For residents of Khirki Extension, law min is a 'hero, who is there to protect them'.
A view of Khirki Extension in Delhi. DC/ Sondeep Shankar
Nishtha Grover
Open landfills, bad roads, leaking water pipes, Delhi’s Khirki Extension is full of civic issues. It’s also a sociologist’s delight, with a plethora of communities – Hindus and Muslims, Indians and foreigners – all living cheek?by?jowl in its narrow bylanes.
One such bylane, opposite Saket’s sprawling Select City Mall, is now in the eye of a storm, thanks to Delhi law minister Somnath Bharti and his Aam Aadmi Party. Khirki, also known for art and culture, has become notorious for its locals’ xenophobia and racism.
They — both Hindu and Muslims — gather near the Sai temple in the village, and the topic invariably is the habshis and habshans. “Their culture is different, these habshi women (African women) have made this an unbearable place.
Earlier, they used to indulge in their activities behind close doors. Ab sharam khatam hai,” said Furkaan Ahmed, a leather shop owner in the area.
Ahmed says it was about time someone told the Africans they can’t be doing anything they wished. “Somnath ji ne bahut achcha kiya, jaise aaye aur in habshiyon ko bata diya ke is desh me yeh log khule aam nahin ghoom sakte.”
The meeting is adjourned, after everyone is done with their share of ridiculing foreign nationals.
Soon after the afternoon azaan, the local mosque starts making announcements to discourage people from renting out accommodation to Africans.
Interestingly, not everyone agrees with that. Radha, 25, a tailor with a local designer, says she can’t see why the residents just can’t stand the foreigners. “Bas dar lagta hai, pata nahin kyun”, she says (They are scared of the foreigners, I don’t know why).
Women’s rights groups and opposition parties may be roundly castigating Somnath Bharti, but for the residents of Khirki Extension, he has become a “hero, who is there to protect us.”
Bharti had gone to the area and standing outside one of the houses, in the middle of the night, ordered police to raid and arrest the Ugandan women there. When the police refused, Bharti conducted the ‘raid’ himself, with his party workers.
The incident led to an unprecedented political stand-off between the state government and the Centre as Delhi Chief Minister Arvind Kejriwal did what he does best, taking to the streets and protesting against the Union government, this time demanding that home minister Sushilkumar Shinde suspend policemen who refused to take orders from Bharti and that the Delhi Police be brought under the state government.
A constable deployed at the entrance of Khirki village breathed fire against the Aam Aadmi Party, now Delhi Police’s enemy number one. "It’s topi terror in this area", he says. “The white cap has become a symbol of terror”.
The policemen refuted AAP’s charge that police had turned a blind eye to the law and order problem in the area. “We were here long before AAP came on the scene.
Everything was smooth and peaceful. Whenever we got complaints from residents, we took action. We have deported so many people from here,” they said.
For some, though, Bharti is Bruce Wayne of Khirki. “He dared to take a step that none before him did. We had filed complaints with the police, but no action was taken,” one local said, alleging that the Africans were openly running drugs and prostitution rackets.
“In the last few years, it has become impossible for us to step out of our houses because of their activities,” another resident said. A number of Khirki residents told this correspondent, "these foreigners had unleashed a reign of terror in the area with the help of the local police.”
But the Africans have a different story to tell, one of xenophobia and racism. “The locals call us all kinds of names and pass comments on our colour,” a Nigerian woman said. “When we protest, we are threatened and told to leave the country.”
What do they do for a living?
A Nigerian boy said the Africans mostly ran small businesses like saloons, but others said they take “stuff like (rare) artefacts from here and sell them in our country.” They denied they were into drugs trade or any other illegal activity. They also had to pay higher rents than Indians, they added.
So, why do they choose to live in Khirki despite all this? The common answers were, “The rents in Khirki are cheaper than in most other places in Delhi” and “this is a central location”. Khirki, full of illegal constructions, does offer lower rents than other parts of South Delhi.
And while it attained notoriety last week, Khirki village – as the area around the 14th century mosque, an ASI-protected monument, is still called – continues to be a favourite haunt of artists and art studios.
In recent years, shopping malls, multi-storeyed houses for rent – mostly illegal buildings that have mushroomed as demand for expat accommodation has grown — and other assorted symbols of Delhi’s modernity have begun to erase its old world charm.
Some still say the place is not as bad as it is made out to be. Mandeep Raikhi, managing director of Gati dance forum, says, “There is a clear energy change in the area after 6 pm. But to say that it is uncomfortable would be wrong.”
Next page- Dec: ‘I am Aam Aadmi’; Jan: ‘I didn’t vote for AAP’
Dec: ‘I am Aam Aadmi’; Jan: ‘I didn’t vote for AAP’
Nilanjan Mukhopadhyay
Returning home this past week from the plush Terminal 3 of Indira Gandhi International Airport, one was curious to know how the denizens — of what is endearingly referred to as En-Cee-Yaar (sic) — reacted to the latest high-voltage confrontation between the Centre and the motley crowds led by Arvind Kejriwal, Chief Minister of the National Capital Territory of Delhi, his vigilante ministers and activists of the fledgling but self-righteous Aam Aadmi Party.
The cab driver, who zipped across lanes to take advantage of the scanty afternoon traffic, was the archetypal AAP supporter. A resident of the nearby Uttar Pradesh town of Bulandshahr, he gave a thumbs-up to the Chief Minister and his colleagues.
Though he was not part of the dharna outside Rail Bhavan, or of any of the previous AAP protests, he was dewy-eyed as he spoke about Kejriwal and how he had braved the bitter Delhi cold in the night.
He had no doubt that AAP had scored another victory – the policemen may not have been suspended, but being asked to go on leave was as good as the old punishment of yore – being sent to the police lines.
Elsewhere in the city, one could spot cars with a new sticker pasted on their rear windshields: ‘I am not responsible for what is happening; I did not vote for AAP’.
On social media, a cartoon is doing the rounds with a caricature of a baton-wielding and mat-carrying Kejriwal saying, ‘Agree with me immediately, or I will roll out the carpets and take out the blanket.’
In barely 20 days after becoming Chief Minister, Kejriwal has stirred the hornets nest. He has taken vigilantism to levels unseen anywhere else in the country. In the process, the Delhi government has acquired the image of being rabble rousers among detractors, and passionate deliverers of justice to his supporters.
The fast-paced developments has resulted in unexpected fluidity in the ranks of AAP’s followers and hecklers. Many who voted for AAP appear to have gotten disenchanted by the ferocity with which Kejriwal and his band are threatening the status quo. On the other hand, a large number of people who live in the underbelly of Delhi are looking at AAP anew and seeing in the bunch a group that has begun addressing their concerns.
The decision of Kejriwal to directly take on the Centre over the issue of suspension of some policemen for alleged dereliction of duty and misbehaving with ministers had a clever twist to it.
Over the past two decades, since Parliament enacted the 69th Consti-tutional Amendment Act and the Government of National Capital Territory of Delhi Act that gave Delhi a state assembly and an elected government, successive regimes have been hamstrung by the limited powers vested with the state.
Unlike other states, Delhi was granted only partial statehood when Narasimha Rao acted on the recommendations of a committee established by Rajiv Gandhi in December 1987 to make recommendations for streamlining the administrative set-up of Delhi.
This was necessitated because the city had grown since 1952 when it was first constituted as a Part ‘C’ State with an elected assembly.
After the reorganisation of states, when Delhi was foisted with the status of Union Territory, it lost an elected body with a meaningful role. The Metropolitan Council, established in 1966, had no legislative powers and was only an advisory body.
Partial statehood for Delhi meant, most significantly, that the capital’s law and order machinery remained outside the ambit of the elected body. Though both the Congress and BJP routinely demanded full statehood and control over the police apparatus, no government followed up on this demand after coming to power.
But the silence resulted in the elected government drawing flak for slippages in law enforcement – most infamously during the December 2012 gangrape case.
The Kejriwal-led offensive, backed by actions like that of law minister Somnath Bharti, has insulated AAP from the failures of the police. AAP leaders demanded that the police be placed under their charge.
They have not made it known to their constituency that this can be done only through an Act of Parliament and not by an executive order passed by the Union home minister. AAP leaders, clearly, are as pragmatic and calculative with their words as the other parties.
By publicly underlining to people that they are on ‘their’ side in the fight against Delhi Police, AAP has succeeded in forging a bond with them. Even in the case of Somnath Bharti’s belligerent stance, the truth is that despite having short-circuited civility and legal procedure, he has the support of significant sections of people who feel that police have deliberately turned a blind eye to the burgeoning drug and sex rackets in the city.
AAP has generated support by propagating an apolitical understanding of corruption and giving an anti-political thrust to its campaign. It has presented service-providing agencies, along with the police, as the main symbols of a corrupt order.
Friday’s release of a video showing three policemen beating up a man and pulling out his wallet is another instance of demonstrating empathy with the common people and simultaneously furthering the demand for placing the police under the brief of the state government.
The method used by AAP is far from the standard fare. Its implications are manifold. Among others, actions by the likes of Bharti and the refusal of Kejriwal to honour national observances like Republic Day, demonstrates the desire to claim more rights than the mandate has bestowed.
Many among AAP supporters would not know the meaning of anarchism but unlike most popular impressions of the word, Kejriwal was definitely using it in the classical sense – the political belief that society should be without government, laws, police, or other authority, and instead must be only a free association of its members.
Whether in the present global order such a structure is possible – and desirable – is open to debate, but this surely cannot be conducted in front of scantily aware TV reporters in the middle of the night on the lawns of the capital’s Boat Club. AAP’s unexpected performance in the assembly polls opened up a trite script for the 2014 parliamentary elections.
The decision to run the state government just as they managed the party and electoral campaign may not have the approval of many, including this writer.
But there is no denying that this has initiated a political churning and all those fair-weather friends from the middle and upper classes who joined AAP in the hope of it shaking up the system just a wee bit to allow them entry positions, have already begun to leave.
This leaves the space for a huge section of the underprivileged — who hitherto did not have platforms, save bandwagons led by others. Picking the AAP for analysis is therefore a bit like betting ‘blind’ in a game of flush. For the moment, it appears that at whichever point its tally will stem, the bearing on the national verdict would be decisive.
(Nilanjan Mukhopadhyay is a Delhi-based commentator and author, most recently of Narendra Modi: The Man, The Times)
Next-Can Kejriwal still stop the Modi juggernaut?
Can Kejriwal still stop the Modi juggernaut?
Sanjay Basak
On December 8, 2013, history was created in Indian politics. The country watched in awe as Arvind Kejriwal’s Aam Aadmi Party swept away powerful political parties and influential politicians, winning 28 of Delhi’s 70 Assembly seats.
Kejriwal went from being the underdog to hero and Chief Minister in less than six months of forming his party, and in a fashion that led many political pundits to begin writing the obituary of the 125-year-old Congress.
So much so that even the script for the 2014 Lok Sabha elections was rewritten overnight. What was until then being projected as a Narendra Modi vs Rahul Gandhi fight suddenly started to look like a Modi vs Arvind Kejriwal, BJP vs AAP, battle for India.
Even the Congress seemed convinced of this and decided to back AAP to form the Delhi government, in the hope that on the national scene, Kejriwal and party would help stop the Modi juggernaut. Congress icon Rahul Gandhi admitted in public that Congress had to learn from AAP.
An AAP wave blew across the country, and common people, civil society activists and public-minded professionals and businessmen began to queue up at AAP's doorstep and joined the party. Kejriwal himself became the “darling of the masses”, as the party’s triumph and appeal began to change the political discourse across the country.
In the national capital and in the ‘cow belt’, Kejriwal emerged as a politician whose likes had not been seen before – a leader who had no love for power and pomp, who travelled in his own car, who did not live in a sprawling bungalow, who was not surrounded by bodyguards and who hated cars with the red beacon.
He even succeeded in doing what everybody else said was impossible – halving electricity rates and supplying a daily ration of free water for all Delhiites. Such was the panic among Congress and BJP governments that they immediately began to imitate Kejriwal, cutting power tariffs and stepping up water supply in their states – Haryana did it, Rajasthan, too, and even Maharashtra. It seemed, the Kejriwal juggernaut was beginning to threaten the Modi juggernaut.
Until Delhi law minister Somnath Bharti, in the wake of the brutal gangrape of a Danish woman on January 15, ‘raided’ Khirki village, an action that the Delhi Police, which is under the control of the Union home ministry, refused to take without a warrant.
In one instant, AAP went from being Indian politics’ ‘game changer’ to a party of xenophobic, racist, anti-women vigilantes. Then, Kejriwal made things worse by descending onto the streets with his supporters in defence of Bharti, and in attempt to parlay the episode into a tool to wrest control of Delhi Police.
The urban middle class, which had begun to rapidly shift camp from Modi to Kejriwal, was shocked as the latter marched to Rail Bhavan and laid siege to the heart of Delhi, even threatening to disrupt Republic Day celebrations if his demands were not met.
The Centre clamped down Delhi. Home minister Sushilkumar Shinde shut down four Metro stations, police barricaded major thoroughfares, Delhi plunged into chaos. Commuters and office-goers blamed Kejriwal for their difficulties. The twitterati tore into him, and many in his own party began to publicly voice misgivings.
Perhaps realising that he had overplayed the ‘Aam Aadmi’ card, Kejriwal and his party have retreated since, but continue to stand by Bharti, perhaps fearing that sacking him might lose the party votes from Khirki Extension, where Bharti has become a local hero.
But Kejriwal's ‘aam aadmi’ image is nothing original, nor is his street protest. In 1969, Bengal Chief Minister Ajoy Mukherjee, who headed a coalition government, went on a ‘satyagraha’ against his coalition partner CPM alleging “lawlessness” in the state in a bid to gain the support of the ‘aam aadmi’.
And, before Kejriwal, Manohar in Goa Parikar and Mamata Banerjee in West Bengal refused government accommodation and do not use government vehicles. Clothed ordinarily, they are also activists in their own ways.
The question is, though, is Kejriwal still capable of stopping Modi short of Delhi? The Congress was sure Kejriwal could block Modi’s way until the Khirki Extension-Rail Bhavan fracas.
Now, nobody is so sure. “The middle class is disillusioned with Kejriwal. The social media, which had backed him to the hilt, is critical of him. He is losing support,” is increasingly the refrain of even AAP’s biggest supporters.
However, with the decline of the Bahujan Samaj Party and the Left, AAP is now emerging as the only non-Congress, non-BJP pan-Indian party and therefore it will continue to pose significant difficulties to the ‘big two’ in the coming Lok Sabha polls, especially as it consolidates its lower middle-class base, and the poor come on board.
If Kejriwal can manage to salvage the party’s image among the middle and upper-middle class voters that are starting to desert it, AAP could still be the only outfit that can put up a fight against Narendra Modi’s BJP.
( Source : dc )
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