Chikungunya, dengue expose AAP, BJP

Ravi Shanker Kapoor |

The spread of chikungunya and dengue is a testimony to the shamelessness and cynicism of the Aam Aadmi Party and the Bharatiya Janata Party. While the two parties have made a mess of governance in the national Capital, the sufferer is the ordinary citizen—who had reposed complete faith in the two parties.

The two vector-borne diseases have claimed 30 lives so far, with the number of people afflicted with them has crossed 2,800. Dengue has caused 18 deaths, whereas chikungunya has killed 12 people. Politicians of the two parties, however, are busy either blaming each other or denying their culpability altogether, not realizing in the process that the cleverest sophistry on their part is angering the people of Delhi.

So, Delhi’s Health Minister Satyender Jain continued to say, on authority of Google, that chikungunya cannot cause deaths. When he was not downplaying the severity of the two diseases, he was trying to score brownie points with his party’s rivals, the BJP in particular. After holding a review meeting with the officials of all the civic bodies and health departments, Jain said, “We are not satisfied with the fogging supposed to have been done by the North, South, and East municipal corporations. There was a need to carry out fogging in the whole of Delhi.”

Meanwhile the BJP has not covered itself in glory by responding to the AAP’s gutter politics in the same phraseology and methodology. Confronting deceit with deceit, crudeness with crudeness, and inaction with inaction doesn’t ennoble the country’s largest party.

The two parties are responsible for governance in Delhi—the BJP at the Central and municipal levels, and the AAP at the state level. Therefore, blame has to go to either of the parties, even as each of them tries to present itself as the paragon of diligence and probity. But such shenanigans won’t cut any ice with the ordinary citizen who has started regarding all politicians as just the same—liars and crooks. Which is true most of the time.

If such feeling gets entrenched, the two parties may be the losers, for they will lose their differentiating features. They gained ground at the expense of the Congress in the last few years because they appeared to be the viable alternatives to the grand old party; people voted for the BJP and the AAP because they trusted that the two parties would deliver—and not for them to deflect their responsibility to others.

It is time the BJP and the AAP stopped the game of one-upmanship—for their own sake if not for the sake of the people.

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