Eye on polls, AAP-BJP woo ‘illegal’ colonies
NEW DELHI : As Delhi gears up for assembly elections in early 2020, the Aam Aadmi Party (AAP) and the Bharatiya Janata Party have started a tussle to garner the votes of four million residents of the unauthorised colonies.
On Saturday, Delhi’s deputy chief minister Manish Sisodia, taking part in demonstrations titled ‘Dhokha Divas’, criticised the Central government for allegedly taking all credit for planning to confer ownership and transfer rights of properties to residents of the 1,728 of 1,797 unauthorised colonies in Delhi.
The AAP held demonstrations at several unauthorised colonies, protesting against the Central government’s delay in conferring property ownership rights.
The BJP, in retaliation, accused the Aap-led Delhi government of acting as an “obstructionist”, especially after Prime Minister Narendra Modi announced the Pm-uday(unauthorised Colonies in Delhi Awas Adhikar Yojana) initiative earlier this month. A Bill is set to be introduced in the Lok Sabha in the winter session of the Parliament, scheduled to begin this Monday.
“With unauthorised colonies, it is the AAP government that has done all development work — from roads, water and sewer lines to good schools. It is the AAP that had written to the Centre in 2015 seeking regularisation of such colonies. Now, when the time has come, the BJP is keen on taking the whole credit,” said Sisodia at
Sangam Vihar, estimated as the largest unauthorised colony in Delhi.
He further said, “The BJP must know that politicising the issue ahead of elections means nothing until people get registry documents in their hands. Otherwise, the whole online procedure will be called a sham. Earlier, the Congress had also come up with the provisional certificates for regularisation of unauthorised colonies, but the document turned out to be void in legal terms.”
Senior AAP members, including Sisodia, Gopal Rai, labour minister, Sanjay Singh, Rajya Sabha MP, Dilip Pandey, northeast Delhi in-charge, and Saurabh Bharadwaj, Greater Kailash MLA took part in the event.
After the Union Cabinet’s decision to confer ownership rights in October, the BJP had also launched an outreach programme for unauthorised colonies, under which senior party leaders are holding public meetings and party workers engage in a door-to-door campaign – explaining the regularisation process and collecting signatures for a campaign to thank the Prime Minister.
Senior BJP leader and the leader of Opposition in the Delhi assembly, Vijender Gupta, said, “It is clear that the AAP is panicking over their own failure after the Prime Minister took up the initiative. Hence, they are creating hurdles and politicising the issue.”
“The AAP government is visionless,” said BJP’S Delhi unit chief, Manoj Tiwari. “They told the Centre and the court that they needed more time for the mapping exercise, at least until 2021. Now that the Prime Minister has intervened, the AAP is creating obstructions,” he added.
The issue of property ownership and transfer rights for residents of the unauthorised colonies in Delhi has been a poll plank for political parties for years now. The AAP, which won the assembly elections by a near-perfect score (winning 67 of the 70 seats), has a strong support base in unauthorised colonies.