The Promise of India by Jaimini Bhagwati

Author:Jaimini Bhagwati
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9789353056155
Publisher: Penguin Random House India Private Limited
Published: 2019-08-02T00:00:00+00:00

Special Status for Delhi, Supreme Court and No-confidence Motion

The genesis of the current problems in administering Delhi can be traced back to a Rao decision of 1992. Going back to the early post-Independence years, Delhi became a part C state under the States Act of 1951. Land, police and public order were placed outside the purview of part C states. Subsequently, Jawaharlal Nehru felt that the Central government should be fully responsible for Delhi, and accordingly, Delhi’s C state status was revoked under the 1956 States Reorganisation Act. Thereafter, Delhi did not have a CM, and the lieutenant governor was the senior-most authority in the Delhi administration.

Supporters of statehood for Delhi felt the local citizens should have their own legislature and mobilized for it over the next three decades. Finally, it was on 2 January 1992, just six months after Rao had taken over as PM, that the Government of National Capital Territory of Delhi (NCTD) Act was passed. While full statehood was not granted to Delhi under this legislation, a Delhi chief minister was then onwards empowered to share in administering the national capital with the Central government. The BJP won forty-nine out of seventy seats in the Delhi elections, and Madan Lal Khurana became CM in 1993, thirty-seven years after Delhi’s statehood was withdrawn in 1956.

Despite having an elected CM, Delhi continues to have a complex administrative structure. An April 1958 Act of Parliament had set up the Municipal Corporation of Delhi (MCD). This Act was amended in 1993 during Rao’s tenure to create three municipal corporations for north, south and east Delhi, and elections are held for these three corporations. Central Delhi (Lutyens’s Delhi) is administered by the New Delhi Municipal Committee which is headed by a Central government appointee.

Other parts of Delhi are administered by the Cantonment Board under the Directorate General of Defence Estates and the Delhi Development Authority (DDA) which reports to the lieutenant governor. The 1992 NCTD Act compounded the problem of multiple authorities in Delhi, leading to each blaming the other for the city’s shortcomings. Official records in the public domain do not provide any statement by Rao on this issue. Rao could have gone to the court of public opinion and explained that, given that this Union territory had been administered reasonably well by the Central government since 1956, no change was warranted. He could have pointed out that several major capitals around the world, such as Washington DC, Beijing, Mexico City and Brasilia, are essentially under the administrative control of the Central governments of those countries.

The collegium system of selecting judges for high courts and the Supreme Court was instituted while Rao was PM. The senior judiciary was probably concerned ever since the arbitrary action of the Indira Gandhi government in 1977 overlooking H.R. Khanna, the senior-most judge at that time, for the position of chief justice. The Advocates-on-Record Association had filed a case against the Union of India about then existing procedures which gave primacy to the Central government in approving the names proposed as judges by the Supreme Court.

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