With MCD win, AAP has greater autonomy, and no one to blame for lapses

After a vicious election campaign, the Aam Aadmi Party on December 7 won a pyrrhic victory in the elections to the 250-member Municipal Corporation of Delhi (MCD), bringing an end to the 15-year stranglehold of the BJP on the civic body.

The scale of AAP’s victory — 134 seats against the BJP’s 104 — is nowhere near Delhi Chief Minister Arvind Kejriwal’s expectation of a clean sweep. However, the win now gives the AAP an increased measure of administrative autonomy across Delhi. It is something the BJP desperately tried to thwart two years ago, when its government at the Centre amended the Government of NCT of Delhi Act to drastically reduce the administrative powers of the Kejriwal government and emasculate the powers of the State Assembly.

Also read: ‘We have to fix Delhi together,’ says Kejriwal as AAP wins MCD polls

A win in the MCD, though by a slender eight-seat majority, now affords the AAP powers of legislation, policy-making, and financial allocation over a wide range of civic issues. Since the MCD does not come under the Delhi government’s jurisdiction, the BJP’s dominance in the civic body has provided Kejriwal with a ready excuse over the past seven years of his chief ministership to escape blame for the mess that the national capital’s civic administration is.

As such, once the euphoria within the AAP camp settles, Kejriwal and his colleagues will now be forced to face a rude reality. With both the state government and the MCD now under their control, they have no one left to blame for Delhi’s long-persisting civic challenges.

Tall task ahead

The AAP, true to its supreme leader’s nature, had promised quick-fix solutions to Delhiites for all their civic complaints. These included levelling out the “garbage mountains” dotting different parts of Delhi (the one near Ghazipur, in particular), cleaning up the filthy Yamuna river, giving MCD-run schools and hospitals a makeover rivalling that of the celebrated Delhi government-run schools and hospitals, sprucing up the corporation’s fiscal health, an action plan against alarming levels of air pollution, and improving the poor condition of civic infrastructure, particularly the potholed, water logging-prone roads across vast stretches of the national capital.

Also read: Delhi MCD polls: Clearing landfill sites among AAP’s ‘10 guarantees’

The AAP’s promise of winning full statehood for Delhi may still be a distant dream but the party’s win in the MCD polls now gives it greater administrative control over two hugely important wings of the national capital’s otherwise complex power structure. The party may still have no say over Delhi’s administrative matters that fall in the Centre’s domain — either directly or through the Lieutenant Governor — but it has control over the state government and the municipal corporation. That is significantly higher power in Kejriwal’s hands than what his predecessor, the late Sheila Dikshit, enjoyed for most part of her 15-year reign at the helm of a Congress government. For nearly 10 of those years, the corporation was under BJP control.

Cunning Kejriwal

That the burden of this new responsibility isn’t lost on Kejriwal was more than evident when he addressed his supporters and the media shortly after the MCD results became clear on Wednesday afternoon. Kejriwal said he needed the “blessings of the central government and of the Prime Minister” to deliver on the promises he and the AAP made during the MCD poll campaign.

It would be naive to assume that this was Kejriwal being humble in his moment of victory. The Delhi chief minister has, much to the chagrin of his political rivals, proved himself to be as cunning a politician as Narendra Modi when it comes to diverting public attention from his failures, administrative lapses, double-speak, and unfulfilled promises.

Through the MCD poll campaign, the BJP tried every trick from its voluminous book on wily political moves to corner Kejriwal on issues of corruption and impropriety (the liquor scam, leaked videos of jailed AAP minister Satyendra Jain getting VVIP treatment in his Tihar jail cell, etc.) while also asking him genuine questions on why, despite the AAP now being in power in Delhi and Punjab, he had failed to curb air pollution caused in Delhi at the onset of every winter due to stubble burning, wanton construction, and other such activities.

However, the Delhi CM steered clear of such entrapments by the BJP. Instead, he played the role of a victim to the hilt, offering no cogent explanation for the glaring inconsistencies in the explanations given by him and his colleagues over the allegations of corruption made against him in the liquor scam investigation or on the Satyendra Jain videos. Kejriwal and the AAP maintained that all of this was being done to malign their “kattar imaandaar” (unwaveringly honest) reputation, as Modi “feared Kejriwal” or because the “AAP is the only party that can defeat the BJP.” Every time he was asked an inconvenient question, Kejriwal shrewdly took refuge either in jingoistic assertions of his Hindu faith or in the credible work done by his government in the spheres of public health and education or by invoking Bhagat Singh and Dr BR Ambedkar.

Machiavellian politics

Kejriwal’s appeal for blessings and cooperation from the Centre and Modi is, arguably, another expression of his Machiavellian politics. He is aware that he can’t deliver on these promises — at least not anytime soon and certainly not before the 2024 Lok Sabha polls — not because he doesn’t intend to but because neither the Delhi government nor the MCD has the resources, financial muscle, or the expertise to effectively tackle many of the national capital’s civic problems. His “I need the Centre and PM’s blessings to deliver” pitch is more of a pre-emptive strike — if asked why the AAP-run MCD isn’t markedly better than one that was BJP-controlled, he can always claim he was denied the help he sought right after the MCD results.

Also read: MCD polls: Vote to ensure corruption-free govt, Kejriwal urges Delhiites

This is a trick that Kejriwal has mastered ever since he stormed to power in Delhi, first with a minority government in 2013 and then with the landslide victories of 2015 and 2020. The Lokpal, a plank on which the AAP was formed, is now a distant memory that Kejriwal never wishes to recall. Similarly, his early promises of transparency within the party and its government — no tickets to tainted leaders, zero-tolerance towards graft allegations, making public all donations received by AAP — have all been forgotten.

A leaf out of Modi’s book

Yet, like Modi, Kejriwal has proven to be a leader with a Teflon armour, something Rahul Gandhi or even the lesser leaders of the Congress do not possess in their political armoury. Allegations of impropriety, ideological duplicity, “jumla” politics, and so on simply do not stick to Kejriwal.

And just like Modi, the Delhi chief minister has made himself indistinguishable from his party. A vote for AAP is a vote for Kejriwal, irrespective of the election — be it for the Delhi Assembly, the MCD, or even the polls in Punjab or Gujarat. The AAP’s MCD campaign also replicated the BJP’s “double-engine sarkaar,” making it clear that for Delhi’s civic problems to disappear, people will need to ensure that Kejriwal runs not just the state government but also the municipal corporation.

For the BJP, the MCD polls are undoubtedly a setback, as the saffron party has finally lost grip on a major chunk of administrative power in Delhi. Yet, the results also present opportunities to Modi’s party. It is no mean feat that despite 15 years of unbroken rule and valid grounds for anti-incumbency, the BJP still crossed the 100-seat mark in the 250-member MCD. This shows that even in an election where the voter turnout was a poor 50%, the BJP did manage to mobilise its voters.

Also read: Bad air quality not just Delhi’s problem, Centre needs to step in: Kejriwal

Additionally, since the anti-defection law doesn’t apply to the MCD, the BJP can engineer full-blown defections from the AAP, as it has done countless times in the past eight years across various states, or it can stealthily derail the AAP’s agenda in the civic body by simply getting a chunk of AAP corporators to abstain or cross-vote as and when Kejriwal tries to get some key decisions passed through the civic body or its committees.

The only real loser in the election, as has now become the norm, is the Congress. Having ceded its space to the AAP back in 2013, the Congress has shown no signs of recovery. It was knocked out on duck in the 2015 and 2020 assembly polls and has now been reduced to a single-digit tally of nine seats in the MCD.