Centre wants to demolish all slums in Capital, alleges AAP

New Delhi: The Aam Aadmi Party (AAP) alleged on Friday that the BJP-led Centre wants to demolish all slums in Delhi.

Addressing a press conference, Delhi Cabinet ministers Atishi and Saurabh Bharadwaj said slums in the national Capital are being demolished “in an inhuman manner”, without rehabilitating the affected slum dwellers.

Atishi alleged that at a meeting on January 9, the Centre directed land-owning agencies, such as the Delhi Development Authority (DDA) and the Municipal Corporation of Delhi (MCD), to clear all slum clusters in the city.

Atishi said whenever elections are held in Delhi, be it for the Lok Sabha, Assembly or the MCD, the Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) makes a promise to slum dwellers that it will build houses for them wherever they are residing. Before every election, the BJP releases advertisements in this regard, the leaders of the party go to the slums and fill up forms, promising houses for each slum dweller, she added. The AAP leader said just before the MCD polls, Prime Minister Narendra Modi had distributed some 500 flats to people in Kalkaji and the BJP

released a full-page newspaper advertisement, saying each slum dweller in Delhi would be given a house within a five-kilometre radius of their current residences.

“Soon after the election, the prime minister handed the keys to the flats in a housing complex to people, while the BJP-governed DDA ordered the demolition of the slums adjacent to that complex,” she alleged.

Atishi claimed that after elections, the BJP either demolishes slums, relocates the affected slum dwellers to footpaths or sends them to places 50 kilometres away, where there are no jobs for them, no schools for their children and no means of transportation.

“The BJP-led central government is conspiring to completely remove slums from Delhi under a conspiracy in a systematic way,” the Delhi minister alleged. Echoing similar views, Bharadwaj alleged that the Centre is demolishing

jhuggi jhopri (JJ) colonies under a conspiracy.

He said it is the duty of the land-owning agencies to rehabilitate the slum dwellers.

Bharadwaj said some notified JJ clusters were removed despite court orders.

He added that in the last couple of years, most of the demolition drives were carried out on land belonging to the Centre, despite a clear-cut policy available in the matter. Hundreds of schoolgoing children and women involved in odd jobs have become homeless due to these demolitions, he added.

The AAP leader said before the G20 Summit, a JJ colony at Dhaula Kuan was

demolished despite the deputy chief minister’s orders to the contrary.

Reacting to the allegations, Delhi BJP chief Virendra Sachdeva accused the AAP government in Delhi of not allowing the implementation of the Pradhan Mantri Awas Yojana in the national Capital and not allotting around

50,000 Rajiv Awas houses that have already been constructed to the urban poor, denying them an opportunity for a better life.

Sachdeva said that for the sake of political survival, the AAP is raising issues for which it itself is responsible.