Reflections
Ar v i n d K e j r i w a l ’ s o d d - e v e n n u m b e r experiment recalls the time in 1970 when Indira Gandhi took it into her head to ride from Safdarjung Road to Parliament House in a pony trap borrowed from Rashtrapati Bhavan. It wasn’t a “gimmick” she swore, self- consciously leafing through a file while the carriage trotted along. It was to save fuel. The country wouldn’t survive without austerity.
Atal Behari Vajpayee was even more flamboyantly austere the next day. He trundled along to the Lok Sabha in a bullock cart. Unlike the Prime Minister, Mr Vajpayee had no coachman: flicking a whip and clicking his tongue, he himself drove the pair of bullocks with a towel wrapped round his head. The Swatantra Party’s irrepressible and inimitable Piloo Mody upstaged them both. Readers might remember, Mody was a large man. So large, in fact, that the story goes his father, Sir Homi Mody, once sent him for a job to the British governor of the United Provinces ( today’s Uttar Pradesh) with a note saying, “As you will see, he is a block of the old chip!” It wasn’t inappropriate, therefore, for Mody to lumber to Parliament perched on an elephant, looking down on the world from the lofty howdah.
All three modes of carriage made headline news, as did the capital’s recent 15- day ordeal. But just as the pony trap, bullock cart and elephant didn’t help to conserve petrol, it’s doubtful if the Delhi administration’s novel experiment brought down the pollution level. Despite the claim by the Aam Aadmi Party transport minister, Gopal Rai, of a 20- 25 per cent drop in the pollution level, several meters showed it had actually gone up. But Mr Kejriwal’s innovation need not be blamed. The weather isn’t subject to chief ministerial commands, and it was probably one of those winter spells when a blanket of fog and smog smothers the city, preventing aeroplanes from landing or taking off. More seriously, the Centre for Science and Environment estimates Delhi’s filthy air kills up to 30,000 men, women and children every year.
This is not to deny the chief minister credit for being more conscious of the peril than most politicians and trying to respond to it with positive measures. Awareness of the crisis explained media support and the willingness of the Central authorities and the Delhi Police — whom Mr Kejriwal singled out for mention — to help the experiment succeed. Even the Delhi high court rejected a public interest litigation questioning the scheme. “For the first time, the middle class has been held accountable and done their bit towards damage control,” was the verdict of Harsh Mander, the environmentalist. The chief minister must have derived wry pleasure from the compliment by Shazia Ilmi, who abandoned the Aam Aadmi Party for the Bharatiya Janata Party that “the city comes together for a good movement regardless of which party one