The decade of 1970s in the Hindi film industry was dominated by a villain called Ajit. While he possessed a debonair personality and a very crisp dialogue delivery, it were the ingeniously drafted dialogues for him which had a very remarkable impact.
Some of his dialogues encouraged his fans to create, what’s known as fallacy compositions, which means create a conformation of your own to suit the style of your idol. One such famous fallacy compositions attributed to Ajit is, “Raabert, is haraami ko Liquid Oxygen mein daal do. Liquid ise jeene nahin dega; Oxygen ise marne nahin dega!” It meant the boss asking his henchman Robert to put a rascal (opponent) in liquid oxygen, where liquid won’t let him live and oxygen won’t let him die.
A similar situation has been created for the jailed chief minister Arvind Kejriwal-led Delhi government. It’s neither living nor dying. It has created a state for the people of the national capital, what’s called a fool’s paradise. In Christian beliefs and scriptures it is the place where fools or idiots were sent after death: intellectually incompetent to be held responsible for their deeds, they cannot be punished for them in hell, atone for them in purgatory, or be rewarded for them in heaven.
When Arvind Kejriwal provided freebies to the residents of the national Capital, in their idiocy they opted for it and are now paying a price for it. As the Delhi Court observed, “Civic authorities are bankrupt. If you don’t have money to pay salaries, how will you upgrade infrastructure?
You want freebie culture. You are not collecting money, so you are not spending any money.”
The present state of Delhi, using another Christian allegorical reference, is that of being in the limbo, meaning in an uncertain and undecided state or condition. The state of uncertainty is such that one leaves home for work, gets caught in civic floods and lands up behind the bars for wedging through the flooded waters to return home.
Referring to the arrest of a vehicle driver for having ‘created waves which crashed the gates of a building in Rajinder Nagar, flooded the unauthorised basement library where three students drowned,’ the High Court said, “Mercifully, you have not challaned (booked) the rainwater for entering into the basement. You would have said how dare the water enter the basement. You could have fined the water also, the way you arrested the SUV driver for driving his car there.”
Several committees have been formed and probes ordered, including the one by the High Court, to look into the catastrophe which has visited the national capital due to civic floods following the incessant monsoon rains. What would they all find, which is already not known. There is no governance in the city, as it has been overtaken by the politicking between Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP)-led Centre and the Aam Aadmi Party (AAP)-led state government.
What withholds an otherwise brusque Home Minister Amit shah from dismissing the Kejriwal government? After all he has been credited with the fall of opposition-led governments in several states. Some would say that it suits the BJP that the city continues in this state of limbo, after all they will not want any degree of sympathy to accrue to Aam Aadmi Party ahead of the assembly polls scheduled in March next year.
Theoretically the existence of AAP has become all the more important for the BJP with a buoyant Congress declaring that it would go all alone the in polls, learning from the favourable results in Punjab and deplorable performance in Delhi in the last Lok Sabha polls. In Punjab, Congress contested separately whereas in Delhi it was in alliance with AAP.
Many a times during the polls, theories go topsy-turvy, which the BJP leadership should realise. This state of limbo and a faceless state party leadership will only harm BJP’s prospects. People will hold them guilty for being equally responsible for their misery as the Aam Aadmi Party.
Sidharth Mishra
Author and president, Centre for Reforms, Development & Justice