Delhi gets a mayor, but familiar brawl ensues
The Aam Aadmi Party (AAP) councillor Shelly Oberoi was elected mayor of Delhi on Wednesday, and AAP councillor Aaley Mohammed Iqbal was elected as her deputy. This was the fourth time the long-delayed voting process was held, and it ended a nearly 12-week stalemate. However, a few hours later, members of the House lost their tempers and beat each other up, threw bottles and slippers at each other, and some even hid under tables to
The meeting on Wednesday night was a lot like the three before it. The elected people in Civic Centre refused to go against a bad trend that has become common in the municipal corporation.
The elections in the afternoon were the end of one part of a story that started in March of last year when the three civic bodies were merged and the elections were put off. The AAP then won the elections in December 2022, taking 134 of Delhi’s 250 wards. However, the Capital didn’t have a mayor for weeks because the three previous sessions at Civic Centre had ended in protests, fights, and violence.
Even though the elections for Oberoi and Iqbal went smoothly and without trouble, violence and protests started later in the evening when councillors tried to choose six elected members of the civic standing committee.
By 6 p.m., members of both parties had gathered in the well of the House and fought. The mayor, who took over as speaker of the House after being elected, said she was “attacked” by BJP members.
“BJP councillors just tried to attack me while I was running the elections for the Standing Committee as ordered by the Supreme Court! “This is how bad BJP’s Gundagardi is: they are trying to attack a woman mayor,” Oberoi tweeted around 10:30 p.m.
In a tweet, Arvind Kejriwal, who is the chief minister of Delhi, said that the alleged attack was “absolutely shocking and unacceptable.”
The reason for this chaos was that the mayor let people bring cellphones into the voting booths during the elections for the standing committee. BJP members said this was against the rules for a secret ballot.
The BJP said that the AAP was trying to delay the elections for the Standing Committee out of “fear of losing.”
Earlier in the day, the AAP was happy with the results of Wednesday’s mayoral elections. Kejriwal called Oberoi’s victory a “defeat of hooliganism.” The BJP said it hopes she will do something about the city’s “notices to traders.”
Oberoi, a 39-year-old council member for the first time from East Patel Nagar ward, got 150 votes in the House. This was more than the BJP’s Rekha Gupta from Pitampura North ward, who only got 116 votes.
Kamal Bagri, a councillor from Ram Nagar for the BJP, got 116 votes, while Iqbal, a councillor from Chandini Mahal, got 147 votes in the Municipal Corporation of Delhi (MCD) House.
The House also met at 6:11 p.m. to choose members of the standing committee, which is a key group that controls the civic body’s budget. But until midnight, no progress was made on this front. At least six adjournments and uncontrolled violence kept the House from working as councillors tried to avoid shoes, water bottles, and other objects coming from all directions.
The fight at the end of the day overshadowed important changes for Delhi’s city government, which had been held hostage by other problems in Civic Centre.
The centrally appointed special officer had been in charge of the MCD until Oberoi was elected. This was in May of last year, when the Union government merged Delhi’s three old civic bodies and put off the elections that had been set for that month.
Oberoi said that the AAP, which will be the first party other than the BJP or Congress to run Delhi’s civic body, will try to start work on flattening Delhi’s trash dumps.
After she was elected, Oberoi said, “Our main goal and challenge is to keep the promises that Chief Minister Kejriwal made to the people of Delhi.” She also said that the city council will start going to the trash dumps in the “next three days.”
Kejriwal was happy that Oberoi was elected. “Today, the people of Delhi won in the Municipal Corporation of Delhi and hooliganism lost,” he wrote on Twitter as a way to congratulate Oberoi. Later that day, he also praised Iqbal in a tweet.
In the run-up to the elections in December, the AAP made cleanliness and sanitation a key part of its campaign. It promised to flatten Delhi’s overflowing garbage dumps, clean and beautify public spaces, and solve the city’s problem with stray dogs. It also promised to get rid of corruption in the city’s civic body.
But Oberoi will only be mayor of Delhi until March 31. Then, in April, new elections for mayor and deputy mayor will take place. Her term was cut short because three corporations were merged into one, new boundaries were drawn, and elections were held in the middle of the corporation’s annual cycle.
The mayor’s job is given to a woman councillor in the first year and a Scheduled Caste councillor in the third year. Over the five-year term, the municipal corporation has five mayors.
The first person to vote was BJP MP Meenakshi Lekhi. Next, MLAs from the AAP, starting with Atishi from Kalkaji, chose their candidates.
At 2:10 p.m., Oberoi was named the winner, so the process was over.
The mayoral election was the end of a long fight between the AAP and the BJP, which led to the mayoral elections being pushed back three times, two petitions to the Supreme Court, and an 81-day standoff after the results of the civic elections were announced, even though the chaos over the standing committee elections seemed to reopen these cracks.
Due to the deadlock over the mayoral election, the special officer and appointed municipal commissioner kept running Delhi’s civic body and even passed the budget for the next financial year. This took away a key administrative power from the elected House.
On January 6, January 24, and February 6, the three sessions before Wednesday were also marked by violence and nonstop protests.
At the first meeting, people from the AAP and the BJP got into fights because aldermen were sworn in before councillors. On the second, council members were sworn in, but no mayor was chosen because there was another big fight between members. The third meeting, on February 6, also ended in shame because Sharma made a lot of unpopular decisions, like letting aldermen vote in the mayoral election.
This made Oberoi go to the Supreme Court later that day. On February 17, the Supreme Court said that nominated members will not be able to vote.
Oberoi will be Delhi’s first mayor to run the city alone since 2012, when the city government was split into three parts: the North, East, and South corporations. This was an experiment that was ended by the Delhi Municipal Corporation (Amendment) Act, 2022, which required that the three bodies be merged and the number of wards be cut from 272 to 250.
Sure, the mayor of the corporation is mostly a title, and most of the power lies with the chairperson of the standing committee and the municipal commissioner, who is chosen by the Center.
MCD has two parts: a group of elected councillors who make decisions and are led ceremonially by the mayor, and a group of civil servants led by a municipal commissioner who is appointed by the Union government to carry out the policies and rules of the DMC act.
The real power to make decisions lies with the house of councillors, the standing committee, and the commissioner’s office. Because of the overlaps, the AAP and the Union government are likely to have more disagreements.
Praveen Shankar Kapoor, a spokesman for the BJP in Delhi, said that AAP council members had “cross-voted,” which both the ruling party in Delhi and the mayor of Delhi denied.
Mayor Oberoi, on the other hand, said, “All of our council members are honest, and we trust them. It was the BJP that was not able to digest its loss in the municipal elections””
“Shame on you, Arvind Kejriwal,” said Virendra Sachdeva, the working president of the BJP in Delhi. We said from the start that you wouldn’t let the standing committee elections happen after the elections for mayor and deputy mayor, and you’ve shown that you won’t let the standing committee elections happen because you’re afraid of losing.”
For the mayoral election, the electoral college was made up of 250 elected councillors, seven members of the Lok Sabha from Delhi, three members of the Rajya Sabha, and a fifth of the members of the Delhi assembly (14 MLAs) chosen by the speaker every year on a rotating basis. Speaker Ram Niwas Goel chose 13 MLAs from the AAP and 1 MLA from the BJP to serve in the MCD.
