In an unprecedented move on December 26, two departments of the government of Delhi – the women and child development, and health departments – sent out notices warning the public not to register for the “Mahila Samman” and “Sanjeevani” schemes, two schemes announced by Delhi’s elected Aam Aadmi Party (AAP) government. The first promised a monthly cash transfer of Rs 1,000 to the accounts of allowances for women, and the second free health care for seniors.
In their public notices, these departments called the two schemes “non-existent” because no such schemes had been notified by the Delhi government. Notification of a scheme announced by an elected government is normally a routine matter. In this case, the subjects fell far outside the limitations prescribed in Article 239A of the Constitution, which reserves only three subjects under the jurisdiction of the central government in the union territories of Pondicherry and Delhi – police, law and order, and land.
Why, then, did the two departments insist on a public notification first? The answer is to be found in the unrelenting, no-holds-barred war that Prime Minister Narendra Modi and Union home minister Amit Shah have been waging against the AAP ever since its inception and capture of the national capital territory.
Why is Modi targeting the AAP?
These notices have, however, served a useful purpose, for they have highlighted the fear that the AAP is inspiring in the greatest tyrant that has governed India since the death of Aurangzeb. That V.C. Saxena, the lieutenant governor of Delhi who is perfectly aware of his duties under the Constitution, is willing to violate Article 239A at Modi’s behest, is a measure of the fear that this prime minister inspired in the officials who have the misfortune to serve the Delhi administration.
Why is Modi going to such extreme lengths – willing even to insult the Constitution – to crush one of the smallest national parties in the country?
The answer is an almost feline awareness of what this tiny party stands for; it is the very opposite of what the Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) is striving to create – an authoritarian government that rules its subjects from the top.
AAP’s vision: Trickle-up, not trickle-down
Modi’s government did not create ruling from the top. This was enshrined in the Government of India Act of 1935. Regrettably, the Constituent Assembly chose to use this Act as the base upon which to create the Constitution. As a result, nearly all the immunities from prosecution enjoyed by civil servants and the police under the British were kept intact.
When the Constitution did not create a legal and justiciable system for financing central and state elections, the criminalisation of politics became complete. Since government sanctions were necessary to implement the decisions of these criminalised legislatures, the corruption of the bureaucracy and police followed closely on the heels of the criminalisation of the legislature.
Over the past 75 years, these initial mistakes have created an inegalitarian, top-down, corrupt and criminalised political system, masquerading as a democracy. That is the political system that Arvind Kejriwal’s AAP is fighting to not merely defeat but eradicate.
It is the AAP’s commitment to create a clean political and administrative system that prioritises the needs of the poor that people have been welcoming in ever larger numbers. This has been demonstrated by the rapid rise of the party in Delhi, Punjab and Surat, in the heart of Modi’s citadel in Gujarat, within 12 years of the party’s inception.
What is Kejriwal trying to do that is evoking such an electrifying response from the people? It is his party’s unswerving belief that good governance must begin with meeting the needs of the poor. Prosperity needs not to trickle down from above, but to seep up from the poor till it palpably improves the lives of the rich.
It is the AAP’s unswerving adherence to this conviction in the face of every conceivable obstacle thrown in its way that explains the party’s meteoric rise from an idea to a ruling party in two states in a mere 12 years. The party’s rapid rise shows how desperately the poor of India have been yearning for this.
The AAP owes its rise to a guiding philosophy that Jasmine Shah, a senior member of the party, has described in a book titled The Delhi Model: A Bold New Road Map to Building a Developed India.
Kejriwal’s first act upon coming to power in 2013 was to set up a helpline for complaints on corruption that the public could convey to the government. That had to be suspended within days because 90% of the complaints it was receiving were against the Delhi police, over whom the state government had no control. When he set it up again upon his return to power in 2015, it took the Modi government only three months to send in the Delhi police, seize the building of Delhi’s anti-corruption bureau and confiscate all its files.
Transforming education in Delhi
But as Modi was soon to find out, Kejriwal had far more ambitious plans for Delhi. Within days, the new government increased the state’s education budget by 45% – taking it to a quarter of the government’s entire spending – and began a teacher training programme, selecting bright teachers from all the government schools, bringing in specialists from abroad to train them and sending the best of them for further educational qualifications to universities abroad.
Kejriwal’s reason for giving education the highest priority was that “if good education is provided to every child in the country, they can eradicate poverty in their families within one generation.” This is the very essence of the difference between the Delhi model of governance, as it has come to be called, and the traditional model of school and college education. The latter is designed for recruiters and managers to serve a “trickle down” model of economic growth. In this model – a quintessential product of private enterprise-led economic development – the rich get the cream while the poor get only the dregs.
In his book, Shah gives a riveting description of the impact that Delhi’s “trickle up” model of governance has made. In the last decade, it has built 22,700 classrooms in government schools. For comparison, 24,700 classrooms had been built in the previous 70 years. The impact of its relentless emphasis on education for the poor has not taken long to become visible. Since 2016, more than 200,000 students have left Delhi’s private schools to join government schools. And since 2016, class 12 students from these schools have performed better than those from private schools.
Addressing basic needs
There have been similar dramatic improvements in health care. The Mohalla clinic initiative has been written about extensively but the number treated is still mind-boggling – over 9 years from 2016 till end of 2024, 540 Mohalla clinics have treated 70 million patients, an average of 60,000 persons per day.
In the provision of water, sanitation and electricity, the AAP has followed a recommendation made decades ago by the World Bank, to provide a “lifeline” amount free of cost. One of its least noticed but most humane enactments has been to allow free travel to women in city buses. One of them who lives outside the city limits told this writer that it had freed 30% of her income – Rs. 3,000 a month earned from cleaning homes in the city – to pay for her children’s school fees.
Shelter is a basic right of human beings but in large cities, it is one that is obtained only by default by the poor. The AAP’s greatest achievement has been to make shelter a central feature of its policies. It has therefore laid 2,100 kms of water pipelines and allowed 20,000 litres of water per month to be provided to each family free of cost. To ensure that the water reaches its consumers, the AAP government has laid over 5,200 kms of water pipelines in unauthorised colonies, giving 99.96% of them access to it.
There are other achievements of this kind listed in the book that will take too long to describe. Among these is making 1,627 industrial units which were using coal and diesel switch to natural gas and plant almost 30,000,000 trees of which a quarter were planted in a single year, 2021.
In March 2017, the Delhi cabinet approved a 36% increase in the minimum wages of Delhi’s five million workers. The legal minimum wage in Delhi now is therefore Rs 17,494 compared to the national minimum wage of Rs 5,340 per month. To sum up the Kejriwal government’s work, it has concentrated upon building human, as against physical, capital to improve the quality of life of its people.
It is not surprising, therefore, that the AAP has become the nemesis of the BJP, the largest national political party. It is also not surprising that Kejriwal has become Modi’s personal nemesis, and that he and his closest advisors have been charged with crimes, repeatedly denied bail and kept in jail for periods of more than two years, without having found a shred of evidence of any wrongdoing on his part.
The Modi government’s animosity is, at least, understandable. But what explains the sustained hostility to the AAP in the Congress party, particularly its Delhi wing? So deep does this run that despite being in some sort of an alliance with the AAP, not one party member has felt it necessary to raise even a murmur of protest against the victimisation of its leaders. If the INDIA bloc loses a general election that it should have won, it has only itself to blame for it. For however small the AAP may be, it offers a future to which the people are able to relate. Since the days of Mohandas Karamchand Gandhi and Jawaharlal Nehru, no party has been able to do anything of this kind so far.
Prem Shankar Jha is a veteran journalist.
