Bravo Kejriwal, but buck stops with you

DELHI chief minister Arvind Kejriwal deserves all the plaudits, for he's making the right noise against pollution. Union Minister for Environment and Forest Prakash Javdekar is worth yawn, if not derision, for ticking off Kejriwal for doing politics over pollution. Tight lid over Delhi's gas chamber has now firmly been clasped. National Capital Region (NCR) is gasping for breath. Executives have shown thumbs to Supreme Court and Rule of Law. Turning deaf ears to orders of the apex court against instruments of pollution is now a policy and administrative habit. Could the Right to clean air become a clarion call in the mainstream political discourse?

An Una-Delhi journey lasts not more than four hours. Foothills of the mighty Himalaya astonishingly have the worst air. The city spaces soak in fumes and thick dust whipped up by vehicles. Only a few kilometers earlier in the descent, Himachal Pradesh stays in the lap of pristine nature. Slipping into the vast expanse of Punjab and Haryana in the Winter months, farm fields on fire and smouldering embers give a stunning sight shock. A few minutes in the open turn eyes irritable and throat soar even while locals continue their chores nonchalantly. Closer to Delhi border, thick blanket of smog take the horizon with frightening proportions. Possibly, journey from heaven to hell lasts only a few hours.  

People in northern parts of India have seemingly made peace with their fate to co-exist in the blanket of dust and fumes. That remains a constant in life notwithstanding change of seasons. Slowing of wind speed and dip in temperature only worsen the prevailing battered air. Stubble burning in Punjab and Haryana coupled with mass hysteria to burn firecrackers sent the air in the NCR to the abyss. Law of hypocrisy shifts focus on others, while dimming own complicity. Farmers, thus, in Haryana and Punjab are currently the whipping boys in the popular narrative of the national capital region.   

Stubble burning before the Rabi crop season has defied all measures of the government. Doles of incentives and sticks with police actions have yielded no results. Farmers in Punjab and Haryana have, incidentally, lit more this year than previously. From harvesting of Kharif crops to the onset of Rabi season, farmers have a small window to clear their agricultural land. Mechanised farming isn't yet the hallmark of Indian farmers, with hands in plenty to do the jobs, which could, otherwise, have been done by machines. Subsidies to farmers to buy machines to harvest their crops have found least takers. Farmers feel least enthused with prospects of machines lying unused for most of the year. With 80 per cent of the farm land holding less than four acres, the policy thrust to extend subsidies to individual farmers could only have been worked by the babus in the country.     

NITI Aayog had commissioned a study on stubble burning, which three years ago submitted the papers, with recommendations that the farmers be incentivised for not burning crop residues along with long term roadmap for setting up infrastructure to process the biomass with the involvement of the private players. The studied solution roadmap, sadly, remains tucked away from cognitive attention of the policy makers. 

The Narendra Modi government only a few weeks ago unveiled enhanced Minimum Support Prices (MSPs) for Rabi crops. The government with MSP increase wants farmers to grow more foodgrains. Ironically, India is a foodgrain surplus country, while there are few takers for the export. A huge pile rots, while rodents feast on them. Intermediaries make fortune out of the MSP driven grain production and its further pushing into the monstrous public food distribution system, accounting one-twentieth of the Budget of the country. Farmers survive for another year, slipping into firm grip of village money-lenders, while intermediaries fatten. If financial strain wasn't enough to break their bones, they also face with the prospects of Haryana and Punjab becoming the cancer bowls of the country. 

India Gate lost to smog.

DELHI by all accounts is a policy sterile city. It has exploded with population after India's partition in 1947. First, the city hosted the migrants from eastern and western Pakistan. Later, the Kashmiris descended. Afterwards, the pulls of economy drove millions of people from Bihar, Uttar Pradesh and hilly states of Uttarakhand and Himachal Pradesh to the national capital. Many came for government and public sector jobs, with Centre anchoring headquarters of almost all the PSUs in the small confines of the city space. Delhi alone, unofficially, is now staring at a population close to 30 million. Rising wave of population drove enterprising builder-politician-bureaucrats nexus to squat on public lands to carve out colonies, which from beginning boasted of sub-human conditions.

Delhi is a city of construction. Buildings get demolished to pave way for fresh constructions. Mass of dusts swirls in the air for want of enforcement of building construction norms. World's most dense city generates more than 10,000 metric tonnes of solid waste daily, half being the organic waste. Only 10 per cent of the waste is processed. Rest is dumped at landfill sites or burnt. Burning of leaves and garbage in Delhi was banned many years ago. But people in Delhi know well that laws are made to be read only in papers.

Vehicular population may, arguably, leave behind its human counterpart. That's incumbent for a city of livelihoods. Yet, Delhi has added least infrastructure after the 2010 Commonwealth games to speed up traffic. The mass transport system, first growing leaps and bounds with whole-hearted support to Delhi Metro by the Sheila Dikshit dispensations till 2013, slowed afterward, with buck largely stopping with the Kejriwal government in the city. Ring Rail in Delhi has now gone idle, with the city government paying no attention to repeated pleas of the Ministry of Railways to provide linkages with Metro stations and Bus stops.              

CHILDREN in Delhi schools must write letters to "Captain uncle" and "Khattar Uncle". They should also write letters to Kejriwal uncle, for Delhi government has only taken cosmetic steps to curb causes of pollution in the past few years. Yet, Kejriwal must be lauded for politics over pollution. That helps bring the discourse to the center-stage of popular consciousness.

A thug state

"I find the prohibitionist a negative person. To ban drinking has as much chance of success as an attempt to ban sex. One unfortunate outcome of prohibitionism anywhere in the world is that it promotes hypocrisy as well as disrespect for the law," wrote Cedric Day, a British bureaucrat, who worked in India in 1960s.

In Cedric Day's descriptions, Nitish Kumar and Arvind Kejriwal should be outright negative persons. But, yet, Kumar can well take refuge in the fact that a large number of women for years had been pleading him for curbs on drunken ruffians in the state. 

No such alibi exists for Kejriwal. That a few elites began loud-talks of toxic Delhi air was reason enough for him to latch on an opportunity to host another event, and engage people on a large scale in a mass hysteria. The darling of television sensed that an event affecting most of the people in Delhi would draw curtain on his fulsome failure on all the grand promises he made to grab power. And, thus, Delhi is hosting the spectacle of the second phase of "Odd and Even scheme" for four-wheeled vehicles.

MITHILESH Kumar (name changed), who stays in Vasundhara area of Ghaziabad,

works in Delhi, and has no option but to commute in his car. The nearest Metro from his home is about seven km away, and no convenient mode to complete this last mile connectivity is there, which explains his bond with the car. 

But the first day of the second phase of "Odd and Even" scheme made his "even" car ineligible to hit the roads. So, he called an Ola cab, and an SMS buzzed his cell phone.

"...3 times peak time charge is applicable on this booking...," read the Ola message. In a hurry, he did not read the message, and rode the cab to his office. But the driver's demand and simultaneous Ola message asking him to hand over Rs 994 left him gaping. And, then he read the first message.

Yet, he did not understand "3 times of the peak charges". The driver cleared his head. "Since there is a massive demand and supply mismatch for cabs due to "Odd and Even" scheme, the formula is arrived at of three times more than peak charges. It could be much higher if demand is more...," he expounded the formula. 

Mithilesh Kumar's car stayed at home, but he rode a four-wheeled vehicle only, and was fleeced three times more money than he normally would have paid. The "Odd and Even" scheme looted him. Yet, Delhi did not see less number of cars on his account. 

Incidentally, he has paid road tax for 15 years in advance. But Kejriwal has not yet said a word if the road tax would be returned, since freedom to ply on roads has been curbed. Kejriwal, in fact, has not yet answered allegations levelled against him and his government in the purported sting operation where palms were greased with crisp papers embossed with Gandhi's image and singed by RBI Governor for distributing CNG stickers (exempt from "Odd and Even").

ASHOK Kumar Walia is a bachelor and a doctor by profession. He had been Minister for PWD, Health, and Urban Development during the 15 long years of the Sheila Dikshit government in Delhi. 

Once he went to Tokyo. There he saw flyovers dotting the city all around. He came back, and told his officials that Delhi needed flyovers. The road congestion was so long and painful, that most of the motorists would be stuck at traffic signals for 15 to 20 minutes. Walia began building flyovers. The Supreme Court in the meantime mandated migration of public transport to the CNG mode. Delhi became better and cleaner.

Walia went to Tokyo again after a gap of about a decade. He saw flyovers over flyovers. He enquired from his hosts, "why do you need flyovers over flyovers?".

"The original flyovers were choking due to rise in vehicular population, and, hence, new flyovers over them were needed," quipped the Japanese host.

The Delhi minister came back and told his officials the need for flyovers over flyovers. An elevated ring road over the existing ring road was planned. 

But Walia and Sheila Dikshit by then had become unwanted in a city where the Gandhian activist Anna Hazare and motley of television channels glibly allowed Arvind Kejriwal to become an answer to all the ills afflicting Delhi.   

The elite camp-follower of Kejriwal glibly argue that many western countries have also tried such a formula to curb pollution. But no such people has yet stopped using four-wheeled vehicles to commute to their work places themselves. 

That Delhi has a remarkable elasticity to dip in their pockets to buy a second car is a fact not worth repeating. Such a plan failed miserably in Mexico. And, Delhi is more closer to Mexico than London surely is lost out to the logical minds of the camp-followers of Kejriwal.

A tourist from Madhya Pradesh was arguably the first person to be challaned on the commencement of the second phase of "Odd and Even" scheme. He told the cops that he had not known of such a thing since he had been driving for a couple of days. But he had to part with Rs 2,000. 

HE may have rightly thought that sometimes the state is a thug, and encourages people to become a bigger thug.

The gust

"Kitna vote se jeete (by how much votes they won)," asked a man sitting on stairs leading to Hanuman temple near Connaught Place. After giving him a short reply, we hurried past, only to stop to ask ourselves, who the man was. Running back to him, I asked for his name. "Gulshan," he said. "I sit here during day and evening, and sleep in a nearby hospital," he added. Next, I asked "did you vote" to which he said "no, don't have vote". 

He was a beggar. And he was asking about the performance of Aam Admi Party (AAP). 

Quite admittedly, we were shell-shocked. A beggar was curious to know the electoral fate of Arvind Kejriwal's AAP. Looking closely, Gulshan's eyes were yellow. He was wrapped in a torn quilt. There was no hope for life in his eyes. He was one of thousands who eke out their livings at Hanuman temple on the largess of devotees. 

Dance and drum at AAP office

The thought wave went fast back in past and recalled reporting Sheila Dikshit led Delhi government's determined efforts to make the national capital beggar free. That was in the run up to the Commonwealth Games. Then she even wanted to make Delhi a digital city. Also, Delhi a smoking free city. And so many others, all ideas borrowed from European countries, Hong Kong and Singapore. None materialized but left many thinking Dikshit as an apathetic leader.    

In her efforts to make Delhi a world class city, Dikshit forgot that a lot of people lived in the national capital, who were struggling to make their ends meet. And most of them were least bothered about Europe, Hong Kong and Singapore.   

And a lot of youth and women were least bothered about the garland of flyovers too. Because, the man who gave them to Delhi -- Ashok Kumar Walia (a doctor and a bachelor) -- was humbled by a rookie AAP greenhorn Vinod Kumar Binni from Luxmi Nagar Assembly seat. 

Dr Walia was hurt, for his people in the constituency were all that he had in his life. So, he shut in a room for three hours and was seen with tears led swollen eyes by his close aides.

On the way to Hanuman temple, the Connaught Circus was full of broom held by people, who looked hailing from the lower income groups. "These are all BSP men and women," I could not resist quipping. The BSP had polled 14 per cent votes in 2008 Delhi elections and five years later the rank and cadre were swept away by the Kejriwal magic. 

The broom that swept away the Congress in Delhi.

Clearly, a hell lot of people sensed that they did not figure in the scheme of things of Dikshit and Prime Minister Manmohan Singh. Price rise had finally broken all the prides of the middle and lower middle class.

But the Congress' slide from 43 seats to eight is quite a journey worth examination. As it appears, only the Muslims were unimpressed with Kejriwal's broom. So, not only JD (U)'s floater Shoib Iqbal but four Muslim candidates of the Congress too won. 

The Mughal Shah Alam's empire had famously shrunken from Chandni Chowl to Palam in the freezing winter of the dynasty founded by Babur and spread by Akbar. Dikshit, despite enjoying popular support, had shrunken her Delhi to the Lutyen's zone. And it was there that she tried to work her developments.

Shah Alam had seen a gust of Afghan and Maratha invaders in his shrunken Delhi. History revisits many a times, and, later we will know if Dikshit was the last Congress leader to rule Delhi.  

If not for Narendra Modi, Kejriwal would have been sworn in as the chief minister of Delhi. Undoubtedly, Modi blocked the Kejriwal gust to throw the BJP too with the Congress into the political abyss.  

Arguably, the Sunday gust intoxicated the Kejriwal gang. And, on the day of the people's mandate, they began talking of another elections. In their verbal jugglery, they had dished out sweeping comments and generalizations. To bow before the people's mandate is the duty of all political parties and rejecting the mandate by seeking another elections amounts to doubt people's will.   

Is it a French monarchy/. From the window, Kumar Viswas tells crowd updates and then shuts.

In a few days from now the magical debut of AAP in electoral politics will be researched word over. There are hardly any parallel. In 1980s, N T Rama Rao decimated the Congress in just six months. But then he was a popular film star and had cult following. There is no other parallel anywhere in the world. 

But take away Kejriwal, will AAP have any future. None, I guess. AAP is least a political party and more of a carry over of gust released by the powerful lungs of Anna Hazare. Alas, Hazare is a lonely man today. But life is like that. Ideas outgrow minds who birth them. Kejriwal is an idea, which was seeded by Anna, and nourished by anger of teeming millions of people. 

The gust by nature is short-lived. And that's the challenge before Kejriwal. He may recall W B Yeats' those lovely words: "I have spread my dreams under your feet, tread softly because you tread on my dreams".  

New Delhi spring

Former Income Tax officer Arvind Kejriwal must have seen with wide eyes the 2004 Mani Ratnam flick Yuva. The Ajay Devgan starrer was high on idea and inspiration. Even the most politically fortified state could allow intoxicated youth to put their feet on the doorway and Kejriwal took the screen fantasy to ground in Delhi in quite earnest. That his fate would be known on December 8 is not so important, as he has been able to open up Delhi's bipolar politics already. 

The 2012 was a year of spring and the jasmine flavour swept through the Arab world, first taking flight

from Tunisia, a country of olive oil. Tahrir Square happened a little afterwards. Soon, Kejriwal began pleading at Jantar Mantar with media, with Anna Hazare on the day one of his iconic fast for Jan Lokpal, for coverage. "It's not a Tahrir Square but a movement in the making," he would plead then. Later, crowd gave him enough "high" to take off into the world of politics.

Anna movement had assured Kejriwal, that crowd and money in India could come easily and he just had to keep banging the well fortified political wall. He was right. Money flowed and with that people too, many convinced that this was the man for the change of the system.

But he probably did not watch Yuva too closely. There the Devgan led former student politicians had made entry into the state Assembly in a small way. Just a few of them were there. And here Kejriwal tells each office-goers in their cars through the FM, that he would be forming a government in Delhi with 47 seats. His ambition has taken a fantasy flight. But politics, historically, has been very harsh to dreamers. 

In Andhra Pradesh, a former Babu Jai Prakash Narayan had formed Lok Satta party and wanted to change the system. He contested all the Assembly seats in AP. In the end, his party won one seat and that was him only. Union minister Jairam Ramesh recalls Andhra too had witnessed a similar sympathy wave for Narayan. But politics turned out to be too harsh for his flight of dream.

Nonetheless, Kejriwal should be happy that it was none other than the BJP's PM candidate Narendra Modi who had to focus on Aam Admi Party in his speeches. From an NGO man, Kejriwal is a politician and making his presence felt. 

The BJP should in fact thank him for committing another suicide by not going ahead with Vijay Goel as it face. That Dr Harsh Vardhan had to be named as BJP's CM candidate is Kejriwal's significant contribution.  

Furthermore, Kejriwal has thrown up ideas, taken from his book Swaraj, for local manifesto and they have all been grabbed by the BJP. Even the Congress is gearing up to come up with state specific manifesto in the upcoming Lok Sabha elections.   

Delhi has been the political capital even before Babur discovered India. The pulse of Indian politic is easily felt in Delhi. From the capture of Delhi by Muslims first to the British rule to the last 67 years of post-Independence India, the national capital has shown the way to the trend across the country.

This was evident in 2008 when Sheila Dikshit was pleasantly shocked to know that she had been re-elected third time despite the back-breaking price rise even then. That was Manmohan Singh undercurrent, not seen till then, which came out in full force in 2004 Lok Sabha elections. 

But not all are blessed with the sense of time and Manmohan Singh is the last to leave the seat of power under any circumstances. Had he retired in 2004, he would have been the most successful Prime Minister of India. But this was not to happen and in the next five years he took dive into the mud. And now the feet of the Congress is stuck in the mud collected all these five years.

The sense of resignation among the Congress leaders in Delhi is hard to be ignored. The fatigue in the campaign is too visible. Sheila Dikshit looks tired. The impregnable forte of the Congress in Delhi awaits December 8 verdict with dread. And hence there are no new ideas from Congress in Delhi but only a promise for continuation of the past and that makes people more dreadful.

In contrast, Sheila Dikshit had come out with magical ideas in 2008 -- regularization of unauthorized

colonies, home to one-third of Delhi's population, and five lakh flats for the poor at Rs 50,000 each only. The people lapped those ideas and left the BJP looking a fool with an old man V K Malhotra as the challenger.

Now the ideas are coming from Dr Harsh Vardhan and coming in plenty. Those ideas are taking wings with the big crowd puller Modi. And finally, the price rise appears becoming an election issue. 

Though Kejriwal is seen hurting the BJP by cutting into the negative vote base, trend in the last decade has been of decisive mandates, with Uttarakhand being the only exception. This began from Bihar and spread to Uttar Pradesh, Odisha, West Bengal and other states. Therefore, Delhi heading for a fractured mandate would be against the established trend.

If the Congress loses Delhi, the grand old party would be shaken. And that would also confirm that the change is in the air -- a much awaited one.