Former Delhi chief minister Sheila Dikshit. (File)
Former Delhi chief minister Sheila Dikshit on Thursday slammed the Aam Aadmi Party-led Delhi government over its continuous sit-ins at the Lieutenant Governor’s office and said party chief Arvind Kejriwal must first read the Constitution and then approach Prime Minister Narendra Modi for its demand for full statehood for Delhi.
“Kejriwal must understand Delhi is a Union Territory and he is wrong if he thinks he can have a governance model like Haryana and Uttar Pradesh. He should first read the Constitution. If he thinks that there is a need to make amendments to the Constitution, he should approach Modi ji and the Parliament,” the senior Congress leader told reporters in the national capital.
While questioning the intentions of the Delhi government, Dikshit said she felt “ashamed” to see the CM releasing photos of the dharna online. “What is his (Kejriwal’s) intention? The role of the Delhi L-G and CM are clearly defined in the Constitution. I wonder why the AAP leaders have been protesting since Monday,” she said. READ LIVE UPDATES
The former CM also drew a comparison between the present government and the one under her when she served as CM in 1998. “The BJP was in power then but we did not have any conflict with them. We had also demanded full statehood for Delhi but never politicised the issue,” she said.
Delhi Pradesh Congress Committee chief Ajay Maken, on the other hand, slammed both the state government and BJP for indulging in “dharna politics” inside “closed air-conditioned rooms”.
Calling the protest an attempt to divert the citizen’s attention from real issues, he said, “The dharna by both the parties (AAP and BJP) is a part of well-planned strategy. The script of this strategy had been written when the chief secretary was assaulted at the CM’s residence… AAP is doing dharna to divert attention from its failure on public issues,” Maken said.
The impasse between the AAP government and Lt Governor Anil Baijal showed no signs of easing as the sit-in protest by Kejriwal and three of his Cabinet colleagues -Deputy CM Manish Sisodia, PWD Minister Satyendar Jain, and Labour Minister Gopal Rai – entered its fifth day today. The AAP convenor, who had written to the Prime Minister on Thursday to intervene and end the agitation of the IAS officers, posted an early morning tweet, lamenting on receiving no response from Narendra Modi and hoped a solution was around the corner.
The BJP’s counter-protest, on the other hand, outside the Chief Minister’s office at the Delhi Secretariat against AAP’s sit-in at Raj Niwas entered its second day with BJP MP Parvesh Verma, MLAs Vijender Gupta, Manjinder Singh Sirsa, Jagdish Pradhan and suspended AAP MLA Kapil Mishra demanding a meeting with the chief minister.