Both parties are being hypocritical in opposing Chief Minister Arvind Kejriwal’s current demand.
.... the bruising battle in Delhi could further intensify from July onward. This is because the AAP government went in appeal against the 2016 High Court judgement to the Supreme Court, which completed the final hearing in the case in December. Six months have elapsed since then, but the five-member Constitution bench, which is headed by Chief Justice Dipak Misra, is yet to deliver the judgement. The judgement will leave one party – the Centre or the state – dissatisfied.
The trigger for the current confrontation between Delhi’s Lieutenant Governor Anil Baijal and the Aam Aadmi Party is the May 21, 2015, notification of the Union Home Ministry. That set into motion a chain of events culminating in Chief Minister Arvind Kejriwal demanding full statehood for Delhi, a demand that both the Bharatiya Janata Party and the Congress have voiced for decades.
The May 21, 2015, notification superseded the one of September 24, 1998, which had made it mandatory for the Lieutenant Governor to consult the chief minister not only with regard to reserved subjects of police, public order and land, but also for services – legalese for the bureaucracy. Under Article 239AA, which was inserted by the Constitution (69th Amendment) Act, 1991, to create Delhi’s framework for governance, the chief minister does not have executive power over the three reserved subjects.
The 2015 notification, however, left it to the Lieutenant Governor to decide whether to consult the chief minister on the three reserved subjects and services. Since the 1998 notification was issued by the BJP-led National Democratic Alliance of Atal Bihari Vajpayee, when the BJP was also heading the state government in Delhi, the 2015 notification conveyed the impression that the Narendra Modi government was striking a different tune only because AAP was in the saddle in Delhi.
In effect, the 2015 notification deprived Kejriwal of even a modicum of control over bureaucrats, on whom the implementation of policies depend. Stung, the AAP government appealed to the Delhi High Court against the notification. But Chief Justice G Rohini and Justice Jayant Nath, in their judgement of 2016, not only upheld the 2015 notification, they also declared that the Lieutenant Governor was not bound by the aid and advice of the Council of Ministers on all matters, contrary to the dominant reading of Article 239AA of the Constitution till then.
The judgement was a slide back into time.
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