Learning Corner

Bulldozing or dozing?

A chance for Delhi’s government to show it respects the law, and takes pride in the city

Three days into the Municipal Corporation of Delhi’s most ambitious demolition drive, political dissembling is writ large on the wall. Congress MLAs have gone into feverish huddles. The search for scapegoats and/or escape routes is well underway. Talk of ideal middle paths etched into the unforeseeable future or in, say, the 2021 Master Plan for Delhi, fills the air. Evidently, the uneasy MLAs have their eyes peeled on the next election. Understandably, the angry residents are thinking only of their homes and shops in imminent danger from the bulldozers. As the street protests mount and the government wavers, we can be grateful that someone out there is steadfast in taking the larger, longer view. The Delhi High Court, at whose direction the drive has begun, and which has set the MCD a strict time frame within which to bring down the unauthorised constructions and identify the guilty who allowed them to come up, is the only actor in this drama unencumbered by vested interest or accumulated inertia. It can, therefore, address the public interest.

It is a sad statement on our times that this is getting to be an enduring pattern. Whether it is the matter of taking on the builder mafia that is stifling the space and spirit of the Capital, or jolting its lethargic administration into keeping its promise to clean up the Yamuna, or even attending to the problem of stray cattle crowding the Delhi roads, the ball is increasingly in the courts. A serial abdication is to blame, and many an unholy nexus. In the fact that an activist judiciary is repeatedly taking up tasks other institutions and agencies have left undone, is a message of hope. But judicial activism also speaks of the terrible effeteness of those other institutions that are simply not doing their jobs anymore.

The High Court’s injunction offers the Delhi government an opportunity. To shake off the old lethargies and cleanse itself of the complicities that threaten to make the Capital an unlovely and unlivable place. To break the vicious habits of disrespect for the law. To inaugurate in their place a virtuous cycle of public spiritedness and civic pride.

 

 

 

 

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