AAP chief Arvind Kejriwal and his deputy, Manish Sisodia, at the Ghazipur dump in Delhi.
Chief Minister Arvind Kejriwal likened himself to a character from the Ramayana, while protesting BJP workers called him a liar, as the battle over upcoming elections reached one of Delhi's largest garbage dumps, the saturated landfill at Ghazipur.
BJP workers protested with black flags and slogans ahead of the AAP boss's visit. AAP workers countered with slogans against the BJP, which ran the Municipal Corporation of Delhi (MCD) for over a decade before all three MCD divisions were dissolved to make one unified body. Elections to the unified MCD are likely by the end of this year or in early 2023.
Slamming the BJP protests as "illogical", Mr Kejriwal later underlined that he'd sent Delhi's elderly citizens to free-of-cost pilgrimages, calling himself Delhi's "Shravan Kumar", the Ramayan hero known for taking his parents to shrines.
"For once, I urge BJP voters to forget party affiliations. We will clean up Delhi. I want to tell the mothers in Delhi, vote for your son who took you to pilgrimages," he said.
The rhetoric is getting sharper — and markedly religious — in light of elections in Gujarat too, where AAP is hoping to challenge an entrenched BJP. With a demand to put images of Hindu deities on currency notes, Mr Kejriwal had yesterday made an apparent bid for the BJP's core Hindutva vote.
At Ghazipur today, before he arrived, BJP workers stomped on AAP flags — some laid them out on the road and landed blows on them with sticks — as they briefly blocked the road that leads to the site. "Kejriwal, haye haye," they cried, beating their chests. AAP workers, in retaliation just some feet away, beat their chests too, and sloganeered, "BJP murdabad".
"I was surprised to see BJP workers protesting," said Mr Kejriwal, "I am only here to see what the BJP-run MCD has done. The BJP had just one big task — keeping Delhi clean. And it has failed. We will not protest if the BJP wants to come see the schools we've built, the mohalla clinics we've built."
The AAP has made sanitation a central issue for the civic body polls, pointing towards the landfill sites — "mountains of garbage" — as standout signs of the BJP's alleged failure.
The BJP argues that the Delhi government of the AAP is "lying" and has not given due funds to the municipalities. It has vowed to clear the landfill sites ahead of the MCD polls.
Election dates aren't formally out yet.
In Delhi, the BJP won the erstwhile south, north, and east Delhi municipal corporations in 2017 — elections were held together — winning 181 of 272 seats. In the now-unified MCD, the number of seats has been fixed at 250.
As for the garbage, a report of the Delhi Pollution Control Committee says the city generates around 11,000 tonnes of municipal solid waste per day. Of this, around 5,000 tonnes is processed and the rest (6,000 tonnes per day or 21.6 lakh tonnes a year) ends up at the three landfill sites.
Government data further shows that less than a fifth of the existing waste at the three landfill sites — Ghazipur, Okhla, and Bhalswa — has been processed since the project to flatten the mountains of garbage started in October 2019. The deadline set by the National Green Tribunal is barely two years away.