lodge a complaint at the police station where the
SHO, who was much displeased to hear complaints at night, didn't give much
hope; he even mused about the practice of mobile snatchers to send the booty at
the shortest possible time to the black market where the machine number is
altered and sold off.
Welcome to achhe din in the capital city of India.
In the seven weeks since June 1 last, there were 1,980 cases of molestation in Delhi, against 3,515 in
the whole of 2013. The spurt is not confined to rape cases. There has been
spectacular surge in robbery and murder cases too. Women are particularly
insecure. Single women are hardly to be seen at public places in the evening.
And equally unsafe are the children; among 53 mega-cities, the National Capital
Region has been regarded as the most unsafe for children. Not that Delhi was ever quite a
law abiding city, but the spike in crime since earlier this year is perplexing.
The police say it is due to increased awareness that more cases are being
reported. That may be partly correct but holding awareness to be the sole
reason for the spike in crime is too simplistic an explanation. No doubt, there
was an absence of authority in Delhi,
a power void never experienced in the capital. Though Shiela Dikshit was at the
helms for 15 years in Delhi
and had a friendly UPA government for 10 long years. Yet she kept complaining
that Delhi Police, not being under her thumb, doesn't listen and kept blasting
the successive police commissioners. But was everything else right in the
National Capital ? The functioning of the Delhi Jal Board, drainage, roads,
transport department and other vital organs of state were equally in the mess.
But she passed on the mess to the corruption-ridden BJP-controlled Municipal
Corporation and split into three separate local bodies. But scams during the
Commonwealth Games proved fatal and she was decimated. The AAP experiment
turned out to be the 49-day wonder and the city is under Lieutenant Governor of
Delhi in the absence of an elected state government.
The climate was ideal when Modi took reins of power at
the Centre and for the first time in several decades that there was one command
governing the Capital city. Be it LG, Delhi Police, DDA, CPWD, Cantonment,
Urban Arts Commission, NDMC and even the MCD; all are one command authority
i.e. BJP-led government of Narendra Modi.
The 'Modi Magic'
can't work in Delhi
as it did nothing in 60 days
One only wonders what prevented the Union Home Minister,
Rajnath Singh, to fulfill the promise to make every city of India like in
Gujrat where young women and children can freely roam around without any fear
even at midnight. What prevented Rajnath Singh to make Delhi a model city, send shivers down the
spines of organized gangsters roaming around freely hand-in-glove with the
policemen under him and instill the fear of the law. Merely asking the babus to
come in time at 9 in the morning and do nothing through the day won't help
either.
It is clear that the Centre lacks the spunk to enforce
Prime Minister Narendra Modi's much-publicised dictum of minimum government,
maximum governance. There is no commitment from the caretaker government that
it is actually working on ideas to give the city at least that much
"governance" which enables its womenfolk to travel safely in the
city. As the Delhi
budget shows, there is little willingness on the part of the government to live
up to its pre-poll promise of overturning the subsidy culture of the previous
regime. To the middle class that supported the BJP more for its economic views
than its religious ideas, the fecklessness of the Delhi budget is particularly sad as they
thought the capital would be the laboratory where BJP would make its
ideological stand clear and then watch how the people respond to it as a new
election takes place.
With another Modi loyalist Amit Shah at the helms in the
BJP, the local corrupt leadership of the party must be weeded out from the MCD
whose engineers made money for their bosses during these decades.
Modi may have got them seven Lok Sabha seats. But to
display the ‘Modi magic’ in the capital of India, the plight of Delhites has
to be improved. The power subsidy for the poor may be fine. But it’s the law
& order that holds the key.
In states like Maharashtra,
Haryana, Jammu &Kashmir and Jharkhand, where elections are due, BJP can
reasonably hope to make its publicity blitz still work. It is a different story
in a small place like Delhi
where the conflict between rich and poor is stark, and the embers of protest
against corruption are still alive.
(The author is
National Editor,
Lokmat group of newspapers)
