For about a month now, big, white billboards that claim “35 officials arrested, 152 suspended” have popped up all around New Delhi as a testament to the beginning of the “battle against corruption” that is being waged by the Delhi government. There have been a few scattered newspaper reports that mentioned a head constable from Sonia Vihar police station in north-east Delhi and some Delhi Jal Board (DJB) engineers among those who were arrested. But apart from that, there has been little information on why or when these arrests and suspensions were carried out and what further action will be taken.
After attempting to contact several people from the Aam Aadmi Party (AAP) through the numbers that were listed on the party’s website, I finally reached Gopal Mohan, advisor to the chief minister and a part of the team that is involved in managing the anti-corruption helpline, 1031. On 2 June 2015, I met Mohan—who was immersed in listening to a sting recording on a smartphone with his colleagues—at his office in the Delhi Secretariat. Mohan told me that the numbers adorning the billboards that were strewn across Delhi were indicative of the action that had been taken by the AAP during its current tenure in power. He said that the billboards had been put up on 15 May—a little before the party completed 100 days in power. The cases that were being advertised had come through the corruption helpline, which, according to Mohan, receives around 4000 calls a day. Mohan estimated that the Delhi government had identified approximately 1000 genuine cases from all of these calls.
The intricate procedure to evaluate these calls for their authenticity was not very clear. However, Mohan did explain the basic structure of the process to to me. Once a complaint is verified, the Anti-Corruption Branch (ACB) of the Delhi government collects and analyses the evidence, before deciding upon the right course of action—be it sending reports to the relevant departments for suspensions, or by conducting raids and filing First Information Reports (FIRs) for arrests. He said that this process usually took anywhere between 24 to 72 hours.
According to Mohan, the guilty officials included schoolteachers, government engineers, and officials from the Municipal Corporation of Delhi (MCD) and the police force. The bribes that these officials had demanded, he claimed, ranged from Rs 500 to Rs 5 lakhs. This was the extent of the information that Mohan was willing to disclose. My request for context on the individual cases was met with resilient silence as he said that he would not be able to provide me with any additional details given that the cases were still pending in courts.
I ventured to ask Mohan why the government had begun brandishing the statistics around these cases when the guilt of the concerned officers had not yet been proven. My query was brushed aside as a trivial matter, and Mohan reminded me that the main objective of this exercise was to eliminate the roots of systemic corruption. “Currently, we are trying to find the troublesome areas,” Mohan told me. “In the end, instead of simply going after individual offenders, we want to bring in a system that won’t leave any scope for corruption.”
Another member of the AAP, who identified himself as Amarjeet Tiwari, and appeared to be a little irritated by my questioning, asked me why I had not filed a Right to Information (RTI) application to procure the answers that I was looking for. Interestingly, on 5 May 2015, Vivek Garg, the Bhartiya Janata Party’s (BJP) candidate from Model Town in the Delhi assembly elections this year and an RTI activist, did exactly that. According to the response to that RTI, which he received on 19 May, only 282 calls had been received on the 1031 helpline till 13 May, and 7 cases registered with the ACB.
On 3 June, I went to meet Satish Upadhyay, the president of the BJP-Delhi at his office on Pandit Marg in Central Delhi. The meeting began two hours after the scheduled time, and Upadhyay asked me in relation to the AAP’s billboards, “How can you publicise the figures if the cases are still pending?” He began speculating on the amount of money that had been spent on the campaign to advertise the arrests, before berating the AAP for its claims of transparency.“150 (suspensions)? There is not even one, I tell you. It’s all a tamasha” he concluded.
Following my conversations with Upadhyay and Mohan, I went to meet Surender Singh Yadav, the additional commissioner of police (ACB) on 9 June at Vikas Bhawan II in Civil Lines. At around 2 pm, two-and-a-half hours after we were supposed to speak, Yadav invited me into his office. He was apologetic, for he had to rush to another meeting and could only give me 10 minutes. As an Indian Police Service (IPS) officer serving the government, Yadav refused to delve into “operational details” or speak about the controversies surrounding recent political statements. He explained to me that 1031 is a helpline that is under the jurisdiction of the chief minister’s office and that calls are transferred to the ACB as per the discretion of the office.
Although Yadav refused to divulge the specifics of any of the cases related to accusations of corruption, he did give me the break-up for the 35 arrests: 12 from the excise department, 9 from the DJB, 7 from the education sector, 3 from the Agricultural Produce Market Committee (APMC), 2 from the MCD, and one each from the Public Works Department (PWD) and the Delhi police. When I pointed out to him the discrepancy between these numbers and the arrests that had been highlighted by the RTI application, Yadav responded by saying, “You could arrest 1000 people from 7 cases.”