The House of the Municipal Corporation (MCD) of Delhi was subjected to an unprecedented embarrassment last week before its reconstitution pending since all three civic bodies were unified.
An unprecedented pandemonium ensued in the House just when the oath taking ceremony began. Shouting, pushing, shoving and vandalism followed. Councillors jumped into the Well. The situation became so volatile that marshals intervened and escorted the presiding officer and key municipal officers who were present there.
Eventually, the ceremony called to elect the Mayor of the unified civic body was disrupted. The maiden meeting was adjourned till further notice.
Many called the ruckus a never-seen event, which had occurred in the history of the Mayor election. However, what set off the ruckus?
The fracas began after the presiding officer of Mayoral election, Satya Sharma, invited alderman Manoj Kumar to take oath which triggered the councillors and MLAs of the Aam Aadmi Party (AAP). Its elected members started shouting and with an objection that aldermen, who are non-elected members of the councils, should not take the oath first. Rather, the elected councillors should be administered the oath before the aldermen. The objection by the AAP invited a similar retort from the members of Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP). Soon after, both the party members came to blows with each other while the councillors of the Congress party chose to walk out.
The AAP said that a precedent has been set that aldermen take oath after the elected councillors and the presiding officer, who is also one of the aldermen, has broken that tradition. Besides, the party also has serious reservations in the manner the aldermen were selected by Lieutenant Governor Vinai Kumar Saxena.
A day before the poll, Delhi Chief Minister and party chief Arvind Kejriwal called the selection process of the aldermen “unconstitutional and a complete departure from the settled practice”.
In a letter written to the L-G, Kejriwal said that traditionally, all files pertaining to nominations under Section 3 (b) (i) are routed through the Urban Development Department, which is the nodal department of the Municipal Corporation. However, this time, this rule was broken.
"Such files are required and have, in the past, always been put up to the Minister-in-Charge of the Urban Development Department or Ministry. "It is, therefore, unfortunate that recently, in a complete departure from this settled practice, files were routed directly by the MCD Commissioner to the Lieutenant Governor completely bypassing the Delhi government. This is contrary to law and the Constitution,” read Kejriwal's letter to Saxena.
As the AAP feared, all 10 aldermen nominated by the L-G were BJP members but they had no right to participate in the Mayoral poll. The law officers of MCD, requesting anonymity, also confirmed, citing section 32 of the Delhi Municipal Corporation Act, that aldermen cannot vote. They also said that it does not matter who takes the oath first because the elections for the Mayor and its deputy will be conducted only after all the members, elected and nominated, are administered the oath.
Then why the AAP was hell-bent on objecting to the oath-taking selection of aldermen despite having numbers beyond the majority in the House that gives it a higher probability of winning the Mayoral poll as well? The answer is the standing committee, which controls the purse strings of the civic body. While aldermen do not have powers to vote in the Mayoral polls and in the MCD house, they have a vote in the zone committees, including in selecting the zone representative to the standing committee.
But first, let’s grasp what aldermen are and who they are?
Who are aldermen?
According to the Merriam-Webster dictionary, the term “aldermen” traces its origin from Old English ealdorman, from eald (old) + man. The word refers to experts specialized in some areas.
The DMC Act empowers the L-G to nominate 10 individuals who are above the age of 25 to the corporation. It is expected that these individuals have specialised expertise or experience in municipal administration.
The aldermen cannot, however, cast ballots in the Mayoral election. They are placed as ward committee members and given powers to cast ballots to choose one representative for each of the 12 MCD zones to serve on a standing committee.
Although they do not have the right to vote in the Mayor polls, aldermen hold significant power and play an important role in the elections of Standing Committees, MCD In-house and Ward Committee meetings.
What is Standing Committee?
The Municipal Corporation provides cradle-to-grave services to residents in the city — right from issuing birth certificates, death certificates, collecting property tax and passing building plans, apart from discharging other responsibilities such as ensuring cleanliness, controlling the growth of mosquitoes, and managing stray animals.
The head of the MCD is the Mayor, but only by name. A mayor is a nominal head of the corporation and has very limited powers such as calling meetings of the house.
It is the Standing Committee that effectively manages day-to-day affairs of the corporation, with functions such as giving financial approval to projects, discussing, finalising and implementing policies. The Standing Committee is the second highest decision-making body of the corporation after the House. There are matters on which the Standing Committee can take a call without seeking the approval of the House. Consisting of 18 members, the committee has a chairperson and a deputy chairperson, who is elected from among the Standing Committee members. Having a clear majority in the standing committee is crucial for any political party to have control of policy and financial decisions.
Six members of the committee are elected in the MCD house directly, after the Mayoral elections. The formula followed is a preferential system in which the councillor getting the first 36 votes wins. The remaining 12 members will be elected through polls in the MCD’s 12 zones. Upon being elected, the members of the Standing Committee will nominate their chairperson.
In Delhi, the MCD is divided into 12 zones. Each zone has a Ward Committee, which includes all councillors from the area, as well as any aldermen nominated by the government administrator. A total of 10 aldermen can be nominated but there is no set number to be nominated from a particular ward. All 10 can be nominated from a single ward if the administrator so wants. So technically, irrespective of who will be the Mayor, the majority by a party in the Standing Committee will decide who will be in-charge of the MCD. The AAP feared that the 10 members nominated to the MCD by the L-G could tip the scales in the BJP’s favour, especially in the zones where the saffron party is weak. With the current statistics the AAP has control on seven zones, while the BJP controls four and the Congress councilors play key roles in one zone. With the aldermen votes, the BJP is expected to gain power on 10 zones and continue to control the reigns of MCD.
The story of the current tussle between the BJP and the AAP was written several months ago when three civic agencies were unified into one.
A bill to unify the three civic bodies was approved by the Lok Sabha on March 30 last year and by the Rajya Sabha on April 5 and the three erstwhile civic bodies, East Delhi Municipal Corporation (EDMC), South Delhi Municipal Corporation (SDMC) and North Delhi Municipal Corporation (North DMC) were re-unified into a single entity on May 22,. The unified civic body in the national capital is not new. Before 2012, Delhi used to have a unified municipal body. It was trifurcated by then Sheila Dikshit government to decentralize the civil administration but the three bodies ended up having unequal resources, responsibilities, and poor financial health.
The BJP say the idea behind the unification was to overcome the financial difficulties and unequal distribution of resources among the three civic agencies. However, the opposition parties claimed that it was done to prevent BJP facing a massive defeat in the election.
In March last year, when the State Election Commissioner (SEC) was about to announce the polls date, it received a communication from the Centre to defer the election since the Union government planned to unify all three civic bodies into one.
Who should take the oath first? That was the question in the House of the Municipal Corporation of Delhi recently. Not only the ceremony called to elect the Mayor of unified civic body was disrupted, many called the ruckus a never-seen event. Ashish Srivastava, Amit Pandey report
