How Delhi L-G has usurped the powers of chief minister Arvind Kejriwal
From 1629 to 1640, Great Britain was plunged into an era of darkness, deterioration, autocracy and eventually a debilitating civil war when King Charles I ruled absolutely and completely, under the umbrage of Royal Prerogative, with zero accountability to Parliament.
Delhi faces a similar situation today wherein the lieutenant governor (L-G), a political appointee of the BJP-led central government and a retired bureaucrat, has usurped the powers of the democratically elected chief minister, and treats Delhi as his personal fiefdom without regard to the expectations or welfare of the citizens.
In the last few weeks, the L-G has repudiated many marquee projects of the AAP-led Delhi government like the radical doorstep delivery of public services, which aimed to reduce human-touch points significantly in order to cut through the bureaucratic red-tape and deliver key public services at the doorstep of citizens, or the doorstep delivery of rations which would have rung the death knell of the toxic bureaucrat-shopkeeper nexus and helped stop the pilferage so prevalent in Delhi’s public distribution system (PDS).
In response, a few days ago, the Delhi government tabled a scathing report on the dilatory tactics that have been deployed by the L-G’s Office, over the past three years, to stall important policies of the AAP government. The key findings were:
1) The L-G, in a majority of projects, does not express any “substantive difference of opinion” with that of the AAP government, but delays matters, interminably, by often raising frivolous objections to the effect of “... I do not think that this scheme is a good idea…” - L-G’s verbatim remark in a file which involved setting up a health corporation to simplify the medical procurement process; asking for clarifications when the matter has been sufficiently deliberated upon by multiple departments and the cabinet; or simply referring the matter to the central government - all in varying degrees of direct contravention of the Transaction of Business Rules (TBR), 1993.
2) The services department which is responsible for filling up government vacancies and comes under the direct purview of the L-G has not held recruitment drives for the past three years and as a result, on an average, almost 50 per cent of the posts are lying vacant across multiple departments. This shortfall in manpower has had a deleterious impact on the effective implementation of key government policies.
The Delhi High Court judgment of August 4, 2016, made it clear that only the subject matters of land, police, law and order, services and the ACB will come under the purview of the L-G and he was, as per a reading of Article 239-AA of the Indian Constitution, supposed to act upon the aid and advice of the council of ministers. However, the above instances clearly show that this is not the case and the BJP is using the constitutional post of the L-G to indirectly further its political partisanship with the AAP.
On the flip side, the L-G and multiple bureaucrats have complained that they are in the right and it is instead the AAP government in Delhi that has politicised policy-making and shown immaturity in governance. This betrays a fundamental misunderstanding of the division of powers vested in the political executive and the unelected bureaucracy.
Introduced in 1987 by political scientist McCubbins, bureaucratic drift is a concept which explains the difference between a bureaucrat’s understanding and implementation of a policy versus the intent of the political executive. Legislation is usually decided upon by elected public representatives, but implemented with impunity by bureaucrats, unaccountable to voters who act as per their own political leanings, preferences and interests.
The central premise of a democracy is that citizens elect politicians in order to hold the unelected bureaucrats accountable. That is precisely why we have elections: To vote to office political leaders who can provide that change to the populace and may not necessarily be aligned to the status quo way of doing things which bureaucrats are used to.
And when in office, accountability is a key lever of performance and governance. After all, when one is elected to office, one is stood up for scrutiny in the court of the masses every five years. It is only the people who have the right to decide whether Kejriwal’s government has committed any errors of commission and omission, not the unelected L-G.
Instead, in a show of blatant disregard for democratic norms and convention, the L-G has encouraged bureaucrats to openly defy or stall the government’s decisions, thereby sidestepping, in spirit, most of the Constitution’s procedural freedoms and evading answerability. He has gradually and surely moved legislative power out of the Vidhan Sabha into siloed and crumbling administrative agencies run by bureaucrats like him.
It is, in essence, a power grab by the BJP which is still smarting from the humiliating drubbing that Kejriwal doled out to them in the 2015 Delhi elections.
It is high time that the L-G stopped acting as the permanent Opposition in residence, and for the BJP-led central government to stop indulging in a naked game of political skulduggery at the cost of welfare of Delhi’s citizens.