By Sidharth Mishra

Around 2011-12, when the Manmohan Singh government was facing a plethora of corruption charges, largely on the account of allocation of 2G spectrum and hosting of Commonwealth Games, then Congress spokesperson Janardhan Dwivedi had famously said, “Congress had said earlier also that all such cases should be investigated and enquired properly and law will take its own course.”

Among the cheer-leaders of the anti-corruption campaign were a few social sector activists namely Arvind Kejriwal and Manish Sisodia. This campaign propelled them to the seat of power in the national Capital, unseating a very successful and fairly clean chief minister Sheila Dikshit. While Dikshit is credited with building infrastructure which is sustaining the national Capital today, the charges against her in the alleged Commonwealth Games scam came a cropper.

It’s just been a decade and now the duo of Kejriwal-Sisodia are themselves being investigated for corruption. One of the senior ministers from their team, Satyender Jain has been languishing behind bars for some time now in a money laundering case. Unlike the Congress in 2011-12, the Aam Aadmi Party has not shown the political finesse of saying, “law will take its own course.”

By Sidharth Mishra

While we are still trying to figure what put legislative functioning of Arvind Kejriwal government into abeyance in Delhi for the past four years, a flurry of attacks by them have further muddied the water. Last we learnt that Deputy Chief Minister Manish Sisodia stonewalled tabling of the Comptroller and Auditor General’s report in the house for four consecutive years.

Now that the report is in the public domain, one learns what made Kejriwal government hold back the reports. The CAG reports pertaining to the years 2017-18 to 2020-21 point to several irregularities of serious nature in the accounts and finance across various departments of Delhi government.

A cursory look at the report would show that every PSU under Delhi government was incurring loss, which is in direct contrast to government's claims that under them Delhi was financially vibrant. As per the report, Delhi government power companies losses stood at Rs 2,561 crore. The Delhi Transport Corporation incurred a loss of Rs 29,143 crore while the loss for Delhi Jal Board was Rs 27,660 crore, the CAG papers indicate.

By Sidharth Mishra

The drive from the western to the eastern end of Uttar Pradesh through the monsoon rains is replete with heart-warming images. First and foremost, the 1000-kilometre-long journey from Ghaziabad to Ghazipur can now be covered in just about 10 hours, thanks to the three expressways – Yamuna Expressway, Taj Expressway and the Purvanchal Expressway. While the huge green expanses of paddy plantations are soothing to the eyes, the images of the young men and in some places young women running on the service lanes of the expressways add to curiosity. Both the eastern and the western fringe of Uttar Pradesh and areas of the neighbouring states are composed of the districts that are known for sending recruits to the Indian armed forces.

These areas while have rich agriculture belts, its economy is also boosted by the cash sent home by the soldiers deployed with the military and para-military forces. Buxar, the westernmost town of Bihar, across the Ganges from Ghazipur, today boasts of several senior secondary schools affiliated to Central Board of Secondary Education (CBSE).

The buses from these schools ferret out in the morning to the interiors on the metalled rural roads built under Pradhan Mantri Rural Roads scheme, ferrying children, mostly of the soldier parents. These schools maintain faculty and hygiene standards equal to any big city school. They also match in the fee charged from the students.

By Sidharth Mishra

Celebrated British poet TS Eliot ends his 1925 poem 'Hollow Men' with the lines ‘This is the way the world ends, not with a bang but a whimper.’ A party which came to power in Delhi riding a popularity wave on the account of its claimed fight against corruption, has just signed a confession statement on being corrupt.

For the first time in post-independence history we have an instance of a Minister criticising a proposal which he himself piloted in the cabinet. After the Delhi cabinet approved the abandoning of Excise Policy 2021-22,  Sisodia was quoted as saying, “They (BJP) are threatening shopkeepers, officers with ED and CBI, they want legal liquor shops to be closed in Delhi and earn money from illegal shops. We've decided to stop the new liquor policy and ordered to open govt liquor shops.”

That the city's Finance Minister was out of his wits on the issue was evident in statement issued on the same day, which said, “We brought a new liquor policy to stop corruption. Before that government used to get around Rs 6,000 Cr revenue from 850 liquor shops. But, after the new policy, our govt would have got more than Rs 9,000 Cr with the same number of shops.”

Can a government sound so helpless, can Ministers from a government which sat on a dharna at Raj Niwas led by their chief minister Arvind Kejriwal would act so meek on the 'threats' held out by the Delhi BJP leaders? The point to be noted is that cabinet decision to abandon Excise Policy 2021-22 came following a police investigation into policy and a faceoff with the Lt Governor who has sought a CBI probe in the matter, based on a report by the Chief Secretary.

By Sidharth Mishra

That the Delhi Government did not table the reports on its functioning by the Comptroller and Auditor General (CAG) in the state assembly for four years in a row shows how legislative functioning has hit a bottomless pit in the national Capital. That the Arvind Kejriwal-led Delhi government, known for its care a damn attitude towards legislative responsibilities, did not table the report is not surprising. What worries is that the opposition benches, constituting of the BJP MLAs, also did not care to demand its tabling. The surprises don’t end there. There is an assembly secretariat, headed by the Speaker, custodian of legislative powers and responsibilities, too went along the government in their devious act to subvert the processes which makes assembly proceedings meaningful. And lastly the role of the former Lieutenant Governor Anil Baijal in overlooking this act of subversion of democratic functioning for four continuous years. According to recent newspaper reports, it took four letters from the present L-G Vinai Kumar Saxena’s office for the government to table the 10 reports panning over four years finally in the monsoon session of the Delhi Assembly on July 5 this year.

The news reports mentioned that the CAG reports of the year 2017-18, 2018-19, 2019-20, 2020-21, detailing ‘State Finances Audit Report’, ‘Revenue Economic, Social & General Sectors and PSUs’, ‘Social General & Economic Sectors’, ‘Finance Accounts of GNCTD’ and ‘Appropriation Accounts of GNCTD’, were pending with Deputy Chief Minister, Manish Sisodia, since as long as when they were submitted by CAG. What does this indicate, a deliberate attempt to paper over the cracks in governance. 

By Sidharth Mishra

Take a drive across the city and you would find huge hoardings with chief minister Arvind Kejriwal hawking some inane scheme or other. One such hoarding displayed these days says that even children from middle class poor families can now speak English, courtesy some Delhi government scheme.

Now one wonders what makes Delhi government categorize middle class families as poor. Secondly and more importantly, what makes him believe that the children from these families were waiting all the while for Kejriwal to launch a scheme to start learning English language? These hoardings are nothing more than an attempt by Aam Aadmi Party (AAP) leadership to paper over the cracks which has come to manifest the functioning of the Delhi government.

This newspaper last Friday broke the news of the Delhi government deciding on the reversal of the new excise policy. This move has come in the face of the charges of huge corruption against the deputy chief minister Manish Sisodia in the allotment of the liquor vends and the probe being carried out by the various agencies.

By Sidharth Mishra

Kargil War, who’s Vijay Diwas (Victory Day) we celebrate on July 26, was not just a military triumph but it came with unprecedented diplomatic success, which in turn helped to completely isolate the adversary. One may say that Pakistan's misadventure in Kargil marked the beginning of its isolation in the international community.

Three months before the detection of infiltration of intruders in Kargil in May 1999, then Prime Minister Atal Bihari Vajpayee in an attempt to thaw the tensions between India and Pakistan, had taken a bus ride to Lahore. A hug that was shared between him and his Pakistani counterpart Mian Nawaz Sharif, however, proved to be a mirage for a long-term bonhomie between the two countries.

On arrival at Lahore in February 1999, Vajpayee had said, “I bring the goodwill and hope of my fellow Indians who seek abiding peace and harmony with Pakistan. I am conscious that this is a defining moment in South Asian history and I hope we will be able to rise to the challenge.” Vajpayee was let down as India and Pakistan engaged in a conflict once again, this time in Kargil, Drass and Batalik sectors in northern Kashmir.

By Sidharth Mishra

Recently in a social media post Pawan Khera, the leading spokesperson of the Congress, claimed that Prime Minister Narendra Modi’s understanding of his party was based on the basis of people who left Congress to join the Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP). As if to qualify what Khera said, though inadvertently, a senior leader from Karnataka added, “We have made enough for three to four generations in the name of Nehru, Indira Gandhi and Sonia Gandhi. And if we do not protest in this situation, there will be worms in our food.”

A former Karnataka Assembly speaker K R Ramesh Kumar triggered a controversy with his remarks that the Congressmen should be indebted to Jawaharlal Nehru, Indira Gandhi and Sonia Gandhi for making fortunes in their names in the course of their individual political careers. What he suggested, which cannot be said to be completely untrue, points towards ‘spoils system’ in the functioning of the Congress party.