Dear Mister Kejriwal: Here is what you SHOULD ask Modi Surajit Dasgupta7 Mar 2014 niticentral/2014/03/07/dear-mister-kejriwal-here-is-what-you-should-ask-narendra-modi-197319.html Dear Mister Kejriwal: Here is what you SHOULD ask Narendra Modi People knew Aam Aadmi Party head Arvind Kejriwal was on a fault-finding mission to Gujarat. Unfazed by the ridicule it has drawn from the crowds, however, today the AAP honcho tried to barge into Chief Minister Narendra Modi’s office in Gandhinagar without a prior appointment, but with the media informed of the impending roadshow beforehand as usual! First, his cadre land up in Gujarat, take pictures of the few dilapidated buildings one comes across while leaving the Ahmedabad airport that long ago used to be makeshift shelters for some daily wage labourers who have been moved to better buildings to live in. They spread selective imagery as if it were representative of the whole State, as canard on Facebook. Kejriwal preaches austerity, uses private jet Then Kejriwal perpetrates the lie via Twitter by uploading a picture of an abandoned house, passing it off as the health centre in village Badi Pipli of the Pattan district. The facts are, first, the building no longer houses the health centre. Second, when it did, it was in a much better shape. Third, health — just as any other sector in the economy of Gujarat — is not exclusively a Government domain. The collective responsibility of the State towards its people’s health is shared happily by private sector doctors for a nominal fee. Under the Chief Minister Services of Experts at Treatment Unit scheme, private doctors (including specialists) offer their services at hospitals and health centres under eight different categories — physician, surgeon, orthopaedic surgeon, paediatrician, gynaecologist, radiologist, ENT specialist and pathologist — at Government cost, three hours a day. The Arvind Kejriwal-led AAP was not such an avowed liar in the days when this correspondent was a part of the party. Its Press conferences used to be equipped with official responses to RTI queries. In those good old days, when Arvind Kejriwal said things were wrong in our system, many would be convinced they were indeed wrong. Now he shoots in the dark, hoping against hope that parts of the accusations will stick with some people. How differently the picture of Gujarat emerges when one visits the State with an open mind becomes evident when one scrolls down the Twitter timeline of Arvind Kejriwal’s comrade in Mumbai, Meera Sanyal. In 2010, when she was not a part of the AAP, a mesmerised Meera Sanyal had tweeted, “Now in Kutch Gujarat. Weather still pleasant, & roads in better shape than Mumbai ! Locals say enhanced investment post Bhuj quake, helped [unedited].” Dear Mister Kejriwal: Here is what you SHOULD ask Narendra Modi With that kind of a mentality, Arvind Kejriwal, particularly after his 49-day fiasco in Delhi, should have asked a set of 16 questions (or more) different from the pre-meditated 16 that he posed. I tweeted with #AKasksModi — appropriating the trend being managed by the AAP’s social media team — my own 16 questions today. In a tenor as though Kejriwal were asking Modi questions, the first three in Hindi may be translated to: » “I told the people how wrong you are. No one is convinced. Tell me a way to convince them.” » “You have been successfully running a Government for 13 years. I couldn’t run one even for 50 days. Help!” » “Please teach me the mechanism of SWAGAT. I couldn’t handle just one session ofjanta darbaar.” The third point merits elaboration. It was hare-brained of the short-lived Delhi Government to presume it could handle a deluge of complainants by letting them physically meet the Chief Minister all at once. The next paragraph explains how Gujarat does it the smart way. SWAGAT stands for State-Wide Attention on Grievances by Application of Technology. Gujarat Chief Minister Modi lends a patient ear to the grievances of people under this popular programme, gives instructions to senior district officials concerned with the complaints via video conference. Out of lakhs of applications handled so far, about 91.80 per cent of grievances have been fairly redressed. Only the rest need further intervention from the Government head. Then, remembering an abusive Rajeev Laxman of MTV Roadies’ infamy and a foul-mouthed Bollywood music composer Vishal Dadlani, I tweeted addressing Kejrwal how celebrities can be used constructively. One remembers how Amitabh Bachchan was used by the Congress and Samajwadi Party. They first made him fight the 1985 Lok Sabha election against Hemvati Nandan Bahuguna from Allahabad. The second made him a face of the campaign for Uttar Pradesh Assembly election in 2007, where the celebrated actor was made to persuade the people to believe the rate of crime was low in the Mulayam Singh Yadav-ruled State and, hence, its people must retain the SP Government. In contrast, Modi used the charisma of Bachchan apolitically to pull tourists to his State. As a result, “Domestic tourist arrivals in Gujarat have ramped up considerably, with an almost 33 per cent rise in the numbers from within the State, a 50 per cent rise from other parts of India and from non-resident Indian (NRIs), and an almost 100 per cent increase from foreign tourists,” read a statement issued by IIM-Ahmedabad on January 30 this year. And what did this supposedly expensive star charge for the advertisement campaign? A longer bed to relax in the night and a treadmill to exercise in the morning! (From the book, Narendra Modi: The Gamechanger, by Sudesh Verma) Does one recall the Kejriwal Government having done anything for tourism in the site-rich city-State of Delhi? How brazen of a former, failed Chief Minister to be desperately looking for instances of bad governance in a much-hailed State of Gujarat! Another thing that Kejriwal does not know as he goes about calling Modi Government “Ambani ki dukaan (Mukesh Ambani’s shop)” is the fact that tenders are offered to bidders only via online-bidding, leaving the process too transparent for anyone to complain. In Gujarat, the physical tendering activity is carried out online using the Internet and associated technologies through e-procurement. The AAP would have people believe it is fighting against systemic causes of corruption. But its former Delhi Government that took no step towards e-governance forgets to ask Modi how to set-up such transparent systems. In any case, the AAP’s claim to fight corruption rang hollow much before its decent showing at the Delhi polls. Ignoring stiff resistance from its active workers, the party’s election in-charge Sanjay Singh distributed tickets among alleged ration mafia kingpin Deshraj Raghav, land grabber Vinod Kumar Binny, drug addict Dharmendra Singh Koli, blackmailer Rajesh Garg, lumpen Manoj Kumar and several others. Compare that with formidable land baron MLA Babu Jamna Patel of Daskroi, Gujarat. He fancied building an expansive ranch that came in the way of the town’s plan. Modi overruled his objections and implemented the plan as designed by experts. The horrible state in which the stretch of Yamuna that passes through Delhi lies is well known. While the Kejriwal Government did not bother to clean it, it does not bother to ask Modi either about how the once filthy Sabarmati was transformed into a tourist attraction. The Sabarmati River Front Development Corporation Limited is surmounting massive design and land use challenges to provide for a walkway, a road along the river, promenades, gardens, 4,000 houses under slum rehabilitation, amusement parks, golf courses, water sports parks and Kotarpur Weir along the river. Yes! There is a Gujarat story Next, Kejriwal is hell bent on branding Modi as communal. This is laughable, given the pathetic showing of the four Muslim candidates the AAP had fielded in the Delhi Assembly elections. This, despite the party’s social media campaign featuring Kejriwal’s photographs with Islamic clerics, Christian padres, Sikh granthis and — to balance it — a Shankaracharya (who was ready to pose for a photo-op)! After the drubbing it received from the minorities, should the party not learn from Modi how to look genuine to all communities? In the 2010 municipal and panchayat polls held in Gujarat, over 100 Muslim and Christian candidates of the BJP had romped home. In the 2012 Assembly election, the BJP won 12 out of the 19 seats that had Muslim voters as the determining factor. Leaving behind the Congress’s distorted interpretation of secularism that the AAP has pursued so far, Kejriwal’s party must hear out Muslim voices from Gujarat. “The Congress has always treated Muslims as a block to be exploited politically, but has done nothing in real terms for the community. On the other hand, the community found hope in Modi’s inclusive brand of politics,” Iqbal Keshodwala, a seafood exporter from Veraval in Saurashtra, said. Kejriwal must know Gujarat’s Muslims are not a marginalised lot unlike those in Delhi for whom he did nothing. Muslims of Gujarat go to mainstream schools instead of madrassas; they apply for and get well-paid jobs and, like Hindus and Parsis of the State, they set up businesses fetching good returns with ease. With water turned into a poll plank by the offer of 700 litres free per household per day turning into a damp squib, Kejriwal must also ask Modi how the latter transformed a semi-arid region into a green spot on earth by constructing over 4.5 lakh check-dams across the State. The AAP must also know that the poor Gujarati women who had to walk miles to fetch water and could bathe only once a week about a decade ago now get water supplied to their homes everyday in abundance. Kejriwal & Co have also alleged electricity is not supplied 24 hours 365 days a year in Gujarat. That’s another falsehood. Under the Jyoti Gram project, on which the State Government has spent Rs 1,200 crore, the administration uses a separate electric feeder for domestic use and limited agricultural supply. It also brought down transmission and distribution losses from 35 per cent five years ago to about 19 per cent in 2012. Further, it sells its surplus power to states like Rajasthan, Haryana, Punjab, Delhi and Maharashtra, earning a profit of around Rs 1,800 crore. While the AAP tried to woo voters living in precariously built unauthorised colonies of Delhi by promising them that their shanties would be regularised, the Gujarat Government commissioned experts in architecture and finally came up with such a standard design for buildings in Bhuj after the devastating earthquake of 2001 that, nowadays, people of the region say they stay at home unperturbed even as the houses shake sometimes due to mild tremors because they have been assured by the engineers that their houses are now quake-proof. The AAP has the gall to talk of the very little poverty in Gujarat it managed to trace even though its own Government had no programme for employment generation. On the contrary, labourers in Saurashtra, who had once settled in Surat for jobs, earning a measly Rs 2 to polish a piece of diamond, are now owners of the kind of factories they once worked in. I concluded my 16 tweets to Kejriwal by advising him not to accuse his political rivals wildly. It must first have a record of governance to write home about. It must tell what its solutions are. Readers of Niti Central must know that several policy sub-committees were instituted by the AAP with much fanfare in April 2013. None of them has come up with its recommendations so far! niticentral/2014/03/07/dear-mister-kejriwal-here-is-what-you-should-ask-narendra-modi-197319.html
Posted on: Mon, 10 Mar 2014 06:27:12 +0000
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