Eye on municipal polls, Amit Shah targets AAP at park launch event

naugurating a municipal park in Delhi on Saturday, Union home minister Amit Shah said the Delhi government should cut spending on advertisements and pay the “pending dues” to the three civic bodies, even as the Aam Aadmi Party (AAP) countered that the Bharatiya Janata Party-led Centre as well as the party’s government in Uttar Pradesh were spending more than double on publicity.

Shah, while launching the Bharat Darshan Park built, by the South Delhi Municipal Corporation (SDMC) in Punabi Bagh, said, “I am here to tell the Delhi CM that it will be gracious of him if he will cut the expenditure on advertisement, and pay the MCDs’ dues instead. Unlike other political parties, the BJP has done what it had promised. And the people of Delhi have now understood that other parties do not work, but just do photoshoots for advertisement.”

In a statement, the AAP shot back, saying all the home minister should have done was to count the number of hoardings that his party put up in the national capital. “There are 850 hoardings of Narendra Modi and Yogi Adityanath in Delhi. In stark contrast, the Delhi government has only put up 108 hoardings,” the AAP said.

“Delhi government spends barely ₹70 crore on advertisements, compared to Yogi Adityanath’s splurge of ₹2,000 crore annually,” the AAP added.

The war of words between the Union minister and the AAP comes months ahead of the municipal elections in Delhi.

Listing achievements by the BJP-ruled civic bodies in Delhi, Shah said the Delhi government owes ₹13,000 crore to the three civic bodies. “Beautification under the flyovers, turning 31 barren plots into beautiful parks and turning over 1,000 parks into open gyms, are few of the many splendid jobs done by the municipalities. Had the AAP government cleared the dues of ₹13,000 crore, it could have completed several other development projects,” Shah said.

The AAP, however, said the three civic bodies were going through a crippling financial crisis only because of the corruption by the BJP, and called the Delhi municipalities the “world’s most corrupt municipal corporation”.

“The BJP leaders of the three MCDs have looted public funds. If Amit Shah tries to run them honestly instead of supporting their corruption, then there will be a huge corpus of funds available for welfare,” the AAP said.

All three MCDs, ruled by the BJP, have been facing financial problems for several years, and have struggled to pay regular salaries to their staff, and implement new projects. While the BJP says the Delhi government was choking flow of funds to the civic bodies, the Delhi government has made it clear that not only it has paid all budgetary dues to the corporations, but has also extended a loan to them.

Claiming that the BJP is the only party that translates promises into ground reality, Shah said that his party doesn’t give currency to criticism from the opposition parties. “When we were talking about Ram temple in Ayodhya, they (the opposition leaders) use to ask about the dates? Now, I say to them not to feel sorry and go Ayodhya to take a glimpse of the deity that established Ram-Rajya in India. I also request them to go to Kashi (Varanasi), take a holy dip in the clean Ganga there and worship Lord Shiva. They will feel relaxed,” he said.

Bharat Darshan Park is the second waste-to-art park in Delhi where replicas of monuments have been set up using scrap material. Officials said that the facility uses 350 tonnes of scrap to recreate 17 Indian monuments over 8.5 acres.

The park has been built for around Rs12 crore over the past two years, said a senior municipal official said.

The first such installation in Sarai Kale Khan, called the Waste-To-Wonder Park, was thrown open to the public in 2019.

The Bharat Darshan Park features replicas of monuments such as the Konark temple (in Odisha), Qutub Minar, Taj Mahal (Agra, Uttar Pradesh), Sanchi Stupa (Madhya Pradesh) and Nalanda University (Bihar).