The Aam Aadmi Party (AAP), on February 2, accused the Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) of allegedly “backstabbing” Delhiites by making officials “unethically” pass the MCD budget before the AAP government was formed.
AAP chief spokesperson and MLA Saurabh Bharadwaj said, “BJP and its central government conspired to create a ruckus in the MCD and not let AAP form the government and now they have discreetly passed the MCD budget.”
“It is the responsibility of the elected government of MCD to fulfil its promises by preparing the budget, but the BJP got the budget passed by fraud to prevent CM Arvind Kejriwal from fulfilling his promises,” he said.
Questioning the move, Bharadwaj said, “If the officials prepare the budget at the behest of the BJP’s central government, how will the Aam Aadmi Party fulfil its promises? This is a huge fraud. Earlier BJP used CBI and LG in Delhi to trouble AAP, similarly now every governor is troubling their state governments.”
Bharadwaj further said, “Today, the BJP has once again gone on to disappoint the citizens of Delhi. Just what we had feared until now, has finally happened.”
“For a while now, the residents of Delhi have been hoping for a change of power in the MCD. The BJP tried everything in its control to derail the elections to the MCD, knowing that the people would vote them out of power. They tried to merge the MCD and undertake a delimitation process,” he said.
“But after the Supreme Court ruled that elections to a corporation cannot be cancelled in the name of mergers and delimitation process, the BJP was finally forced to conduct the election and they even went on to lose to AAP,” he said.
Bharadwaj added that the budget of the MCD is a very important document that gives a detailed breakdown of how much money the elected government hopes to spend in the fulfilment of its promises. He said this is where all the planning of the team is reflected and then work begins in mission mode to deal with the problems that the people of the city are facing.
“But what has happened now is the betrayal of the citizens of Delhi by the BJP. Despite losing the elections to the Aam Aadmi Party, the BJP-ruled Central Government has illegally passed the budget of the MCD through the officials that it uses to control the corporation,” said Bhardwaj.
Dilip Pandey, AAP MLA from Timarpur, said the BJP government had passed the MCD budget without the consultation of the elected AAP.
“The BJP government is doing an experiment by bypassing the elected government in the national capital. They have been doing it in many other states including Puducherry and West Bengal,” Pandey said.
The BJP is destroying electoral democracy. They should immediately withdraw the budget and apologise to the people of Delhi, Pandey added.