E-Paper
Centre and Delhi govt must walk ‘hand in hand’, says SC while hearing Facebook petition
New Delhi: The Centre and Delhi government must work together on governance issues in the Capital, the Supreme Court said on Thursday, urging both administrations to walk “hand in hand” without adopting a “my way or highway approach”
New Delhi: The Centre and Delhi government must work together on governance issues in the Capital, the Supreme Court said on Thursday, urging both administrations to walk “hand in hand” without adopting a “my way or highway approach”.
The comments by the top court came while deciding a petition by Facebook vice president Ajit Mohan, who challenged summons by a Delhi assembly panel in connection with communal riots that rocked northeast Delhi in February 2020.
“No governance model requiring such collaboration can work if either of the two sides take a ‘my way or the highway’ approach –which both seem to have adopted,” said the three-judge bench headed by Justice Sanjay Kishan Kaul.
The judges noted that Delhi’s hybrid administration – in which the Union government holds the prerogative for several key areas of governance –has worked well for many years with different political dispensations in power both at the Centre and State.
“But the last few years have seen an unfortunate tussle on every aspect with the State government seeking to exercise powers as any other assembly and the Central Government unwilling to let them do so….” the bench added.
“This has been responsible for a spate of litigation and despite repeated judicial counsel to work in tandem, this endeavour has not been successful,” said the bench, also comprising Justices Dinesh Maheshwari and Hrishikesh Roy.
The Court called this an endeavour to “score points over the other”, which it said resulted in the present litigation filed by Facebook. The social media company, the court said, sought to take “advantage of this divergence of view” and the inability of both the Centre and State government to “see eye to eye on governance issues in Delhi”.
Taking the role of a mediator, the bench advised the Aam Aadmi Party government in Delhi and the Bharatiya Janata Party-led government at the Centre to show maturity at their ends. The Court asked AAP government to recognise and work within the constitutional scheme of division of powers in Delhi and “not what they think should be the division of powers”.
On Centre, the bench said: “The central government is required to work in tandem, albeit with a different political dispensation… To work well, the central government and the state government have to walk hand in hand or at least walk side by side for better governance.”
The court said that the two governments must realise the electoral mandate which has shown maturity to elect one dispensation in the Centre while seeking to choose another in the State, not once but twice.
“The two powers unfortunately do not seek to recognise this aspect, and that is the bane of this structure requiring collaboration and concurrence. Some prior discussion and understanding could easily solve this problem instead of wasting large amounts of judicial time repeatedly arising from the failure of the two dispensations to have a broader outlook,” the bench remarked.
In the present proceeding, the Court held that the Delhi government acted out of a duty to ensure that “peace and harmony” prevails in the Capital. “However, we may note that the long and repeated battles between the State and the Centre appear to have cast a shadow even over the well-meaning intent of the committee to assess peace and harmony as reflected in the Terms of Reference,” said the bench.
