Column

Delhi's chief minister, Sheila Dikshit, must be regretting the day she decided to use the High Court order on demolitions to refurbish her sagging image. Operation Cleanup is threatening to boomerang. Over the past two weeks, the bulldozers have gone berserk in the constituencies of MLAs loyal to Dikshit.

Such is the nexus between the Capital's building mafia and politics, none of these MLAs can hope to win the next elections. Although she's the CM, Dikshit was helpless to stop the demolitions. Her rivals in the Congress control the municipal corporation and they clearly decided to use this opportunity to settle political scores. The bulldozers first went for Dikshit loyalists. After they raised a hue and cry and put pressure on the CM, Operation Cleanup has slowed down. No demolitions, therefore, in areas held by anti-Dikshit MLAs.

Sadly, both the national parties, the BJP and the Congress, are pretty much in the same state. There's so much factionalism that their leaders are far too busy fighting their enemies within to waste time and energy on traditional opposition politics. There's a lesson somewhere in the twin implosions that took place simultaneously, the BJP in Mumbai and the Congress in Delhi.
* * *
Dikshit's detractors turned the tables on her so neatly that it took some time for the message to sink in. In fact, before she grasped what was happening, a municipal squad actually landed up at her private residence in Delhi's Nizamuddin colony to check for illegal construction. The squad came complete with TV cameras and reporters for publicity and rang the doorbell.

Dikshit's hapless tenant, blissfully unaware of the demolition politics playing out in the Capital, opened the door and let the hordes in. Fortunately for Dikshit, the building that houses her flat is pretty much within the municipal bye-laws, so the team went away disappointed. The incident underlines how far the war in the Congress has gone. Dikshit has finally sprung into action but it's too late to rescue her loyalists whose political fortunes lie buried under mounds of rubble in their constituencies.
* * *
It's ironical that a move that has attracted support from resident welfare associations in the capital has been opposed bitterly by the political class. It's not difficult to understand why. Just ask BJP's former chief minister, Sahib Singh Verma. It's well known in political circles here that the capital's entrenched building mafia got him ousted. Verma's sin was that he went against established interests and tried to promote new ones.

They got him in the end and the BJP drafted its old warhorse, Madan Lal Khurana, to replace Verma midway. But by then, the mafia was so angry with the BJP that it worked overtime to ensure that the party lost the next assembly elections and the BJP hasn't been able to get a look into Delhi's power circuit since. It's a fear that haunts the Delhi Congress now.

Can it win the 2008 Assembly elections without the support of vested interests that drive all activity in the city, legal and otherwise? The capital desperately needs to be cleansed of the thousands of illegal constructions jamming the roads and clogging the bye-lanes. My fear is that no party has the political will to do it.

Email: a_jerath@dnaindia.net