Announce time-bound schedule for delimitation, civic polls in Delhi: AAP to Amit Shah

After inflicting a crushing defeat on the BJP in the Rajinder Nagar bypoll in Delhi, the AAP demanded on Tuesday that Union Home Minister Amit Shah announce a time-bound schedule for the completion of the delimitation exercise in the national capital and the conduct of the civic polls.

Addressing a press conference here, Aam Aadmi Party's (AAP) Delhi convenor Gopal Rai claimed that the city is filled with dirt and garbage and people are clueless as regards what needs to be done as the entire system of maintaining cleanliness in the national capital has ''collapsed'' due to the absence of an elected civic body.

The maintenance of cleanliness in the city was ''bad'' when the Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) was at the helm and it has become ''worse'' now after the subsuming of the three erstwhile civic bodies into one as the unified Municipal Corporation of Delhi is functioning in an ''arbitrary'' fashion, Rai charged. ''The home minister had said in Parliament that the unification of the three municipal corporations will lead to a complete turnaround of Delhi. On the contrary, the system to maintain cleanliness has completely collapsed after the unification. The city is filled with dirt and garbage,'' he said.

People do not know what to do in the prevailing situation as there is nobody in the unified municipal corporation to listen to their grievances and solve their problems, Rai claimed.

''And the central government has been sleeping since issuing the diktat of unification,'' he added.

After the merger of the three civic bodies, the BJP-led Centre appointed a special officer and deployed just one commissioner to run the unified municipal corporation but did not send ''a single rupee'' to it, Rai said.

''And with this, they feel something better will happen in Delhi,'' he added.

The unified civic body came back into existence in May following an amendment to the Delhi Municipal Corporation (Amendment) Act and President Ram Nath Kovind's assent to it in April, a decade after its trifurcation in 2012 during Sheila Dikshit's tenure as the chief minister.

The Centre brought the proposal to re-unify the three corporations at a time when the schedule for the polls to the three civic bodies were due to be announced.

''You played this game just before the announcement of the civic polls because your defeat was imminent. Then houses of poor people were demolished using bulldozers and efforts were made to spread hatred in Delhi, keeping an eye on the Rajinder Nagar Assembly bypoll,'' the AAP leader claimed.

Despite all the ''tricks'' to keep the AAP at bay in the bypoll, the results showed that the people of Delhi do not want the BJP's corrupt politics, he said.

''You tried all the tricks, did unification also. On behalf of the party, I demand that the home minister now announce a time-bound schedule for the completion of the delimitation exercise and the conduct of the MCD polls,'' Rai said.

(This story has not been edited by Devdiscourse staff and is auto-generated from a syndicated feed.)