Aam Aadmi Party (AAP) councillor Shelly Oberoi was on Wednesday elected the mayor of Delhi and the party’s Aaley Mohammed Iqbal her deputy, as the Capital’s municipal corporation completed the long-delayed voting process in its fourth attempt, ending a nearly 12-week-long impasse, but not before the House shelved civility hours later, as members beat each other up, threw bottles and slippers at one another, even as some scampered for cover under tables to avoid projectiles.
Wednesday evening’s scenes were reminiscent of the previous three meetings as the elected occupants of Civic Centre refused to buck a grim trend that has become familiar with the municipal corporation.
The afternoon’s elections capped one part of a saga that began in March last year, when the three civic bodies were unified and the elections delayed. The AAP then won the December 2022 elections (grabbing 134 of Delhi’s 250 wards), but the Capital remained without a mayor for weeks, after three previous sessions at Civic Centre also ended in protests, brawls, and violence.
Though the elections to pick Oberoi and Iqbal were smooth and peaceful, the protests and violence began when councillors sought to pick six elected members of the civic standing committee later in the evening.
By 6pm, members of both parties crowded the well of the House, and later came to blows, even as the mayor, who occupied the speaker’s chair after being elected, alleged she was “ attacked” by members of the BJP.
“BJP councillors just tried to attack me while I was conducting the Standing Committee elections, as per Supreme Court orders! This is the extent of BJP’s Gundagardi that they are trying to attack a woman mayor,” Oberoi tweeted at around 10.30pm.
Delhi chief minister Arvind Kejriwal, in a tweet, called the alleged attack “absolutely shocking and unacceptable”.
The point of contention over this chaos was the mayor allowing cellphones inside the voting booth during the standing committee elections, a move BJP members said was a violation of the secret ballot process.
The BJP accused the AAP of trying to push back the standing committee elections for “fear of defeat”.
Earlier in the day, the AAP hailed the outcome of Wednesday’s mayoral polls, with Kejriwal labelling Oberoi’s win the “defeat of hooliganism”. The BJP said it hopes she will act against “notices being issued to traders” in the city.
Oberoi, 39, a first-time councillor from East Patel Nagar ward, secured 150 votes in the House, trumping the Bharatiya Janata Party’s (BJP) Rekha Gupta, from Pitampura North ward, who got 116 votes.
Meanwhile, Iqbal, the councillor from Chandini Mahal, was backed by 147 members in the Municipal Corporation of Delhi (MCD) House against the BJP’s Ram Nagar corporator Kamal Bagri, who garnered 116 votes.
The House was also to elect members of the standing committee, a key body that controls the civic body’s purse strings, and convened for the process at 6.11pm. However, till midnight, no headway was made on this front, with at least six adjournments and unfettered violence interrupting the House, as councillors tried to evade oncoming footwear, water bottles and other objects from all ends.
The late brawl overshadowed key developments for Delhi’s civic governance, which was held hostage by the previous disruptions in Civic Centre.
Oberoi’s election marked the end of the centrally appointed special officer’s control of the MCD, a run extending to May last year, when the Union government merged Delhi’s three erstwhile civic bodies and postponed the then impending elections.
The AAP, which will be the first party other than the BJP or Congress to run Delhi’s civic body, will aim to start work on flattening Delhi’s trash dumps, said Oberoi.
After her election, Oberoi said, “Our goal and main challenge is to fulfill CM Kejriwal’s 10 guarantees to the people of Delhi.” She added that the civic body will start visiting the city’s landfills over the “next three days”.
Kejriwal hailed Oberoi’s election. “Today in the Municipal Corporation of Delhi, the people of Delhi won and hooliganism was defeated,” he tweeted, congratulating Oberoi. He commended Iqbal in a tweet as well, later in the day.
In the run-up to December’s elections, the AAP made cleanliness and sanitation a key bulwark of its campaign, promising to flatten Delhi’s overflowing landfills, beautify and clean up public spaces and fix the city’s stray dog problem, while also promising to weed out corruption in the civic body.
However, Oberoi will remain Delhi’s mayor till just March 31. A fresh set of elections for the mayor and deputy mayor posts will then be held in April. Her truncated tenure is a result of unique situations arising due to unification of erstwhile three corporations, delimitation and elections occurring in the middle of the corporation’s annual cycle.
The mayor’s position (which comes with a tenure of a year) is reserved for a woman councillor in the 1st year and Scheduled Caste councillor in 3rd year and over the five-year term, the municipal corporation gets five mayors.
The election began with BJP MP Meenakshi Lekhi casting her vote, followed by MLAs picking their choices, beginning with the AAP’s Kalkaji legislator Atishi.
The process concluded at 2.10pm, when Oberoi was declared the winner.
The mayoral election eventually closed the chapter on a long-drawn tussle between the AAP and BJP that led to the mayoral elections being postponed thrice, two petitions in the Supreme Court and an 81-day impasse after the civic poll results were declared, even as the chaos over the standing committee elections seemed to reopen these fissures.
The stalemate over the mayoral elections resulted in the special officer and appointed municipal commissioner continuing to run Delhi’s civic body and even passing the budget for the coming financial year, in effect stripping the elected House of a key administrative power.
Just like Wednesday, the previous three sessions — on January 6, January 24 and February 6 – were marked by violence and relentless protests.
The first meeting saw brawls between AAP and BJP members over aldermen being sworn in before councillors. The second saw councillors being sworn in, but no mayor elected after another full-blown tussle between members. The third meeting, on February 6, also ended in ignominy after a host of controversial decisions by Sharma, including allowing aldermen to vote in the mayoral polls.
This pushed Oberoi to move the Supreme Court later that day, with the Supreme Court on February 17 ruling that nominated members will play no part in the voting process.
Oberoi becomes Delhi’s first solo mayor since 2012, when the civic body was split in three – the North, East and South corporations — an experiment that was overturned by the Delhi Municipal Corporation (Amendment) Act, 2022, which mandated that the bodies be merged and the number of wards be reduced from 272 to 250.
To be sure, the mayor of the corporation is a largely titular position, with much power concentrated in the chairperson of the standing committee as well as the municipal commissioner – who is appointed by the Centre.
MCD comprises two wings – a deliberative wing of elected councillors ceremonially headed by the mayor and an executive wing of civic bureaucracy headed by a municipal commissioner appointed by the Union government that implements policies and provisions of the DMC act.
The real decision-making power is with the house of councillors, the standing committee, and the commissioner’s office – with the overlaps likely to lead to more stand-offs between AAP and the Union government.
Delhi BJP spokesperson Praveen Shankar Kapoor said AAP councillors had “cross-voted”, claims that Delhi’s ruling party and mayor dismissed.
Mayor Oberoi, however said, “All our councillors are loyal and we are confident about them. It was the BJP that was not able to digest its loss in the municipal elections””
Meanwhile, Delhi BJP working president Virendra Sachdeva said, “Shame on you Arvind Kejriwal. We were saying from the beginning that you will not allow the standing committee elections to be held after the mayor and deputy mayor elections and you have proved that you will not allow the standing committee elections due to the fear of defeat.”
The electoral college for the mayoral poll included 250 elected councillors, seven members of the Lok Sabha from Delhi, three members of the Rajya Sabha and a fifth of the members of the Delhi assembly (14 MLAs) nominated by the speaker by rotation every year. Speaker Ram Niwas Goel nominated 13 AAP MLAs and one BJP MLA for representation in the MCD.